Wally spun on LB. He mouthed the question.
Where’s Doc?
LB pointed at his own butt.
Wally banged on the side of the chopper. He tossed a thumbs-up to the pilot, who’d turned in his seat to watch his helo loaded. Quincy slid the door shut. The pilot wasted no time, lifting off the moment LB and Wally cleared the blades and doubled back for Doc.
Pedro 2 continued to rake the field. Acres of wheat bordering the road had been barbered down to yellow stubble. The low sun winked on thousands of spent casings lying in the debris and on the road. In the late afternoon, between the red mountains, the land was golden.
Wally got on the ground-to-air. He called Pedro 2 to swing around for a pickup.
The minigun quit as the bird pulled away from the field. Nearby, Pedro 1 climbed to take over guard duty.
When Wally and LB reached the ditch, Doc still hadn’t moved off his stomach. They dug under his armpits to put him on his feet. Doc howled as they set him in motion. He would put no weight on his wounded right side.
LB lacked sympathy. “It’s just an ass wound.”
Doc, arms spread over both sets of shoulders, smacked LB in the back of his helmet.
“Ever been shot in the ass?”
“Yes.”
“It fucking hurts.”
“Quit whining about it.”
Wally yelled across Doc.
“Lighten up.”
Pedro 2 descended rapidly into the bowl of dust she reared. With Doc hanging between them, Wally and LB pulled up short to let the chopper swoop down.
LB had to shout.
“You ever been ass shot?”
Wally shook his head.
“Then what do you know?”
“I know now’s not the time.”
Doc squeezed both their necks. “Both of you, shut up.”
When the chopper’s wheels touched, the door was flung aside. LB and Wally urged Doc toward the dust storm under the rotors.
Sparks flashed off the Pave Hawk’s fuselage.
In the window, the chopper’s gunner swept the 7.62 side to side, searching for a target. Then, like everyone on this mission, he strafed the wheat field blindly, and the road, the mulberries. Another flurry of incoming bullets bit the dirt around LB’s loose boot. Again, the locals had lain in ambush, this time for a rescue helo. Why wouldn’t they just take the rest of the day off? LB didn’t know, didn’t care. He’d done three missions today, the sun was setting, and he wanted to get on this bird. He tugged Doc forward to cover the last distance to the chopper’s open door.
Wally dug in his heels, screaming. “Get down.”
Wally collapsed, pulling the helpless Doc down with him. LB tried to tug Doc back to his feet and press onward; their ride out of here waited twenty yards farther. Another spark off the spinning rotors left LB no choice; he dove to the dirt beside Doc, who’d landed on his backside and was bellowing loud enough to be heard over the gales from the chopper and the minigun.
On all sides, the battlefield erupted. Overhead, Pedro 1 coursed past, taking its turn battering the wheat. Behind their wall, Bengal’s commandos popped off at shadows that returned fire. Pedro 2’s spinning six barrels flailed at every hiding place, the field, orchard, roadside ditch, the already-riddled wreckage in open ground. In the distance, one of the innocent, tied-up goats was felled.
Pedro 2, a big target, wasn’t going to sit on the ground long and tolerate being shot at. Plenty of cover fire was going on. LB wanted to move, now. He scrabbled to his knees, grabbing for one of Doc’s wrists.
“Come on, get up.”
Wally shook his head and wrapped Doc in both arms, pushing him over to lie on his back. Doc, in too much pain to resist, flattened. Wally hurled himself across Doc’s chest to shield him.
LB belted at the two of them. “You’re kidding me.”
Pressed under Wally’s weight, Doc howled. “Get off me, get off, goddammit.”
LB hauled on Doc’s arm. “Then get up.”
Wally held Doc to the ground. “Stay down.”
Doc batted at Wally. “Get off.”
LB tugged on Doc’s arm. “Get up.”
Wally kicked at LB. “Get down!”
* * *
1 long-range patrol.
2 severity of wounds.
