by Paul Sussman
Although he lived in a house, with a kitchen and a bathroom and three fields behind – two growing vegetables, one bersiim – the desert was Zahir al-Sabri’s true home. And it was to the desert that he always returned when his heart was heavy. As it was tonight.
He didn’t go far, just a few kilometres out, his Land Cruiser rising and falling with the dunes like a coracle on the ocean, its one working headlight casting a pale glow across the sands. Although everything merged together in the darkness – a hazy collage of sand and rock and moonlight – he seemed to know exactly where he was going. Weaving his way through the uncertain landscape, he navigated the slopes and the troughs, the gravel pans and boulder fields as though they were streets in a city, eventually turning into a long valley between high dune walls and coming to a halt beside a solitary, stunted abal bush.
Removing wood and straw from the back of the Land Cruiser, he built a fire. The tinder burst alight the moment he touched a match to it, like a ragged orange flower opening and unfolding with the first warmth of the sun. He brewed tea in an old, fire-blackened pot and lit his shisha pipe. Wrapping a shaal around himself against the evening chill, he gazed into the flames, his lips pulling gently at the shisha’s mouthpiece. The only sounds were the low crackle of burning wood and, from somewhere far off, the melancholy bark of a desert fox.
Often Zahir would come out here with his brother Said, or his son Mohsen, his beloved, his heir, the light of his life. Together they would camp under the stars, sing old Bedouin songs and tell and retell the story of their family, how they had come to Egypt all those centuries ago from the al-Rashaayda homelands in Saudi Arabia. So much had changed in the intervening years. So much had been lost. Tents had been replaced with concrete and mud-brick, camels with 4x4s, nomadic freedom with taxes and identity cards and paperwork and all manner of bureaucratic restrictions. For all that they remained Bedouin at heart, desert dwellers and desert travellers, and they had only to come out here for a few hours to remind themselves of the fact, to reconnect with their illustrious heritage.
Tonight, puffing on his pipe, Zahir dwelt upon that heritage. In particular upon the memory of his ancestor, Mohammed Wald Yusuf Ibrahim Sabri al-Rashaayda, the greatest of all Bedouin, the father of his tribe, who with his camels had crossed the Sahara from north to south, east to west, until there was no corner of the wilderness with which he wasn’t familiar, no grain of sand that he hadn’t at some point trodden underfoot.
There were so many wonderful stories about Old Mohammed, so many tales and legends that had been handed down through the generations. But for Zahir, one story stood out above all others, encapsulating everything that was noble about both his kinsman and his people as a whole. And the story was this: once, travelling deep within the Sahara, two hundred kilometres and more from the nearest oasis, Old Mohammed had come across a man staggering across the sands. He was without food or water or camel, and vultures were circling silently overhead in anticipation of his imminent death.
The stranger, it transpired, was a Kufra Bedouin, of the Banu Sulaim tribe, a sworn enemy of the al-Rashaayda. Mohammed’s own brother had been killed by a Banu raiding party, and he would have been well within his rights to have cut the man’s throat there and then with the knife that now hung on Zahir’s living room wall. Instead he had given him water to drink even though his own supplies were dangerously short and lifted him onto his camel and carried him seven days to safety, by which point both of them were at death’s door.
‘Why have you done this?’ the Kufra Bedouin had asked when at last they had sighted civilization. ‘Saved me when there is such hatred between our tribes, so many wrongs that can never be righted?’
And Mohammed’s answer: ‘For the Rashaayda Bedouin there are many obligations, but none more precious than the duty of care to the stranger in need, whoever they might be.’
Usually this story was a source of joy and pride to Zahir. How many times had he recounted it to his son, enjoining him to live as Old Mohammed had lived, to show the same dignity and humility and compassion?
Tonight, after all that had happened lately, it made him neither joyful nor proud. Instead it caused him to feel the most unbearable sense of emptiness and self-reproach.
For the Rashaayda Bedouin there are many obligations, but none more precious than the duty of care to the stranger in need.
