A concession to Kabir was to have one of his desert-wise men drive the second Rover. Rodriguez was riding shotgun, a well-worn red-checked keffiyeh making him look like the driver’s brother.
Even Rizzo, whose dark features and hooked nose made him ideal for the part, had the scarf affixed to his head with dual bands of thin, black rope, the agal. He sat on a couple of sleeping rugs on the back seat of the second Rover, next to Annie. She was covered head-to-toe in a black burnoose and a light, black veil covered the lower half of her face. It was hot, but it was necessary. Above everything, they wanted to blend in as much as possible, to be invisible to the people around them. Tom was next to Annie, a sweat-stained ghutra, the white version of the checked keffiyeh, on his head.
Bohannon was anything but relaxed. For the first time in months, they were completely dependent on someone else. Aaron’s staff was stashed carefully in the back, in a padded weapons carrier, but Bohannon kept glancing over his shoulder to make sure it was still there and to make sure there was no lightning bolt from heaven or angelic death ray shooting out from the bag. He felt like he was riding in the Nitro Express. Slowly.
This was going to be a long day.
11:22 a.m., Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Saudi King Abbudin had already been surprised once this day. He didn’t like surprises, particularly such monumental ones.
The first surprise came when the Swiss and Chinese agreed. It was rare for Switzerland and China to agree on anything. But today, Geneva and Peking agreed to rescue the world’s economy. The Swiss bailed out the European Union with an infusion of one billion euros into the European Central Bank, staving off the imminent bankruptcy of half a dozen nations. And the Chinese bought debt around the globe, stabilizing shaky markets from New York to Tokyo.
Abbudin was conferring with his minister of finance and the head of the Saudi Central Bank—both cousins of the family Saud—when his son Faisal brought news of a second surprise.
Crown Prince Faisal, Abbudin’s heir and pride, was barely through the door when he began to speak, a breach of etiquette but one his father tolerated on this day. “The Americans are moving swiftly,” Faisal declared. “President Whitestone has removed all limits on pumping from the Alaskan oil fields, and he has offered licenses for off-shore drilling and for more drilling in Alaska to American-owned companies only.”
Faisal came to the side of the table where his father sat with his ministers. “Even more surprising, the Russians have opened up a new oil field—the Mamontovskoye Field—for the express use of Europe. The field was unknown to us, but it is fully prepared for production. It sits right along the Trans-Siberian pipeline. They can be pumping oil into the pipeline in three days.”
A portrait of his father hung over a mantel across the room from where Abbudin sat. He gazed at it with questioning eyes. What would you think? His father had dreamed of a moment in time like this, a moment to throw the arrogant Americans under his feet. What would you do now?
King Abbudin turned his gaze to his son. “We have lost the initiative and the element of surprise. We have one chance to regain it. Has there been word from Baghdad?”
“I wish there was.” Faisal sat at the table on his father’s right. “Somehow the Americans have disappeared again. Operatives of the Brotherhood were closing in on them yesterday evening in the ruins of Babylon. Then they vanished, along with some of our men.”
“Underground?”
“Perhaps … likely.”
“How long ago did they vanish?”
“Eighteen hours?”
“Then we must assume they found the garden,” said Abbudin. “If they surface—when they surface—we must be prepared to act as if they found the staff and have it in their possession. Get word to all the ISIS commanders to turn the attention of all their men to finding this team of Americans. Tell them to look for the dwarf. And tell the Brotherhood faithful to take to the streets, the roads, the bridges. Find these infidels. Find the staff, and we still have a chance.”
Abbudin looked at the portrait once more. We are so close, Father. So close.
11:35 a.m., Baghdad, Iraq
The old man in the tobacco shop had never been so frightened. His hands were wrapped together in a knot around the telephone pressed to his ear. The urgency of the demands coming from Riyadh, and the threats that underlay that urgency, once again made him doubt the wisdom of this alliance he’d formed with the Brotherhood.
