Manhunt Is My Mission

by Stephen Marlowe

  I wondered if Baki Osman had had time to give me the full treatment, if I would have marched dutifully to the witness chair after the fat opium merchant. It is not a pleasant thing to think about and, once thought, will make you guard whatever integrity you have more closely.

  But the whole idea of a kangaroo court is speed. They could manage without me.

  Forty-five minutes after Haroun Totah sang his song, El Thamad read the death sentence to Falcon Pasha. The florid-faced Englishman was pale and the marks of Galib Azam’s riding crop stood out boldly on his cheek. Otherwise, he stood tall and straight and the set expression on his face never changed. He would be shot, El Thamad said, by military firing squad.

  “May I say a word to the court?” Falcon Pasha asked. “Not on my own behalf. I have been sentenced. But just so the record is set straight?”

  El Thamad nodded his head gravely. “You may speak, Englishman,” he said, and that surprised me. Allowed to talk, Falcon Pasha might stuff Totah’s words down El Thamad’s throat.

  “I have spent the better part of my adult life,” Falcon Pasha began, “here in Motamar in the service of the king.”

  That was as far as he got. El Thamad had everything figured, including his own magnanimous permission for the condemned man’s final words. The room was packed with Scourge of Allah troops. With Falcon Pasha’s first words as their cue, they began stamping their feet, whistling and shouting. Falcon Pasha tried to shout them down. It was useless. Falcon Pasha shrugged wearily and left the witness chair.

  Instantly you could have heard a pin drop.

  “They’ll get away with it, too,” Dr. Capehart predicted bleakly. “Nobody expects a kangaroo court to operate in a civilized way. Nobody expects the verdict to be reviewed.” He asked suddenly: “Did they put any pressure on you?”

  “They tried.”

  “I got some of the same. We would have built their case even better, but they don’t need us. Don’t you see what’s going to happen?”

  I shook my head, no.

  “Except for his Scourge of Allah officers, El Thamad’s power lies with the rabble. Palestinian refugees in the big camp down south. They’re fed on doles and there’s no work for them. They have nothing to lose that they haven’t lost already. The illiterate masses in every festering village from Qasr Tabuk to Shughur City … kids half-blinded by trachoma before they’re old enough to read … what kind of adults do you think they make? Half of them would slit your throat for a pack of cigarettes.

  “The rabble, that’s where El Thamad’s power lies and he knows it.” Dr. Capehart’s eyes got wistful. “If you can reach them while they’re still kids, if you can feed them and keep them clean and educate them and give them honest work before they—well, that’s why I’m here. But there goes old Ugly American Capehart losing the point again.

  “It’s this, Drum. If El Thamad’s power lies with the rabble, then his biggest threat comes from the middle class and he knows it. Motamar’s small handful of professional people and businessmen talked King Khalil’s father into building the Motamar Legion in the first place. Falcon’s khaki troops were the only thing that stood between them and anarchy.”

  Capehart took a deep breath. The trial wasn’t over yet. El Thamad and Baki Osman were still conferring. “With a setup like this,” Capehart told me, “El Thamad’s got to either get the middle class on his side in a hurry or else wipe them out. They’d never play ball with the Scourge of Allah; too many of them have heard the knock on the door in the middle of the night. So that means he has to wipe them out. Condemning and executing Falcon Pasha gives him his chance, because every door on every big white house on the hills around Shughur City was open to him. Falcon Pasha is a man who makes friends, and thanks to his friendship, heads are going to roll.”

  “You mean something like, if the English dog killed King Khalil, all the well-dressed, high-living effendi in their houses on the hills were in on it too?”

  “Right. What El Thamad’s after is a blood bath. And he’s going to get it.”

  Haroun Totah was ordered to stand before the dock. If ever a face battered almost to a pulp could show stunned surprise, his did. When he was given the same sentence as Falcon Pasha, the opium merchant screamed like a woman in difficult childbirth.

  9

  “YOU ASLEEP?” Dr. Capehart asked me.

  “No.”

