The Saudi prince grinned. “Well, now it’s because of oil, obviously. But in ancient times it was mostly because this part of the world was the path to other places. For the Romans it was the fringe of the known world, and they wanted whatever they could reach. If you sailed east on the Mediterranean, what did you hit when you reached the shore? Palestine and Lebanon. That gave you a beachhead to move inland. Later on it was the route to the exotica of India and the Far East. Then there’s also the religious aspect of the place—the cradle of the three Western religions, and God knows we haven’t exactly gotten along through the centuries.”
“One man’s devout next-door neighbor is another man’s infidel,” Pete quipped.
“That’s right,” said Abdul. “Think of all the blood that’s been shed in and around the so-called Holy Land. Every age has had its own reasons for following this particular path to conquest. Now the Visitors do, too.”
Pete glanced out the window and did a double take. “Is that what I think it is?”
“And what do you think it is, Yank?”
“I think it’s Kansas, U.S.A. Are those fields of crops?” Abdul raised an eyebrow. “I told you it wasn’t all sand. We’ve got oases, of course, but a lot of the money you pay us for oil has gone into massive desert reclamation projects— building irrigation canals, planting grass and trees to hold the soil, then cultivating crops. The idea is to create new lands for nomadic tribes to settle on and farm, as well as for overflow from expanding populations in the coastal cities. The Israelis aren’t the only ones making the desert bloom, eh, Lavi?” “Stuff it, Your Highness!” came the good-natured reply from the aft cabin.
“All right, Yank, time for me to take over the controls,” said Abdul, peering out the front windows.
“We’re close?”
“Mm-hm. Weil be landing outside the Al Hasa oasis—the biggest oasis in the world.”
Pete swallowed uncomfortably. “That’s where you all get to torture me and make me ride that damned camel.”
“That’s right.” The Saudi turned in his seat. “All right, weil be landing in about ten minutes.”
Lauren started digging through her canvas pack. “Okay, time for Pete and Neville to put on their disguises. And I’ve got diplomatic papers and ID’s for the three of us.” She looked up at the local agents. “Are you sure you won’t need fake ID’s?” “Well,” Gamel said, “I’m staying back with the shuttle, and Lavi and Abdul should be able to act like they belong here after entire lifetimes.”
“Well, / can,” Lavi said smugly, “but Prince Charles might be more at home in London, eh?”
“Are all you Jews such wise-asses?” Abdul called over his shoulder.
“Is that what they mean by ‘Chosen People’?” Gamel deadpanned.
Lauren handed disguise kits to Pete and Neville and soon had two companions with full beards and mustaches. They peeked approvingly in a mirror and compared their images with the identification pictures in their passports.
“That’s a good print job,” Neville said, carefully examining the papers.
“It should be,” Lauren replied. “It’s the same printer who does real UN documents.”
With a gentle thud the aircraft settled down onto the dusty ground. Pete reached for the hatch release and they all clambered out. Nearby was a cluster of drab brown tents and an assortment of camels and goats bent over a small watering hole. Date palms stood in tall clusters, their stately trunks tapering as they curved up and spread umbrellas of fronds overhead. For some distance around the watering hole, short grass grew like a carpet of green fuzz. Beyond that there were a few squares of cropland, with unidentified stalks sprouting in neat rows.
“Is this the main oasis?” asked Pete, unaccustomed to his new facial foliage and suppressing the urge to brush it away with his hand.
“No,” said Abdul. “It’s ten miles away. This is one of those new settlements I was telling you about. A1 Hasa has over a hundred thousand people, or it did before the Visitors took it over. There’s a giant bazaar there. These days, it’s probably the biggest black market in the world.”
Lavi scratched his thick hair. “Are you sure we’ll be able to avoid being picked up by the Visitors?”
“Well,” said Abdul, “you all come with me and I’ll make you look like bedouins. They travel back and forth from here to Hofuf so often, the Visitors don’t pay any attention. From there, you and I turn into local guides taking these three diplomats via rail from Hofuf to Ras Tanura, on the coast.” “No more camels?” Pete wanted to know as he walked alongside the prince.
