by Paul Sussman
And it never had. Whether it would work now was a different matter, but he couldn't think of anything else. Finishing his cigarette and pulling the scarf tightly around his forehead and face, he stood, climbed back to the top of the dune and started down the other side, waving at the guards below.
'Salaam,' he called to them. 'Everything OK?'
There was confused shouting and three guards hurried forward, guns raised, intercepting him at the bottom of the slope.
Always look confident, Khalifa told himself. Always look confident.
'Hey!' he laughed, holding up his hands. 'It's OK, guys! I'm on your side!'
The men continued to point their guns.
'What's going on?' said one of them. 'Where have you come from?'
'Where the hell do you think I've come from? I've been out on patrol.'
'Patrol?'
'Complete waste of time. I've been walking all night and haven't seen a thing. Any of you guys got a cigarette?'
There was a pause and then one of the men fumbled in the pocket of his robe and pulled out a packet of Cleopatras. His companion, the one who had spoken before, motioned him back.
'There aren't any patrols out tonight. Guards around the perimeter, that was the order. Nothing about patrols.'
'Well, I wish someone had told me that,' said Khalifa, trying to keep his voice steady. 'I must have walked thirty kilometres.'
The man stared at him, eyes narrowed, and then, lifting his gun, indicated he should remove the scarf from the lower half of his face.
Brazen it out if they start asking questions, Ali had told him that day at the museum. Get angry if necessary. Never show doubt.
'For God's sake,' snapped Khalifa, 'I've been out all night. I'm cold!'
'Do it,' said the man.
With an annoyed grunt Khalifa slowly pulled the scarf down over his chin, making sure it remained wrapped closely around his forehead. The man leaned forward and stared at him.
'I don't recognize you,' he said.
'And I don't recognize you! I don't recognize half the people here, but I don't go around pointing my gun at them. This is crazy! Crazy!'
He paused and then took a risk.
'If you don't believe me why don't you go and ask Dravic? He knows me. I was with him when he cut up that old guy in Cairo. Ripped half his face off with that bloody trowel of his. Fucking animal.'
There was another brief pause and then, nodding at each other, the men lowered their guns. The one with the cigarettes stepped forward and offered Khalifa the pack. He pulled one out and put it in his mouth, hoping they didn't notice how much his hand was shaking.
'You going back to the camp?' asked the one who had been questioning him.
Khalifa nodded.
'Well, tell them to send someone down here to relieve us.'
'Sure,' said the detective. 'And do me a favour, will you? What I just said about Dravic, keep it to yourselves, eh?'
The men laughed. 'Don't worry. We feel the same about him.'
Khalifa smiled and, raising his hand in farewell, began walking away. After a few paces, however, a voice called after him.
'Hey, haven't you forgotten something!'
The detective froze. What had he forgotten? A password? A secret sign? He should have known there'd be something else. Turning, he found the three men staring at him, clutching their machine-guns.
'Well?' said the one who had given him the cigarette.
Khalifa's mind was a blank, his heart racing. He grinned inanely, his finger curling instinctively round the trigger of his gun, eyes flicking from one man to the next, sizing up his chances. There was a brief painful silence, the calm before the storm, and then, suddenly, raucous laughter.
'The cigarette, you idiot! Don't you want a light?'
It took a second for Khalifa to register what they meant, and then the air whooshed from his lungs in a deep sigh of relief. He lifted a hand and touched the cigarette in his mouth.
'That's what a night in the desert does to you,' he said, laughing with the others. 'Turns your mind.'
The man flicked a lighter and held out the flame. Khalifa leaned forward and puffed the cigarette into life.
'The sooner we get out of this god-forsaken place the better,' he said.
Murmurs of agreement.
He took a couple more puffs, nodded a farewell and started away again. This time no-one called him back. He was through.
The eastern horizon was definitely greying now. Khalifa crossed the valley and climbed to the top of the next dune, the huge rock rearing monstrously to his left, silent and immutable, a pivot on whose point the entire sky seemed to balance. At the summit he passed between two lookouts, neither of whom paid him any attention, and gazed down at the chaotic scene below – the crater, the tents, the camels, the piles of boxes and artefacts. Droves of black-robed figures were moving to and fro, most of them packing and loading crates, although a small group was working within the crater itself, wading among the tangled corpses, doing something with lengths of cable. There was a large man in a white shirt standing above them, supervising their work. Dravic, he guessed.
