“He shaved off his beard and cut his hair.”
“I ask you. Are you Amal Bahrudi?”
“I am now.”
“No you’re not! Any more than he is Azra! That man was brought in here five hours ago from a bazaar in the Waljat. He’s a drunken imbecile, a swaggering clown, nothing more. His fellow pig slashed his own throat with a policeman’s knife!”
“I was there, Faisal. He is Azra, brother of Zaya Yateem.”
“Because he tells you so?”
“No. Because I talked to him, listened to him. His holy war isn’t for or against Allah, Abraham or Christ. It’s for survival in this life, on this earth.”
“Madness! All around us, madness!”
“What did Ahmat say?”
“To do as you say, but you must wait until his special police arrive. They are two men he trusts completely—your instructions, I believe.”
“Tweedledum and Tweedledee? The two uniforms who’ve been with me from the bazaar to the Al Kabir?”
“They are special. One will drive the police vehicle, the other will act as your guard.”
“Good thinking. I’m really playing out Ahmat’s scenario, aren’t I?”
“You’re unfair, Mr. Kendrick.”
“He’s not too shabby himself.… Here are the other two prisoners I want in the transfer, in the truck with Azra and me.”
“Why? Who are they?”
“One’s a lunatic who’d curse out his own firing squad, but the other … the other is Azra’s beard. He does whatever color-me-Blue tells him. Take those two away and there’s no one to hold the fort together.”
“You’re being cryptic.”
“The rest are breakable, Doctor. They don’t really know anything, but they’re breakable. I suggest you take three or four out at a time, put them into smaller cells, and then shoot off some rifles into the back wall of this compound. You might find a few fanatics who aren’t so crazy about their own executions.”
“You are shedding your true skin, Shaikh Kendrick. You’re going into a world of which you know nothing.”
“I’ll learn, Doctor. That’s why I’m here.”
The sign came! The guard by the van’s door steadied himself, briefly lowering his left hand; he shook it to restore circulation and immediately reached up to grip the crossbar again. He would repeat the action in less than a minute and then it would be the moment for Evan to make his move. The choreography had been created quickly in the compound’s laboratory; the attack was to be swift and simple. The guard’s reaction was the key to its success. Twenty-two seconds later the guard’s left hand plummeted down again in a gesture of weariness.
Kendrick sprang off the bench, his body a compact missile hammering into the guard, whose head crashed against the door with such force that the man’s suddenly hysterical expression became instantly passive as he collapsed.
“Quickly!” commanded Evan, turning to Azra. “Help me! Get his keys!”
The Palestinian leaped forward, followed by the sergeant-foreman. All together, their shackled hands threw the MAC-10 machine pistol out of the way and ripped the keys from the guard’s belt.
“I’ll kill him now!” shrieked the harelipped zealot, grabbing the weapon and lurching forward in the swaying truck, the gun aimed at the guard’s head.
“Stop him!” ordered Azra.
“Fool!” roared the sergeant-foreman, wrestling the weapon away from the young fanatic. “The driver will hear the shots!”
“He is our holy enemy!”
“He is our holy way out of here, you miserable idiot!” said Azra, unlocking Kendrick’s shackles and handing Evan the key to do the same for him. The congressman from Colorado did so, then turned to the extended wrists of the sergeant-foreman.
“My name is Yosef,” said the older man. “It is a Hebrew name, for my mother was Hebrew, but we are not part of the Jews of Israel—and you are a brave man, Amal Bahrudi.”
“I don’t like firing squads in the desert,” said Kendrick, throwing his shackles on the floor and turning to the young terrorist who would have killed the unconscious guard. “I don’t know whether to let you free or not.”
“Why?” shrieked the boy. “Because I will kill for our holy war, die for our cause?”
“No, young man, because you might kill us and we’re more valuable than you.”
