Arabesk (58 page)

Koenig Pasha looked from one child to the other and back again. “No brother,” he said to the boy. “But this is your sister, right?”

Puzzlement met hope in the boy’s thin face. As if the child was watching for the catch, for a trap that would snap shut on his lies. He said nothing, not even when the General repeated his question.

The old man sighed. “I thought so,” he said and waved them away.

Neither moved.

“Go,” Koenig Pasha ordered. “Go now, before I change my mind…”

When they reached the edge of the ruined olive grove, the General suddenly stepped forward and shouted for the boy to stop. He did, as rooted to the dusty earth as the broken stump next to him.

“Good luck.”

Again those puzzled eyes, distant and uncertain.

“With finding your goat.”

The boy grinned fit to burst and snapped a ragged salute. Then, grabbing the girl’s hand, he hurried her out of sight down a slope.

“Truants,” said the Senator.

“Who might have died,” the General agreed flatly. “If their being alone up here was reported to the
morales
… Everything has a price,” he added, leaving blank which
everything
he had in mind.

“They die. That’s the law?”

The old man shook his head. “I am the law,” he said. It was a statement of fact, nothing more. “The boy would have been badly beaten by his father. But the girl…” He shrugged. “Locked in a cellar. Maybe even bricked in to starve or tossed in a ditch with her throat cut. Not stoned to death, not yet. Though that may come…”

If you don’t support me
. He imagined the Senator could read his subtext easily enough.
Stick with me because what comes next will be worse
… She’d have heard it before. Hell, she’d probably heard it all over. Mostly in Central America. Apparently half of her research staff agreed. He knew too that the other half thought she was breaking rule one of foreign affairs.
Never ask for what you know cannot be delivered
.

“What was it you wanted to tell me?” she asked the General.

“Tell you…?”

“This is about achieving deniability, isn’t it, Your Excellency?” Senator Liz indicated the empty terraces surrounding the sunlit farmhouse. In the near distance dust plumed as a pair of jeeps juddered their way up the dirt track road towards the crown of the hill. She and the General had another two, maybe three minutes to themselves at the most.

“No.” The General shook his head and fished in his pocket, finding a box of Sobraine and his Zippo. Engraved on one side was an eagle over crossed thunderbolts, badge of the Fifth French Foreign Legion. Koenig Pasha’s capture of the lighter was a long story and he was resigned to no one ever getting it right.

“I didn’t bring you here to talk,” said the General. “I wanted to show you this…” He waved a hand at the ruined farmhouse and the terraces with their collapsing walls and uprooted vines. “You know what this place is?”

He watched Senator Liz struggle to remember all she’d been told about the General’s history, about Iskandryian politics. Sometime in the last week, before the woman landed at Ali Pasha, spooks from Langley would have briefed her. After the briefing, she’d brushed up on her protocol.

Those lessons had been only partly successful. At least that was the General’s opinion. Her manners at the table were impeccable and practiced. Small amounts of food got left at the side of her plate to acknowledge the richness of her hosts. She never showed the soles of her Manolos when she sat. Her right hand only was used to present her card and eat or drink, the unclean hand she kept to herself.

The Senator even kept eye contact longer than most Westerners and her handshake was gentle, lacking that bone-crunching grip most Americans believed indicated decisiveness or virility. But like most of her kind, her grasp on history was so slight as to be dangerous. And though she could
salaam
with grace, touching her hand to her breast and then forehead, before lifting it away, she lacked the wit to realize that in El Iskandryia no woman ever used that greeting.

Saeed Pasha sighed. He was prejudiced against Americans. Mind you, he wasn’t that fond of the English either. The Germans and the French, now you knew where you were with them. The first were brutal, the second devious. He had the blood of both in his veins.

“This place,” said the General. “You know where you are now?”

“No, I’m sorry… I don’t.”

“They came up that track…” Koenig Pasha pointed to a strip of road. “Wearing rags that had once been uniforms, their bare feet soled with tar from the desert road. Many of them were younger than your granddaughter.”

He’d been briefed too. On the woman’s background and tastes, which were both predictably American.