3 improvised explosive device.
4 casualty collection point.
5 close air support.
Today
Chapter 1
The Empty Quarter
Six miles east of Ma’rib
Yemen
Arif stood on the crest of a high dune lit orange by the horizon behind him.
The desert was not empty. Like the sea it was vast, with waves that rolled at the pace of years. Yet standing alone, facing the endless ribs of it, Arif’s sense was of emptiness. The great desert was not for the eye or ears but for the heart. If a man himself was empty, this was not the place for him. The desert kept a still tongue, and when it did speak it came for your life. But if a man was full, if a man had found his own voice, the desert was the most intent of listeners.
At the end of his evening walk, approaching the time for prayer, Arif turned northwest to his lost homeland and to Mecca inside it. The setting January sun pressed his cheeks like warm, open hands. One mile away, the distance Arif had walked, the light cast his pickup truck into silhouette. Six miles farther, the shanties, old city, minarets, and fading homes of Ma’rib gleamed amber against the perfect sky. Ma’rib bore the history of a prince fallen to beggar. Once the land of Sheba, a crossroads in the Ramlat al-Sab‘atayn desert between the Orient and Mediterranean, she’d been the site of a marvel of the ancient world, the huge dam to fill the Wadi Adhana. For two thousand years a man-made lake fed fields of sorghum, wheat, frankincense, and myrrh. Along with the plants, prosperity and influence took root in Ma’rib. She became a center of knowledge and riches, lasting for millennia. Then, as they will, the riches overtook knowledge, and the people lost the ways to keep their wealth flowing. In the year of the Prophet’s birth, the dam was overtopped, and Ma’rib found she’d forgotten the skills to repair it. While Muhammad grew into a man in Mecca, the desert reclaimed what had been kept from its reach in Ma’rib. Many fled; the city withered with the roots. Most of those who left were foreigners, the non-Arab merchants and tradesmen who’d flocked here for business. Their exodus began with the Prophet’s birth.
Closing his eyes to begin the sundown prayer, Arif was grateful for Ma’rib’s fall into poverty. He was not Yemeni but Saudi; this was not his people’s tragedy. Ma’rib was no longer a jewel of temples and silk but a small mark on a worn map, beneath notice, a place for him to hide.
“I offer Maghrib prayers, seeking nearness to God, in obedience to Him.”
Arif raised his open hands beside his ears.
“Allah hu akbar.”
He uttered the first rakaat to the blazing horizon and the sun dousing itself behind Mecca six hundred miles away. Arif spoke into the sand as he bent from the waist. He whispered through his beard, into the dune, with his forehead touching.
Arif flowed through all three rakaats, bending, bowing.
From his knees he muttered the final Salaam. He spoke this not to faraway Mecca but to the outline of his little village on the eastern rim of the city, bathed in sunset. There Nadya would be rising from her own Maghrib.
Arif got to his bare feet, peckish and thinking of the evening meal. He wondered what Nadya would prepare. A Yemeni ogdat stew, a chicken, or lamb shank she’d picked up on the drive home from her women’s clinic? Milk tea and a sweet afterward. Before taking the downward slope of the dune, he reached into a pocket of his white thobe. It was an oddity of Ma’rib that some of the best cell phone reception could be found a mile east in the desert.
He caught his balance on the edge of the dune and rocked. The message had come. One wait had ended; another would begin. He slammed the phone shut. Arif hoisted the long hem of his thobe, not to trip over it as he ran.
He skidded the pickup to a stop, flinging gravel inside the mud walls of his little courtyard. Arif slammed the truck door, rushing to the back of his earthen-brick house, shouting for his wife.
He lifted the lid on the generator box to fill the tank with diesel so that he would not be interrupted if the power went down, as it often did. Nadya emerged from the rear door. Stepping outside, she lifted a silk scarf over her head.
“You’re driving like you’re in the movies now?”
Arif tilted the diesel can higher to pour the last of the fuel.