He gazed down at them for a few moments and then turned his attention back towards the camp, just in time to see a fair-haired woman disappearing into a tent right in the centre. He noted its position, between a row of fuel drums and a pyramid of straw bales, and then started down the slope. As he did so an amplified voice drifted up from beneath: 'Allah u akbar! Allah u akbar!'
The call to dawn prayers. He quickened his descent, pulling the scarf back up across his face.
A tide of men streamed through the camp and out onto a flat area of sand to the south of it, where they lined up in rows, facing east. Sayf al-Tha'r moved with them, but turned aside on the edge of the camp and stepped into a tent with an antenna jutting above it. A man rose as he entered, but Sayf al-Tha'r waved him back to his seat in front of heavy radio apparatus.
'The helicopters?'
The man handed him a piece of paper. 'Just taken off.'
'No problems?'
'None. They'll be here in under an hour.'
'And the guards? Nothing?'
The man shook his head.
'Keep me informed,' said Sayf al-Tha'r and stepped out of the tent again.
The tide of men was thinning now as the last stragglers hurried towards the prayer area, leaving the camp deserted. The lookouts had remained in position, but they too were facing east, heads bowed. He gazed up at them, black hummocks strung out along the dune-tops like a line of vultures, and then turned and made his way back through the camp. The sound of prayer wafted through the air like a breeze.
He reached his own tent and threw back the flap. As he bent to step inside he stopped suddenly, shoulders tense. Slowly he stood and turned, eyes darting to left and right. He came forward half a step, eyes probing the shadowy labyrinth of canvas and equipment, but there was nothing and after a moment he shook his head, turned and disappeared inside, the canvas flap dropping down behind him.
NEAR THE LIBYAN BORDER
The helicopters flew low, hugging the desert, twenty of them, like a flock of carrion birds sweeping over the sands. One was slightly ahead of the others and those behind followed its every movement, rising and falling as it rose and fell, swinging to left and right, a perfectly choreographed dance of flight. They were large machines, heavy, their lumpen bodies somehow at odds with the grace of their movement. In their cockpits human forms could just be made out. They rushed on ahead of the dawn, slicing through the silence as the sky slowly turned to red.
40
THE WESTERN DESERT
Khalifa remained hidden among a jumble of oil drums until the camp had emptied completely. He then made his way swiftly through the twisting avenues of equipment and tents, searching for the one into which the girl had disappeared. He reckoned he had fifteen minutes, twenty at the outside.
From above the layout of the camp had seemed perfectly clear. Now, at grou
nd level, it wasn't so easy to orientate himself. Everything looked the same and the landmarks he had noted a few moments before – the row of fuel drums, the stack of straw bales – were nowhere to be seen. He put his head through a couple of doorways, thinking they might be the ones, but there was nothing inside and he was just beginning to get desperate when he emerged from behind a teetering wall of crates and saw ahead of him, beside a heap of bales, the tent he was looking for. He grunted with relief and, hurrying forward, drew back its flap and leaned in, machine-gun held ready in front of him.
It wasn't necessary, for the guard he'd been expecting wasn't there. Neither, however, was the girl. Instead, kneeling with his back to the door, was a solitary figure, his forehead pressed to the floor. Khalifa made to step back, realizing he'd again got the wrong tent, but something stopped him. He couldn't see the man's face, nor even much of his shape beneath his costume of black robes. Somehow, however, he knew. It was Sayf al-Tha'r. He raised his gun, finger ready to squeeze the trigger.
If the kneeling figure noticed the policeman, he gave no indication, but continued with his prayers, oblivious to the presence behind him. Khalifa's finger tightened on the trigger, squeezing the metal tongue back until it was just a twitch away from firing. From this distance there was no way he could miss. The tent's interior seemed to echo with the beating of his heart.
The man straightened, stood, recited, knelt again. One twitch of the finger, thought Khalifa, that's all it would take. One twitch and the figure in front of him would be dead. He thought of Ali and raised the muzzle slightly, aiming it at the base of the man's head. He drew a deep breath, bit his lip, then lowered the weapon again, eased his finger off the trigger and stepped backwards and out of the tent.
For a moment he stared at the worn canvas flap, a strangely hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach. He could only have been looking at the man for a few seconds, but in that time the sky suddenly seemed to have become much lighter, dawn sweeping swiftly in from the east like a wave. They'd be finishing prayers soon. He turned and hurried off through the camp.
'I wonder how Joey is,' mumbled Tara.
She was sitting on the tent floor, hugging her knees, rocking back and forth. Daniel lay beside her, drumming his fingers on the ground, occasionally lifting his arm to look at his watch.