Fumbling in his pocket he pulled out the metal compass. He opened it up and gazed at the initials inscribed on the inside of the metal lid – AH – his dark eyes glowing in the firelight, the words of his ancestor echoing around his head, chiding and tormenting him. What use was knowing the desert as he knew it, keeping alive all the old stories and songs, if he could not live up to the most fundamental precept of his people? He had a duty, and he had failed in that duty. The weight of his failure pressed down on him, so that tonight, instead of helping him to reconnect with his Rashaayda heritage, his presence out here in the wilderness only served to remind Zahir how unworthy he was of it.
For the Rashaayda Bedouin there are many obligations, but none more precious than the duty of care to the stranger in need.
He finished his tea and puffed a while longer on his pipe. Unable to find the peace he craved, he kicked sand over the fire, threw his equipment back into the Land Cruiser and set off home. The dunes rolled and turned around him as if the desert was shaking its head, letting him know how very disappointed it was.
CAIRO
‘How much do you know about the Iran-Iraq War?’
Molly Kiernan’s voice echoed from the kitchen where she was making coffee. It was not a question Freya had been expecting.
‘Is this going to be a history lecture?’ she asked. ‘Because I’ve already had one of those today and, fascinating as it was, I’m not in the mood for another.’
Kiernan looked through the kitchen’s serving hatch, uncertain what Freya was talking about.
‘I gave her the Zerzura tour,’ explained Flin. ‘In the museum.’
‘Ah.’ Kiernan nodded, pouring steaming water out of a kettle. ‘No, I’m not going to give you a lecture – I leave that sort of thing to the professionals.’
She tipped her head at Flin and continued pouring.
‘Just a bit of background. No Benbens or papyri, I promise.’
There was a rattle of mugs as she lifted a tray and disappeared from view before reappearing in the living room doorway. She came over and placed the tray on the floor.
‘It’s only instant, I’m afraid,’ she said, handing mugs up to Freya and Flin. ‘And there’s no milk or sugar, but I guess it’s better than nothing.’
She took the third mug for herself and went over to the window, tweaking back the curtains and peering down at the street below before turning to face them.
‘So?’ she asked, blowing on her mug and sipping, her left hand perched on her left hip. ‘You know anything about the war?’
Freya shrugged.
‘Not really. Only what came out on the news when we invaded Iraq. Didn’t we support Saddam, supply him with weapons?’
Flin grunted. ‘Not the free world’s finest hour. Propping up a genocidal, mass-murdering dictator in the interests of some warped notion of realpolitik.’
Kiernan tutted, gave an impatient shake of the head.
‘Let’s not get into a political debate here. Freya wants answers and I think we should focus on providing them.’
Flin stared into his coffee mug.
‘The war lasted from ’80 to ’88,’ continued Kiernan, ‘and pitted Saddam’s Iraq against Khomeini’s Iran. Two utterly barbaric regimes, although Saddam’s was marginally the lesser of evils, which is why, as you rightly said, we were prepared to offer him financial assistance, intelligence, weaponry—’
‘Biological agents courtesy of special envoy Donald Rumsfeld,’ interrupted Flin.
Again Kiernan tutted.
‘We supported Saddam for exactly the same reasons that Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia a
nd a dozen other countries supported him. Because the alternative, namely a victory for Khomeini and his revolutionary madmen, was just too terrible to contemplate. As Kissinger put it at the time, it was a shame they couldn’t both lose, but if someone had to emerge victorious it was better for all of us that it should be Saddam.’
‘And what a loyal ally he proved to be,’ muttered Flin.
Kiernan threw him an annoyed look.
‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘All that’s relevant for current purposes is that by the mid-1980s, after some initial successes, Iraq was militarily very much on the back foot. Although it had the more advanced weaponry and better trained troops, the war had by that point settled into a drawn-out conflict of attrition, and that favoured Iran, which had three times as many men on the ground and didn’t give a hoot how many of them got slaughtered because there were always more to replace them.’
Her mouth puckered slightly, as if in distaste at the mindset she was describing.
‘The fact that a significant proportion of the Iraqi army was made up of Shia Muslims only added to Saddam’s worries,’ she added, ‘given that he and his ruling regime were Sunni.’
In front of her Freya sipped at her coffee – weak, tasteless – wondering where the hell all this was leading. Flin had sat back and was gazing up at the ceiling, eyes tracing a thin crack that ran diagonally from one side of the room to the other.
