“I’m fine. Now’s your chance to show boot camp what it missed,” he called down, his voice barely a hoarse whisper.
“You mean you made it?” Her voice was incredulous.
“Did you ever doubt it?” he called back.
“Not for a minute!” came an exuberant girlish voice from the darkness below.
The Scorpion wedged himself into the niche, his back against one side, his feet against the other. His battered fingers explored the rock, trying to get a feel of the space he occupied. He was seated in a den about three feet across scooped out of the rock. There was barely enough space to sit up without cracking his head and it couldn’t have been more than a foot and a half deep. Getting the two of them in there would be like shoe-horning a size ten foot into a size four shoe, but it would have to do. The cramped space worked to his advantage in one regard; it made it easier to brace himself tightly. And he’d need every edge possible if he was to get her up.
He called down for her to catch the rope and used it to bring up the wooden stave. She would have to carry the lamp up. They couldn’t risk dropping it. At last he was ready to bring her up.
Tightly braced, he placed one end of the braided rope so that it was pressed by the bottom of his foot against the opposite side of the niche. Then he ran the rope from his right hand across his back to his left hand. He dropped the rope from his left hand.
“Got it!” she called up.
His thirst was terrible. His mouth had a foul taste. He licked the sweat off his forearm. His tongue felt swollen, and as raspy as a cat’s. He had to swallow his own spittle to try to talk.
“All right. Loop it around you under your arms. Make sure to use a knot that doesn’t slip. Use a bowline or a square knot or something,” he called down.
“I knew being a Brownie would come in handy some day. I finally get to tie a square knot,” she shouted.
Her voice echoed dully in the leaden air, bouncing between the sides of the well like a tennis ball gone flat. He felt tugging at the other end of the rope; at first faint, then stronger, as if a fish were taking the line. It seemed to take a long time until she called up that she was ready.
The Scorpion flinched as he grabbed the rope. He was literally holding her life in his hands, he told himself. He couldn’t let go. No, he wouldn’t let go, he vowed. He would obliterate any thought of letting go, remembering Sheikh Zaid’s ancient prayer from the Holy Koran: “I seek refuge in the Lord of men from the mischief of the slinking prompter who whispers in the hearts of men.”
“Hang on, Kelly,” he shouted down and pulled, taking her weight in his hands and across his back. The strain was unbelievable and he could barely manage the weight. He pulled with his left arm and shoulder and pushed with his right. Then he stamped his feet against the few precious inches of slack he had gained. He slid his hands back to their original position and pulled again, twisting his shoulders as well to gain a few more inches.
The rope left a trail of fire across his shoulders and back. The strain on his spine felt like one of his vertebrae was about to snap at any second. “I seek refuge from the slinking prompter who whispers in the hearts of men,” he repeated to himself over and over.
Suddenly, the line went slack.
“Hey, I’m taking a breather,” Kelly called, her voice much closer. She must have found a foothold, he thought excitedly, gaining all the slack he could.
He looked down and was rewarded by the sight of the lamp flame barely six feet below him. His heart leaped up. Almost there, he thought.
“I just thought I’d let you know. I’m planning to go on a diet,” Kelly called up impishly.
“Good timing,” the Scorpion managed to choke. Then he was laughing, trying to control it so he wouldn’t let her slip. She’d done it, he admitted to himself. She’d reached through to him.
The last few feet came quickly. The rope grew shorter and shorter and suddenly she was there, grabbing hold of his arm with both her hands. He heaved with every last bit of his remaining strength and she was up, slumped across him, both of them panting as if they would never get enough air.
Later, after they had caught their breath, she whispered, her lips almost touching his ear.
“I was teasing before, but you really are what every woman dreams about whether they admit it or not: a knight in shining armor. Someone to lean on when … you know.”
“Like Antar and the maiden Abla,” the Scorpion breathed.
“Who?”
“It’s just an old story; something from long ago,” he murmured.
Kelly bit her lip hesitantly. Then she brought it out. “I lied when I said I never doubted you for a second.”
