First Citizen

by Thomas T. Thomas

  I wasn’t too worried about the Saudi pilot who was displaying a NATO-issue Beretta 9mm automatic pistol. If he tried to get a shot at me moving from between the cockpit seats, he only had about a one-in-ten chance of hitting something vital in my anatomy. Of course, he had about nine-in-ten of drilling the turbine engine, which was aft of the bulkhead behind us. But if that happened, I imagined they could autorotate down to some kind of landing.

  Still, the situation was frozen up right then, a bad time to move. So I decided to lie back and enjoy the inevitable.

  “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” I asked, keeping my voice on the line between adult casual and kid smartass.

  The woman looked at me for, it seemed, the first time. Her eyes were wide-set, deep, a liquid-black that in other circumstances I could stare into for hours. They showed a flash of nameless recognition—that same instant of sexual understanding that sometimes passes between strangers in a waiting room or on a bus. Then the veil of private purposes, other aims, fell across her eyes.

  “We are kidnapping you, Mr. Corbin.” Her English was perfect, slight British accent, education and polite society hinted in the tone and syntax.

  “Really? What for—money? You’ll find my family doesn’t have all that much and the company will probably care more about getting their helicopter back than saving me. They paid more for it.” I thought I was lying smoothly; later I found out what a helicopter can cost.

  “Not money,” she said. No trace of a smile at my humor. Her grip on the scatter gun never varied. “This is an act of terror directed against the fanatical regime that has seized my country and seeks to return it to a state of feudal peonage. They slaughter our youths and squander our national wealth in a futile war against Marxist—”

  “What country are you—?”

  “Persia.”

  “And you seek to restore Queen Farah Diba?” My years among the books of Harvard hadn’t shut out all of the current world situation. I could guess that this reverse tide of imperialism had already fired debates, revisionism, and schisms back at the Commune—if it was still in business.

  “Of course,” she said. “Our aim is a return to the course of modernism and enlightenment begun by her husband, the late Shah.”

  “I see. And taking an American hostage is going to bring the ayatollists to their senses? I’m hardly a bargaining chip. They’ll pay you a bounty for my dead hide!”

  “Why do you Americans always think of money?” Her mouth curved around in an ugly bow. “It is not ransom we propose, but cooperation. Your company holds contracts, through third parties, for twenty-eight percent of Persia’s oil production. If Petramin refused to take delivery, even for a week, the backup would exceed the Ministry’s storage capacity anywhere along the line. As you may be aware, the last four attacks at Kharg Island were targeted on tank groups and pumpage. A slowdown in the take will strangle the oil fields. They will have to cap wells and lose pressure. It will take the Ministry months to recover.”

  “Do you really believe Petramin would damage an oil field just for me?”

  “You are a senior official, are you not?” Even as she said it, her eyes clouded. It must have been obvious even to a terrorist that I was still a green kid in my twenties. Maybe they mature early in the Middle East. “Anyway, your company will cooperate,” she said, “when we begin sending pieces of you to your family.”

  “And you call yourselves modernists?”

  “Terrorist pressure is a very modern concept. If we were truly barbarians, we would be offering you the hollow consolations of martyrdom and an easy way to Paradise.”

  “Yes, well, I do appreciate that.”

  I turned away from her and stared out the window. My attention focused on the small of my back, where the gun still pointed.

  The helicopter had crossed the outskirts—or at least the narrow fringes—of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, some minutes ago. The last tended terraces and lines of palms around cloistered villas had given way to the near desert. The land rippling below us was gray rock and gravel, with here and there a clump of scrub that showed dusty green. If you looked long enough, you could begin to pick out the dry watercourses, deep S-curves cut in the gravel where desert storms had poured out a rush of water. Every five years or so.

  Luckily, I had come dressed for a field trip: khaki shirt, denims, gray-suede Italian climbing boots. I tried to picture myself walking out of that countryside in a wool three-piece and wingtips—looking something like a new ad video for men’s cologne. Except for the sweat stains.

