Reg had no doubt that Faisal would lead his men against whatever city destroyer was nearest, whether it was actually headed toward Mecca or not. It was clear to him that Faisal intended to turn the desperate situation to his own advantage, no matter who suffered in the process. He would gladly pervert his pilots’ genuine religious fervor to his own ends and force the less devout among them along by whatever means he had at his disposal.
The presence of the foreign pilots had no doubt complicated Faisal’s plans considerably, but the man had proven to be a fast thinker, rapidly turning any situation to his own advantage. Reg thought of all of these things, and of Fadeela, until the heat of the day eventually forced him to leave the tent.
It was around ten in the morning and the sun had only just begun its daily assault, already pushing the mercury past a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The other British pilots were just returning to their area, pink-faced and soaked with sweat. Thomson had brought Reg some breakfast, a paper cup filled with cold yellow beans in a spicy red sauce. Tye contributed some broken crackers from one of his many pockets to round out the meal.
None of the three had done much more than mutter a greeting before Reg dipped his cup in the communal water bucket and sat back on his haunches in the fractionally cooler shade of a Tornado.
Thomson, looking as if he were finally running out of hope, spoke to Reg. “Guess you haven’t heard about Houston, then,” he said.
Reg remembered Faisal’s news of the Americans’ planned nuclear assault from the night before. A single glance at the faces of the other three RAF men was enough to tell him that the attack had met with failure.
“We’re screwed backwards and sideways,” said Sutton. “What else can we throw at those bastards?”
“Edward talked to one of the radiomen. They said the Americans reported that the destroyer didn’t even move when the bomb went off. Those shields must be impenetrable.”
Reg took a drink of water. “I wonder if this changes Faisal’s thinking at all,” he said.
“I hope not,” muttered Sutton darkly.
Reg looked around at the other three men, noticed how none of them would meet his eye.
He sighed, and chose Tye. “Okay, what is it?” he asked the tall youth.
“What’s what?” Tye asked in turn.
“What is it you’re not telling me?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tye answered. Reg hadn’t thought it possible for the mechanic to turn any redder, but as he lied, Tye’s face glowed a fraction more crimson.
Thomson shifted uncomfortably, then threw his hands up in the air. “It’s vile,” he said, “but we can’t just sit out here forever.”
“Did we not agree just five minutes ago not to tell him until after the Saudis took off?” snarled Sutton.
Reg held up his hand. “No, no,” he said to Thomson. “Don’t go against the plan. What if I’m captured, and Faisal turns his knife boys loose on me to find out what I know, eh?”
He stood and stretched, looking around at the other international contingents. He saw that the Israelis had removed the access panels from their fighters and were tinkering in the electronics compartments.
“As long as I don’t know what you lot are up to, I can’t give away the plan,” he said, turning back to the others. He walked over and crouched next to Sutton.
“As it is, I’ll have to tell them something to save my own skin, of course. Just make up something nonsensical. What should I tel! them?”
The surly lieutenant scooted away from Reg. “I don't care what you tell the buggers,” he said.
“How about this, then?” Reg asked. “How about I tell them that we’ve estimated that the Saudis have about two hundred men in this camp all told, and that we figure they’ve got about a hundred and twenty operational planes.” Tye looked up at Reg, eyes wide.
“Once they fly off to bring everlasting glory to Ghalil ibn-Faisal,” Reg continued, “that leaves just eighty or so soldiers guarding the camp—and the fuel dump. And, of course, the fifty or so international pilots who haven’t signed on with Faisal’s jihad, I suppose they’ll still be here. Playing cards, probably.”
Thomson looked vaguely embarrassed, but said nothing. “Next,” said Reg, “I’ll get really creative. I’ll tell them that the Israelis almost always stockpile small arms and the odd submachine gun on their planes in case they go down in hostile territory. These Arabs will believe any crazy thing about the Jews, won’t they, Sutton?”
“Who told you?” the lieutenant muttered under his breath.