“We have agents at the airport in both the commercial and private terminals.” His explanations sounded like pleas for mercy. “We have teams of men at every bus station, every railway terminal. We’ve dispatched fighting squads to every major highway intersection and others patrol almost every secondary road.”
He listened to the voice on the other end of the phone connection. “No, Your Excellency. We captured one of their contacts yesterday and beat her until we got the information we sought. But she lied to us and then escaped. We surrounded their hiding place, only to find it empty. We will kill her when we find her again.”
He listened.
“No. We have no other leads.”
The old man wondered if he would see another moon. Unless he succeeded, it was unlikely. His grandson would have only a memory.
“Yes, Your Excellency. We will not give up.”
11:54 a.m., Al-Kifl, Iraq
They turned off the approach road and onto the bridge across the Euphrates. Immediately Rodriguez spotted the militia. There were loiterers around the bridge entrance, which concerned him, but a few yards onto the bridge itself, two Jeeps were parked on either side of the bridge, men in ragged, mismatched camouflage and holding automatic weapons standing on the hoods to get a better look at any passing vehicle.
“Don’t look.”
Rizzo swung his head toward the urgency of Rodriguez’s voice, and his gaze drifted past Rodriguez and out the window, toward the men standing on the Jeep along the side of the road. For one fleeting moment, his eyes locked with one of the men.
Kabir turned in the seat and looked over his left shoulder, out the back window of the Land Rover, as they gained speed on the down slope of the bridge. He couldn’t see much, or for long. But he noticed that the men who had been standing on the hoods of the Jeeps were gone.
“Faster,” he said to the driver.
He was a baker, his shop a prosperous one in the southeast fringe of Baghdad. He owed much to the Muslim Brotherhood, including his bakery. But he was annoyed at being pulled away from his work and his family for this “emergency.” At times he wondered if he had bargained with the devil.
The concrete was hot under his feet. Two of his men were on the far side of the road, inspecting the unpaved track that crossed this unnamed highway at right angles and continued into the western desert. He and his men had chased the Land Rovers from the bridge. He feared they had lost the trail at the Najaf Road, but after much delay, one of his men noticed the tire marks in a desolate, unpaved track that led into the desert. Whether by intuition, experience, or the will of Allah, they had followed this far and he had stopped the Jeeps short of the road. On foot, they found the faint residue of desert grit, a number of tire tracks turning off the unpaved east-west trail onto the north-south road.
His driver walked quickly across the road. “There are no tire tracks on the other side, sir.”
“They turned north.”
“Why would they do that? If these men were taking the Americans across the desert, why turn north?” asked the driver. “There is no benefit to that.”
“Unless their destination is in the north. Their way of escape is in the north.”
The two men looked up the long ribbon of road. They had worked side by side for nearly three years, occasionally fighting together, and knew each other well. “There is nothing north,” said the driver, “except …” He looked at his commander. “Al Asad?”
“I don’t know,” said the commander. “But if I were trying to escape the country, escape detec
tion, this would be a good plan. West is a thousand kilometers of wasteland. South the same. They are not traveling to Fallujah or Ramadi, and they must know they can no longer leave from Baghdad. What does that leave them?”
“But I would not drive on this road past Ramadi,” said the driver. “It would be foolish.”
“Perhaps. Gashur!”
The driver of the second Jeep trotted up to the road. “It appears that their destination is not west through the desert, after all. We believe they run for Al Asad. Take your Jeep and one of your men and drive quickly to Karbala. Contact Baghdad and tell the leader what we believe. Have him dispatch as many units as possible from Ramadi, some up the Euphrates road, some the interior road, and others into the desert along the wadis. Have some units go directly to Al Asad. Try to reach the air base before them. We may have them in a trap. Go. Quickly.”
4:05 p.m., north of Ramadi, Iraq
The lead vehicle on the interior road west of the Euphrates was a well-worn, four-wheel-drive Subaru station wagon with 267,000 miles on its odometer, a hole ripped in the roof above its rear cargo compartment, a heavy-caliber machine gun mounted on the floor and protruding through the hole in the roof.
