Firebird (26 page)
Authors: Michael Asher
Monod buckled and choked blood over my jacket. I stepped into the alcove and found a narrow, crumbling staircase spiralling up out of sight. I pulled Monod after me, and a moment later Daisy backed in, still firing. I holstered my pistol and Daisy and I grabbed an arm each and half dragged, half carried the body up the dark stairs and out into the blinding sunlight of another rank alley. It was full of the hulks of rusting cars, and we dodged behind them into another derelict, roofless house, where we laid Monod down gently in the goat dung and refuse. We peered through the broken window. Figures in long, black Barbour coats — six or seven of them — were pouring out of the cellar exit and skirmishing towards us between the car wrecks. They worked in pairs, moving with the concentration of spiders, covering each other with fire.
‘The same guys who bumped us last night!’ Daisy said. ‘The guys Van Helsing claimed were Militants!’ She inserted a fresh mag into her SIG and began firing aimed shots through the window. After each shot she rolled back out of sight, just in time to duck the submachine gun rounds that spattered the brickwork and reduced the window frame to matchwood. Monod groaned and fought for breath. I ripped away the robe to see if I could stanch the bleeding, but I already knew what I’d find. Our clothes had sopped up litres of his blood like blotting paper, and most of the rest lay spilt in a trail along the derelict street. There was an entry wound on his right pectoral, through which air wheezed nauseatingly in and out, and I cut a section out of my T-shirt with my blade and covered it. I couldn’t reach the exit wound in the back, but I knew it must be huge, because most of the blood was coming from there. Monod gurgled and coughed.
‘Can’t breathe!’ he whispered.
‘Don’t try,’ I said, lie still. We’ll get you out.’
A couple of bullets whazzed off the walls, fragmenting into bits of shrapnel. I bellowed as a piece took out a tiny bit of my right earlobe and blood streamed down my neck. Daisy popped up and fired a double tap. ‘Got the bastard!’ she said, throwing herself back into cover. Monod’s eyelids fluttered, and he found my wrist, curling his fingers around it like tentacles.
‘Inside my robe...’ he said, then he coughed and a dribble of blood ran out of the side of his mouth. ‘Ibram warned me...’
A hail of slugs hissed past my bleeding ear and I dipped down. I felt Monod’s grip go limp and I realized suddenly that he wasn’t breathing. My mind raced through possibilities of resuscitation — mouth to mouth, heart massage — but deep down I knew it was useless. I fumbled inside his robe. Stitched into the lining was a flat package, and I ripped it out with the help of my knife. It was already badly bloodstained and my ear bled on it even more copiously before I got it inside my jacket.
Daisy fired another double tap and rolled. ‘Look out!’ she screamed. ‘They’re here.’
A face in shades and
shamagh
appeared at the window and Daisy popped up and shot it from a range of a couple of feet. The head seemed to detonate into a bloody mash of dark shards and bits of
shamagh
. Another face replaced it instantly, like a hydra’s head, and almost simultaneously a third face and a body materialized at the door. The guy wore a flapping black trench coat and held a big handgun, but he opened his mouth to say something and in that moment I skewered him with my blade. It’d been a long time since I’d thrown it in anger, but I hadn’t lost my touch. The stiletto took him bang in the abdomen, and he doubled over letting the handgun slip from his grasp. I kicked him in the face, put a stranglehold on his neck, retrieved my blade in a shower of fresh blood, and slashed off his
shamagh
. I don’t know quite what I’d been expecting, but this guy was no Militant — not unless they’d started recruiting them from blond Nordic types. He looked more like a grizzled version of one of the U S marine corporals at the medical facility.
‘Sammy!’ Daisy yelled, and I glanced up to see her struggling with another foot soldier who’d launched himself through the window. The cry only distracted me for an instant, but it was long enough for my grizzled veteran to flex himself up, shrug off my stranglehold and grab his weapon. He pointed it at me shakily, holding his guts together with his left hand as blood pulsed through his fingers.