The Senator knew what Koenig Pasha was talking about now. “What did you do?” she asked; though he could tell she wasn’t really sure she wanted to know.

“What could we do? We killed them. We gunned them down in their thousands as they shambled towards us. All the amulets in the world couldn’t hold back our bullets, despite what the enemy had been told. They carried ancient Kalashnikovs, spare magazines duct-taped together, pangas blunt with overuse, Martini Henrys…” The General stopped. “
Martini Henrys.
British revolvers taken by the Dinka, the barrels and cylinders drilled out to take current ammunition. It was a bloodbath.”

He could see it still in front of his eyes. A hot morning in early summer with the Nile only just on the rise. The mercury hitting 110F. No rain for six weeks.

Ten thousand strong they advanced up the desert highway with limp banners aloft in the hot and breezeless air. The dust from those in front had turned to khaki the ragged clothes of the ranks behind. Now, all that many of them had by way of uniform was a red ribbon tied to one of their upper arms. Behind them, at the rear, marched their officers, five hundred veterans of a ruthless campaign fought in the deserts around Meroe and the foothills of Abyssinia. They carried laser-sighted rifles, mortars and portable rocket launchers. Most wore lightweight body armour, air-conditioned helmets, earbeads and throat mikes. Men and women alike, their hair was cropped short and their eyes hard with satisfaction at how easily Al Qahirah had fallen.

Major Koenig Bey, as he was then, had three hundred men left from his regiment. Some had died but more had deserted in the face of assurances that to oppose this Ragged Army was to oppose the absolute will of God. In vain the local Mufti had insisted in proclamation after proclamation that this was untrue. The Sublime Porte, His Imperial Majesty Mehmet VII, in his role as religious leader of the Osmali empire issued an edict stigmatizing the Mahdi. No one paid any attention.

Winning was left to a twenty-eight-year-old sapper, a half-Egyptian, half-German who had reached regimental rank solely because every other officer had resigned, deserted or was already dead.

This was a man whose first action on arriving at his new HQ in a farmhouse overlooking the desert road was to send for a flame-thrower, have the pressure tank converted to take emulsion and order that the walls, floor and ceiling be sprayed white. While teenage officers advised by elder NCOs set up gun encampments and mortar pits, Major Koenig oversaw first the removal of all furniture from the downstairs of the farmhouse, then the removal of its two cheap overhead striplights and the light switches. Only then was the converted flame-thrower used to redecorate the rooms to suit the major’s taste.

Back in went a table and chairs, the overhead strips and a potbellied charcoal stove that the major took everywhere, for when he wanted fresh bread or coffee.

People might mutter but not when he was within earshot. And besides, the major knew exactly what he was doing as he stood in the middle of the redecorated room and told his officers not to bother setting up charts.

They were outnumbered and outgunned. All they had on their side was their command of a hilltop. That and strategy. And in the end Major Saeed Koenig Bey won by retreating. Though first he shot his favourite brother through the head for refusing to follow an order.

Amil was young, handsome and the undisputed favourite of both his parents in the way that only youngest sons can be. Bizarrely, despite their difference in age, Major Koenig adored him.

With the Ragged Army marching uphill, into the fire of the major’s machine guns and with every death being recorded by CNN drones hung high enough overhead to be out of rifle shot, Major Koenig ordered a retreat.

“Why?” Amil’s question had been simple.

Because we’re being filmed
. Because we’re turning ourselves into murderers. Because I won’t order the deaths of a thousand twelve-year-olds who think that dirty feathers and dry twigs in a totem bag can stop bullets and that paradise waits with open gates for those who die, and see nothing contradictory in those two beliefs.

All of these would have been honest answers. But his senior sergeant and the other NCOs were watching the major, their uncertainty as to the wisdom of his order curdling to doubt. And orders were orders, that was what he’d been taught. The rules of engagement demanded it.

“Because I say so…”

“But we command the hill.”

“Not any longer.”

Amil opened his mouth to protest and bit back the words as his brother pulled a Luger from his belt.

