by Paul Sussman
Cursing, he looked swiftly over the edge of the dune. It dropped almost vertically down, far too steep to negotiate in the four-by-four. Leaping back into the driver's seat he started the engine and tugged the gearstick into reverse, flying back down the dune's leeward slope, the wheels skewing and swerving beneath him. At the bottom he spun the steering wheel and drove the gearstick into first, slamming his foot down on the accelerator. The car's rear end skidded round and he flew forward. After just a few metres it jerked to a halt, an angry hissing sound coming from beneath as the tyres struggled for grip on the desert floor, digging themselves deeper and deeper into the sand.
'Dammit!' he shouted, desperate.
He shunted the car into reverse, staring up at the summit of the dune opposite, expecting the two bikes to fly over it at any instant. The vehicle rolled back and up and for a moment it looked as if he had freed himself. Then the wheels spun again, embedding themselves even deeper than they had before, almost to the level of the axle.
He leaped out and looked. The tyres had all but disappeared. There was no way he was going to dig them out in time. Scrambling back into the car he threw the GPS unit into his bag, hefted one of the water containers off the back seat and began running back up the slope he'd just descended, feet sinking deep into the sand.
About halfway up the dune started to slip beneath him and he stopped making any headway. He drove himself forward, but couldn't seem to get any closer to the summit, as though he was on a giant treadmill. The water container wasn't helping, and eventually, reluctantly, he threw it aside, using his free hand to steady himself while his feet dug into the sliding sand, fighting for leverage. He could hear the bikes powering up the far side of the dune behind. If they got to the top and saw him he was dead.
'Come on!' he hissed. 'Come on!'
For a moment he still didn't get anywhere. Then, just when it seemed certain he would be seen, he managed to get a foothold and was moving upwards again, eyes popping with exertion. He came to the top and dived over just as behind him the bikes crested their dune and raced down towards his abandoned car.
He lay still for a moment trying to get his breath back and then, pulling out his gun, rolled onto his front and eased himself back up to the dune's summit, peering cautiously down at the valley beneath.
The bikes had by now almost reached the four-by-four. Skidding to a halt, the riders dismounted, swinging machine-guns from their shoulders. One of them opened the door and peered inside, removing Khalifa's jacket, which he'd left behind in his hurry to get away. The other started up the side of the dune, following the twin trails of Khalifa's footprints and the tyre tracks. The man stopped for a moment beside the discarded water container, pointing his gun down at it and blowing a hole in the plastic, then continued upwards. The sound of the gunshot echoed away across the desolate landscape.
Khalifa rolled away from the summit. There was no point trying to run. The man would see him and pick him off like a rabbit. He could shoot him as he came up from the other side, but that would still leave the one down below.
He looked around swiftly. The upper part of the dune was, at this point, slightly undercut, leaving a long hollow running just below its summit with a heavy lip of sand curling over it, like the crest of a wave turning back in on itself. Someone crouching beneath this overhang would be invisible to a person standing on the dune-top above, even though they were almost directly beneath their feet. It wasn't much of a hiding place, but it was the best the desert had to offer and, grabbing his holdall, the detective slipped down and rolled into it, lying on his back with his gun held ready on his chest, gazing up at the canopy of sand above.
For a moment nothing happened. Then he heard the crunch of feet. He could picture the man coming out onto the top of the dune, looking around, walking forward a few paces, stopping above him. A trickle of dislodged sand wept down over the edge of the overhang, confirming that the man was indeed almost directly overhead. Curling a finger around the trigger of his Helwan, Khalifa tried not to breathe.
There was an agonizing silence. He could almost feel the man thinking, trying to work out where he had gone. The trickle of sand grew heavier, turning into a small landslide, and it looked for a moment as if the man was coming down. Khalifa shrank back into his hollow. Seconds passed and nothing happened. Gradually the sandfall slackened off. The man was staying where he was. There was another long silence and then a shout: 'It looks like he's been up here, but then he went back down again. We must have missed him further back.'
There was a pause and then the crunch of receding feet. Khalifa breathed a sigh of relief, shoulders relaxing.
'Thank you, Allah,' he mumbled.
Abdul's mobile phone started ringing.
The sound was so unexpected it took Khalifa a couple of seconds to realize what it was. When he did he drove his hand desperately into the holdall in an attempt to turn the phone off. Too late. He could hear the man above him shouting and the slap of running feet. He squirmed frantically out from beneath the overhang and, raising his gun, fired off three shots in quick succession. The first was too high, the second wide. The third hit the man square in the forehead, throwing him backwards and out of sight down the far side of the dune.