“Amal!” cried Azra, gripping Evan’s arm, as much to steady himself as to compel Kendrick’s attention. “I agree he’s an idiot but there are special circumstances. Settlers in the West Bank blew up his family’s house and his father’s clothing store. His father died in the explosion and Israel’s Custodial Commission sold both properties to new settlers for next to nothing.” Blue lowered his voice, speaking into Kendrick’s ear. “He’s a mental case, but he had no one to turn to but us. Yosef and I will control him. Let him free.”
“On your head, poet,” answered Evan gruffly, unlocking the young terrorist’s wrist irons.
“Why do you say a desert execution?” asked Yosef.
“Because the road beneath us is half sand, can’t you feel it?” said Kendrick, knowing the route they were taking. “We just disappear, burned or buried in the desert.”
“Why us?” pressed the older terrorist.
“I can explain me better than I can you: they don’t know what to do with me, so why not just kill me. If I’m dangerous or influential, both the danger and the influence go with me.” Evan paused, then nodded his head. “Come to think of it,” he added, “that probably explains Yosef and the boy; they were the loudest prisoners in there and their voices were probably identified—both are easily distinguishable.”
“And me?” asked Azra, staring at Kendrick.
“I should think you could answer that without my help,” replied Kendrick, returning the Palestinian’s look, a degree of contempt in his eyes. “I tried to break away from you when they came after me by the toilets, but you were too slow.”
“You mean they saw us together?”
“The student gets a barely passing grade. Not only together but away from everyone else. It was your conference, big shot.”
“The truck’s slowing down!” exclaimed Yosef as the van braked slightly, heading into a descending curve.
“We have to get out,” said Evan. “Now. If he’s going down into a valley, there’ll be soldiers. Quickly! We want the high ground. We need it; we’d never climb back up.”
“The door!” cried Azra. “It must be padlocked on the outside.”
“I have no idea,” Kendrick lied, following the scenario as it had been rapidly drawn up in the compound’s laboratory. Rivets had been removed and loosened in two panels. “I’ve never been taken prisoner here. But it doesn’t matter. It’s a sheet-steel alloy with seams. The four of us rushing together can smash out a partition. The center. It’s the weakest.” Evan grabbed the hare-lipped boy by the shoulder, pulling him to his left. “All right, wild man. Hit it like you’re breaking down the Wailing Wall. The four of us! Now!”
“Wait!” Azra lurched across the van. “The weapon!” he exclaimed, picking up the MAC-10 machine pistol and looping the strap over his shoulder, the barrel directed downward. “All right,” he said, rejoining the others.
“Go!” shouted Kendrick.
The four prisoners crashed into the center panel of the door as the van lurched over the rocks in the downhill curve. The metal partition gave way, bulging at the seams, moonlight protruding through the wide separations.
“Once more!” roared Yosef, his eyes on fire.
“Remember!” commanded the man now accepted as Amal Bahrudi. “If we break through, tuck into your knees when you hit the ground. We don’t need anyone hurt.”
Again they rushed the half-collapsed panel. The bottom rivets snapped; the metal flew up in the moonlight and the four figures bolted out on the twisting road that led to a desert valley. Inside the van the guard rolled forward with the pitch of the vehicle’s descent, his face streaked wi
th perspiration brought about by fear of his own death. He crawled to his knees and hammered repeatedly on the wall of the driver’s carriage. A single thud was heard in response. Their assignment for the night was half finished.
The fugitives also rolled, but against the descent, their movements abruptly halted, reversed by gravity, each straining to regain his balance. Azra and Yosef rose first to their feet, swiveling their necks and shaking their heads, instinctively checking their bruises for signs of anything worse. Kendrick followed, his shoulder on fire, his legs in momentary agony and his hands scraped, but all in all, he was grateful for the harsh requirements of backpacking through the mountains and riding the white water; he hurt but he was not hurt. The harelipped Palestinian had fared the worst; he moaned on the stony earth with its pattern of desert grass, writhing in fury as he tried to rise but could not. Yosef ran to him, and as Evan and Azra studied the valley below, the gruff older man made his pronouncement. “This child has broken his leg,” he called over to his two superiors.
“Then kill me now!” shrieked the youngster. “I go to Allah and you go on to fight!”