“I can still move fast.”
“You drive fast, that’s all. Was there news?”
Needing both hands, Arif waited until he set the can down empty. He closed the generator box, then produced the opened cell phone.
She ran a fingertip across the face of the phone, the email notice.
“Allah hu akbar.” She shifted her hand to his big chest and patted. “Patience.”
The Prophet said the world rests on an ox and a fish. The ox meant farming, the fish hunting. A farmer sows seed and waits. The hunter leaps when the prey leaps.
Arif stood on Yemeni ground, not his birthplace. He’d been the ox for two years now.
“I’ve already been patient. Will you bring me dinner?”
“Eat with me properly. I won’t see much of you for a while.”
Inside, Arif washed his hands in the kitchen, praying silently. A candle flavored the air cedar. Was this a romantic touch, or a celebration? He joined her in the alcove, where she waited on the carpet. A heaping plate of kapsa steamed between her folded knees; beside it, a wheel of freshly baked kimaje. Through the windows, the last daylight smoothed the crinkles around her coal eyes, softened the grey in her long black hair. Arif did not need these concessions of the dusk to find her lovely.
She poured milk tea while Arif descended to the carpet and pillows. Nadya held out the full cup. “What will you find?”
“I don’t know.”
“Whatever it is, I understand.”
Arif sipped, watching Nadya. She blinked at welling tears, drawing the flickers of the candle into her eyes.
“You are a warrior, my wife.”
Together they said their du’a before eating.
Because she had cried, Arif did not fidget during the meal to hurry away to the tug of his computer. He tore the kimaje, using the flatbread in his right hand to scoop up chunks of chicken and rice. Hints of cinnamon and cardamom on his tongue played with the piney aroma of the candle and the rising youth of his wife in the settling light. Arif let himself be fully in the alcove with her because she was correct; she would not see much of him once he left the meal.
He let the conversation drift from the hot weather and his afternoon walk on the dunes to her day in her women’s clinic. A pregnant qabil6 girl had come in malnourished. A village matron with chlamydia. An elder who found a lump in her breast paid for her exam with the chicken in tonight’s kapsa. More than a physician, Nadya counseled the village’s newest bride-to-be on the secrets and surprises of the wedding bed.
She cleared the plates, then set between them a bowl of honeyed figs. Easing down to her pillows, Nadya mentioned that a woman came to the clinic today to schedule the abortion of another man’s child. Under the hadiths that the woman lived by, the abortion was allowed within the first four months. But the adultery was perilous, and she begged Nadya to keep her secret. Nadya hid from Arif the woman’s name, but because she’d mentioned her while setting down the figs, he assumed she was the young wife of a village fig farmer he knew to be a bully.
With the last fig, the meal ended. Hands steepled, they said together, “Alhamdulillah.” Allah be praised.
Arif rose to boil another pot of tea. He fetched his wife’s cigarettes and kneeled in the alcove to light her first smoke. He stayed close beside Nadya while the teapot heated.
She reclined against a pillow, the shade of night drawn outside. On the eastern edge of the village, the homes were sparse, only dogs made noise after dark, and lanterns and fire pits cast as much light as electricity. The desert beyond the road spawned a mute rising moon. Nadya blew a patch of smoke against a windowpane, facing away from him, perhaps crying again. Arif pushed the hair off her neck to run his thumb up the tendon there. Her skin was slick. She’d bathed and oiled before the meal, expecting a different evening. Arif leaned into the mist of her cigarette to sniff her perfumed throat. He kissed the tendon, nuzzled her neck with his beard, and cupped her breast as the teapot whistled.
She did not turn from the window but pinched the cigarette at her fingertips, smoking like a starlet. Nadya took a somber drag. So she was crying again.
“The tea, Arif.”
He let loose her bosom.
He shut off the burner on the stove and set the teapot on a trivet beside her.
“I’ll go.”
Nadya blew out the candle.