“No, no more camels after this short ride, Yank. At Ras Tanura—that’s where most of the refineries are—we take a van north to Safaniya, where the lizards have their drilling platform.”
A fat man in native tribal robes and burnoose waddled toward them, a smile spreading his cheeks. Two gold teeth flashed inside his mouth. “Your Highness!”
Abdul greeted him with a rowdy hug. “Said, my friend! You’re looking extremely well fed considering the times.” Said lowered his head in shame. “I come by my food honestly, Your Highness.”
“I’m sure you do,” Abdul grinned, “and you’re embarrassing me calling me Highness while we don’t have a real government. So Abdul will do for now—don’t make me remind you again. Now, is everything ready?”
“Of course, just as you ordered!” He panned a slow gaze down the line of people with Abdul, grunting disdainfully. “We have to make these people into bedouins?”
“I know—a nearly impossible task. But I have faith in you, Said. Now, let’s hurry.”
By the time the travel party was properly clothed, Gamel had the Visitor shuttle covered with a tarp and buried in sand. He waved farewell as Abdul led his unlikely band of counterfeit nomads north toward the oasis city. A narrow ribbon of aging and sometimes crumbling blacktop made the trip somewhat easier, and it took only four hours to cover the ten miles into Hofuf, an ancient city that had maintained its character as a teeming trade mart. Like most cities in the Arab world that had endured through intermixed ages of prosperity and poverty, Hofuf was a jumble of modem high rises side by side with mosques and minarets, modern offices shadowing classic examples of Arabic architecture from centuries ago, with their domes and arched windows and entry ways.
Latterday avenues connected to alleyways too narrow for a Fiat to pass through. Within was the labyrinth of shopping arcades, with colorful overhangs shading the tumult that refused to subside just because the Visitors had taken over. The air of the alleys jangled with music and the singsong medley of merchants praising their wares.
“Where are we going?” Lauren asked as they rode up to the outskirts of the medina, the old city at the core of Hofuf.
“Just ahead.” Abdul reined his camel toward a stand of date palms. An Arab waited in the shade, with two others a couple of steps behind him. The Saudi prince dismounted and spoke quickly and quietly to the waiting men. They hustled over to help Abdul’s companions get off their own camels. On command, the animals knelt, allowing riders to hop down. Pete rubbed his rear end.
“These things’ll never replace my Mercedes,” he grumbled.
“Quickly,” Abdul ordered, stripping off his robes and headdress, emerging in street clothes. The others did the same. Pete, Lauren, and Neville were dressed casually, as befit diplomats on the road. Abdul and Lavi, posing as guides, wore simple khaki bush shirts and pants.
“Our contact is waiting in the suqs,” Abdul said.
“The what?” Pete asked.
“The craft quarters in the medina,” Lavi explained. “You know, the twisting alleys you see in James Bond movies when double-oh-seven is in the Middle East.”
“I didn’t know places like that still existed,” Pete said. “A few more years, they may not,” Abdul said, guiding them out of the trees to a potholed street. “Saudi Arabia’s falling prey to urban renewal, too. A lot of the medina is turning into a slum. Come on—we’d better hurry.”
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“Is there some danger of the Visitors spotting us?” said Neville.
“Well, of course there is,” Abdul answered. “We’ve got no guarantees on this journey, I’m afraid. The longer we hang about, the greater the risk. Our contact’s got our travel passes and railroad tickets, and I’ll feel a damned sight better once we’re on that bloody train.”
The Visitors were a noticeable presence in Hofuf, but not as obtrusive as Pete had feared. Platoons of helmeted regulars marched here and there. Elite shock troopers guarded the local Visitor headquarters, a mosque chosen because it had open space around its perimeter, a buffer through which any attackers would have to pass. The alien commanders must have figured that a holy place, even one defiled by invaders, was probably more immune to reprisals by the natives than any other building they might use as a command post.