“So did I,” he replied.
For a long time that might have been seconds or minutes or hours, they lay together in silent exhaustion. Finally, he became conscious of her weight heavy on him. She lay face down, her head on his shoulder, her breasts flattened against his chest, her body molded tightly into his. He felt his manhood begin to stir, feeling her pelvis pressed against him.
“How tired are you?” she teased.
“Too tired,” he grunted and half-struggled to ease part of her weight off him. The clock was still ticking, he thought.
“Well, now that we’re here, what do we do? It takes at least two men to move that big rock,” Kelly said.
“That’s where the broken spear comes in,” the Scorpion said.
While Kelly held the lamp the Scorpion used the chisel to cut a small notch in the end of the wooden shaft. Then he wrapped cloth around the butt end of the chisel and jammed it into the notch, tying it to the staff with a piece of the cloth rope. He soon had a functional spear about five feet long.
The Scorpion wiped his sweating brow on his forearm and longed for a cool drink. If they didn’t get water soon they would begin to die.
Kelly looked at him anxiously. Her lips were dry and cracked. Her eyes were huge and luminous. They seemed to dominate her face. It reminded him of the faces of starving children back in Asia. He looked away, not wanting her to know what he was thinking.
“Cramped up here,” he muttered.
“Yeah, now I know how a sardine feels,” she sighed, wedging her body against the hard rock to give him a few extra millimeters of space.
He showed her how he wanted her to hold the lamp so that the light shone dimly on the opposite side of the well at the junction of the top stone and the lip.
“I’m going to chip away at the far side. When the underpinning rock is gone, the stone will tilt or fall that way and we’ll be able to get out.”
“What makes you so sure it won’t fall this way, on top of us?” she asked.
“Because they haven’t repealed the laws of physics yet.”
“With my luck, they’re probably working on it right now,” she wisecracked.
“Don’t worry. The only time you can get politicians to agree on anything, they’re probably making a mistake,” he grinned and hefting the spear in his right hand for a second, thrust it hard at the opposite lip of the well. The clink of flint hitting true was followed by a big chunk of rock splitting away from under the massive top-stone sealing them in.
“Wow! You hit that like you mean to kill someone,” Kelly remarked.
“I do,” the Scorpion replied, tight-lipped.
He braced himself against the niche, holding on to the bare stone with his left hand as he jabbed savagely at the far rock edge. As each blow landed, the reverberations passed down the wooden shaft to his battered hand, causing him to wince at every blow. But he was only inches away from freedom, he thought, stabbing relentlessly at the far wall, his face almost demonic in its intensity.
Suddenly Kelly’s voice broke through his concentration.
“What was that?” she asked.
“I didn’t hear anything,” he said, stopped.
They listened intently. There was nothing but the sounds of their own labored breathing.
“That!” she cried, fear rippling through
her voice.
A sound like distant thunder filtered through the silence.
“What do you think …” she began.
“Shh …” he hissed.
The thunder came again. Then the rumbling was much closer. The ground trembled. Pebbles trickled down in the blackness. The ledge began to sway and shake. The Scorpion and Kelly embraced desperately as the rumbling engulfed them.
“Is it an earthquake?” she screamed, her voice barely audible above the ear-splitting roar of sound. Even as she cried out, the realization of what was happening hit him square between the eyes like a bullet.
“No, bombs! Our side is attacking!” he shouted.
Suddenly they were blinded by brilliant sunlight flooding the well. An ear-shattering explosion seemed to tear the earth open. The giant slab which had sealed the well stood upright for one impossible instant. Kelly screamed.
The Scorpion had a split-second view of blue sky before it was blotted out by the slab’s massive black shape hurtling down upon them.
The Citadel
THE SKY HAD NEVER seemed so blue, so bright. He stared up at it in wonder. Then he remembered that he was alive.
