Saleem sat in the floor between three armed men who were still trying to figure out what to do with him.
Gary saw him and went into acting mode. “Hey, that’s my partner, Muhammad. We’re working together.”
The men looked at Saleem and then back at the American.
“He was knocked out while trying to fight with Heru,” one of the men commented. “And he was lucky that we found him when he did. He was well on his way to being murdered. But he told us his name is Saleem, not Muhammad.”
Gary thought fast and said, “Yeah, Saleem Muhammad. He’s probably still a little dizzy, that’s all. We all can forget our last names sometimes.”
Saleem eyed him and was not at all amused.
“And what is your name?” the men asked Gary. They all continued to call him “the American,” even their head commander.
“I’m Gary,” he answered, “Gary Stevens from Louisville. Now let me get my partner back. We work much better together. Did you guys see us in the lobby earlier?”
He was hamming it up to get Saleem out of there. And it took awhile, but it eventually worked.
“You two need to go back down and let us professionals handle this,” a more confident soldier boasted.
Saleem nodded in submission, as if accepting it all, but only until he could walk alone with the American down to the twenty-third floor.
“We need to get back up there and try him again,” Gary whispered. “Maybe you and I both would be able to deal with him.”
Saleem nodded, still massaging his aching forehead. “He’s indeed a tough man to take. And he used my own strength against me, knowing that I could overtake him.”
As they slipped onto the twenty-third floor, Gary asked, “So what’s his weak spot?”
Saleem thought about it and said, “The bombs. That is his ultimate goal here. So he will continue to fight the soldiers to protect them.”
As soon as Saleem said that, powerful gunshots began to ring out at the higher floors of the building again.
“Let’s go,” Saleem said. “You go back up with the soldiers, and I’ll take the opposite stairs.”
Neither one of them had a gun, but with so many dead bodies with guns on the top floors of the building, they didn’t need to carry one. They only had to grab another one from a dead body.
By the time Gary had returned to the twenty-sixth floor, the tough-talking soldier was pulling a knife out of his neck while bleeding profusely.
Jesus! This guy is good! Gary told himself as he proceeded back into the hallway of the twenty-sixth floor. New dead of the UAE soldiers were everywhere, like plague. Heru was a serious one-man army.
Gary then heard more shooting and soldiers running on the floor above him. Grabbing another assault weapon and a pistol, he ran up the stairs and back to the twenty-seventh floor, where he arrived just in time to catch Heru climbing up into the ceiling.
Gary aimed and shot at him immediately, just missing his foot. Not wanting to chance him getting away again, Gary ran up the hallway after him and continued to shoot, forcing Heru to jump back down from the ceiling and shoot back.
Gary was forced to dive into an open room for safety. But as Heru ran to the opposite end of the hallway to take the staircase back down, Saleem charged through the exit door and cracked him with the butt of his assault weapon.
He now realized that it took too long to aim a heavy rifle inside of a small hallway. And you could never be slow against a man with the speed and anticipation of Heru.
Heru lost his gun from the hit and stated, “You again,” and kicked Saleem in his chest to create distance. But Saleem grabbed on to his right leg, only for Heru to whip around his left leg and send the Pakistani face-first into the wall again. However, Saleem would not let his right leg go.
“Gary!” he screamed down the hall to the American to help him.
Gary jumped back out into the hallway with a gun, aiming to shoot, but knew that he couldn’t fire with so many different changes in their position. He could accidentally shoot Saleem.
“Help me!” Saleem hollered.
Heru tussled with him and finally kicked his foot free while reaching down to grab his second blade from a holster on his ankle. Gary arrived down the hall just in time to distract Heru enough to swing his sharp blade in his direction instead of at Saleem.
“You missed,” Gary teased. “And I’m not dead yet.” He fig ured talking trash might be a way to throw off the Egyptian’s concentration.
“Keep talking so I can hear you moan when I finally cut you,” Heru said.