‘By 1986 Saddam was a seriously nervous man,’ Kiernan went on, her left hand coming up and fiddling with the crucifix at her neck. ‘It was clear that even with western support he was never going to win the war outright, and actually stood a good chance of losing it. He was like a boxer coming into the final rounds of a fight, knowing he’s behind on points, his opponent’s got more in the tank and the longer the contest goes on, the more vulnerable he is. What was needed, he decided, was a single knockout blow, a sucker punch that would end the conflict there and then and take out Iran in one fell swoop.’
She paused, her eyes fixed on Freya.
‘And the obvious form for that sucker punch to take was a nuclear strike against Tehran.’
Freya looked up, surprised.
‘But I thought …’
‘Saddam didn’t have the bomb?’ Kiernan finished the sentence for her. ‘He didn’t. He wanted it, though, desperately. And despite what Blix and the other bleeding-hearts at the UN claimed, he came way closer to getting it than has ever been publicly acknowledged.’
From outside came the sudden, high-pitched shriek of cats fighting. Kiernan took another cautious look out of the window, then moved over and sat on the arm of the sofa beside Flin.
‘Believe it or not, building an atomic device isn’t technically that difficult,’ she said, sipping her coffee. ‘Certainly not to someone with the sort of scientific resources Saddam had at his disposal. The problem is acquiring the necessary fissile material, specifically plutonium-239 or uranium-235. I won’t go into the physics of it all – to be honest I don’t even understand the physics – but producing either of these isotopes in sufficient quantity, and to a sufficient degree of purity for deployment in a weapon, is an enormously complex, costly, time-consuming process, and one that back in 1986, as today, was beyond all but a handful of countries. Saddam was never going to achieve it on his own, and whatever other support the western governments were giving him they sure as hell weren’t going to welcome him into the nuclear club. So he started looking elsewhere, putting out feelers to some of the world’s more unscrupulous arms traders to see if they could procure the necessary goods for him. And in late 1986 one of those arms traders came up trumps.’
She drained off the remainder of her drink.
‘That man was Romani Girgis.’
Freya had been on the point of butting in, demanding to know what all this had to do with her sister’s murder, with everything that had happened to her these last 24 hours. At the mention of Girgis’s name, she held off.
‘Girgis is an arms dealer?’ she asked.
‘Among other things,’ said Flin, sitting forward. ‘Arms, drugs, prostitution, antiquities smuggling – there aren’t many shit-pies he doesn’t have a finger in. Arms trading’s his main thing, though.’
‘And he supplied Saddam Hussein with a bomb?’
‘With fifty kilos of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium, to be precise,’ said Kiernan. ‘Enough to construct two implosion-type atomic devices with the destructive power of the Hiroshima bomb. At a stroke Saddam could have flattened Tehran and Mashhad, ended the war, ended the Iranian Revolution, established himself as the dominant power in the entire region. In short, changed the course of history. And he almost did it as well.’
She allowed Freya to absorb this, then stood.
‘More coffee, anyone?’
Flin handed up his mug, Freya kept hers. Kiernan disappeared back into the kitchen. For a brief moment Flin and Freya’s eyes met, then they both looked away.
‘Even quarter of a century after the event we’re still not a hundred per cent clear about the precise details of the deal Girgis put together,’ came Kiernan’s voice. ‘From what we can gather he acquired the uranium from a Soviet middleman named Leonid Kanunin – a distinctly unpleasant piece of work who got himself murdered in a Paris hotel suite back in ’87 – who in turn seems to have sourced it from contacts in the Soviet military. Where exactly it came from originally we’ve never managed to pin down, nor is it relevant. What we do know is that in November 1986 Girgis chartered a Cayman-registered Antonov cargo plane piloted by a guy named Kurt Reiter, a veteran cold war drug and arms smuggler. That plane rendezvoused with Kanunin at an airfield in northern Albania where two of Girgis’s representatives picked up the goods and handed over a down-payment of $50 million. To keep people off the scent the cargo was then to be flown round two sides of a triangle, first down to Khartoum and only then over to Baghdad, where its safe arrival would trigger a balance payment to Kanunin of another $50 million. Girgis would get his twenty per cent cut, Saddam his bomb, Iran would be obliterated. Smiles all round.’