Immediately Khalifa was on his feet, scrambling up to the dune's summit. As he reached it a burst of gunfire ripped up the sand in front of him, forcing him back and onto his stomach. There was a pause and then another burst of gunfire, although it wasn't aimed at the top of the dune. Khalifa eased himself upwards. The man below had shot out the tyres of the second dune bike. Raising his pistol Khalifa fired, but missed. The man swung and sprayed the dune-top with bullets again, forcing the detective back. There was another brief pause and then the sound of a motorbike starting.
Khalifa counted to three and lifted his head again. The bike was already pulling away. He came up onto his knees and, aiming, emptied the clip at the rider's back. The man jerked, but didn't come off and, with no bullets left, Khalifa could only watch helplessly as the bike roared away down the valley. After a hundred metres it came to a stop and, turning in his seat, the rider fired a volley of bullets back at the stricken Toyota. He continued firing for five seconds and then suddenly, with a deafening roar that echoed far out across the desert, the car erupted in a ball of flame, a mushroom of heavy black smoke rising into the air above it. The bike sped away.
For a long moment Khalifa stared down at the furnace below, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps, his hands trembling. Then, taking a couple of deep gulps of air, he slowly came to his feet and trudged back down to his bag, where the mobile phone was still ringing. He took it out, pressed the 'Yes' key and held it to his ear.
'Yusuf, you old rogue!' boomed Abdul's voice. 'What took you so long? Just calling to make sure my car's OK.'
Khalifa looked round at the column of velvety black smoke spiralling upwards into the air and his heart dropped.
'Yes, Abdul,' he lied. 'It's absolutely fine.'
39
THE WESTERN DESERT
Sayf al-Tha'r had been on the dune-top since dawn, watching as beneath him more and more of the army had slowly been uncovered. The sun had risen, levelled and dropped again, and all the while the excavation crater had spread inexorably outwards like a vast mouth levering open. By noon so many bodies had been dug up, and so much equipment stripped from them, that they'd run out of packing crates. More would be arriving with the camel train later that night, but they still wouldn't be enough to deal with the thousands of artefacts piled up below. The valley floor looked like an enormous scrapheap, ancient weapons, armour and bodies piled up everywhere.
Now, however, Sayf al-Tha'r had turned his back on the army and was instead gazing out at the plume of smoke rising in the distance. An hour ago one of the patrols had radioed in to say they'd found a set of tracks leading across the desert. The smoke presumably indicated they'd caught up with whatever vehicle had made them. He should have felt relieved. Instead he had a curi
ous sense of foreboding.
The boy Mehmet scrambled up beside him.
'What is it?' the man asked. 'What has happened?'
'They found a car, Master. Destroyed it.'
'The driver?'
'He got away. Killed one of our men. The other's on his way back.'
Sayf al-Tha'r was silent. The column of smoke was rising higher and higher into the air, as though some noxious black gas was hissing from a rip in the desert surface. A breeze tugged at its upper part, stretching and twisting it.
'Let me know when the patrol comes in,' he said eventually. 'And send the helicopter over. The driver can't have gone far.'
'Yes, Master.'
The boy turned and ran back down the side of the dune. Sayf al-Tha'r began pacing, hands locked behind his back, a cloth wrapped around his scorched palm.
Who was this intruder, he wondered. What was he doing out here in the middle of the desert? Was he alone or were there others?
The more he thought about it, the more uneasy he became. Not because he feared they'd been discovered. It was more elemental than that. He could feel something. It was as if a hand was stretching towards him out of the past. He stared at the plume of smoke and it seemed to him that it had assumed an almost human form, towering above the desert like a genie. He could make out a head, and shoulders, and an arm, and even two eyes where the breeze had punched holes through the fumes. They seemed to be looking directly at him, glaring angrily. He turned away, annoyed at himself for imagining such things, but he could still feel the black shape looming malevolently at his back. He closed his eyes and started to pray.
'You're breaking up, Abdul . . . I can't . . . you're . . . it's . . .'
Khalifa pressed his mouth to the receiver and made a noise that he hoped sounded like static, then switched the mobile off. For a brief moment he wondered whether he should call for help, but immediately dismissed the idea. Who would he call, after all? Chief Hassani? Mohammed Sariya? Hosni? Even if they believed him, what could they do? No, he was on his own. He threw the phone into the holdall and hurried back to the top of the dune, the air heavy with the smell of petrol and burning rubber.
Flames were still leaping from the four-by-four's shattered windows. Directly beneath him, at the bottom of the slope, lay the body of the man he'd killed, sprawled face up on the sand, one arm twisted at an unnatural angle beneath his head. He started down towards it, stopping briefly to check the ruptured water container. Most of its contents had drained away, although there was still a small reservoir of liquid in one corner. Carefully raising the receptacle to his lips he swallowed what was left and continued down to the valley floor.
