“Yes, Highness,” Susan replied. “I understand perfectly.” She did not take her eyes off him, and the smile remained as well, which only served to make Zuwayy angrier. “Is there something specific you wished of me, Highness?”
“Wish? What do I wish? I’ll tell you what I wish, Queen Salaam!”
“What His Highness is trying to say, Madame President,” Juma Hijazi interjected, glancing at Zuwayy, hoping that he could keep his anger in check for just a few more minutes, “is that His Highness is still waiting for a conclusion to the contract between yourself and the Central African Petroleum Partners for the kingdom’s share of the partnership. As you remember, Madame, you said that in exchange for His Highness’s support during your elections, the kingdom would receive a one-third share of the partnership—”
“It wasn’t one-third, Minister, it was thirty percent,” General Baris interjected.
“One-third, thirty percent—it’s all the same damn thing,” Zuwayy retorted.
“You’re right, General—it was thirty percent,” Hijazi said. “But the fact is, the agreement has not been concluded. Egypt has graciously and effectively opened its borders to many Arab nations and instituted the work visa program in record time, which has helped tens of thousands of workers from all over the Arab world. It is a shining example of the spirit of cooperation that we hope to continue.”
“Thank you, Minister.”
“But what about the rest of it?” Zuwayy interjected hotly. “Part of the deal was a third of the partnership, a third of the revenues. We haven’t seen a dinar yet. If you try to back out of the deal now, Salaam, you’ll find yourself at the bottom—”
“Do you have some explanation for the delay, Madame Salaam?” General Fazani interjected before Zuwayy could threaten Salaam’s life right in front of witnesses.
“I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation, Majesty,” Baris offered.
“Yeah? What is it, Baris?”
“Perhaps it is that you haven’t paid for it yet, Majesty,” Susan said. Her smile never wavered, but her eyes suddenly lit up in slow-burning anger.
“Paid for it?”
“Majesty, the CAPP cartel invested a total of three point six billion U.S. dollars toward the project,” Baris said. “Egypt has promised in writing to grant the kingdom of Libya one-third of its shares in the partnership, but only if Libya agreed to purchase one-fourth of the shares owned by the cartel. That requires an investment by the kingdom of Libya of nine hundred million U.S. dollars.”
“What? You expect me to pay a bunch of fat-cat Western oil companies almost a billion dollars for oil that belongs to me!”
Hijazi couldn’t stop Zuwayy from stating his claim to the Salimah oil fields, but both Salaam and Baris pretended not to notice what he said. “I think what His Highness is saying, Madame,” Hijazi interjected, “is that perhaps we can come to some sort of accommodation.”
“What’s that?”
“Allow us to pay our fee to the cartel out of our share of the oil revenues,” Hijazi said. “It can be paid over, say, five years—they can take it right off the top of our share. We will even agree to pay a reasonable interest rate—it can be a loan of sorts, secured with the oil revenues from Salimah.”
Susan paused for a moment, then nodded. “I don’t think the Central African Petroleum Partners cartel would object, Minister,” Susan said.
Hijazi and Fazani breathed long sighs of relief, smiled, and nodded at each other. “That’s good news, Madame President. I think that we—”
“But I object,” Susan added.
The Libyan ministers’ mouths dropped open. Zuwayy was stunned—he couldn’t believe what he had just heard. To the Libyan ministers’ surprise, they noticed that even Ahmad Baris had a shocked look on his face. “Madame President, you . . . you are saying you will not accept a payment option based on our revenues? I don’t understand.”
“It is quite obvious, Minister,” Susan said, looking directly at Zuwayy, her smile gone. “Libya made this deal by threatening Egypt with war if we did not agree to your demands. You have no right to any part of the Salimah project—it is not your land, nor did you invest in any part of the production infrastructure. Yet I accepted your demand, even though I felt my country was under duress, because I wanted peace and prosperity for all of Egypt’s neighbors. I made only one request—that you reimburse the European cartel for their shares in payment for their substantial investment in the project. That was more than fair—it was the right thing to do.
“Now, as Libya has done before, you are reneging on your promise. Not only do you demand the shares that Egypt was going to give you for free, but you then demand that you take the next six years to reimburse the European cartel for their shares. This tells me one thing: that Libya cannot be trusted, that Libya—no, that you three— want nothing more than to rape and steal from your own country.”
