Rotten Gods

by Greg Barron

  What have you done? Frantic. Looking for girls. Where? Simon.

  Isabella looks around again. The mujahedin have not stirred, but she meets the eyes of another delegate a row behind. She is certain that he has seen her with the phone. He is pleasant looking, with a clean jawline and athletic shoulders, his brown hair longer than that of most of the other males in the room, and his smile open and honest. They exchange what she decides is understanding. Is he part of the large American delegation? She thinks so, for the President — still the most powerful man in the world, if control of nuclear warheads, ships and men with guns is a true measure of power — sits nearby, surrounded by a gaggle of aides and inferiors.

  Looking up between letters, Isabella uses her thumb on the virtual keypad to reply.

  Simon. Forgive me. Girls taken from Aden airport. My heart is with you, along with all my hopes and trust.

  She pauses, wanting to say more. Everything seems so petty now. At that moment she feels closer to him than to any human being alive — the man who held her hand while she screamed in pain and brought forth the children they conceived together. She could never doubt his love for his children and thinking of him warms her heart. Still, it is all too complicated — the wounds so fresh. What can she say that will not undo all that was so hard to do? Moving her thumb back to the keypad she picks out the final word — Isabella.

  Sitting in the dull light, she gathers courage. Now she has the means to explain herself, then to help; to pay back some of what she owes. She composes a text in her mind. It has to be short, and to the point. The next question is who to address the message to.

  Isabella’s immediate superior is a genuine Dame — the honour bestowed because of her charity work — Shelley Chandler. She is a capable woman with a busy social life of openings and exhibitions, but can be a little vague, and might sit on the message until she decides what to do with it.

  Almost a year earlier Isabella was approached by a Director at MI6 to provide intelligence on the East African and Middle Eastern region — just incidental stuff — and since then she has passed on bits and pieces as they cropped up, nothing serious or consequential. In this way she has met Tom Mossel half a dozen times. She freezes inside when she thinks of him. He is just one of many people who must feel let down by what she did. They would all know by now — of course they would.

  Again she holds the phone low between her knees. Mossel is both smart and discrete — she will not need to spell things out.

  How can I explain? Was tricked and used. Girls abducted Aden airport, acted under duress. Please find them, heart is breaking. One m’tant asleep. AKA awake and Zhyogal. How can I help? IJT

  Without stopping to think too hard she thumbs the ‘send’ tab.

  Looking around, she moves her hand inside the waistband of her skirt and all the way to her knickers, slipping the phone underneath. Out of despair, worry and fear, a new determination is rising.

  Day 1, 20:30

  Abdullah bin al-Rhoumi, head of GDOIS division, Dubai police, sits in his office with his head in his hands. He is a tall man, sixty-seven years of age, with faint crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes. His nose has a prominent dorsal hump falling away just above the nostrils. He wears the white kandoura robe at home and when going about the city, but at work he prefers a grey, off-the-peg Western suit, coupled with a shemagh head cloth, tied with the black woollen aqal rope. A city engineer has just briefed him on the possibility of building a tunnel from Interchange Number Seven to the fortified bunker that lies deep beneath the Rabi al-Salah Centre.

  This is his Dubai. His world. That makes it hard to believe that al-Muwahhidun have brought their abhorrent brand of terror to the city that he has loved from its beginnings.

  In the earliest years of Abdullah’s childhood, Dubai was a nondescript, local port centred around Dubai Creek, a silted, disturbed channel of water. Pearl diving and the trading of dates and copra were the main economic activities. Oil had recently been discovered in the area and, while men whispered of its potential, nothing changed until hired barges came and dredged the creek. The biggest oil discoveries were a hundred and fifty kilometres to the north, and it seemed that little would change here.

  Like most of his peers, Abdullah lived in a thatched hut without running water or electricity, and received a basic schooling in the local madrasah. His family were of the merchant al-Tujjar class, and thus wealthy. They ate yoghurt and flat bread each day for breakfast, washed down with dark coffee. Lunch, the main meal of the day, was a happy, chatty event with the brothers sitting with their father. The women ate in the kitchen. All dined on fish or meat, rice and vegetables, supplemented at times with dates or olives.

