Declare (33 page)

Hale heard the rapid multiple crunch of camel hooves, and saw that Ishmael’s group of Mutair and ’Awazim had goaded their camels into a rolling gallop toward the east; in the southwest the unknown riders were close enough for him to see that their camels also were running—stretching their long legs and holding their heads low. Bin Jalawi was still sitting imperturbably on his camel close at hand, but all of them needed to get moving right now.

Nevertheless Ishmael had clearly meant what he had said, and it was probably true. If they cheated this, this
oracle
, the entire Rabkrin Soviet operation
might
misfire, which meant that Declare would misfire too.

Hale flexed his hand on the checked wooden grip of the .45—but it had been nearly eighteen years since he had shot a man, and he had never simply
executed
anyone, and somehow the sight of the old man’s gray face and bare feet made shooting him impossible.
“Kill yourself, then,” said Hale thickly. “But do it quickly—I need your rifle if we’re to get away from this hole.”

The old man unslung the BAR from over his shoulder and simply tossed it through the air upright to Hale, who caught it by the stock with his left hand. The polished wood was warm, and the steel barrel was hot, and Hale noticed belatedly that the sky had cleared and the sun was a caloric weight on the landscape.

Then Ishmael simply turned toward the pool and started walking down the crusty sand slope—and the fringes of black water were as distinct as tentacles now, though water and steam still flew from their ends; as Hale watched, they began to bend forward, like the spines of a huge black Venus’s-flytrap. The spinning rocks clattered like weighty castanets, and Hale could see the whirlpool mouth constricting and dilating until Ishmael knelt in front of the opening, blocking Hale’s view; then the old man raised his hands and bowed forward.

Hale quickly slung the rifle and bent to pick up the radio, and then he stepped across to his couched camel and scrambled up onto the saddle. He tapped her neck to get her to stand, and as she rocked up onto her feet, he tucked the .45 and the radio into a saddlebag by his ankle, and neither he nor bin Jalawi looked back as they goaded their mounts into a gallop after their fleeing companions, away from the pursuing ride rs and the living sulfur pool and the splashing, sucking, cracking sounds behind them.

Hale thought of Elena’s friend Maly, who had voluntarily gone to Moscow to be killed, and he wondered fleetingly if Ishmael had also been a religious man, once.

Hale was straddling the saddle and clinging to the rifle as his camel began lumbering after her fellows against the hot breeze, her hooves pounding the sand and the saddlebags flopping as she picked up speed. Hale braced himself with one hand on the forward saddle pommel, and he craned his neck to look back.

The strangers were gaining; he could clearly see the fluttering white robes and head-cloths, and the brandished rifles. And not all of the weapons were simply being waved in the air—his ribs went icy cold as he heard the chatter of a short burst of full-automatic gunfire, and then another.

He had just glanced down at the trigger assembly of the rifle that was jolting in his lap and flicked the change lever from single-fire to auto when he was startled by a loud and wildly prolonged burst from only a few yards to his right. Bin Jalawi had turned around on his own saddle and raked the whole quarter of the compass behind them.

More jackhammer racket replied, and Hale saw simultaneous spurts of sand kicked up along the ridge of a low dune ahead of them.

“Bloody hell,” he wailed through clenched teeth. He clamped his legs on the saddle and then twisted his body around to point the heavy rifle’s muzzle at the riders. When the front sight was bouncing closely across his view of the figures he pulled the trigger and released it, sending three or four 7.62-millimeter slugs toward them. The barrel jumped out of line, and he swung it back and fired briefly again.

When he glanced ahead he saw an underslung, streamlined olive-green shape scudding low over the dunes—it was the helicopter, flying toward them half in profile, and now he could hear the thudding of its rotors.

He lunged forward over the hot barrel of the rifle and snatched the radio out of the saddlebag by his ankle; he found the set’s power switch, and he yelled into it in English, “Rabkrin! I’m the two riders! Shoot the ones behind me!”

He didn’t know whether they understood English or had even heard him, but a moment later he saw a bright spot of fluttering muzzle fire in the dark rectangle of the helicopter’s open cargo door; for several seconds the nearly continuous flashes didn’t cease, and he could hear the choppy whisper of bullets ripping through the air over his head; then the muzzle flashes went dark and his ears were belatedly battered by the stuttering roar of the machine gun.