“What did you say?” Zuwayy thundered, his eyes bulging in sheer fury. “How dare you? How dare you accuse me of such a thing? I will have you executed!” Zuwayy lunged for his desk drawer. Fazani, knowing exactly what he was reaching for, used his body to keep the drawer closed. “Get out of the way, Fazani! I’m going to kill this Anglo bitch for what she’s just said!”
“No, Jadallah!”
“I said, get out of the way—”
“Madame Salaam,” Hijazi said quickly, “I strongly urge you to immediately and sincerely retract that statement and beg His Majesty’s forgiveness.”
“I will not,” Salaam said, rising to her feet. She kept her hooked-crook cane in her hands, as if keeping it at the ready—Hijazi knew what she could do with that cane—but stood calmly right in front of Zuwayy’s desk while he still grappled with Fazani.
“You’re dead!” Zuwayy shouted. “You are dead! Yours will be the shortest presidency in Egyptian history. Your husband will look like Adonis compared to what your body will look like after I get done with it!”
“Good day, ‘King,’ ” Susan said, making an exaggerated bow. “Don’t worry about your people—they will be perfectly happy in Egypt. Where do you think you’ll be headed next? I think Brazil is nice this time of year.”
“Get out!” Zuwayy cried out. “And I’d make sure you know where your bomb shelters are in Cairo—you’ll need them!” Salaam and Baris departed, with Shafik backing toward the door right behind them, her right hand invisible under her jacket. “I want her dead, Fazani!” Zuwayy shouted after they departed.
“You can’t kill Salaam now, Jadallah—she’s more popular than God right now,” Fazani said. “If anyone finds out you put out a contract on her, we won’t even be able to hide in Brazil. We’ll have to live in Antarctica.”
“I don’t want a piece of Salimah anymore—I want the whole damned thing destroyed!” Zuwayy shouted. “That American bitch has insulted me for the last time!” His eyes spun wildly as he thought. “Launch the attack immediately.”
“Jadallah, only a few hundred of the twenty thousand- plus Libyans working there now have returned,” Hijazi said. “You can’t attack now! We’d be slaughtering our own people!”
“No! Launch the attack immediately!” he shouted. “Do it. Let Queen Salaam be the ruler of the largest graveyard in Africa.”
Jadallah Zuwayy stomped off to his private residence, kicking furniture and individuals out of his way with equal fury. “How dare she?” he shouted as he slammed the door to his apartment closed. “How dare that bitch spit in my face like that? Who does she think she is?”
“Who, my lord?” a woman’s thickly accented voice asked behind him.
“An Egyptian whore that has the unmitigated balls to tell me what to do!”
The woman approached him, naked, holding a crystal glass of thick, potent arkasus, or licorice brandy, in one hand, and a silver tray with a linen napkin covering it. He tossed down the brandy in one gulp. She set the tray down on a nightstand beside a lounge sofa, then kissed the back of his neck and started to massage his sh
oulders. “Why don’t you just eliminate this Egyptian whore, my lord?” the woman asked.
“Because she was just elected president of the Muslim Brotherhood, and she is a guest in my country,” Zuwayy said. “Do you know nothing of Arab culture, Russian?”
Ivana Vasilyeva felt for the knot of bone at the base of Zuwayy’s long, scrawny neck, then counted the right number of vertebrae up—right there. Snap that bone and Zuwayy would become a helpless lump of flesh on the floor, unable to do anything—except feel pain. But she simply continued her massage. “Forgive me, my lord,” Vasilyeva said. “You must instruct me about your country and all its customs.”
Zuwayy turned, ran a hand roughly over a nipple, then pinched it, hard. Vasilyeva opened her mouth in a half-yelp of pain and half-moan of pleasure. “The first lesson is: Women must learn to be subservient,” Zuwayy said. “You are nothing but bleeding, whining creatures who respond better to the lash than to reason or reality. The quicker you understand this, the happier your life will be.”
“Yes, master,” Vasilyeva said.
Zuwayy kissed her lips roughly, released her nipple, then lay down on the lounger. He rolled up the sleeve of his right arm. “You were recommended to me because you had a unique talent. Show me. And if you disappoint me, you shall pay dearly for it.”