But Reg wasn’t finished. “Now, by that point, Faisal’s men will probably be really angry with me. They’ll ask me what kind of fools I take them for. ‘The foreign pilots conspiring to take over the camp once the bulk of our forces are away?' they’ll say. ‘That crazy Miriyam distributing guns?’”
“You’ve made your point, Major,” said Sutton.
“‘Do you think we’re children, Englishman?' I hope there’s no kicking. I can’t bear to be kicked. ‘ What makes you think we ’d believe the foreigners would come up with such a STUPID, BLOODY OBVIOUS PLANT ”
“Sutton here was pretty sure it would work,” said Tye.
“Shut up, Tye,” said Sutton.
Reg turned to the colonel. “You realize there are civilians over there,” he said.
“I told you he’d be a problem,” Sutton fumed to the others. “Look here, Cummins, that Miriyam has got it all figured out. You can sit here and take shit from Faisal all you want, but the rest of us have better things to do. The only thing we need from you is that you keep your mouth shut, understood?”
“Lieutenant Sutton,” said Reg, “if I didn’t know any better, I’d think that you just addressed a superior officer in a disrespectful tone. Shame, shame, Sutton. Shame, shame.”
Before the lieutenant could reply, there was a commotion on the opposite side of the runway. One of the radiomen, still wearing his headphones, was trotting toward the British planes. He was clutching a piece of paper in his hand and shouting in Arabic. One of the guards along the perimeter of the foreign enclave waved him through.
The man stood before them, then, still shouting, obviously repeating himself and stumbling over words in his haste.
“What the devil is he saying?” asked Thomson, frantically thumbing the pages of his phrase book once more.
Reg had been listening to the man closely. Finally, he raised his hands, indicating that radio operator should calm down. “Feh hemt,feh hemt,” said Reg. I understand, I understand.
The radio operator nodded, then ran to the next encampment, where he spoke just as swiftly to the Egyptians.
Reg spoke to his companions. “He says they’re picking up some kind of message in English, along with some Morse code. They can’t understand all of it. Let’s go have a look.”
“Wait,” Sutton said. “That doesn’t make any sense. They’ve got plenty of men over there who speak English. They don’t need us. Sounds like an ambush.”
Reg looked at Sutton gravely and nodded. “You may be right. They’d obviously want us to be standing next to their airplanes instead of our airplanes when they open fire. I’ll give you a detailed report if I make it back alive.”
When Reg began running toward the radio tent, he found that Thomson was right on his heels.
“Slow down, Cummins,” puffed the colonel. “I’m coming along.”
“What about Sutton’s ambush?” Reg asked.
“To hell with Sutton.” The portly colonel waved his arms. “I’m going to ambush him if I have to stay around him much longer.”
Members of almost all of the other international contingents were converging on the radio tent. Reg was startled to see that many of them were now openly carrying weapons. Sensing one such armed man beside him, Reg turned to see Yossi, trotting along and carrying an Uzi.
When he saw Reg looking at him incredulously, Yossi shrugged, and said, “Miriyam said I should invite myself a
long. I thought I’d stick close to you Englishmen, since ‘your fondness for Jews is well-known.’” His imitation of Faisal was surprisingly good, but Reg doubted that it would come in handy if any of the Arabs were unhappy with a gun-toting Israeli showing up at the radio tent.
There was a crowd around the radios. The shaded area beneath the open-sided camouflage tent looked like an electronics bazaar. Much of the equipment Faisal’s team had gathered up was surplus, some of it older than the soldiers themselves. The tent resembled an Arab market, with fifty different conversations going on at once. But the noise and activity quickly melted away as the foreign visitors stepped beneath the canopy inside. As Reg had feared, the Arabs interpreted Yossi’s presence as a taunt.
Khalid hurried toward Reg and pulled him to one side. “They have destroyed Amman, and now they are moving south. I spoke with Faisal and tried to convince him we should follow your advice, but he is committed. Unless the ship changes course, he will order an attack within the next two hours.”