“Come on and bring it,” Gary challenged him, bouncing on his toes with readiness.
Heru stood between both men in the hallway with his blade in hand, knowing that he could not afford any wide swings. Everything had to be quick and straight, which was more risky with two men who were also good at combat. So he was hesitant to strike, not wanting either man to get an edge on him.
Gary faked a jump forward to try and force a reaction, only for Heru to slice his right arm.
Gary squealed.
Saleem then made his move, only for Heru to whip his blade back around across his face. Saleem dodged it just in time. However, Heru caught his shoulder instead on the downstroke.
“Arrgghh,” Saleem responded. But he remained hesitant to use his own blade out of fear of Heru being better with his.
Gary attempted to strike him with a fast elbow, only to catch the same right of Heru’s blade in his arm.
“AAAHHH!”
“That’s the scream I promised you,” Heru teased him back.
On cue, Saleem decided to pull his own knife and jabbed with three moves that all missed. But Heru was able to slash him across the chest with his move, enough to make him bleed, but not enough to kill or damage any organs.
Frustrated by being too cautious with fear, Gary, in desperation, grabbed Heru’s arm from which he wielded the knife.
“Get him now!” Gary hollered to Saleem.
When Heru went to punch him with his second hand to break free, Gary caught his fist in his palm, holding him two ways for Saleem to strike him. But Heru twisted his nimble body in the air and kicked Saleem’s knife out of his hand, punching it deep into the wall. That forced Saleem into his own act of desperation as he tackled Heru’s lower body to the floor.
Heru then switched hands with his knife, cutting the back of Gary’s wrist and freeing himself in an attempt to bring his blade down on Saleem’s back, but Saleem grabbed Gary’s wrist just before Heru could strike him. Gary helped to pull back Heru’s arm right as another round of UAE soldiers arrived at both sides of the hallway with their guns drawn.
“Wait, don’t shoot! We have him!” Gary screamed.
Saleem wasn’t so sure. He felt that he and the American might have to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the people. Heru was simply too skilled to be captured alive. But as the armed men closed in on them, Saleem began to believe that they could indeed capture Ra-Heru, the leader of the most memorable labor revolt in the short history of Dubai.
Realizing that the soldiers were closing in on him with nowhere left to go, Heru dropped the knife and punched Gary in the face with his free hand before rolling over, grabbing an assault weapon, firing it recklessly at the soldiers and diving back into the room where the men had taken out the bombs earlier. However, they hadn’t checked under the mattress of the bed in that same room. That’s where Heru had hidden a parachute, which he quickly slipped onto his back before shooting out the window and jumping, all before Gary, Saleem and the soldiers were able to get to him.
“Are you kidding me?” Gary commented as he and the others, having arrived in the room just a second late, watched the Egyptian soar from the hotel room with a guided parachute.
Saleem took one of the assault weapons and started firing at him to take him down. But Heru still had the gun with him as well, spinning in their direction to clear them from the window with a stream of bullets.
/> Unfortunately for Heru, the room faced the front of the hotel, where the crowd, the police force and the soldiers were all able to see him up high—an open target. Even the helicopters were over top of them. But Heru shot the helicopters off.
The soldiers jumped on the military phones for the commander to order the snipers.
“Heru is flying away in a parachute right above you!”
*****
Back down at street level, inside the armored truck headquarters, the commander and Tariq heard the urgent report and ran out of the truck to get a good look at the ringleader flying through the sky.
“Horus or Heru was also know as half-human and half-falcon,” the commander commented to his intelligence force.
“Well, let’s go shoot the falcon down,” Tariq advised him.
In anticipation of the volley of bullets that he could expect while floating down in a parachute, Heru began to fire down on the armored truck headquarters and at all of the police and soldiers, forcing Tariq and the commander to duck for cover. But there were simply too many men outside with guns to miss a floating target, no matter how the ambitious Egyptian tried to maneuver around them. And after killing nearly fifty of their men by himself, the UAE soldiers and police finally had their chance at retaliation, more like a fifty-one gun salute.