'Who's Joey?' he asked.
'Our black-necked cobra. At the zoo. He's not been well.'
'I would have thought you'd have had enough of cobras to last you a lifetime.'
She shrugged. 'I never particularly liked him, but then . . . you know . . . when you think you'll never see him again . . . I hope Alexandra's kept up with his antibiotics. And taken his rock out. He had a skin disease, you see. Was rubbing himself up against it. Damaging the scales.'
She was rambling, talking for the sake of talking, as if by making conversation she could somehow put off the moment when they would be taken outside and . . . what? Shot? Beheaded? Stabbed? She looked at their guard. Not the boy Mehmet any more, an older man. She pictured him holding a gun to her head and firing; the sound, the feel, the explosion of blood, her blood. She began wringing her hands.
'What the hell was it with you and snakes anyway?' muttered Daniel, struggling into a sitting position. 'I never understood the attraction.'
Tara smiled ruefully. 'In a funny way it was Dad who got me interested in them. He hated them, you see. It was the one chink in his armour. Made me feel like I had some sort of power over him. I remember some students once hid a rubber one in his bag and when he opened it . . .'
Her voice trailed off, as if she realized there was no point finishing the story because neither of them was going to laugh. There was a long, heavy silence.
'What about you?' she asked eventually, desperate to keep the conversation going. 'You've never told me why you became an archaeologist.'
'God knows. I've never really thought about it.' Daniel was fiddling with the lace of his boot. 'I've just always loved digging, I guess. I remember before my parents died, when we lived in Paris, we had a garden and I used to dig these holes at the bottom of it, looking for buried treasure. Huge holes, deep, like craters. Dad said if I wasn't careful I'd end up in Australia. That's where it started, I suppose. And then I was given a book with pictures of the Tutankhamun treasures, and somehow the digging and Egypt . . .'
The tent flap was drawn back and a guard stepped in, his scarf wrapped close around his face against the dawn chill. The guard on the floor started getting to his feet. As he did so, the new arrival brought the metal butt of his machine-gun down hard on the side of the man's head. He slumped backwards, unconscious. Daniel leaped to his feet, Tara beside him. Khalifa pulled the scarf down to reveal his face.
'There is very little time,' he said, bending to pick up the guard's gun. 'I am a policeman, I am here to get you out.' He handed the gun to Daniel. 'Can you use this?'
'I think so.'
'How did you get here?' asked Tara. 'How many of you are there?'
'Just me,' said Khalifa. 'There's no time to explain. In a few minutes they'll have finished prayers and the camp will be swarming with people again. You must go now, while you have the chance.'
He put his head out through the flap, looked around, turned back to them.
'Go north up the valley, past the excavations. Stay close to the bottom of the westward dune. That way you'll be out of the line of sight of the lookouts above. Go as fast as you can.'
'What about you?' asked Tara.
Khalifa ignored the question, reaching into his robe and pulling out the phone and GPS unit.
'Take these. Once you're clear of the guards call for help. Your co-ordinates will show up on the unit here. You just press—'
'I know how it works,' said Daniel, taking the unit and handing the phone to Tara.
'What about you?' she repeated, louder this time.
Khalifa turned to her. 'I have business here,' he said. 'It is not your concern.'
'We can't leave you.'
'Go,' he said, pushing them towards the entrance. 'Go now. North, and close to the left-hand dune.'
'I don't know who you are,' said Daniel, 'but thank you. I hope we'll meet again one day.'
'Insha-Allah. Now go.'
They ducked through the flap. On the other side Tara turned and, leaning forward, kissed Khalifa swiftly on each cheek.
'Thank you,' she whispered.
He nodded and pushed her away. 'I am sorry about your father, Miss Mullray. I saw him lecture once. He was magnificent. Now go, please.'
Their eyes locked for a second and then Tara and Daniel ran off through the tents. Khalifa watched until they had disappeared and then turned and moved swiftly in the opposite direction.
He made his way towards the south end of the camp, stopping every now and then to listen to the murmur of prayers ahead of him, gauging how much time he had. A couple of minutes. Not much more. A translucent band of pink light had appeared over the ridge of the eastern dune, widening all the time, its glow mingling with and slowly superseding that of the arc lamps.
He kept going until he reached the point where the tents began to run out, giving way to a confusion of equipment. Beyond, fifty metres away, lines of men were kneeling on the sand, their lips trembling with prayer. He slipped behind a stack of crates and cast around for a way of creating a diversion.