  When he was ten, the British, long-term rulers in this part of the world, packed up and left. The United Arab Emirates were formed in 1971, from a rabble of Sheikhdoms. To Abdullah, this changed his life only a little. The Sheikh of Dubai, Mohammed, once titular ruler for the British, was now de facto head of the greater Emirates government. Abdullah’s father moved from trading pearls to importing Western consumer goods for a growing market.

  Abdullah’s passion was his horse, a roan gelding called Mulham, the inspired one. Like the other children, he rode bareback, yet with a skill that amazed his contemporaries: moulded to the back of his mount; becoming one organism; swifter than the wind; gliding over the desert sands. Arab horses are among the most beautiful of all living creatures, and over thousands of years of Bedouin life only those of good temperament and manners were permitted to breed. Prized specimens were stabled inside the family tent, and interacted with their owners like few other species. Such horses are easy to love.

  In his teens, Abdullah discovered endurance horse riding — the sport of a million steps, as it was called, conducted over desert courses of one or even two hundred kilometres, in the most forbidding terrain. These were dirty, difficult affairs where riders and horses were fortunate to finish, and even more fortunate to do so without injury.

  Sheikh Mohammed, meanwhile, planned to inspire Dubai’s growth via massive investment in infrastructure. An ambitious new port and airport went from drawing board to mortar and steel. Both facilities, however, remained lightly used until the strategic thinker Ahmed bin Sulayem suggested to Sheikh Mohammed that they should set up a free-trade zone, where international companies could trade without income tax, tariffs, or duties to trouble them.

  This was the spark that would ignite the phenomenon of Dubai.

  Abdullah, at twenty-three, returned from London with a degree in economics, placed it in his bottom drawer and went straight to the stables, disinterested in work as many young men can be.

  A few weeks later, however, competing in a Djibouti endurance race, he saw Ahmed bin Sulayem, who had been a few years above him at school, and was now the official in charge of the free trade zone. Ahmed rode a beautiful stallion, fifteen hands high, with all the hallmarks of the best Arabian breeding: wide nostrils, a slight jibbah-bulge between large, inquisitive eyes, and a broad, strong back. The horse carried his tail high, almost arrogantly.

  In the closing stages of the race, Mulham, then eighteen years of age, lost his wind and Abdullah was forced to walk. He was surprised when Ahmed slid off his own mount and walked with him.

  ‘What are you going to do with your life, Abdullah?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You have a degree in economics.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you like to work in that field?’

  Abdullah moved his eyes from Mulham to his companion, then lowered them. ‘No, I don’t think so.’ In truth, a life of ledgers and profit statements left him cold. That career path had been his father’s idea, a way of making him useful to the family business.

  Ahmed went on, ‘There are many foreigners here now, and you are a man of action, not of numbers and account books. Sheikh Mohammed is struggling to put together a police force able to cope. You have spent time overseas. You understand the challenge
s. I could suggest you to him?’

  Abdullah shrugged, scarcely listening. ‘Thank you, I would like that.’

  A strange and unexpected thing happened. Abdullah found that he cared about police work. He discovered a belief in the importance of the values he had grown up with. That people should feel safe to enjoy the burgeoning night life of the city. That within a few minutes of a crime being committed, a patrol car cruised out to investigate.

  When Abdullah was twenty-six, still living at home, his father divorced his mother with the traditional, I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee. Being past the age of ten, Abdullah had entered the male realm of his father, but their relationship had soured since he refused the career path chosen for him, and entered the police force. He accepted his mother’s pleas for him to go with her. Life for a divorcee is difficult without a male relative close at hand for escort duties and dealing with the outside world. Even calling a tradesman for a lone Muslim woman is difficult.