  “It’s almost dawn. That’s when they’ll do it.”

  We were alone in a small room on the second floor of the warehouse. I sat on the floor, my back propped against the whitewashed wall. Outside the small barred window the sky was a velvety blue. The stars were beginning to fade.

  “I haven’t been able to sleep either. I was wondering …”

  “What?” I said.

  “I don’t know. If I’d said I wanted out, if I’d said I had enough, there wasn’t anything a Westerner could do in Motamar, what about Falcon? Would he still have stayed? Is it my fault they’re going to kill him?”

  “Cut it out,” I said. “That won’t get you anywhere. He’d have stayed no matter what. You said it yourself in Al Saydr. Like most professional soldiers, he didn’t understand one damn thing about people. Not only that, he counted on his own reputation. He’s a legend in Motamar. He must have figured that even if he lost, they’d need him in the new government, must have figured he could tone down their tyranny. At the worst he probably figured, he’d be declared persona non grata and told to leave the country. The way he saw it, there wasn’t any hurry. He could wait to see what would happen.”

  “But that’s just it, Drum. Because he is a legend they’re going to kill him. They’ve got to.” Dr. Capehart was pacing back and forth. Enough pre-dawn light came through the small window now so I could see him. “He’s like a figure out of Greek tragedy. It’s something we in the West don’t understand, but they understand it here. When they drum it into the heads of the illiterate Arabs from here to Qasr Tabuk that he killed King Khalil, he’ll fall so far his name will be anathema. For the next twenty years they’ll be telling the story of his execution.”

  “You almost make it sound religious.”

  “It is, in a sense. Tragedy and religion are two sides of the same coin, aren’t they? A tragic figure suffers, and there’s exaltation. A god dies, among primitive people to magically guarantee the return of spring, but among more sophisticated people to expiate their—what’s that?”

  There was the sound of a truck motor. I went to the window. A large truck was backing and filing in the courtyard formed by the two wings of the U-shaped warehouse building. Clouds of dust billowed in its headlight beams. At last it stopped with its rear to the warehouse loading platform. The headlights cut through the dust and, seventy-five feet away, struck the wall at the opposite end of the courtyard. The lights remained on.

  “They may not wait for full dawn,” Dr. Capehart said, his voice grim. “Kangaroo court justice,” he went on. “The one thing they’ll want is an audience. We’ll be taken down there in a few minutes, you watch and see.”

  He was right on both counts. Five minutes later I heard footsteps in the hall outside. The door was unlocked. Two swarthy Scourge of Allah soldiers stood there, Sten guns ready.

  They say a man dies as he lives—a brave man, a hero’s death, a coward, a craven’s. They say no man can witness his own funeral. They say some scenes are etched forever on your brain, the bitter acid of life and death cutting knife-sharp into the secret places of memory. They say a lot of things, foolish and wise, pipe dream and real, and you nod your head or you shake it, you agree or you disagree, you say life is like that or it is not, and you live twenty-four hours every day so that when you are wise enough or have seen enough you can decide what to believe and what to scorn.

  Put it this way—John Baylis Falcon did die as he had lived, he did witness his own funeral and no one who saw it will ever forget.

  The spectators came first. About a hundred of us were prisoners, and we were ordered to sit
in single file with our backs against the base of the loading platform. At either end of the file a pair of Scourge of Allah soldiers hunched ready over .50 caliber machine guns. Anyone who got up without being told to wouldn’t move three feet from the loading platform without being cut down.

  Hundreds of other spectators—not prisoners—sat or stood on the loading platform itself. Half of them wore the green Scourge uniform. They were El Thamad’s officers, and if any of them had it in mind to nudge the counter-revolution’s momentum any further, El Thamad was showing them which way the Motamar cookie crumbled. The rest were civilians, Shughur City bigshots, Dr. Capehart told me. They had been roused from bed by the Scourge of Allah’s knock at the door and, for all they knew, it could have been their own executions they were driven to. I remember what Dr. Capehart had said. Falcon Pasha was the dying god who would expiate for them the sin of treason against the new order.