“I understand, master.” Vasilyeva removed the linen napkin from the tray, revealing a hypodermic syringe and a rubber hose. She wrapped the hose around Zuwayy’s biceps, kissed his right hand, then curled his fingers for him, silently telling him to make a fist. Zuwayy never felt the needle slip into his vein; never felt a thing as Vasilyeva injected the drug.
What an idiot, Vasilyeva thought. She had bribed a Tripoli drug pusher to spread her name around as a trained nurse and anesthesiologist; she had been admitted to the residence almost immediately. Zuwayy liked whores and he liked heroin—he was a slave to both. But apparently he disliked having his nurses and his whores around for too long, so he usually had them killed after about a week in the residence.
That was not going to happen to Vasilyeva.
The drug she had administered was not heroin but thiopental sodium, an ultra-fast-acting, short-duration sedative. Zuwayy was not unconscious, just very relaxed. Vasilyeva removed the rubber tube from his arm and swabbed the injection site. “Do you feel all right, Highness?”
“You can leave me now.”
“Not quite yet, Highness. Where is the female American prisoner, the one called McLanahan, and the other American prisoners?”
“The American spies? In my interrogation facility.”
“Which ones? Where?”
“Who are you, woman? Why do you care about the Americans?”
“I’m here to take care of your problem with the Americans, if you just tell me where they are.”
“I don’t care to tell you.”
Vasilyeva had to remember to be patient. Thiopental sodium, also known by its brand name Sodium Pentothal, was just a mild sedative, not the much-vaunted “truth serum” fiction writers made it out to be. If the subject didn’t want to talk, thiopental sodium couldn’t make them do it. Eventually, however, she could get the information from him. She needed to learn a little more about his peccadilloes, fantasies, fears, and weaknesses. One or two more days and she would have him eating out of her hand.
She prepared a small dose of heroin and, as expertly as the first time, injected it into a vein, “jacking it off’ by drawing blood into the syringe in and out several times before injecting it all into his arm.
He looked at Vasilyeva with half-closed, dreamy eyes. “Are you going to kill me now?” he asked.
“I have no such orders, unless you resisted,” she said.
“Good. I was hoping to get rid of those damned Americans anyway—I should’ve shipped them off to Mersa Matruh and had them zapped with the neutron bombs along with the others.”
“How very interesting. So you deliberately killed those prisoners at Mersa Matruh with a neutron weapon? It wasn’t an Egyptian insurgency group or Hamas or Hizb’allah or any of the other right-wing Islamic terrorist groups? It was you?”
“Sure. I wasn’t going to let the Egyptians get the glory for saving them. I wish I did the Americans too.”
“Of course. So, is it true that you are not really a Libyan king, but just an ordinary army soldier who is pretending to be a king?”
“Pretty good scam, wasn’t it? I’ve got half the world believing I’m a fucking god. It’s priceless. Some fools will believe anything you tell them as long as they think they’ll get something good out of it.”
“How clever of you. What will you do now, Highness?”
“Attack Egypt, again,” Zuwayy said. “That bitch Salaam won’t back me with the oil cartel, so I’m going to have to destroy Salimah. Actually, not destroy it—just the workers. I’ll keep the oil fields for myself. I’ve got enough troops to take the whole southern part of Egypt.”
“Did you already give the order to attack?”
“Yes. And that cowardly bastard Fazani better follow my orders too.”
She picked up the phone beside the lounger. “Call off the attack, Zuwayy. Killing all those workers won’t get you any closer to the oil.” But he had already drifted off into his drug-induced world, oblivious to the real one.
SURT AIR BASE, NORTHERN LIBYA
THE NEXT EVENING
As soon as the three fighters fit their afterburners, the copilot started counting: “Talaeta, itnen, waehid... daeyikh!” The pilot released brakes and slowly moved the throttles up to full military power, let them stabilize a few seconds, then pushed the throttles into afterburner zone. He waited for the inevitable kohha—the “cough”—as the old fuel valves struggled to keep raw fuel flowing into the afterburner cans. Half the time, especially if the pilot advanced the throttles too fast, a valve stuck or failed and the afterburner would blow out completely. But it didn’t happen this time—the nozzles opened, the fuel-flow needles jumped, and the Libyan Tupolev-22 bomber leapt down the runway. Six seconds behind him, the second Tu-22 bomber began its takeoff roll.