  The woman’s position, theirs if she represented any real organization, was incredibly weak. She had thought she was kidnapping an American beegweeg, someone she could trade for concessions, but she ended up with a small fish, really, a nobody and no use to her. It said so on my traveling papers: No deposit, no return. In about five minutes, she was going to figure out that her winning strategy was to shoot me and the American pilot, dump the chopper, and set us all ablaze. … To fight again another day.

  My winning strategy was to keep her talking, to find a way to strengthen her bargaining position, and so my prospects for continued breathing.

  “What’s your name?” I said quietly—or tried to. Actually, I was still facing the window and, even in the insulated cabin, the clatter of rotor blades tended to drown out whispers; so I had to shout it.

  “That is not important.”

  I turned and looked at her, a long measuring stare straight in the eyes.

  “Of course it’s important. We’re about to fly out into the Great Sandy.” I jerked my head toward the even, brown horizon ahead of the aircraft. “That makes us traveling companions. People who must depend on each other in a land of thirst and cold and blowing dust. That land can kill us all, no matter who is holding the guns. … Now, what is your name?”

  She seemed to wilt for a moment. “Sybil Zahedi.”

  “And where do you come from, Sybil? You obviously haven’t been home to—Persia—in many years.”

  “London, and before that Cairo.”

  “Educated there?”

  “In London, yes.”

  The gunman in the front seat was watching this closely.

  “And you?” I said to him.

  “Faisal Ibn Mehakim.”

  “Are you something royal?”

  He actually smiled. “No, my father is a sheikh. One day I may be sheikh, too—if I survive this adventure.”

  “But you’re not Persian?”

  “Only a sympathizer.”

  “And the man who’s doing the flying?”

  The American glanced back at me. “Billy Birdsong. I work for the company, same as you.”

  “So you’re not in on all of this?”

  “Just caught in the crossfire. I fly the bird for Petramin, but nobody will have any tears if they get a piece of my finger in the mail.”

  “All right. Where are you from, Billy?”

  “California.”

  “Hey, so am I. You know the Bay Area?”

  “Too rich for me, Boss. I come from down near Needles.”

  “High desert man?”

  “No, just Injun.”

  I marked him for about two notches less hostile than the people wielding the guns. No way to tell, yet, how he would jump if an opportunity came along.

  “You said we were going to Oman, Miss Zahedi? And that’s a long flight, Billy says, over eight hundred miles. What’s that in time—about eight or nine hours?”

  “Yes.” Her gun drifted. Hesitation.

  “Do you have a refueling stop planned along the way?”

  “Why do you ask all these questions?”

  “My life depends on your good planning. We’re traveling companions, remember?”

  “Wrong. You are my hostage.”

  At a nudge from Faisal’s gun, Birdsong veered off on a long arc to the south. I looked out along our original course and saw the squared-off edges of rooftops in the heat haze. Jabrin, it had
to be, according to my memory of the map. In the landscape below us, rock and sand turned to pure sand, and the sand built into the standing lines of dunes, regular as waves of the ocean. This sea of sand, the Rub’ al Khali, was fully as large as the Black Sea or the Caspian.

  “Do you think I’m trying to escape? Into that?”

  “You ask questions. … And you are not afraid. That is bad in a hostage.”

  “Hey! I’m an American, remember? Tourists want to see everything there is to—”

  “Shut up!” Her hand whitened on the grip of her gun. I could see that the rough-sawed edge of the walnut grip was dark with sweat, even though the cabin was air-conditioned cool. I shut up.

  The sand below went on and on. So did the pulse beat of the rotors. My mind drifted and, after a minute or an hour, my chin slid forward and my eyes closed.

  I was awakened by a change in the pitch of the engine. We were dropping past, then circling back toward, a cluster of blocky houses in a thin grove of date palms that hid a flash of open water, with the dunes all around like hills. That would be Abaila, the one permanent settlement the map showed in the northern, or Ar Rimal, quadrant of the desert.