“I don’t want to know what you find.”
She tapped another cigarette from the pack. Arif left her in the alcove surrounded by haze and moonlight.
In his dim second-floor office, Arif turned the power on to boot up his computer. He tossed the white thobe over the back of his chair and pulled on a black T-shirt and khaki shorts. After flicking on the window fan, he bound his hair into a ponytail. In the chair, Arif slid his hands under the spotlight of the lamp bent low above his keyboard. With a pause to mark the clutch in his chest, he logged in to his offsite command and control server in Al Hulaylah, United Arab Emirates. With the link established, Arif opened the message from Jaffar bint-Ahmed al-Saffar.
The email had as its subject “High-Paying Network Engineering Jobs.” Two days ago, Arif found a list of Saudi ISP network engineers who’d attended the International Conference on Network Security in Dubai the previous week. To those two hundred names, Arif sent an email with an attachment touting the benefits a few lucky job seekers could expect with an exciting start-up Internet company in Sana’a, Yemen. Among the Saudi technicians, Arif went phishing for the one who was not just underpaid and malcontent but careless.
This evening, while Arif prayed in the dunes, Jaffar bint-Ahmed al-Saffar opened the email, then the attachment, and let Arif in.
The malicious software had leaped into Jaffar’s computer, boring deep into the privileged kernel ring while Jaffar read an apology email that all the engineering positions at the new company had been filled. With the malware in place, the payload wrapped itself next around Jaffar’s keyboard driver, capturing all his keystrokes, including passwords and user IDs. A separate thread in the rootkit checked to see if Jaffar was running any network monitoring tools and, finding none, established a covert secure socket connection between Arif’s server in the Emirates and Jaffar’s office computer at Saudi Telcom, a private Internet service provider in Riyadh. From that moment, Arif could monitor everything Jaffar’s computer did, peruse anything it contained.
Jaffar had sent a politely disappointed reply, asking to be kept informed of any further openings with the start-up in Yemen. He sent along his résumé.
Arif had left his wrists hovering above the keyboard near the hot lamp. He pulled his hands out of the light to rub them and accept the gravity of this moment.
“Masha’allah.” God’s will.
With a keystroke, he linked to his command and control server via the Onion router that would randomize and mask his connection. He selected the tunneled link to Jaffar’s computer.
Arif spent only moments on the first glimpses of Jaffar’s computer. He familia
rized himself quickly with the trivialities of how the technician managed folders and files, then moved past them. Arif dove straight for the network shares on the file servers available to all Saudi Telcom software engineers. He selected three gigabytes of files, all email messages, for upload to the c&c server, then downloaded the files to his own computer’s hard drive. Before logging off, Arif covered his tracks by deleting the source files and event logs.
He converted the files into flat text to load them into an indexed database in order to make them searchable. Lastly, Arif initiated a Boolean search for records and email addresses from all members of the House of Saud—over two thousand in the royal family—sent to Prince Hassan bin Abd al-Aziz, the head of the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency. The quest exploded into an uncountable number of hits, arranging themselves into subject lists, ordered by date. While the search worked, Arif walked onto the balcony of his office.
He lit a cigarette from a pack left on the lawn chair. He should go lie with Nadya under their quiet roof. Loving her, marrying her, bringing her here, these were all acts of defiance. One more would be to go to her.
He gave himself until the end of the cigarette to make up his mind, but when it was done he remained on the balcony. The half-moon rose above the desert as if floating on the heat. An old man in a white bamboo kofia strolled past on the road, humming, unaware he was being watched. Arif would make his choice once the man’s song faded.
The passing stranger moved in the gray light like a ghost of Arif’s old father, who used to hum to himself. He would not see his father’s simple grave again so long as he remained in exile. The tune disappeared with the hat into the village.
From the balcony, the milky desert lay smooth like skin. This was no jinn or mere metaphor, but a pull to Nadya’s side.
The Empty Quarter Page 3