As Reg listened, he watched over Khalid’s shoulder, keeping an eye on the other Saudis. Some of them were demanding that Yossi state his business, meaningfully grasping the handles of their pistols. Finally, one of them thumped the Israeli in the chest, and shouted, “Imshi!” Scram!
Reg interrupted Khalid. “How do you say ‘lawyer’ in Arabic?” Khalid blinked, confused by the question. But he answered. “Advocat. Why?”
“Going to use some Thomson school diplomacy,” Reg said before he joined the knot of Saudis surrounding Yossi. Once among them, he shook his finger at the largest man, loudly proclaiming something in halting Arabic. There was a brief silence, then all of the Arab speakers in the area began laughing.
Remarkably, Thomson had left his phrase book at the camp. “What did you say?” he asked.
“I said not to worry about Yossi. He’s our lawyer.”
One of the radio operators pointed at the machine gun the Israeli soldier held and cracked a joke of his own, which Khalid translated: “Yes, and I see he remembered to bring his fountain pen! ” When the men had had their laugh, they began turning back to their workstations.
“Now,” Reg asked, “where’s this Morse code?”
Khalid led the way to the center of the tent, where the camp’s best radio was being monitored by a trio of technicians. They were all listening intently, scratching out notes on pads of paper. By their expressions, Reg could tell they were frustrated. One of them slipped off his headphones and handed them over to Reg.
He put them on, expecting to hear a sequence of dots and dashes. Instead, there was a roar of static. It seemed to be nothing but a storm of interference noise, but then he heard it: a faint voice shouting through the blizzard. Reg closed his eyes and tried to make out what the voice was saying. . . . States government has captured. . . shield we will. . . alien mother ship outside... do not engage. . . forces happy. . . The voice belonged to an American man who was speaking in an urgent but controlled tone. It seemed impossible to piece together the fragments of what he was saying.
If this broadcast is coming from America, thought Reg, there's no telling how many times it’s been relayed, boosted, and amplified before it reached the Empty Quarter. “Can’t make it out,” Reg said to the operator sitting next to him. “It’s just so much sonic mush.” He began to remove his headphones, but the Saudi motioned for him to keep listening.
“Wait,” said the man. “You will hear.”
He was right. A few seconds after the voice transmission was finished, a Morse sequence began. This, too, was faint, frequently interrupted, and barely audible. Reg quickly realized the spoken message was being repeated in this different form. He grabbed a pad and pencil and began writing, decoding as he went. The brief message was continuously recycling itself, and, after ten minutes, Reg had as much of it as he thought he could gather.
Everyone in the tent waited anxiously as Reg compared his own notes to those taken by the other men. Like a person solving a crossword puzzle, he fit the pieces together fragment by fragment. When he was finished, he read it over a couple of times and couldn’t help but smile. When he stood up from the table, every pilot in the immediate vicinity rushed up to hear the news.
“It’s from the Americans,” he announced. “They want to organize a counteroffensive.” A guarded cheer went through the crowd.
“It’s about bloody time,” Thomson harrumphed. “What’s their plan?”
“It’s .. . well, it’s damn creative.”
“Read it!” several men demanded. Soldiers and civilians were streaming in from all directions.
Reg cleared his throat. “It says: ‘To any and all remaining armies of the world. The U.S. military has captured one of the alien attack ships, has learned to circumvent and disable its protective shield. We will attempt to disable all shields worldwide. Preparing now to infiltrate alien mother ship outside Earth’s atmosphere and use computer interface to temporarily disable source of shields. If successful, we anticipate only a small window of opportunity. Please commit all possible military resources to worldwide synchronized attack to begin at approximately 03:15 GMT. We will announce success or failure of our mission at that time. Conserve your weaponry. Do not engage enemy. Accept civilian losses. This action authorized by U.S. President Thomas Whitmore. Continue to monitor this frequency. Relay message to other forces in your area. Happy Independence Day.’ ” As one of the radio operators repeated the message in Arabic, the tent and surrounding area filled with murmured discussions. Reg looked down at the paper in his own hand. The word harebrained went through his head, followed closely by impossible.