Kalil Unifa was small and dark, an enigma to his men and a terror to his enemies. An ISIS cell leader from its infancy in Syria, he read the Quran morning and evening and Tom Clancy novels before he went to sleep. He preached benevolence to the poor and death to the infidel with the same passion. And he was fiercely loyal, obedient to death.
“If you were trying to reach Al Asad undetected,” Unifa asked his driver, “which way would you go?”
“Wadi Al-Ubayyid,” the driver answered without hesitation. “Dry, flat, off the road. It reaches nearly all the way to Al Asad. It would be the best way.”
“And if you wanted to intercept these people in the wadi?”
“There is a good place to the north where a rocky hill reaches into, and over, the wadi below. We would see them coming—have good lines of fire,” said the driver.
“Excellent. Quickly.”
5:44 p.m., Wadi Al-Ubayyid, Iraq
The Subaru pulled onto the low promontory that hung like a nose over the Wadi Al-Ubayyid and stopped well short of the edge. The other two cars came up on his flanks and came to a halt. They held eight men, and only a cursory glance would reveal they were fighters. Green fatigue jackets bleached by the sun barely covered massive shoulders and biceps. They all wore cargo pants of differing hues of gray and boots so battered by the desert and their duty that they were more scuff and scratch than shoes. They wore no hats, but their heads were covered with thick, curly masses of hair, dusted with the residue of the dunes.
Unifa pulled a night-vision scope from his gun bag and surveyed the wadi below. It would be dark soon. He put his hand on the left shoulder of Varun and passed the scope to him. “Do you see that place where the wadi narrows and the large mound is in the middle? Cross the wadi to the far side. Take some of the dynamite and the RPG launcher. Set your charges along the far-side track. Your task is not to harm them or their vehicles, but to chase them to us.”
Two men followed Varun as he gathered up the gear and disappeared into the wadi.
He turned to his muscled driver. “Uncouple the fifty. Take it about halfway down the hill. Don’t open up until Varun sets off his charges. If they refuse to stop or get through our blockade, destroy the engine of the first vehicle, not the people inside. Be very careful. Do not incur the wrath of the leader.”
His mind visualizing the coming encounter, Unifa retraced his steps to the Subaru and opened the rear door. He unloaded three Swiss-made machine pistols and handed those to the men behind him, then pulled out a long, heavy sniper rifle, affixed the 10X scope onto its stock, and lifted it onto his shoulder.
“Scour the hillside. Find any large stones or wild brush and bring them to the floor of the wadi. We will build a barricade on the near side. We will stop them and hold them until the leader arrives. Go.”
45
6:10 p.m., Abraham’s Oasis, Iraq
Tom jumped out of his sleep, wrestling to find a way out of the blackness. Fear ripped through him. Memories of the cave crashed through his mind.
“It’s okay.” Joe’s voice. “We’re just slowing down.”
Tom drew in a hot breath of the desert, drying his mouth even more, and tried to focus his eyes. The Rovers were covered by the false twilight cast by a sharp narrowing of the wadi’s walls, the dry riverbed twisting through a series of tight turns. He must have dozed somewhere after they turned off the road. The Rovers pulled to stop, tightly hugging one of the walls. Bohannon opened the door and stepped out. He was so sore, even his eyes hurt. He leaned over, his hands on his knees, and tried to stretch out the aches.
“Where are we?”
Whalen’s voice to his left.
“Just below the oasis.”
Curiosity gnawed at Tom. Above them was Abraham’s Oasis, a long, thin ribbon of green grasses, palm trees, and marshland surrounding a small, still lake. Kabir provided the oasis’s history, an unproven legend of speculation that Abraham and his family—at that time more than three hundred trained fighting men, along with camels, goats, dogs, and women, children, and elderly—had stopped at this oasis on their journey from Ur of the Chaldees to Canaan. This oasis sat astride the main caravan route from Ur and was one of the few known oases between Ur and Haran, making it a likely resting place for any travelers heading west.