It had been a near thing. He was running through his nine lives very quickly, the Scorpion admitted to himself. The giant boulder had just missed them, tucked securely in their niche, as it crashed down into the well. All around he heard the sounds of battle, the explosions and shouts and the air thick as rain with the rattle of small-arms fire. He had to get to Abdul Sa’ad at all costs or King Salim was history, he knew. He grabbed the crude spear and prepared to spring over the side. The noise was deafening.
He shouted at Kelly to stay in the niche.
“Where are you going?” she cried.
“I have work to do,” he snapped.
“I’m coming too,” she said, starting to get up. He shoved her back down.
“Don’t be stupid! This is the safest place. It’d take a direct hit from above to get you. Just keep your head down, and you’ll be OK,” he said, crouching on the ledge, his head just below the lip of the well.
“What about you?”
“I’ll be back for you.”
“Will you? Will you, really?” she cried.
“Yes,” he said, looking into her incredible violet eyes for an instant before vaulting over the edge.
Almost immediately he found himself being fired upon. White-hot fragments of metal whizzed all around him as he crawled like a scurrying insect on the burning ground. He couldn’t get a fix on the source. It seemed to be coming from everywhere all at once. He crawled blindly without direction.
Suddenly a shape loomed up off to the side barely ten feet away. It was one of Abdul Sa’ad’s soldiers rising up and aiming his AK-47 directly at the Scorpion’s head. In desperation, the Scorpion flung the spear with all his might.
The soldier stared with stunned disbelief at the wooden spear shaft protruding from his belly. He seemed too shocked to do anything but stand there, as if unable to believe that he had been killed by a spear in this day and age. The Scorpion leaped forward, kicking at the soldier’s thigh and grabbing for the AK-47. As the soldier fell abruptly backward, the spear standing straight up like a flagpole, the Scorpion had already grabbed the Kalachnikov away. He fired a round into the soldier’s head to make sure the gun worked. The bullet shattered the skull like a smashed melon.
Ricochets whined all around the Scorpion’s feet, the fire coming from the direction of the old fortress. He dived behind the body, burying his face in the blood-moistened sand. He could hear the thunks as bullets slammed into the body. If he didn’t get to King Salim soon, everything was lost, but he was pinned down with nothing between him and the fortress but flat open space and rubble.
In the distance he could see a line of slowly advancing Saudi National Guard tanks and APCs, white puffs of smoke billowing from their guns. And beyond was a ragged army of tribesmen on foot and in pick-up trucks, firing wildly as they advanced under the billowing green banner of the House of Saud strung from radio antennae. And his heart leaped up as among them he saw the white Toyota trucks of the Mutayr as they charged screaming their battle cry, “Allah Akhbar!” “God is Great!” at the top of their lungs. It had worked! he thought triumphantly. They had found him by the transmitter and the tribesmen and National Guard had rallied around the king.
As the tanks approached Abdul Sa’ad’s forward positions, the lines erupted in white smoke. He saw a National Guard tank hit a mine and explode in a fireball spitting metal fragments and black smoke. Three army tanks lurched out of the citadel behind him like prehistoric beasts, their cannons pointed like ugly snouts. They lumbered forward, firing straight at the attackers. Fire erupted on all sides and the attacking line began to waver. The Scorpion could see the tribesmen being mown down like wheat and still he could do nothing.
Short savage firefights reached a crescendo at a dozen points. It was hard to determine what was happening, like a chess game with a confused board. Suddenly, the thought struck him that in this battle as in chess, the winner would be determined not by how many of the enemy you removed, but by who captured the king.
Salim! he thought, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had to find Salim! There was no time left.
The Scorpion fired from behind the corpse at the fortress, then rolled sideways from the body and suddenly began an insane zig-zagging sprint towards an ancient rubble pile near the fortress wall.
One of the tanks swerved towards him and began firing its machine gun at him. The steel treads ground towards him, cutting him off from the fortress. The bullets stitched a jagged line in the sand, racing relentlessly towards the Scorpion. He was running wildly, as if his lungs would burst. The bullets drilled into the sand with tiny explosions of white dust almost at his feet. His spine tensed for the inevitable bullet in his back. Just then, a royal Saudi jet fighter loomed behind him firing at the tank. He dived behind the rubble pile.