“Oh, shut up,” said Azra, gripping the MAC-10 weapon in his hand and walking with Kendrick to the injured boy. “Your compulsion to die becomes boring and your grating voice will instead kill us. Tear his shirt in strips, Yosef. Tie his hands and feet and put him in the road. That truck will race back up the minute it reaches the camp below and those fools realize what’s happened. They’ll find him.”
“You deliver me to my enemies?” screamed the teenager.
“Be quiet!” replied Azra angrily, strapping the machine pistol to his shoulder. “We’re delivering you to a hospital where you’ll be taken care of. Children aren’t executed except by bombs and missiles—all too frequently, but that’s neither here nor there.”
“I will reveal nothing!”
“You don’t know anything,” said the man called Blue. “Tie him up, Yosef. Make the leg as comfortable as possible.” Azra bent over the youngster. “There are better ways to fight than dying needlessly. Let the enemy heal you so you can fight again.… Come back to us, my stubborn freedom fighter. We need you.… Yosef, hurry!”
As the older terrorist carried out his orders Azra and Kendrick walked back to the road hewn from rock. Far below the white sands began, stretching endlessly in the moonlight, a vast alabaster floor, its roof the dark sky above. In the distance, intruding on the blanket of white, was a small pulsating eruption of yellow. It was a desert fire, the rendezvous that was an intrinsic part of the ‘escape.’ It was too far away for the figures to be seen clearly, but they were there and rightly assumed to be Omani soldiers or police. But they were not the executioners Amal Bahrudi’s companions imagined.
“You’re much more familiar with the terrain than I am,” said Evan in English. “How far do you judge the camp to be?”
“Ten kilometers, perhaps twelve, no more than that. The road straightens out below; they’ll be there soon.”
“Then let’s go.” Kendrick turned, watching the older Yosef carrying the injured teenager to the road. He started toward them.
Azra, however, did not move. “Where, Amal Bahrudi?” he called out. “Where should we go?”
Evan snapped his head back. “Where?” he repeated contemptuously. “To begin with, away from here. It’ll be light soon, and if I know what I’m talking about, which I do, there’ll be a dozen helicopters crisscrossing at low altitude looking for us. We can melt in the city, not here.”
“Then what do we do? Where do we go?”
Kendrick could not see clearly in the dim moonlight, but felt the intense, questioning stare leveled at him. He was being tested. “We get word to the embassy. To your sister, Yateem, or the one named Ahbyahd. Stop the photographs and kill the ones involved.”
“How do we do that? Get word into the embassy? Did your people tell you that, Amal Bahrudi?”
Evan was prepared; it was the inevitable question. “Frankly, they weren’t sure where the pipeline was, and they assumed if any of you had any brains it would change daily. I was to pass a note through the gates directed to your operations council to let me through—through the pipeline wherever it was at the moment.”
“Many such notes could be passed as a trap. Why would yours be accepted?”
Kendrick paused; when he answered his voice was low and calm and laced with meaning. “Because it was signed by the Mahdi.”
Azra’s eyes widened. He nodded slowly and held up his hand. “Who is?” he asked.
“The envelope was sealed with wax and not to be broken. It was an insult I found hard to accept, but even I follow orders from those who pay the freight, if you know what I mean.”
“Those who give us the money to do what we do—”
“If there was a code signifying authenticity, it was for one or all of you on the council to know, not I.”
“Give me the note,” said Azra.
“Idiot!” yelled the congressman from Colorado’s Ninth District, exasperated. “When I saw the police closing in on me, I tore it to shreds and scattered it through the Al Kabir! Would you have done otherwise?”
The Palestinian remained motionless. “No, obviously not,” he replied. “At any rate we won’t need it. I’ll get us into the embassy. The pipeline, as you call it, is well regulated both inside and out.”
“It’s so well regulated that films are slipped out under the noses of your well-regulated guards. Send word in to your sister. Change them, every one of them, and start a search immediately for the camera. When it’s found, kill the owner and anyone who seems to be a friend. Kill them all.”