  Haroun Totah came first. It was cool and very quiet and no wind blew, and then suddenly you heard the tramp of feet across the courtyard. Six soldiers marched past the truck’s headlights with the fat opium merchant. His arms were fettered behind his back. Two of them had to drag him. His heels made furrows in the dust and sand that covered the paving stones of the courtyard, like the hooves of a slain bull mule-dragged from its moment of truth in the bright sun of the arena.

  He was beyond speech. He wailed—a distant, keening sound that seemed to follow him several yards behind as if his life already had fled his gross body. They dragged him to the wall where the headlight beams struck and left him there. He sank on his haunches, wailing, in the dust.

  A soldier stood him upright again. He was blindfolded. He dropped to his knees when the soldier stepped back. He began to crawl in a little circle.

  The firing squad—six Scourge soldiers with rifles—stood three on either side of the truck’s radiator.

  A command was barked in Arabic. Six rifles came up.

  Haroun Totah stopped crawling. He had never left the glare of the headlight beams that splashed off the whitewashed wall.

  At the second command, Haroun Totah raised his head and shouted hoarsely:

  “La ilaha illa Allah!”

  Then, their voices louder, the rifles spoke.

  Falcon Pasha stepped out smartly ahead of his death-guard. You had to look twice to see that his arms were fettered behind his back. He looked straight ahead, his head high. You almost expected him to issue a command or two which the death-guard double filing behind him would carry out with dispatch.

  He reached the wall and said something softly. The noncom leading the death-guard nodded and unfettered his arms, then produced a black blindfold. Falcon Pasha waved it away scornfully.

  That was when a British Legionnaire a few yards to my left began to sing. The solitary voice, tentative and unsure at first, echoed in the courtyard. Pretty soon other voices joined it, swelling in the still air, until every Legionnaire was singing—all spontaneous, their voices true. Falcon Pasha managed to smile a little. He even tossed them a final salute. I felt a cold chill down the length of my spine. It is what is meant when they say the hero of a tragedy, in his suffering, purges you of pity and terror.

  The voices rose:

  Some talk of Alexander

  And some of Hercules.

  Of Hector and Lysander

  And such great names as-these.

  But in all the ranks of heroes

  There’s none that can compare

  With the to-ro-ro-ro-ro-ro,

  The British Grenadiers.…

  A volley of rifle fire cut through their singing. Falcon Pasha fell.

  El Thamad called it military justice and execution. I called it murder.

  10

  THE AMERICAN CONSUL’S name was Taggert. He had a scrubbed-faced, boyish look, a sandy brush-cut and smiling, baby blue eyes. He wore a wash-and-wear chino suit, shell-rimmed glasses and a small-patterned foulard tie knotted tightly in a four-in-hand. His tie-pin was a Phi Beta Kappa key that had been blitz-clothed carefully and often. After looking me over, he seemed to regret I hadn’t made the same fraternity. Obviously, that explained why I was on ice in El Thamad’s warehouse, needing a shave and a bath and a change of clothes, and he was free to come and go and looked as if he had just stepped out of a Brooks Brothers display window.

  “Let me tell you I had a high old time of it tracking you down,” Taggert said. “Is there anything you need?”

  “My freedom would be nice.”

  “Well, yes,” Taggert said, not quite so enthusiastically. “But of course, that’s going to take time. This’ll probably come as a surprise to you, but did you know they regard you as a maximum security prisoner?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  “They do. But just leave it to the Consul-General. I’m not speaking officially, of course, just off the record and off the top of my head, but let me tell you you’re one lucky guy to have a Consul-General like Mr. Smiley going to bat for you. Why, only the other day, while they were tearing up the pea-patch in Qasr Tabuk …”

  He went on to tell me, in elaborate detail, how Consul-General Smiley, who’d been told by the Embassy staff in Qasr Tabuk that I was on my way north, had moved heaven and earth to find me once the fighting stopped in Shughur City. “Not only that,” Taggert said with pride, “but we managed to get a line on Dr. Capehart too. He’s the man you’re after, the Consul-General said. What would you do if I told you he was right here in Shughur City—in this very building in fact?”