  A welcoming committee waited for us on the only flat place, west of the date palms. About fifteen men and women in green fatigues stood in a well-spaced semicircle with Uzi submachine guns at parade rest. They squinted but didn’t flinch when the rotor wash kicked up a blast of dust and sand.

  Sybil Zahedi was first out of the ship, followed by me, Birdsong, and Faisal. Sybil spoke a little abracadahra-kush-kush—which I assumed was Farsi—to a yard-wide, hard-bitten man with a graying moustache, a scar across his chin like a bad weld, and two pistols stuck in his web belt. He nodded and Sybil walked off alone toward the buildings. At a word from him, the team moved on Birdsong and me, separating us, handcuffing us, and walking us off in different directions—me toward the buildings, him toward the open desert.

  “Hey, uh, wait a minute.” I twisted in their grip to look over my shoulder, back at Birdsong. “Where are you taking him?”

  Shrugs. Blank looks.

  “No. No, this isn’t right.” I stopped my feet, but their hands just swept me along. “No! Stop this! Miss Zahedi!” She was ahead of us by fifty yards. “Sybil!”

  She turned, waited for us to catch up.

  “Where are they taking the pilot, Birdsong?”

  “To dispose of him.”

  “Wha—? Why?”

  “He said himself he is of no use to us.” She tipped one shoulder in a shrug. “No one would grieve for him.”

  “Yes, well, but, ah, think of what that will do to your bargaining position with Petramin.”

  “Our bargaining position?”

  “If you have already killed one of your two hostages—not for effect, but just on a technicality—before you even start negotiating, they’re going to figure you for a loose bunch of amateurs. Lightweights. Unstable. Unpredictable. Unable, probably, to close a deal.”

  I watched her eyes change as she heard this, from a cynical squint to an offended glare to a cunning glint. She finally nodded and said a few words to the man nearest. He raised his Uzi in the air and fired a measured burst, then whooped something and raced off toward the other party.

  Sybil turned and started trudging on toward the buildings. The others brought Birdsong up and took us both to a tiny hut made of whitewashed clay—or maybe concrete, I meant to find out which—like the rest of the settlement. It was a storage room, twenty feet on a side, with just the one door of rough boards, no windows. A quartet of horizontal slits, six inches wide, were cut below the roof for ventilation. And it still smelled as if the Arabs had stored camel dung in there.

  Without a word, Birdsong and I prowled this gloomy cell—he moving left and I right—tapping the walls, scuffing the rammed-dirt floor, fingering the edges of the vent slits. I felt around the door hinges and the bolts of the hasp, trying to judge the effect of a straight heel-kick on the dry wood. Three kicks, maybe four, would pop the door right off its hinges. Then we could rush out and overcome half a dozen guards who were holding machine guns. … I needed a new idea.

  The room was empty except for fourteen one-gallon cans stacked in a corner, the labels all alike. I couldn’t figure out the Arabic scribble-squig on them; my command of the language was just first-grade conversational.

  “What they got?” Birdsong asked.

  “Paint.. ... Pink paint,” I said, seeing the dried stuff around the edge of one lid.

  “Hey! You can read Arabic?”

  “No.” That left him puzzled, but my mind was working too fast to explain. Now if I only had a cigarette lighter, we could burn the paint, call for the guards, and when they rushed in … I still needed a new idea.

  Birdsong faced me in the dark middle of the room. “Hey, tell me … what was all that, out at the landing site? First they split us up, then put us together. What happened?”

  What should I say to him? “Conflicting orders. … For the torchbearers of the new Shahdom of Iran, these people do not exactly have the details worked out.”

  “Bad news for us.”

  “Not necessarily. … You remember that little piece of paper you signed, before coming into the country?”

  “Which one? I signed about sixty of them.”

  “The one that legally acknowledged International Travel Order 6263.”