‘Son-of-a-bitch!’ he grunted in English, ‘you’re gonna die real slow for this.’ He choked and blood dripped from his nose. ‘You got something we want,
asshole
, and guess what? It’s handover time. Dead or alive, it’s all the same to me.’ He’d lowered the weapon slightly for a nasty shot in my balls, when there was a crack as a brilliant red aureole developed in the side of his head. Half his grey matter splattered over the wall.
A second later Hammoudi torpedoed himself across in front of me and grabbed the guy Daisy was wrestling with round the throat. He dug the .44 into the guy’s back and pulled the trigger, breaking his spine instantly. The foot soldier slumped like a broken doll and Hammoudi pulled Daisy out of the way and ducked as another hail of bullets chopped up the window frame.
I threw myself down next to them. ‘I thought you were dead,’ I said.
Hammoudi tried to wink, but his chest was heaving and his breaths came in sobs. ‘Told you, boy,’ he panted, ‘I’ve been round a long time. You got what you came for?’ I nodded. ‘Then get out. You and the girl. Now!’ He slapped a set of car keys into my hand. ‘There’s a four wheel drive Daihatsu at the end of the street — the escape car — and it’s kitted out. Take it. You know where to go.’ He gestured to the hole he’d come in by, then spun round and fired at another face that had popped up behind the window. ‘Jesus and Mary!’ he said. ‘How many of these creeps are there?’
He braced himself against the door jamb and punched another clip into the .44. ‘Go!’ he bawled, but this time I didn’t know whether he was speaking to us or himself, because the next I knew he’d dashed out in the street into a hail of gunfire. I grabbed Daisy by the hand and we belted out through the back of the ruined house and down a parallel street. I was ready for sentries, but these guys had evidently been so sure of themselves they hadn’t bothered to post them. That was their mistake. It took us only seconds to reach the compact little silver grey car and within a minute Daisy had the key in the ignition and the turbo roared into life. A second later we were racing through the tight alleys towards Shari’ al-Azhar and my seat was already slippery with blood — most of it someone else’s. Peasant faces in turbans and skullcaps glared at us. Some shouted curses and waved their fists. Daisy swerved around a narrow corner, almost colliding with a hand cart full of fruit, and its owner jumped out of the way, screaming abuse. Dogs barked at us, and someone threw a stone that bounced feebly off the bonnet.
These streets had been built for a less frenetic world than the one we lived in — for camel caravans and donkeys, not motorcars moving at sixty kilometres an hour. One alley was full of hundreds of porcelain baths and toilets, and Daisy ploughed through several ambitious displays, the bull bars on the front of the car smashing or shunting them aside. There were more strings of curses, and men in
gallabiyyas
and vests shambled after us, gesticulating. Daisy steered us down an alley of one room workshops caked in grease, where men waved welding torches at us threateningly. At last we shot out of the bazaar into the main road by the Azhar — a university that had stood here since before the American continent was even discovered. There were crowds on the streets and the skyway was full of traffic. Daisy ran serenely down the gears as if she was driving in a funeral cortege, and worked her way into the slow moving stream of cars. She looked at me and giggled, showing off her white teeth.
‘You look like an extra from
Nightmare
on
Elm
Street
,
’
she laughed, ‘your shirt is cut to pieces and you’re soaked in blood.’
‘I hope Hammoudi left me a change of clothes.’
The traffic speeded up as we drove through Opera Square and into the heart of modern Cairo. There were cops on traffic duty, and I sank down in my seat to keep my bloody face out of view. The only real wound I had was a nick on the ear, but that had bled profusely.
‘What did you take from Monod?’ Daisy asked.
I felt inside my jacket and came out with the package I’d found stitched inside his robe. The wrapping paper was soggy with blood — mine and other people’s — but inside was a sheet of crumpled parchment that seemed relatively untouched. I opened it out and studied it carefully, then I opened the packet Hammoudi had given me. They were two halves of the same map, and they fitted together with perfect precision.
‘What is it?’ Daisy asked, trying to squint sideways and cope with the traffic at the same time.
‘It’s the other half of Ibram’s map,’ I told her, ‘only this one’s got the scale and coordinates on it.’
‘And you recognize the place?’