The dead man's face was a gruesome mask of blood and sand, his forehead gaping open to reveal a mash of bone and brain within. Trying not to look, Khalifa prised free the machine-gun that was still clasped in the man's hand and began to strip the body of its clothes. He didn't like doing it, but if he was to get into Sayf al-Tha'r's camp unnoticed he would need them. He rolled the robe and headscarf into a bundle, grabbed the gun and started back up the dune. After ten metres, however, his conscience got the better of him and, turning, he hurried back down and scooped a shallow grave out of the loose sand. It wasn't a proper burial, but he couldn't just leave the body to be picked at by vultures or jackals or whatever other creatures lived out here in this god-forsaken wilderness. Enemy or no enemy, the man deserved at least that small show of respect.
The gesture almost cost him dear because as he came back up to the top of the dune he heard, distant but unmistakable, the thud of helicopter rotors. Another twenty seconds and he would have been spotted. As it was, he just had time to snatch up his holdall and scramble down beneath the overhang before the helicopter swept overhead, its downdraught sweeping a spray of sand from the dune's ridge. For a minute it hovered overhead taking in the scene and then rose and swung away north-westwards.
His initial plan had been to get away from the spot as quickly as possible, but with the helicopter around it wasn't safe out in the open, so he decided to stay where he was until dark. He loaded the one remaining clip into his pistol, jammed the black robes into his holdall and lay back in his sand cave, lighting a cigarette and gazing out across the dune sea as it slowly faded in the dying light of the day. An hour, he reckoned, perhaps less. He hoped the moon wasn't going to be too bright.
The sun had dropped beneath the horizon and the first faint stars were twinkling in the sky when the bike leaped over the dune and bucked down towards the camp, skidding to a halt in front of a pile of crates. The rider dismounted, clutching his shoulder, and collapsed. A crowd gathered around him, including the boy Mehmet, who knelt at his side, took something from him and then pushed his way out through the mass of men and sprinted up the dune towards his master.
'Well?' said Sayf al-Tha'r.
'He found these', panted the boy, 'in the car.' He handed over Khalifa's wallet and police ID.
'And the helicopter?'
'It's been searching, but there's no sign of him. He's disappeared.'
The man shook his head. 'He's out there somewhere. I can feel him. Keep the helicopter searching until nightfall. And double the guards around the army. He'll have to come here. There's nowhere else. Tell every man to be alert.'
'Yes, Master.'
'And send Dr Dravic up. Immediately.'
'Yes, Master.'
The boy spun and ran back down the slope. For a moment Sayf al-Tha'r remained where he was, gazing out at the column of smoke, still just visible in the thickening twilight, and then opened the ID card and looked down at the name and photo inside. His face registered no emotion, although his eyes widened fractionally, and his Adam's apple quivered as if something was crawling beneath the skin of his throat.
He stared at the card for almost a minute, then slipped it into his pocket and began going through the contents of the wallet. He removed a picture of Khalifa's wife, another of his three children, and another of his parents, standing arm in arm in front of the pyramids. There was a Menatel phone card, twelve Egyptian pounds and a miniature book of Koranic verses. Nothing else.
Or at least he thought there was nothing else. Then, in a hidden pocket inside one of the other pockets, he discovered one more photo. It was creased and faded, the corners dog-eared, but still recognizable: a young man, handsome, similar to the one in the ID photo but sterner, more severe, with piercing eyes and a mop of black hair falling down over a high, intelligent forehead. He was staring straight into the camera, one arm hanging at his side, the other lying on the head of a small stone sphinx. On the back was written, 'Ali, outside the Cairo museum'.
Sayf al-Tha'r's hand started to tremble.
He was still staring at the photo when Dravic staggered up onto the top of the dune.
'What's going on?' puffed the German.
'We start flying the artefacts out tomorrow,' said Sayf al-Tha'r.
'What?'
'I want the helicopters here at first light.'
'I thought you said we weren't going to use helicopters.'
'The plan has changed. We take as much as we can by helicopter, the rest goes with the camel train. I want us off this site within twenty-four hours.'
'For Christ's sake, we can't just—'
'Do it!'
Dravic glared angrily at him and, snatching a handkerchief from his pocket, began mopping at his sodden brow.
'There's no way we can get everything in place by tomorrow. No fucking way. We only found the rear of the army this morning. It's almost three kilometres away. It'll take us at least two more days to get the whole thing rigged.'
'Then we put more men on it. We put all the men on it. As of now we stop digging and concentrate on preparing the army for our departure.'
'What's the problem, for Christ's sake?'
Sayf al-Tha'r gazed down at the photo in his hand. 'Someone knows. A policeman. He's out here. In the desert. Near.'
For a moment Dravic stared at him incredulou
sly, then burst out laughing.