Ironically, Ra-Heru Amun saw his death as an obvious need for an entire army to kill him rather than any one man or a group of snipers. So he accepted his death like a legend of war that he imagined himself to be.
The crowd watched it all unfold, including Basim, who had just arrived to witness the shooting by air, up close. Inside the truck headquarters, Mohd watched the camera monitor and heard all of the bullets being shot up into the air at his oldest son. He then closed his eyes to say a silent prayer, not only for his son, but for the souls of all the victims who died that day.
“Wow … what a way to die,” Gary commented from the window from the top floor of the building as they all watched the dramatic conclusion before them. Then Gary snapped them to attention. “All right, we need to find the rest of those bombs in the rooms and get the people out of here.”
The soldiers moved fast as if the American was briefly their commander of the moment. But he was right—they had no time to marvel and gloat.
Saleem pulled Gary aside as the soldiers went on about their work. “It’s been fun fighting with you, my friend,” Saleem said, “but had it not ended that way with Heru, I don’t know if either one of us, or both of us together, could have ever really beaten him.”
Gary smiled and nodded. “Well, now we don’t have to.” He then wrapped several bathroom towels around his arms and wrists to stop his bleeding. Saleem did the same with his wounds.
“So, where do you go from here, my friend?” the Pakistani asked the American. He figured the man had come a long way that day. Maybe he would be ready for more antiterrorism.
Gary shrugged and didn’t think of any missions as Saleem thought of them. He wasn’t really a military man. So he answered, “Back home, I guess, after I spend a few more days in Dubai to heal my wounds. What about you?”
Saleem shrugged and didn’t believe the American. He figured he was young enough to participate in a lot more dangerous missions. “I no longer have a home,” Saleem said. “So I’ll go wherever my next job takes me.” Maybe this is my best job, he told himself without voicing it, special mission warfare. It’s much better than the disrespect of construction.
“Yeah,” Gary said, thinking of his own minimal ties back at home, “I know just what you mean.” He still felt as if he would do more traveling … alone.
Chapter 34
The Death toll from the siege and battle was one-hundred and seventy-eight. It could have been much worse had Ra-Heru succeeded in his plan to detonate the top floors of the building. Soldiers found bombs on four of those floors.
Once the immigrant men inside the lobby found that Heru had been shot down and killed in his escape, several more of Mohd’s loyal guard shot down Heru’s lieutenant to take over the room. They were then able to release the rest of the hostages, but the damage had already been done.
The Union Defence Force took the heaviest loss with seventy-one killed, mostly by Heru, including his plan to assassinate the UDF commander. Sixty-four immigrant gunmen had been killed, along with twenty-eight UAE police officers, including Chief Ali Youssef. Of the tourists, fifteen hostages had been killed, including two elders who had died from massive heart attacks.
When Abdul received the final reports in Abu Dhabi at the home of his uncle Sheikh Al Hassan—where he and Hamda were ordered to remain—they were both devastated. Not only did Abdul understand that he had no right to fight his punishment of suspension of his construction and development licenses, he cried and prayed for hurt of the innocent families, the UAE police and for the Defence Force soldiers, who had lost their lives. He also hurt and prayed for his young nation and pondered what the fallout would mean for the future of Dubai. And he and his wife understood that they had a lot of amends to make in the country to ever regain respect for their good names.
As for Mohd and the rest of the surviving immigrants, they would have to deal with the Sharia law of the United Arab Emirates and the strong emotions of the people involved who had lost the lives of their loved ones.
*****
After the dust had all settled that evening, the Prime Minister and the President of the United Arab Emirates met with the commander of the Union Defence Force, private investigator and counsel Tariq Mohammed, the American traveler Gary Stevens, the Pakistani Saleem, the Sri Lankan Johnny Napur, the Jordanian Ramia Farah Aziz, and several more of a large group of heroic men and women in the royal chambers to discuss honoring them all with a Bravery Medal, Nut al-Shaja’at.