  “Turn cartwheels,” I said, and regretted it because of the pained smile it brought to Taggert’s earnest young face. But less than four hours ago they’d shot Falcon Pasha dead. The consul’s enthusiasm was not contagious.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I found Capehart yesterday. Been together ever since, except when they separated us for this interview. You seen the Doc yet?”

  “I’m going to as soon as I finish with you here. Do you happen to know why you’re “maximum security prisoners?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  “Khalil wasn’t assassinated by the Legion,” I said. “El Thamad’s goon-squad did it. Or El Thamad with an assist from Galib Azam. Dr. Capehart knows it and I know it. We also know Falcon Pasha was killed as a scapegoat.”

  Shock and then mild annoyance cloaked the youthful enthusiasm on Taggert’s face. “Are you sure?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “Not under lock and key in here I can’t.”

  “In the American Village on Shughur Hill,” Taggert said slowly and with a forced smile, “we have a little saying. Tell an Arab what he wants to hear and you’ve made a friend for life. Or at least—heh-heh—for your tour of duty in Motamar. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Better watch your step, Taggert. The room may be bugged.”

  He cast a startled glance at the walls and the desk. He tried to open a drawer. It was locked. He opened the door and saw the guard stationed out there with a Sten gun. When he shut the door and turned back to me, his face was pale.

  “If you let me have a green light to give El Thamad the Consul-General’s word that you’d leave Motamar inside of twenty-four hours after they freed you, would you agree that would be the judicious thing to do?”

  “Yeah. It would be the judicious thing to do.”

  “Then I have your word?”

  “Taggert, I’m a gone goose in Motamar. So’s Dr. Capehart. We both know that. But what we do after we get out—”

  “If you get out,” Taggert cut me off warningly.

  “Hey, whose side are you on?”

  “I was merely trying to demonstrate,” he said pompously, “that you are in a very difficult situation indeed.” He ran a hand nervously through his brush-cut. “With a little judicious cooperation on your part, the Consul-General may be able to get you out.”

  “Okay. But what we do after we get out, that
’s our own business.”

  Taggert shook his head. “If, thanks to the Consul-General’s intervention, you do manage to leave Motamar, and if afterwards you don’t let sleeping dogs lie, you’ll place the Consul-General in an extremely untenable position.”

  “They might take away his PX card,” I said.

  “Mr. Drum, why are you snapping at me? We’re trying to help you.”

  “Sure, I guess you are at that. But listen, Taggert. I can’t say this very well. I saw a brave man die this morning. I’ve seen them come and I’ve seen them go, but John Baylis Falcon was tops in my book. They gave him the kind of trial that would be an outrage even in the U.A.R. or Russia, and then they shot him. He never had a chance. In a world of Consul-Generals and political necessities and strange bedfellows, he died like a man. He—”

  “All right,” Taggert said. His manner had changed. He was on familiar ground now. He spoke crisply and with authority. “You made a speech. Now I’m going to make one. Motamar is oil, Mr. Drum, and oil is the twentieth century in a word. Half the world’s oil flows through what you probably regard as this little backwater country. The West has always gotten most of it. Whatever happens, we can’t let the Russians get it.

  “All right,” he said again. “King Khalil’s dead. We regret that sincerely. He was pro-Western. We can only hope his successors will be too. If they are, we’ll play ball with them. We have no choice. As for Falcon Pasha, I respected him too. All of us at American Village did. He was a great man. But he’s dead. He’s dead, Mr. Drum, and whatever you do—whether here in Motamar or elsewhere—won’t bring him back. I say let it lie, and when I say that you can be damn sure I’m speaking on behalf of Consul-General Smiley and the Embassy staff in Qasr Tabuk, too. Give us your word and we’ll move heaven and earth to get you out of here. If you don’t—”

  “If I don’t, you let me rot in jail and see to it the Red Cross sends me packages every fourth Thursday. Is that it?”