‘No, but I’d bet money it’s the Sea Without Water, the
Bahr
Bela
Ma
. You remember that circle thing you spotted on the torn edge of Ibram’s map? Well Monod’s bit has the rest of it, and it contains the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the Firebird. Ten to one poor old Monod just handed us the location of the Benben Stone.’
The story goes that when the god Ra became senile a group of human beings plotted to overthrow him, but someone snitched and he decided to rub out the whole race. At a celestial council, though, the elder god, Nou, advised him to convene a proper court, so that the conspirators could be proved guilty. Ra ignored this advice, because he guessed that if summoned to the court, the rebels would abscond into the Red Land — the desert — which was beyond the reach of the guardian gods of Egypt. Instead he sent his Eye — the wild beast Sekhmet — on a rampage, and she didn’t stop tearing people apart until the land was red with blood. In fact, Ra — who’d regretted his decision — had to trick her into swallowing thousands of barrels of beer to get her canned enough to lay off. For me, the moral of that story had always been that if human beings had reached the desert they would have found the ultimate sanctuary from Sekhmet. There in the wilderness they would lie beyond even the power of Ra.
We mingled with the traffic in the city centre, and crossed the Nile by Tahrir Bridge, heading for Giza. ‘Where the hell are we going?’ Daisy asked.
‘Don’t ask,’ I said, ‘trust me.’
As she diced with the jams on Sudan Street, I searched the glove compartment and found the spare shirt and the false ID card and driving licence Hammoudi had left for me. This was my escape kit. It wasn’t much, but it would get me where I wanted to go. I wriggled into the new shirt, put on my shoulder rig and jacket, and dropped my bloody T-shirt out of the window, then sealed my ear with a Band Aid and used some tissues to get the rest of the stuff off my hands and face. Daisy drove along Shari’ al-Ahram, past the pyramids at Giza and out along the road to the oases, where the black land gave way abruptly to the desert. The pyramids loomed over us like vast direction pointers, and ahead of us the traffic slowed down for a military police road block.
‘Shit!’ Daisy said. ‘They’re on to us.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s just routine. Let me take the wheel. You get in the back. Cover your face with the veil and pretend to be asleep.’
There was a heavy duty red and white striped barrier across the road, in front of a concrete blockhouse with a radio aerial sticking out of the roof. A robust corporal with a red armband and a scarlet beret, almost bursting out of his khaki, was checking the outgoing cars, while another MP raised and lowered the barrier. On both sides there were sand bag emplacements protecting sentries in flak jackets and steel helmets, and a Russian made jeep and two Suzuki motorcycles were pulled up near the blockhouse. When our turn came at the barrier I had my false papers ready for the corporal. He glanced into the back window. ‘Who’s that?’ he demanded.
‘Just my wife,’ I said, ‘she’s tired.’ I rounded my hands across my stomach. ‘You know.’
The corporal studied the picture on my ID card and glanced back at me with flinty eyes. He walked round to the front of the car and read the number plate.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked, still holding my documents.
‘To Kharja,’ I said, ‘to see my relatives.’
The corporal handed the papers back to me reluctantly, and kept his eyes fixed on my face. He gave the signal to lift the barrier, and I put the car in gear. Just then another MP came trotting out of the sentry post waving a clipboard. He shouted something to the corporal, who held up his hand to stop me, but the car was already moving and I was through the barrier. I rammed the accelerator as far down as it would go and the Daihatsu’s turbo roared as the car exploded forwards. There were staccato shouts of ‘
Gif
!
Gif
!’ and in the mirror I saw that the corporal had drawn his revolver. We rushed past the sentry in the sandbag emplacement, and there was a volley of cracks as he opened up with a Kalashnikov.
The rear windscreen shattered, sending a spray of glass over Daisy, but in a trice she was up with her S I G in her hand. ‘There’s two guys on motorcycles coming after us!’ she shouted.