Clouds of sand scooped up into the air a hundred yards ahead. The helicopter was apparently settling down for a landing, its tail elevated as if the pilot was afraid of hitting one of the low sand dunes with the tail rotor.

The camels began hitching and lifting their heads as they
pounded closer to the hovering aircraft, and when they were still fifty yards short of it they wobbled to a halt and balked at going any farther.

“—not bothered by a bloody
genie,”
Hale snarled as he gripped the rifle and the .45 and simply jumped from the saddle. He knocked his chin with one knee when his bare feet hit the hot sand, but a moment later he had got up into a crouch and was limping to bin Jalawi’s mount.

And Salim bin Jalawi rolled off of his saddle, slid facedown across the glistening water-skins and thumped heavily to the sand on his hip and shoulder. He was facing Hale, and the front of his robe was bright red with blood.

The sunlight seemed to dim, and there was a shrill keening in Hale’s head. Ignoring several crackling, megaphone-amplified shouts from the helicopter, Hale crouched helplessly beside the dying Arab.

“Salim!” Hale’s breath wavered in his throat. “Salim!”

The Arab opened his eyes. The flap of his
kaffiyeh
had been pulled away from his white-bearded face, and Hale saw blood on the man’s teeth when he grimaced. “Get out of this, bin Sikkah,” he whispered. “These men—traffic with devils—”

“Salim,” said Hale urgently in Arabic, “I am still working for Creepo, under deep cover. This is a pretense, a trick, to confound this lot’s plans. Are you hearing me? I—I pretend to kiss the enemy’s hand, the better to be sure of cutting it cleanly off.”

Bin Jalawi’s mouth opened in what might have been a pained smile, as if he were trying to laugh.
“ ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din,’ ”
he said in English, quoting the Kipling poem that Hale sometimes used to recite when drunk; and then he shuddered and died.

Hale looked back the way they’d come—the riders who had been pursuing them appeared to have stopped and dismounted several hundred yards back, and Hale thought there were fewer of them now. They weren’t shooting.

The Mutair and ’Awazim with whom Hale had ridden here were somewhere to the east, on the far side of the small sandstorm around
the hovering helicopter—they or these southern tribes would no doubt take possession of the camels and, being Bedu, give bin Jalawi a Moslem burial.

Hale got to his feet and jogged painfully across the sand toward the drifting helicopter. Squinting against the stinging sand kicked up by its whirling rotors, he could see in the cargo doorway a short-haired man with sunglasses and earphones, waving at him; the man had apparently put down the megaphone, and the steady booming of the rotors was too loud for Hale to hear anything the man might have been shouting. Hale forced his aching legs to run faster over the uneven sand, and when at last he exhaustedly set one bare foot on the metal skid and grabbed the edge of the door frame, the man took Hale’s free hand and dragged him in to sprawl onto the corrugated steel cargo deck between two .60-caliber machine guns mounted on pylons.

Hale’s rescuer, who was wearing dungarees and a sweatshirt and appeared to be European, waved toward the pilot’s station, and then Hale felt heavier as the big rotors thudded more loudly with their pitch angle increased for a fast ascent. There was no shaking or vibration from the engine, and Hale realized that it was some kind of turbine, not one of the piston engines that had powered the old Sikorskis and Bristols he had flown in after the war. He got cautiously up on his hands and knees and only then realized that he had at some point dropped both the BAR and the .45.

After several seconds the helicopter banked to the north, tilting the open cargo door up toward the sky, and Hale impulsively crawled forward and gripped the bottom edge of the steel-and-ceramic laminate of the craft’s exterior armor, and he peered over the door sill, down through a hundred feet of swirling sand clouds, at the rippled desert of the Kuwait–Saudi border; he could make out bin Jalawi’s camel, though he couldn’t see his friend in the beast’s shadow, and farther west he saw the shadows of other camels and the scattered white dots of robes sprawled on the reddish tan ground. Not far away to the north was the sulfur pool, though it was a featureless black disk from this height and distance. Farther off he could see the white of the salt flats, and dimly beyond them the long
shadow of the Ash Shaq valley, while the tan horizon was the broad interior deserts of the Summan and Nafud.

The man who had pulled him into the aircraft now grabbed him by the ankles and dragged him back from the door.

“They still have rifles,” the man told Hale, shouting to be heard over the rotor noise through the open door. “Come up by the pilot’s station.” Even shouting, he had a German accent. He pulled the heavy door closed along its track, and in the relative silence after it had slammed shut he said, “You look like hell. Are you shot already?”