A third bomber wasn’t so lucky—both of its Dobrynin RD-7M-2 turbojet engines’ afterburners blew out seconds after engagement. The pilot quickly yanked the throttles back to military power and tried once more to light the afterburners, inching the throttles up over the detent in slow, careful increments. But it was no use, and the third Tu-22 bomber aborted the takeoff, its screeching, smoking brakes barely managing to stop the two-hundred-thousand-pound bomber before it rolled off the end of the runway.
Libyan air force major Jama Talhi, the pilot and flight leader, said a silent prayer as he retracted the landing gear and flaps, watching the hydraulic needles jumping wildly in their cases. Hydraulic fluid was even more expensive than fuel or weapons, and because it was not changed as often as it should be, contamination was a problem. Amazingly, everything was working. Talhi, a ten-year veteran of the A1 Quwwat al Jawwiya al Jamahiriyah al Arabiya al Libya, was the Libyan air force’s most experienced Tu-22 bomber pilot, with a grand total of just over three hundred hours in this ex-Soviet medium supersonic bomber. In any other air force, three hundred hours would mean you were hardly out of flight school—in Libya, surviving that many hours usually meant a promotion. Tupolev-22 bombers were notorious maintenance hogs—they routinely cannibalized as many as ten planes to keep three in the air. This time, even that ratio wasn’t enough. Talhi had experienced every possible malfunction and inflight emergency in a Tu- 22, but had never crashed one. That made him top dog in the Libyan air force.
“Sahra flight, check.”
“Two,” his wingman replied. The third plane had already reported aborting its takeoff, and the timing on this mission was so critical that they could not wait for him. They would have to do the mission with one-third less firepower.
“Dufda flight, Sahra flight checking in.”
“Sahra flight, acknowledged,” the leader of the flight of three Libyan Mikoya
n-23 fighters replied. They had launched from Suit Air Base in northern Libya just ahead of the bombers and were already at patrol altitude at twenty thousand feet. It took just a few minutes for the two formations to join up, and they proceeded east, flying in loose formation as the crews completed checklists and got ready for the attack. “No contact yet, but we expect company any minute.”
Just ten minutes later, Major Talhi began a slow descent, keeping cruise power in all the way down until his airspeed approached six hundred knots. They received a few bleeps of their Sirena radar-warning receiver from the Egyptian air defense base at Siwah, but they were below radar coverage in moments, cruising at nearly the speed of sound across the northern Libyan Desert.
But they were not low enough for Egypt’s main air defense system—a former American Navy E-2C Hawkeye radar plane, orbiting over the desert just north of Al-Jilf Air Base in southwest Egypt. The powerful AN/APS-145 radar of the E-2 Hawkeye spotted the Libyan planes two hundred miles away, and the radar controllers immediately vectored in Egyptian alert fighters—a mixture of former Chinese, French, and even Russian jets from three different bases in central and southern Egypt.
“Sahra, Sahra, be advised, Egyptian fighters inbound, range fifty miles and closing,” the lead pilot of the MiG-23 fighter escorts reported.
“Sahra flight copies,” Talhi responded. “Sahra flight, go to point nine.” The pilot pushed his throttles until the airspeed indicator hit six hundred and sixty knots—eleven miles a minute, or nine-tenths the speed of sound.
Talhi’s copilot, Captain Muftah Birish, sat in the rear upper cockpit compartment of the Tupolev-22 bomber. The copilot’s seat swiveled around the rear compartment so that he could fly the plane (not very well, but better than nothing) by facing forward, or operate the electronic warfare equipment and the remote-controlled 23-millimeter tail gun by sitting facing backward. Right now he was studying the SRO-2 threat warning display with alarm. “At least two fighters, maybe more, closing in from the northeast,” Birish reported. Thankfully Talhi had his unit’s most experienced copilot with him, although that wasn’t saying much—systems officers, even copilots, got even less flying time in the bombers themselves than pilots. “India-band search radar—Mirage 2000s.”
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