Mostly, the Visitors allowed the Arabs in this oasis to go about their business. They maintained a high-tension state of vigilance, but the hurly-burly of the city made it difficult to exert iron-fisted control. As a result, the resistance group picked up its train tickets without incident.
It took about two hours to cover the hundred or so miles between Hofuf and Ras Tanura, where an Arab teenager with a peach-fuzz mustache was waiting for them as they disembarked. He handed Abdul the keys to a rusty Volkswagen microbus parked nearby. Then the youthful resistance agent huddled with the prince and chattered darkly in Arabic.
“We’ve got a new fly in the ointment,” Abdul said. He pointed over the top of the train, up toward the dusky eastern sky. They all turned at the same time and saw the menacing bulk of a Visitor Mother Ship, hanging like a thunder cloud in the distance.
“He says it wasn’t here before,” Abdul explained. “It arrived while we were on the train.”
Pete scowled. “Diana’s ship? It has to be.”
“But her ship hasn’t left the California area since they came back,” said Lauren.
“Maybe she wanted to see a different desert,” Lavi said dryly.
Pete turned to Neville. “Was this part of the plan, her coming to the Middle East with her whole damned ship?” The Englishman shrugged. “It wasn’t a prerequisite. She could just as easily have thrown the switches from California.” “Shit,” Pete spat. “Let’s get going. We’ve still got a drive ahead of us.”
They climbed into the van and headed north to Safaniya. As they drove up the coastal highway, they could see the changes wrought in the six decades since the oil genie had been freed from the parched lands of the Arabian Peninsula. Compared to the sandy wastes they’d flown over to get here, the strip along the Persian Gulf could have been the vision of some developer gone mad. Massive oil-storage tanks lined the shore like great drum-shaped monuments, a modem equivalent of the Pharaohs’ pyramids.
In every direction, tall A-frame oil well derricks guarded the flat horizon, stripped-down Eiffel Towers that worked for a living. Or they had until the Visitors returned to Earth. Now most wells were dormant. The stacks that used to light the sky with flaring fire as they burned off excess natural gas were dark and silent, matches snuffed by alien invaders. Out in the Gulf, offshore processing plants perched on their stilts, profiles bristling with crane arms and smokestacks, all inactive. Pipelines bordered the highway, leading from terminals where supertankers would dock to inland plants and storage facilities.
It was another 150 miles to Safaniya, another three hours lost to travel. But the timing couldn’t have been better. They arrived in the last glow of twilight; darkness was ready to cover their initial reconnaissance of Visitor installations.
“Two blocks from here,” Neville said, pointing at a blacked-in square on the hand-charted map of the oil port. He and the others were inside a boarded-up storefront on a Safaniya street. They were dressed in Visitor uniforms, ready for the nighttime foray. Peter and Neville had shed their beards. “That’s the communications relay center?” asked Pete. The Englishman nodded. “Right. We break into there, I can tell what Diana’s been up to since I left her cozy starship. I can tap into their entire computer grid.”
“Something you arranged, no doubt?” Lauren suggested. Neville simply smiled.
“How’d you get Diana to go along with having these facilities almost entirely run by computers?” Pete said.
“It’s rather a dull tale, mate. They’ve got a manpower—er, lizardpower—shortage. This way, they just need a handful of technical types, and Diana gets to throw the switches from her very own bridge.”
“Which suited her liking to be in charge,” Pete said. “Right. And it suited my needs. I guaranteed my own access to the system with a few well-hidden passwords, just in case Diana crossed me. Which is what she’s done.”
Lavi cracked his knuckles as he sat on one of the wooden crates that were the storefront’s main furnishings. “I still don’t like it.”
Neville looked annoyed at being questioned. “It’ll work, believe me.”
“I’m just not used to doing something like this without lots of explosives.”
Abdul shook his head ruefully. “You’ll have to forgive him—he’s partial to blowing things up.”
“Simple but effective,” Lavi shrugged modestly.
“And terribly noisy,” Neville reminded them. “Not to mention unnecessary, at least in this case.”
“Fine—you’re calling the shots,” said Pete. “But Lauren and I are in charge. Now, how many Visitors can we expect to run into in this communications center?”