“No,” said Hale, bracing himself against a gun pylon as he got wearily to his feet.

The two high-backed seats up in front were nylon mesh strung across aluminum frames, and in the right-side one the pilot was hunched over the cyclic control stick—Hale saw that as he moved it, the stick in front of the empty left-side seat moved too, and for one childish instant, before he realized that the control sticks were linked, he nearly flinched.

“Ishmael killed himself?” asked the man standing beside Hale, still speaking loudly.

“Yes,” said Hale, wondering if these men would believe a description of the action at the pool. They appeared to be in their late twenties or early thirties—and Hale, stiff and sore after sleeping on the ground in the rain and riding a camel for two days, felt incalculably old and decrepit and unreliable. “I didn’t see it, but—I heard it.”

The pilot nodded. “Years now, that old man’s been looking for an excuse.”

The German gave Hale a quizzical look. “The genie ate him?”

Hale found that he was laughing, though not hard enough to justify the tears that were blurring his view of the switches and circuit-breakers on the console in front of him. “That’s what it sounded like, yes.”
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
“Do you gentlemen have any
drink
aboard?”

The pilot groped by his left knee and then, without looking away from the Perspex windscreen, lifted over his head a half-full pint
bottle of Smirnoff vodka that swayed in his hand with the motion of the aircraft. “Bung ho, eh, what?” he said in an affected British drawl.

“Skol, Prosit,”
agreed Hale absently, catching the swinging bottle. He unscrewed the cap and took several deep swallows of the warm, stinging liquor. In his mind he saw bin Jalawi as he had been in 1948, dark-bearded and whipcord-thin; and then as he had looked two days ago, his beard white now, listening to the radio in his Al-Ahmadi house with the electric range and refrigerator in the modern kitchen. Hale thought, It was not a good day for you, old friend, when I came back into your life. “Where are we—going?”

“Kuwait International Airport,” the German told him. “Ishmael said you have been confirmed, so now you are to get on an airplane, a private jet, there.”

“To go… where?” Hale asked. “Do you know?”

The German gave him a blank stare. “Somewhere intermediate, I suppose. Probably several intermediate places. You are at home in them, I think.”

Hale nodded and tipped the bottle up for another couple of swallows. “Oh sure,” he said hoarsely. “Me and intermediate go way back.”

“Soon we will be at the airport,” said the pilot. “There are airport staff clothes and shoes in a locker in the cargo bay—get into them now.” He glanced back at Hale with a cold smile. “You can take the bottle.”

Hale found the locker, and after sloughing off his bloody, muddy old Bedu costume he put on the tan uniform, complete with name badge, of a Kuwait International Airport baggage handler. He bundled up the Bedu clothes and shoved them into the locker, and then he sat down cross-legged below a couple of bright steel bolts where a passenger seat could have been installed. He sipped at the warm vodka and tried to take satisfaction in the thought that he was now successfully injected into the opposition’s machine, and that Theodora would be pleased; but in his mind was droning the old refrain,
You can’t relax yet.

* * *

The next twelve hours were a series of destinations and layovers, seen through a haze of intermittently renewed alcohol and persistent exhaustion.

At the Kuwait airport he simply walked from the helicopter across fifty yards of tarmac to a sleek British Aerospace commuter jet that the German had pointed out to him, and climbed aboard. The only crew members Hale saw were two young Arab men in snowwhite Saudistyle robes and head-cloths, and they didn’t speak to him beyond ordering him in terse Arabic to take a seat in the cabin and, in En glish, “Belt up.” When the plane had taken off and reached cruising altitude, somewhere down the gulf coast over Oman, he was given a Savile Row suit to change into, and a shaving kit, a French passport, and an Alitalia Airlines ticket. Four hours later the jet landed at Benina International Airport near Benghazi, and he followed the directions he’d been given and got right aboard the next Alitalia flight bound for the Ciampino Airport in Rome, having spent less than forty minutes in Libya. Slumped in a window seat in the turboprop Alitalia Vanguard, he drank Canadian whiskey and watched twilight darken to full night over the purple expanse of the Mediterranean; and he kept reminding himself of what Ishmael had said to the djinn in the sulfur pool—
He will be flying tonight west over the sands, to the western sea—your brothers and sisters are awake, but they will not approach him…