  Mother and son went to live in one of the new apartments above the sands of Jumeirah Beach, just a short walk from the mosque. They had always been close, but now they became closer still. In the evenings after work he would buy her a flower, or some Swiss chocolate. Perhaps a small gift of jewellery.

  Still, the grief of being spurned by the man she had supported all her life weighed upon her. She smiled only rarely, and spent hours staring out through the window at the world of men that she could not join.

  Abdullah, meanwhile, rose through the ranks of a force that expanded almost daily, until from a ragtag band of just forty men he commanded a division of five hundred. The keys to his leadership were high expectations, supreme personal standards and a willingness to try new techniques, often gleaned from overseas forces: London, New York, and Paris.

  Into his thirties he remained at home with his mother, refusing social invitations. Apart from riding weekly, he had few engagements outside work and home. With no father to plan his marriage, he made no efforts in that direction, and he lavished attention on his mother, even as she became devout — mindful of a thousand tiny superstitions, many of which revolved around the Holy Qur’an itself. The book, for example, could never touch the ground. Abdullah’s mother insisted on using stands purchased to hold the book at eye level. It must never be left open or the Devil would come and read it, assimilating the wisdom inside. When not in use it must be wrapped and placed on the highest shelf in the house.

  Like much of the population of the Arab world, she burned bakhoor — incense — in the belief that it discouraged devils, or jinn, from inhabiting the house. After cutting her own or Abdullah’s hair, she collected every fallen strand, wrapped it in newspaper and hid it in a closet. It was well known that Jews and other potential enemies might use discarded hairs or nails to cause sickness and death to good Muslims.

  Each morning mother and son would together recite the thirty-sixth Surah, the Ya Sin, with its powers of healing, protection of property, defence against the jinn and an eventual easy passage to Paradise.

  You, O Muhammad, are one of the Messengers, on a Straight Path. This is a Revelation sent down by the Almighty, the Most Merciful, in order that you may warn a people whose forefathers were not warned, so they are heedless. The Word has proved true against most of them, so they will not believe. We have put on their necks iron collars reaching to chins, so that their heads are forced up. And we have put a barrier before them, and a barrier behind them, and we have covered them up, so that they cannot see. It is the same to them whether you warn them or you warn them not; they will not believe.

  Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, and the resulting First Gulf War, when half-a-million American servicemen flooded the region, rattled Dubai’s economy, but still it rebounded. Further concessions brought more foreign companies into the trade zones, and money flowed into an economy boosted by ambitious local infrastructure projects.

  Abdullah’s mother sank into a depression no doctor could comprehend or cure. One morning he woke to silence. No sound of activity in the kitchen where she had prepared his morning meal for fifteen years.

  They found her in Dubai Creek, between the pylons of al-Maktoum Bridge, yellow nightshirt wound tight around her body. She had, according to the coroner, been dead for three hours. Abdullah used his position to have the details suppressed, and a short press release issued, explaining that his mother had drowned while swimming. He sold the apartment and took a smaller one.

  He remained friends with Ahmed, who went on to head Dubai World, a government-backed corporation worth a hundred billion dollars in assets at its peak. He watched the building of the Palms, towering hotel after towering hotel, then some of the most extravagant shopping malls in existence. Countless thousands of Pakistanis crossed the Arabian Sea to slave for this empire of money.

  Finally, he watched the economic ravages of the first and second Global Financial Crises, then the slow rising of the sea so that the Palms and the unfinished World were threatened by water, ravaged by supertides. Billions of dollars worth of man-made real estate, threatened by the changing planet. Itinerant workers were trapped without employment, housed in their slum estates, unable to afford the fares home. Crime rates soared. The world of Abdullah’s childhood cracked and crumbled.

  Now past any likelihood of marriage, Abdullah is experienced in sexual intercourse only with Russian and Chinese prostitutes, who solicit in certain streets and nightclubs of Dubai. Technically no virgin, spiritually he has never been touched. Modern Dubai courtship, much of which centres on passing business cards to members of the opposite sex you find attractive, is repugnant to him.