There was a massive explosion close by. The Scorpion buried his face in the sand as a clatter of red hot metal rained all around him. He heard screams and looked up. Thick oily black smoke poured from the burning tank. He saw two crewmen, their clothes on fire, leap from the turret and run blindly towards the minefield before collapsing in blackened heaps.
The jet fighter banked in the distance, then tore back for another pass, its cannons blazing. The fighter’s needle nose seemed to be pointed right at the Scorpion. It came in very fast and so low he could see the pilot’s face. The fighter’s bullets tore through the ancient mud-brick fortress wall behind him. A large section of wall, virtually puréed by the slugs, collapsed in a heap of dust. Even before the fighter had passed over, the Scorpion was already up and running at the newly created gap in the fortress wall. Leaping over the shattered brick remnants of the ancient wall, he was through the gap and into the courtyard before Abdul Sa’ad’s men even realized he was there.
The courtyard was a mass of confusion, like an ant-hill kicked open. Soldiers ran about aimlessly, firing wildly into the air or at each other for no apparent reason. All along the sides of the courtyard ran a long colonnade. At the far side was the inner citadel of the fortress. That was where he had to go, the Scorpion thought. But his way was blocked by the panicked soldiers. He cocked the rifle and aimed.
A knot of khaki-clad soldiers along the parapet turned their weapons down on the courtyard, then froze at the sight of the Scorpion who was methodically mowing down a scurrying crowd of soldiers with a long burst from the AK-47. Their mouths dropped open in horror. They had thought him dead. Prince Abdul Sa’ad had told them the Scorpion had been destroyed, but clearly he was too powerful a demon. He had risen from the dead!
Few doubted that he was a demon, standing there naked except for a tattered white rag around his waist, his hair matted and unruly, his eyes demon-red and wild. His sun-bronzed body was magnificent, every muscle clearly etched as if carved out of solid stone. He seemed oblivious of the firing ar
ound him, as if the legend was true, that bullets fired at him turned to drops of water.
One soldier, fear rattling in his throat, made an incomprehensible sound and suddenly took to his heels. An officer screamed at them to fire and when they hesitated, he grabbed a gun and aimed it at the Scorpion. With a kind of sixth sense, the Scorpion glanced up just at that moment and in a single sweeping movement fired almost without aiming. The officer toppled from the parapet, a bloody scoop of flesh where one of his eyes had been. Screaming in terror the soldiers threw down their weapons and fled through the gate, where they were cut down by the cross fire from the approaching tribesmen.
Bandar came rushing from a corner turret, his good eye darting left and right as he sought the Scorpion. Without bothering to check whether his own men were in the way or not, he lobbed a hand grenade down into the courtyard. He fired into the explosion, spraying bullets all around the courtyard, but when the smoke cleared, the Scorpion had gone, vanished into thin air. With a terrible scowl Bandar turned on the poor corporal who had dared tell him the Scorpion was alive and shot him between the eyes. It was impossible! He himself had shot the vile spawn of camel slime in the heart!
But Scorpion or no Scorpion, Abdul Sa’ad was doomed, Bandar decided. No one was supposed to have found them until the king had abdicated and the succession was clear. By what demon’s trick had they been discovered? Treason or worse, he thought darkly. But one thing was certain. Abdul Sa’ad could not be the Mahdi, the Chosen of Allah, after all. The Mahdi would never have failed so badly, Bandar thought. But he, Bandar, still lived and there were debts due him. The image of the American woman came to him, her white breasts heaving in fear, her loins moist with desire. It was kismet, he swore to himself. With a wolfish howl, Bandar whirled and ran for the fortress gate closest to the old well.
Even as Bandar broke for the gate, the Scorpion emerged from behind a crumbling column, his face half-concealed in the shadow of the colonnade. For a split second he might have had a shot at Bandar, but he was almost out of ammunition. He would find Bandar with Abdul Sa’ad, he told himself. There would be time to settle old scores.
Scorpion Page 28