But then again, at least it’s a plan, he thought. And who knows? The Americans have surprised me before.
After the initial flush of enthusiasm, questions and reservations about the plan started to crop up. How were the Americans going to get into the mother ship? How were our computers going to interface with the alien technology? How would anyone know when the shields were down, assuming they ever came down at all? “No, no!” protested one of Khalid’s men. ‘This is a bad plan, too much crazy.”
But this man was in the minority. More and more of the pilots, both Saudi and international, began discussing how the group might work together to fulfill their role in it.
Then, from the edge of the tent, a booming voice interrupted the gathering. “We Arabs are a proud people until our foreign masters tug on the leash,” said Commander Faisal, striding to the center of the group. “Then we forget our own obligations in an instant.” He was obviously displeased with the way some of his men were embracing the new plan. He shook an admonishing finger at them. “As soon as the Americans, the infidel Americans, speak, you turn into lapdogs! A few words over a radio, and you forget the Holy City!”
Reg felt the energy and enthusiasm begin to drain from the group. The influence that Faisal had over his men could not be underestimated. He was a charismatic man, capable of rousing hearts and raising morale with a few well-chosen words.
Somebody needs to choose the right words to turn this thing around, Reg thought. This American plan is madness, but it’s the only chance we’ve got. Reg looked at Thomson, considering whether the colonel would be able to turn the tide of opinion against Faisal.
“I think someone’s trying to get your attention, Major,” Thomson said. Reg looked to where the colonel was pointing and saw a handful of Saudi woman. Piercing green eyes stared at him from behind the shrouding abaya of the tallest. It could only be Fadeela.
Knowing that there was no way, in this public forum, that she would be able to speak to him, Reg watched as she slowly raised her arm and pointed directly at him.
She’s thinking the same thing I am, Reg thought, and she wants me to talk to these men. But they despise me after last night!
Fadeela lowered her arm, but continued to hold him in her gaze. He could see the questions in her eyes. What do you have worth fighting for? What do you believe in?
Reg consider
ed then that Fadeela Yamani might be the bravest person he had ever known. She lived her life as if walking a treacherous path, fraught with danger. Holding to the strictures of her society on the outside, internally she longed for a life of independence, of freedom of a sort no one in her position should ever hope to obtain. But she did not give up hope; she did not give up the fight.
It’s her, Reg thought, simply. She’s worth fighting for. I believe in her.
Reg saw a half-full water barrel immediately behind the spot where Faisal still stood, haranguing his men. He walked over to it and did something guaranteed to draw the rapt attention of every one of these desert-bred men. He turned it over.
Faisal cursed and leapt away, narrowly avoiding muddying his highly polished boots. When he turned, Reg had already overturned the barrel and climbed atop it.
Reg clutched the American message in his hand and held it above his head. “This plan,” he said in a loud voice, “may be the most foolhardy damned plan I’ve ever heard of. There’s no logic to it! It depends on a thousand variables and perfect timing among hundreds of units spread across the globe.” One of the Saudi soldiers started to approach, but Reg saw Faisal wave him off. He thinks I'm going to argue for doing nothing, thought Reg. Good.
Reg caught the eye of the pilot who had disparaged the plan earlier. ‘“Too much crazy,’ right? Risking all on a one-in-a-million chance that the Americans will accomplish what? That they’ll shut down the shields for a few moments at best! Their President Whitmore must think we’re crazy!” A few of the Saudis were nodding, but Reg saw that more of them were disappointed that he wasn’t arguing for the plan. I don’t want to be a disappointment, he thought, and continued speaking.
“Or maybe I should say that Whitmore must hope we’re crazy. The Americans must hope that we’ll join them. That is, after all, what they’re offering us. Hope. The first glimmer of hope we’ve had since the aliens destroyed Jerusalem.”
Stephen Molstad - [ID4- Independence Day 03] Page 9