Perhaps fanciful conjecture, but the local Bedouins believed the legend and passed it down as gospel from generation to generation.
Whether Abram ever drank from this pond or rested under its palm trees was less critical than discovering what occupied the space now.
“Let’s take a look.”
Tom pushed his body upright, stretching out the hurts. “I’m going, too.”
They climbed the steep sides of the wadi along a track that was more likely intended for goats. Below the summit, Kabir stopped and peeked over the edge. Tom watched as Kabir’s body visibly tensed. He waved them forward with exaggerated caution, which is when Tom noticed that Rizzo was right on his heels.
“I’m not going to miss this,” Rizzo whispered.
Tom raised his head above the lip of the desert floor and was surprised that the sky was purpling in the west, the sun gashes of orange behind low clouds. Maybe it was because he slept, but he thought it was early to be getting dark.
Kabir pointed off into the distance and passed the binoculars to Whalen.
“Three vehicles … I could see only two men,” said Kabir.
“There must be others waiting for us,” said Whalen. “Where would they be hiding?”
“They would expect us to come along the main channel of the Wadi Al-Ubayyid, over there to the west where they are.”
“Can we get around them?”
Kabir touched Whalen on his left shoulder and pointed farther south. “The militia is not our only problem.”
Bohannon looked to the south. The low clouds he had noticed to the west obscured the sun. Then he looked closer. The clouds were boiling along the surface of the desert, not dipping from the sky. They covered the horizon, left and right, for as far as he could see in either direction. They were brown. And they were advancing.
“The Great Anbar Storm. The last one I encountered was fifteen hundred kilometers high, almost a mile,” said Kabir.
Tom’s eyes could not break from the roiling mass rolling in their direction.
“Sandstorm.” Rizzo was by his side. “I saw one, almost got eaten by it, in Egypt. This one looks pretty ticked.”
“How far away?” asked Whalen.
“Thirty minutes, perhaps less,” said Kabir.
“Looks like a brown ocean. Can we outrun it?”
“No.”
“Commander!”
“Yes, I see it. A little sand. Tell the men to stand fast.”
Kabir’s men, the two drivers, were quick and pre
cise, wrapping the two engines in rugs that had been strapped to the cars. Kabir and Whalen’s men rigged the tents to extend from the wadi’s walls, over the Rovers, and down the far side. Tom, Annie, Joe, and Rizzo had sparingly used their precious water to wet down torn cloth and then stuffed it into every vent and over every window, which were cranked up tight. Not impervious to the coming sandstorm, but better protected. The wind was growing in ferocity, and they could hear a thick rumble coming closer and closer as they piled into the vehicles and took cover.
Their driver, silent most of the trip, climbed in last, took a length of cloth, and wrapped it over his nose and mouth, motioning for each of them to follow suit.
“Hey, Lone Ranger, are the masks necessary?” Rizzo wrapped his cloth strip around his forehead. “Yo, I’m Rambo!”
The driver looked at Rizzo in the rearview mirror. “The sand will suck the oxygen out of the air and out of your body. Be careful, or you may turn to stone.”
“I’ve always wanted to be immortalized,” said Rizzo. But he quickly pulled the strip off his forehead to cover his mouth. “Hey, Abdul, how many—”
The wind-driven sand slammed into the far wall of the wadi with the thunder of a passing freight train, rolled back over the floor of the gorge, and rocked the Rover with such force that the left side of the vehicle was thrown into the wadi’s bank. The desert’s brown grit pummeled the Land Rover on three sides, invading the Rover’s interior through unknown openings. Soon, the silt-like particles were falling like rain inside the car.
Tom had taken off his chamois shirt and draped it over Annie’s head, supplementing the robe and veil she had worn through most of the trip, and now had his arms wrapped around her shoulders, trying to protect her in any way possible. He figured his wife must be getting awfully hot under there as the temperature in the car continued to climb.
“Does it always get hotter inside a sandstorm?” Joe asked.
The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) Page 37