I was in third now, still with my foot jammed hard down, but I could see the MP motorcyclists in the mirror and they were gaining. I changed to fourth but they were almost up to us — within thirty metres, I reckoned — at any rate I could see their white helmets with ‘MP’ stencilled on them, and their dark glasses. I began to weave from side to side deliberately in case they started shooting, but Daisy squealed, ‘No! Keep her still!’ There were two pops from the S I G and I saw the leading motorcyclist swerve to the right with the bike leaning dangerously on a flat tyre. Suddenly it slid over sideways right into the path of the other motorcyclist, who braked so suddenly that his bike turned somersault and hurled him into the road. The last thing I saw in the mirror was a miniature mushroom cloud as one of the tanks detonated.
‘Bloody good shooting,’ I told Daisy. ‘That was really hot!’
I put the Daihatsu in top and we raced towards the vanishing point on the horizon, where the asphalt glittered like water in the high sun. To the west, the limestone desert undulated on to infinity, its shale and feldspar beaches lost in an iridescent sheen. Near the road the desert was made ugly by pylons and rubbish dumps, but beyond this flotsam of industrial society, I knew, it stretched on clean and unbroken for thousands of miles as far as the Atlantic coast. I put twenty kilometres between us and the guard post before I turned off the asphalt road and headed directly west into the desert.
‘Where the hell are you going?’ Daisy demanded again.
‘Just relax,’ I told her. ‘If we stay on the road we’re dead meat. There are other VCPs ahead and they’re in radio contact.’
‘But they can follow our tracks.’
‘They won’t know where we turned off the road. There are millions of car tracks here and it’s going to take them hours to find good trackers. Even if they do find out, they’ll think twice before they follow us into the desert. It’s Cairene mentality. They’re big mouths on their home ground but you take them out into the Red Land and they’re chicken shit.’
‘Sammy, they don’t have to use trackers. There are such things as choppers and even lands at images now.’
‘This is Egypt. You forgotten we had to use an FBI chopper just to get to the Fayoum? It will take them for ever to get it jacked up, and by then we’ll be long gone.’
Daisy climbed back into the front seat and looked around in bewilderment. The road had already disappeared and the skyline was a uniform distance from us in each direction. The car was a silver insect lost in a landscape so vast it skewed the mind — an undulating plain of black limestone relieved only by a patina of white where mineral salts had been leached out of it, or by chains of amber coloured barchans and strings of flat topped hills far in the distance. The car crunched over sand beaches littered with stones like the remnants of some ancient inferno —limestone blocks shaped like giant sponges, conch shells, hollow rolls and petrified octopi. Here and there were grooves in the rock and angular groynes where a few salt bushes or desert succulents grew, and there would be tracks of spiders, beetles and snakes. Everywhere else, though, the desert seemed lifeless as far as the eye could see.
‘Shit,’ Daisy said, ‘no wonder the ancient Gyps were scared of this place. I mean there’s nothing to get a fix on. I wish I’d kept my GPS.’
‘Nah,’ I said, ‘I don’t need one. See the sun — old Father Ra up there? He’s my GPS. I can drive in a straight line using the shadows on the stones.’
Daisy stared at me in open disbelief and gripped the side handle.
‘At first this limestone desert appears all the same,’ I said, ‘but look harder. You’ll see that it actually changes quite quickly, but the changes are small and you don’t notice them unless you concentrate. I like to think of it as passing through a whole series of giant rooms. In one room there are marine fossils, in another nodules of chert and oxidized iron, in another small pebbles or silica balls. Real desert Bedouin can find their way blindfold simply by feeling the changing texture of the surface. What outsiders don’t understand is that the desert has a kind of grammar — a geological syntax of its own.’
‘Sammy. Where are we going? Do you know, or are we just heading off into the blue?’
‘You’ll see.’
By three o’clock it was already cooler. The sun was listing to the west, still fiery but softening by the minute — the time when the furnace Ra of midday became the milder Atum of evening. The silica glittered like glass in places where the sun caught it, and there were sudden shimmers of intense light, opening and closing like winking eyes. In places tiny spools of dust unravelled, spinning across the stones like corkscrews. An hour later I spotted what I was looking for — a huge cairn of boulders which the Bedouin called Mahatt al-Mezraq — the Javelin Cast. I stopped the car by the mound and we got out and stretched. The silence was almost unearthly, broken only by the sudden rasp of sand on rock and the occasional high pitched whistling the Hawazim called ‘the Voices of the
Jinns
’. I sniffed the wind and took in the faint traces of flint and chalk. After four years of the sounds and smells of Cairo at last I felt at home. I showed Daisy the mass of graffiti carved on the cairn’s larger boulders — mostly the camel brands of passing tribes, some so old that the tribes themselves had long ago disappeared into history. I sought out the lizard brand of the Hawazim among them.