Tariq was immediately considered to take over the UAE Chief of Police position, an honor that he asked to think about to discuss with his wife and children at home. The Defence Force honorees were asked to fill higher positions of command as well. As for the civilians, they were also to receive an undisclosed amount of “honor money,” and their choice of a stay at the best hotel in Dubai, which was Gary’s idea. He told the President and Prime Minister that he would offer any monetary award to the tourists and families, and that he would add a significant contribution of his own to the police and soldiers. He only asked that he and his new friends could have their private rooms at the famous Burj Al Arab hotel for the remainder of his stay there.
“I’ll take the Burj Al Arab over a hospital any day,” he joked.
“That can be easily arranged and granted,” he was told.
That evening after midnight, Gary lay gingerly on a royal-sized bed at the seven-star Burj Al Arab hotel, an honor that billions around the world could only dream about. Words could not begin to explain the opulence of the room. But Gary felt that he actually deserved it, not through his inherited wealth, but through his selfless and heroic service to the people of Dubai who needed it. He had put his life on the line for them. However, his service did not stop there. He knew that there were many other places around the world that he could travel to, and many more people in need to help.
“Unbelievable,” he moaned to himself as he nursed his injuries through a personal medical staff at the hotel. All he needed was to call them, like room service, to help change his bandages. The Emirates had even replaced his phone. However, they had no idea how complicated his broken phone was to replace.
I’ll call Jonah in the morning, he told himself. He knew she would be worried sick about him, yet he did not have the same feelings of urgency to call his girlfriend, Karla, in Washington.
I guess that’s my answer then, he thought. I just don’t have strong enough feelings for her.
On cue, the doorbell of his hotel room rang. With the advancements of room technology, there was a camera at the peephole where Gary could immediately view his visitor on his large flat screen television that was high above the bed. He also had a remote
control to open the door with. Such amenities were needed in a room the size of a public swimming pool.
Once Gary saw that it was Ramia, he quickly buzzed her in to keep her from getting into trouble with the Muslim nation’s restrictive culture on open sexuality, particularly with Muslim women.
He sat up as she walked into the room and asked her, “What in the world are you doing here? I thought you shared a double room with your cousin. He let you sneak out?”
She smiled and said, “I am a grown woman, whether my cousin accepts it or not. And I wanted badly to see you tonight. I could not sleep without it.”
Her hair was out, clean and blow-dried, and she smelled of the exotic body oil and perfume that she had used after a long cleansing bath inside of a whirlpool. Her dress was nearly see-through under her robe, where she wore no panties or bra, like a liberated woman of the West. And as the beautiful Jordanian woman popped up on the bed with Gary, with her hazel eyes aglow, seeming to reflect all of the colors in the expensively decorated room, Gary took a deep breath and composed himself, realizing that he was in need of strong discipline. She then tossed her robe to the floor.
“So, who are you?” she asked him. “You still owe me plenty of answers.”
Her beautiful, soft skin, with a natural tan that matched her eyes and hair color, was right there in front of him to touch and take advantage of. And it was what she wanted him to do, to possess her like a romantic American. Yet Gary fell back in his mountain of pillows and relaxed.
“I’m just a regular guy,” he told her, “who’s trying to figure out where he is in life.”
Seeing him lying there with bandaged wounds and no shirt made Ramia feel comfortable enough to caress him softly and wrap her right leg over his.
“This does not hurt you, does it?”
Her body felt like another pillow, only warmer and slightly heavier, with a heartbeat. He felt like he had died and been taken to a Muslim heaven, yet he continued to feel uneasy about it. She was still so young, in a very expensive Arab hotel room with him where he was quite sure they had cameras. He figured that they could haul him away to jail for this.