“Oh, I’d say perhaps Tour or five. No more than that.”
The five resistance fighters moved quickly through the shadows of Safaniya’s deserted streets. Their immediate target was a small one-story building constructed of white concrete slabs. It was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high chain-link fence topped with snarls of barbed wire.
“First obstacle,” Neville said. “It’s electrified.”
Lavi squatted on the pavement and reached into his black nylon tote bag. “No problem.” He removed an electronic device the size of a deck of cards. A pair of rubber-coated alligator clips snaked out of one end. “Somebody got the wire cutters ready?”
Abdul answered by holding the cutters up.
The Israeli carefully gripped the pincers and clipped them to the fence. Then he twisted a dial on the little electronic box. Sparks flared at the connection points and then were gone. “Okay, the fence is neutralized.”
“What if that thing falls off?” Peter asked.
“Then the fence current goes back on. I’ll stay here to make sure nothing happens while you all go inside. Go ahead—cut, Abdul.”
With a few deft snips, the Saudi had cut a doorway and rolled the mesh hack. Pete, Lauren, and Neville slipped through. Abdul followed. “Don’t take all night!” Lavi hissed after them.
With quick strides, the quartet proceeded to the steel doors of the low building, bolted by a computerized security mechanism. Neville pulled a coded plastic card from his uniform pocket and inserted it into the slot. The lock blinked the Visitor color sequence of red, purple, and blue. Neville yanked the door open and waved the others in.
Crouched over the device hanging on the fence, Lavi heard footsteps behind him, then a voice.
“Find something, Lieutenant?”
Lavi straightened slowly, starting a deliberate half turn. “As a matter of fact-—”
He finished his sentence by shooting the approaching Visitor square in the chest with the laser pistol at his hip. The alien, his scaly natural face visible, dropped instantly.
Lavi regarded him with open annoyance. “Can’t leave you lying around. Shouldn’t leave the current neutralizes Ah, let’s go, lizzie. ...”
Holstering his laser, the Israeli draped the dead alien over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and hauled him to a pair of dumpsters. He shoved the body in between the two, where it wouldn’t be seen. Then he hurried back to the fence and glanced at his watch.
“This way,” Neville instructed, leading them d
own a featureless cinder-block corridor.
“What was this before it was borrowed by Diana?” said Lauren.
“A control facility for tanker traffic coming in and out of this port.” Neville slowed as he spotted a Visitor at a security desk at the junction of two hallways. This alien was also without his human mask. His hat was off and he was scratching his skull crest with one green-scaled finger. Motioning for the others to stay back around a comer, Neville walked up to the security guard. The guard cradled his laser gun protectively.
“Commander,” the alien addressed Neville. “Isn’t it late to be here? I thought everyone had returned to the Mother Ship.”
“They did. I came back to check on a few things. It won’t be long now, eh, Lieutenant?”
“No, sir.”
“At any rate, I heard a noise from the main relay room. I was wondering if you had the key so I could check it out?”
“Yes, sir.” The Visitor reached into his uniform and produced a crystalline blade with notches chipped into it. He followed Neville, who then stepped back as they neared the comer and let the alien go ahead. Pete suddenly stepped out in the Visitor’s path and delivered a two-handed roundhouse clout to the jaw. As the guard went down, Neville added a sweeping kick to the chest, then finished the job with a pistol butt to the back of the head.
“A little bmtal there,” said Lauren, showing her distaste for excessive violence.
“Gets the job done.” Neville snatched the sparkling key from the unconscious guard’s hand and slid it into the relay room’s lock. The door opened. Neville and Abdul dragged the Visitor in after them.
“I take it this door is a little Visitor addition?” the prince said.
Neville nodded. “You know what happens when every Tom, Dick, and Neville gets his hands on the key.”
Lauren hung back in the doorway. “You guys take care of this. I’ll take his guard post in case someone else comes by. It’ll look pretty suspicious if they notice a missing guard.” Pete nodded. “Be careful.”
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