“We retreat now. Understand?” Major Koenig glanced round his command group, which comprised a couple of hardened NCOs and a dozen subalterns so young they hadn’t yet had time to grow a first moustache. The Ragged Army advancing up the hill was forgotten momentarily. The crack of return fire from his own men outside the farmhouse gone from the major’s mind.

“We pull back to the crossroads and stop.”

“Sir,” his senior sergeant had raised a hand.

“You have a problem, Sergeant?” Words sharper than flint and cold as ice. Disdain, derision, mounting disbelief that any NCO might dare question an order. All of those and more were in the five words.

The senior NCO swallowed a smile. He was old enough to know the voice of his old commander, the major’s father, a ruthless bastard but a highly efficient one. As commanding officers went he was good, but the sergeant wouldn’t have wanted the man for his father.

“No, sir. Absolutely not, sir.” He snapped out a salute like the rawest, most frightened recruit and swung on his heels, the other NCOs straightening up, reassured now the decision had been made.

And there matters would have ended if Amil hadn’t insisted on taking a step forward to object. The rest had gone down in legend. Muttered by the General’s enemies as proof of his ruthlessness and spoken openly by his friends as proof of the same. Amil died with a mocking smile on his face and a bullet between the eyes from his brother’s gun.

Major Koenig left the body where it dropped.

By the time the major returned to the farmhouse that evening, walking under a white flag of truce, Amil’s body had been carried away and dumped with others in a pit dug into the terraces by a thin girl on a tractor. He came alone, unarmed, and stood silent and uncomplaining as rough hands searched him before letting him inside.

The ground floor of the farmhouse was crowded with the cream of the Ragged Army’s generals, their own uniforms anything but that. Some of the junior officers wore battledress stripped from UN observers but most had uniforms cut and sewn by local tailors along the way.

A few were imported, bought via middlemen from military tailors in Algiers, Berlin or Stambul. Two officers were even dressed in the uniform of Major Koenig’s regiment. One had, until that afternoon, been his
aide de camp
and the other the major had thought dead. Certainly the man had never returned from the morning’s reconnaissance.

Amused eyes watched him notice them.

A charcoal fire burned in the potbellied stove he’d been forced to abandon, heating a brass jug of fresh coffee. A hurricane lamp lit the room against advancing night.

Against centuries of tradition, Major Koenig was not offered a small cup of sweetened coffee or a brass sheesha filled with apple tobacco. He sat unasked on the only chair not in use and when he requested a glass of water to wet his throat this was refused. The major was pleased. It made what came next easier.

He was there to negotiate the surrender of El Iskandryia to the Ragged Army. General Mahdi had not bothered to come in person. Rumour said the jihad leader was too busy imposing his rule on Al Qahirah, where cinema doors had been bolted tight, bars burned and women whipped in public for going out with their heads uncovered. Schools for girls had been closed, female doctors banned from working, and aid workers of both sexes given twenty-four hours to leave the country.

Berlin, Paris and Washington were too busy being outraged to have time for what was about to happen on a hill to the south of Iskandryia.

Camped on terraces that had been cut into the slope before Islam or Christianity even existed, the Ragged Army crouched round fires lit with dried dung or branches ripped from the ancient olive grove. Food had been plentiful in Al Qahirah and most were no longer hungry. But they lit fires and killed any goats they could scavenge because that was what they did. Habit can take only weeks to become tradition and they’d had years. First in the Sudan, then moving north.

“Tomorrow and the next day we march,” their leader told Major Koenig. “The evening after that we arrive at El Iskandryia. Friday we pray. Saturday you bring out the old man to make his surrender.”

Fat chance,
thought the major. The Khedive was too ill to leave his bed. Besides, he was Khedive, the old man would die rather than surrender his city. “And the terms?” Major Koenig asked.

There were no terms. The city surrendered. That was all there was to it. Those whom the Ragged Army let live were those who would live. No promises would be made.

Same terms they gave Al Qahirah.

“I agree.” Major Koenig held out his hand and when this was not taken, bowed slightly and clicked his heels, Berlin style, purely for the pleasure of seeing hatred flood the faces of his enemy. “The city will be ready for you,” he added.