  His home is visited only by Lualhati, the Filipino maid who has, for twenty years, parked her Corolla in his underground parking space at 11:00am, cleaned the unit, and prepared an evening meal. Rarely laying eyes on her, Abdullah mails her a cheque every second Thursday, with a small bonus on the holiday of Eid, at the conclusion of Ramadan.

  A long-standing member of the Equestrian Club, he competes in three or four races a year, and maintains four hardy Arabs, agisted through the club and stabled by professionals. On weekends he still rides, finding pleasure in companionship with the finest horses money can buy.

  The job of coordinating security at Rabi al-Salah is the culmination of a lifetime’s work, a task at which he has already failed. The overall plan was simple: a core of GDOIS and British DRFS, supplemented by representatives from other nations, backed up by the elite Dubai Fifth Air Battalion.

  It should have been enough. Would normally have been enough. But there is always the imponderable — the gentle man who has gone to the other side. Something that defies even the most rigorous security checks.

  Abdullah prays, inviting his God to prepare for Dr Ali Khalid Abukar the hottest fires at His disposal.

  Despite his job, Simon hasn’t been to Aden for years, a city that remains impoverished and relatively lawless. It did, however, escape the mass killings seen in Taiz and Sana’a, during the vigorous protest movement that resulted in such severe wounds to the dictator Saleh that he was forced to leave the country to seek treatment. The violence worsened on his return, and thousands died in the pursuit of freedom. Even now, Yemen teeters on the edge of civil war.

  Reputedly the site where Noah built his ark and invited the animals aboard two by two, the peninsula is shaped like a dragon’s head, divided by the crater of a long dead volcano, the industrial city of Sheikh Othman on the opposite shore to the sprawling port complex. Ripples of rock make up the ridges of the mountain — the backbone of the dragon.

  The airport was once a RAF base, and those hangars of 1950s corrugated iron remain. It boasts long and serviceable runways; the only hazard on take-off and landing being the volcano itself.

  As the plane comes to rest, Simon is already moving, lifting down his bag and leading a line of passengers to the door, waiting while the stairway is clipped into place. Inside the terminal, he switches on his phone and reads Isabella’s text me
ssage.

  Simon. Forgive me. Girls taken from Aden airport. My heart is with you, along with all my hopes and trust.

  For a moment he cannot move, instead running her words through his mind.

  Forgive you for what? What did you do, Isabella? Is it true that you had sex with him? That you screwed an Algerian terrorist? That while our girls slept you rutted with a killer, a planter of bombs? That you let the bastards take the one beautiful thing in our lives. The daughters we both love, whatever our own failings …

  Entering a grimy bathroom of pale linoleum and ceramic, rust-stained sinks, Simon wrinkles his nose at the smell of urine and worse. He washes and shaves, changing his shirt for a lightly soiled one from his bag, losing some travel sweat in the process. Finally he combs his hair, pins his BA identification card to his top pocket and walks towards the security gate where other visitors have queued up to display their documentation.

  Simon feels the first trepidation at what he is about to do, opening his passport with its flight crew stamp. A pair of dark eyes fix on his, and he wonders if he is about to be questioned, but then he is through and there is no shout behind him. He passes on, pleased that bluff is still possible in a world of suspicion, body scans and iris readers.

  At first he is content to wander the concourse, aware of the obvious differences between this airport and the showpiece at Dubai — this is older, more workmanlike than ostentatious. Aden, he decides, is a perfect place to abduct the children of a high-ranking official — one not so important as to attract her own security detail, but senior enough to serve their purposes.

  Workers and travellers pass by in twos and threes, talking loudly as is common in the local culture. The bulk of the speech is in Gulf Arabic or, occasionally, Farsi. Simon has a working knowledge of both, gleaned over years of travel, and dealing often with staff from Middle Eastern airports. He deciphers what he can. Snippets, statements, questions, the clutter of everyday life.