  “Oh, yeah, the Dead Meat Clause. Some of the pilots were joking about that one.”

  “What’s the joke?”

  “Just that declaring political hostages legally dead did not apply to George.” He caught my blank stare. “He is one of the company’s pilots—and also our nickname for the automatic pilot on an airplane.” I was still blank. Birdsong waved it away. “Professional joke. But why is that order not bad news? These people will kill us if no one will bargain.”

  “But they obviously don’t know that. Or don’t believe it. The situation gives us an opening.”

  “To do what?”

  “Don’t know yet. I’m working on it. How long does it take to refuel that chopper?”

  “Not long. But no more flying today.”

  “Why not?”

  He pulled a hand out of his jumper pocket, cupping half a dozen fuses in his palm. “Technical difficulties.”

  “You don’t think Faisal will spot what’s wrong?”

  “Him? That one is ballast. Never flown before.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Any copilot knows to keep his hands off the stick and his feet off the rudder bars when he is not actually flying. Faisal screws around. Had to fight him for the controls all the way out here. I will disable my bird before leaving it with a guy who thinks four hours of watching qualifies him.”

  Birdsong walked over to the far wall, put his back to it, and sank down to the floor. I began to wonder if he knew how close he had come to taking those fuses into a desert grave. He was a sensible man; he probably did know.

  The Iranians were going to leave us overnight, apparently. I settled in against the other wall and, in the dark, Birdsong and I talked. At least we tried to, but our backgrounds were too different. Places, foods, women, tech stuff, company politics, the price of oil. The topics rose and fizzled out almost immediately. We ended up dozing in the cold. Come the feeble light of dawn, with my muscles in knots and a taste like sour slime in my mouth, I felt mean enough to begin poking our captors.

  “Hey! Hey, out there!” I shouted, pounded on the door, kicked it for the noise value. “Up the Shah! Down with Khomeini!” Birdsong roused and squinted at me. The guards were right outside. They slammed the door open and leveled their burp guns.

  “I want to talk to Sybil Zahedi!” They just stared at me. I tried some of my halting, phrase-book Arabic: “Laish hel intidhar? Wain Zahedi?” [Why are we waiting? Where is Zahedi?] And when they still didn’t move: “Mumkin tesa’idnyp” [Will please you help me?] Finally, with my hands I pantomimed breasts, hips, ass—then tal
k-talk with my fingers. The one on the left got the message and smiled. He jerked his gun to show I was to come out.

  He took me to a two-story house down by the shallow pond at the center of the oasis. The building had generator power, air conditioning, moisture seals on the doors, windows that faced out on green plants. And it didn’t smell of camels. Sybil was sitting at a small table, smoking, drinking coffee out of a tiny cup, and looking out at the water. Even with all this luxury, she appeared to have spent a night no better than mine. The guard pushed me through the door, then stammered an abracadabra explanation of why he had brought me. Sybil looked up at me with tired eyes.

  “What is it that you want?” She took a drag on her cigarette.

  “To keep you from making a mistake.”

  “Your companion has sabotaged the helicopter. We cannot move or call for help. Do you know what he did?”

  “No, but I can find out—and convince him to fix it—if you will listen to me.”

  She motioned the guard to move closer. I felt the muzzle of his machine pistol brush my kidneys. My hands were not bound and this bumpkin had actually brought his weapon inside my range. Well, well, karate hero. … But not now.

  “Just for two minutes?” I pleaded.

  “All right. What mistake am I making?”

  “You must have guessed by now that Birdsong and I are no prizes. He’s just a pilot, one of a dozen on staff out here. I’m a very junior attorney, not even passed the bar yet. I’ve been with the company less than three months.”

  “What you are saying is not likely to prolong your life.”

  “I know. And I want to live. I want to help you do that. You see, I know all the Petramin officials here in the Kingdom, know where they’re staying, their itineraries, their plans. I can take you to them, help you capture someone important, someone Petramin will really care about getting back.”