‘This place has been a meeting point for the tribes for generations,’ I told Daisy. ‘It gets its name from an event that occurred here hundreds of years ago. An old man and a girl of the Hawazim were travelling under the protection of two companions from the Awlad ‘Ali tribe. In Bedouin law, the office of
rafiq
or “Way Companion” is sacred once you have eaten bread and salt together. Well, when they got here, the two Awlad ‘Ali tried to rob them. That’s a big no-no in Bedouin law. But they’d also underestimated the Hawazim. The old guy was carrying two javelins and he gave one to the girl. They skewered both the double crossers right here. Their bodies are buried under the cairn and it exists as a reminder about the absolute sanctity of the
rafiq
.
’
Daisy was watching me carefully. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘and is this pile of rocks what we came for?’
‘No,’ I said, pointing to a huddle of stone buildings hidden so cleverly in a dip behind us that she hadn’t noticed them. ‘That’s our destination.’
Her mouth fell open in surprise. ‘That?’ she said incredulously. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s called al-Manakh,’ I said. ‘That means the Kneeling Place — or the place where camels kneel. A desert holy man or
faqi
— one of Sanusi’s relatives, probably — tried to set up a lodge here, but it soon died out for lack of water. Only the buildings remain.’
We got back into the car and a few minutes later we were cruising slowly in amongst the stone huts. They were arranged in a crude oblong around a yard, the gaps filled in with a dry stone wall that had fallen down in many places. I stopped the engine and we got out. Nothing moved in the place but the wind sifting grains of dust, and bits of tumbleweed drifting through the yard snagging on stones and boulders. I took in another lungful of air, and felt a sudden sense of peace. I knew a long, lonely phase of my life was over and whatever happened, I would never go back to living in a city again. With the tranquillity, though, came an intense weariness. The bennies had disguised it, but now they’d worn off and my body suddenly realized it had gone a whole night without sleep. I yawned.
Daisy stared about her warily. The stone buildings were large — one or two of them as big as barns — and they looked as if no one had been near them for years. In the yard, though, there were signs of recent inhabitants — three stone fireplaces with odd stubs of firewood and flattened tin cans, bits of leather from dried out drippers, broken camel hobbles, shards of old pots. In places there were shallow pits where camels had dug themselves in, surrounded by piles of their date-like droppings. I picked a piece of camel turd up and squeezed. It was brittle and bone dry — months old — and it contained grains of undigested sorghum.
‘The last visitors here came from the Sudan,’ I said, ‘probably in May or June.’
Daisy sniffed suspiciously. ‘How do you know that?’ she demanded.
‘By the dryness of the dung, and by the sorghum in it. Only the Sudanese Bedouin feed their camels sorghum.’
There was a jerry can of water in the car, and Daisy opened the back door, murmuring to herself as she examined the bullet holes punched cleanly through the metal. She poured us both water in Styrofoam cups, handed one to me and looked me in the eyes. ‘So,’ she said, ‘what do we do now?’
‘We wait.’
The sun was low on the western skyline, sinking into a wing of ashlar cloud and painting it molten gold and liquid orange. Daisy moved a step nearer, dropped her cup and put her hands on my shoulders. ‘Wait for whom?’ she asked softly. She opened her mouth and brushed my lips with hers, rounding them into a sensual pout. I kissed her lightly and was about to put my arms round her when her hand suddenly shot under my jacket and hooked out my Beretta. She leapt backwards and before I could react I was looking down the barrel of her SIG for the second time in a week.
‘God dammit!’ I said. ‘I should have been wise to that move.’
‘Don’t try going for the stinger,’ Daisy said, ‘you know I’m fast, and I never miss. And like I told you, the cowboy won, so just ease it out carefully.’