“On such surface observation?” protested Azra. “We risk wasting innocent lives, valuable fighters.”
“Let’s not be hypocritical,” laughed Amal Bahrudi. “We have no such hesitations with the enemy. We’re not killing ‘valuable fighters,’ we’re killing innocent people quite properly to make the world listen, a world that’s blind and deaf to our struggles, our very survival.”
“By your almighty Allah, now you’re the one who’s blind and deaf!” spat out Azra. “You believe the Western press; it’s not to be questioned! Of the eleven corpses, four were already dead, including two of the women—one by her own hand, for she was paranoid about rape, Arabic rape; the other, a much stronger woman not unlike the marine who attacked Nassir, threw herself on a young imbecile whose only reaction was to fire his weapon. The two men were old and infirm and died of heart failure. It does not absolve us from causing innocent death, but no guns were raised against them. All this was explained by Zaya and no one believed us. They never will!”
“Not that it matters, but what about the others? Seven, I believe.”
“Condemned by our council and rightly so. Intelligence officers building networks against us throughout the Gulf and the Mediterranean, members of the infamous Consular Operations—even two Arabs—who sold their souls to sell us into oblivion, paid by the Zionists and their American puppets. They deserved death, for they would have seen us all die, but not before we were dishonored, were made caricatures of evil when there is no evil in us—only the desire to live in our own lands—”
“That’s enough, poet,” broke in Kendrick, looking over at Yosef and the boy terrorist who longed for the arms of Allah. “There’s no time for your sermons, we have to get out of here.”
“To the embassy,” agreed Azra. “Through the pipeline.”
Kendrick walked back to the Palestinian, approaching him slowly. “To the embassy, yes,” he said. “But not through the pipeline, just to the gates. There you’ll send in the message to your sister spelling everything out for her. With those orders my job is finished here and so is yours—yours at least for a day or two.”
“What are you talking about?” asked the bewildered Blue.
“My instructions are to bring one of you to Bahrain as soon as possible, and you’re the one. I was captured and escaped and can’t take any more chances. No
t now!”
“Bahrain?”
“To the Mahdi. It will only be for a few hours, but it’s urgent. He has new orders for you, orders he won’t trust to anyone but a member of the council. And you’re a member and we’re both outside, not inside.”
“The airport’s watched,” said Azra firmly. “It’s patrolled by guards and attack dogs; no one can get in or out except by passing through interrogation. We’d never make it. It’s the same on the waterfront. Every boat is flagged down and searched or blown out of the water if it does not comply.”
“None of that has stopped your people from coming and going through the pipeline. I saw the results in Berlin.”
“But you said ‘urgent,’ and the pipeline is a twenty-four- to forty-eight-hour process.”
“Why so long?”
“We travel south only at night and in the uniforms of the Yemeni border garrisons. If we’re stopped, we say we’re patrolling the coastline. We then rendezvous with the fast deepwater boats—supplied by Bahrain, of course.”
“Of course.” He had been right, thought Evan. The southern coast as far as Ra’s al Hadd and beyond to the Strait of Masirah was open territory, a cruel wasteland of rock-filled shores and inhospitable interiors, heaven-sent for thieves and smugglers and, above all, for terrorists. And what better protection than the uniforms of the border garrisons, those soldiers chosen for both their loyalty and especially their brutality that equaled or bettered that of the international desperadoes given sanctuary in Yemen? “That’s very good,” continued Amal Bahrudi, his tone professional. “How in Allah’s name did you get hold of the uniforms? I understand they’re unusual—a lighter color, different epaulets, boots designed for desert and water—”
“I had them made,” interrupted Azra, his eyes on the valley below. “In Bahrain, of course. Each is accounted for and locked up when not in use.… You’re right, we must go. That truck will reach the camp in less than two minutes. We’ll talk along the way. Come!”
Yosef had placed the bound injured young terrorist across the road, calming him and giving him quiet but firm instructions. Azra and Kendrick approached; Evan spoke. “We’ll make better time here on the road,” he said. “We’ll stay on it until we see the headlights coming up from the valley. Hurry.”