She came back into the living room with two steaming mugs, handed one to Flin and again perched herself on the arm of the sofa. There was silence. Freya stared down at the floor, processing everything Kiernan had just told her. Then, looking up again, right into Kiernan’s eyes, she put the question she had been on the point of asking five minutes earlier.
‘I don’t understand what any of this has to do with my sister. With this hidden oasis thing?’
‘Well now we come to it,’ said Kiernan. ‘We’d got wind of the whole operation pretty early on, from informants in both Girgis’s and Kanunin’s organizations. But it was all broad-brush stuff. We knew what was being planned, who was involved – what we couldn’t get hold of were precise dates, places, times. It was literally only a couple of hours before the Albanian rendezvous that we were finally able to nail down details of how the uranium was being moved, and where it was being moved to.
‘By that point it was way too late in the day to intercept the Antonov before it took off. There was a slim possibility we could have caught it when it came down to refuel in Benghazi, but given our relations with Gaddafi at the time that would have presented a lot of complications. Better to keep a close track on the plane and catch it in Khartoum, before it started its final run up to Baghdad. We had a Special Forces unit stationed just across the Red Sea in Saudi, the Israelis were primed to help out. It should have been textbook. Would have been textbook if nature in her wisdom hadn’t intervened.’
‘Nature?’ Freya shook her head, not understanding.
‘The one thing we could never have planned for,’ said Kiernan with a sigh. ‘The Antonov got hit by a sandstorm as it was flying over the Sahara, lost both its engines. One of our listening stations picked up a Mayday from somewhere over the Gilf Kebir Plateau and then the plane dropped off the radar screens and disappeared.’
For the first time Freya caught a faint glimpse of light, of understandi
ng.
‘It crashed into the oasis, didn’t it? That’s what this is all about. Why Girgis wanted the photos. The plane crashed into the Hidden Oasis.’
Kiernan smiled although there was no humour in the expression.
‘We didn’t find that out immediately,’ she said. ‘All we knew was that the Antonov had come down somewhere in the vicinity of the Gilf, which is a pretty big area, 5,000 square kilometres of rock and desert. But about six hours after the first Mayday we picked up a second radio message, this one sent by the plane’s co-pilot, a guy named Rudi Schmidt, who seems to have been the only survivor of the crash. The transmission was garbled and only lasted about thirty seconds, but in that time Schmidt was able to give a rough description of where the plane had crashed. In a tree-filled gorge, he said, with ruins everywhere. Ancient ruins, including some sort of enormous temple with a strange obelisk-shaped symbol carved all over it.’
‘The Benben,’ murmured Freya. Although the room was warm she felt goosebumps prickling her arms.
‘Even without that little titbit it couldn’t have been anywhere but the wehat seshtat,’ said Flin, taking up the story. ‘There are no other known or reputed ancient sites within two hundred miles of the Gilf Kebir, and certainly none inside the sort of gorge he was describing. It’s just about conceivable it was some unknown site, but the Benben motif put it beyond any doubt.’
He shook his head and bent forward, picking up the photographs he had dropped on the floor.
‘A million-to-one chance,’ he said, leafing through the images. ‘A billion to one. With the whole Sahara to crash in, the Antonov comes down slap bang in the middle of the Hidden Oasis. Like dropping a piece of cotton over New York and it just happening to thread itself through the eye of a needle. You couldn’t make it up, you just couldn’t make it up.’
On the sofa-arm beside him Kiernan was also staring at the photos. It was the first time she had seen them, and her eyes were gleaming.
‘We’ve been looking for that plane for nigh on twenty-three years,’ she said, her head angled to one side to get a better view of the pictures. ‘Sandfire – that was the operational name we used for the search. It was highly classified of course – even within the Agency there was only a small group of us who knew anything about it – and from the outset a decision was taken to not involve the Egyptian authorities for fear of someone tipping off Girgis we were on to him. Even so, given the available technology – satellite imaging, surveillance aircraft, UAVs – we should have been able to track the thing down in a matter of days.’