The Hidden Oasis

by Paul Sussman

  Girgis shrugged, smoothed a hand over his hair.

  ‘Usman certainly thinks so. And Brodie too, by all accounts. We’ll just have to wait and see.’

  ‘Incredible. Absolutely fucking incredible.’

  ‘Fifty million dollars, Boutros, that’s incredible. The rest of it’s just …’

  Girgis gave another shrug and waved his hand dismissively, the two of them watching as more and more aluminium cases were wheeled from the hangar and out to the waiting choppers.

  THE WESTERN DESERT

  From a distance it looked like a small white beetle crawling across the landscape, creeping up dunes, scuttling over gravel pans, a single luminous eye peering out into the pewter-coloured wilderness. Only as it came closer did it resolve into its real form – a battered white Toyota Land Cruiser zigzagging through the desert. Its roof-rack was laden with 20-litre jerry cans, a sharp beam of light speared forward from its one working headlamp, slashing transient patterns across the ground as it manoeuvred this way and that. Although the terrain was broken and uneven, folding into towering sand walls and jagged rock formations, the driver seemed to know exactly how to navigate its intricate twists and turns. Even in the most labyrinthine stretches he still kept up a reasonable speed, rarely dropping below fifty kilometres an hour, doubling that across the sand and gravel flats that punctuated the landscape like huge lakes. How many people were inside the vehicle it was impossible to tell for its interior was completely dark, although at one point it stopped and someone emerged from its passenger side, lifted the hem of his djellaba and urinated, so there must have been at least two of them in there. Beyond that, and the fact that its driver was clearly in a hurry, everything else about the car was a mystery: a solitary white speck weaving its way through the arid wastes, the growl of its engine echoing across the sands, its nose swaying to and fro as though following a scent that drew it irresistibly towards the south-west.

  THE GILF KEBIR

  They found a jumble of dried wood neatly heaped under a ledge at the bottom of the rock formation – traditional Bedouin practice, Flin explained, to leave such stashes beside obvious desert landmarks. Borrowing from it, he built a small fire and got it going. They pulled on even more clothes against the night chill and spread blankets on the ground. Opening the cool box, Flin produced various fire-blackened pots and pans and began to brew up some coffee and heat the baked beans Freya had found in her sister’s kitchen.

  ‘Reminds me of when me and Alex were kids,’ she said, shuffling closer to the flames and hugging her arms around her legs, gazing at the orange wafer moon hovering above the dunes to the east. ‘Dad used to take us camping all the time. We’d build fires, eat beans, pretend we were Indians or early pioneers – we slept outside more than we did in.’

  Flin sipped his coffee and leant forward to stir the pot in which the beans were heating.

  ‘I envy you. My father’s idea of fun was to send me and my brother to the Ashmolean to draw ancient pots.’

  ‘You have a brother?’

  For some reason Freya was surprised by the revelation.

  ‘Hada brother. Howie died when I was ten.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t …’

  He shook his head, continued stirring.

  ‘Named after Howard Carter, the guy who discovered Tutankhamun. Shared his name and ironically died of exactly the same form of cancer, although at least Carter made it into his sixties. Howie was only seven. I miss him sometimes. Often, actually.’

  He gave the pot a final stir and lifted it from the fire.

  ‘I think these are ready.’

  Spooning the beans onto a couple of plastic plates, he handed one to Freya and took the other for himself. They ate in silence, peering into the fire, their eyes occasionally flicking up and meeting. Once they were done Flin cleaned the plates – wiping them with sand and splashing the sand away with a handful of water – and they settled back with mugs of coffee and the chocolate bars Freya had brought. Flin reclined against the rock, Freya stretched on the other side of the fire.

  The first stars had already started appearing while they were up in the air, and now the night sky was ablaze with webs of light. Rolling onto her back, Freya looked up, feeling something of what she’d felt during the flight out over the desert: calm, peaceful, contented even, the silence and the stillness wrapping her like a duvet. I’m glad I’m out here, she thought. Despite it all. I’m glad I’m here in this place my sister loved so much, just me and the sand and the stars. And Flin as well. I’m glad I’m here with Flin.

  ‘Who’s the girl?’ she asked.

  ‘Sorry?’

  She glanced across at him and then up again. A shooting star flared briefly across the hem of the sky, fading almost as soon as it had appeared.

  ‘Back in Cairo, as we left the apartment, Molly mentioned a girl. “This has nothing to do with the girl.” I was just wondering who she was.’

  He sipped his coffee, poking at the embers of the fire with the toe of his boot.

  ‘Something that happened a long time ago,’ he said. ‘When I was with MI6.’

  His tone suggested he didn’t wish to pursue the matter and Freya let it go. Sitting up, she wrapped a blanket around her shoulders. The rock spire towering above them felt menacing yet at the same time curiously comforting, as though they were being cradled in the arm of a giant. There was a silence, broken only by the hiss and crackle of burning wood; then Flin lifted the coffee pot and refilled his mug.

  ‘It sounds hopelessly naïve now, but I actually joined the Service because I wanted to do some good. Help make the world … well, if not a better place, at least a slightly safer one.’

  His voice was low, barely audible, as if he was talking to himself rather than to her, his eyes locked on the fire.

  ‘Although if pushed, I’d probably have to admit that part of it was about pissing off my father as well. He didn’t really approve of things like MI6. Didn’t really approve of anything outside academia.’

  He gave a wry smile, drawing patterns in the sand with his finger. What this had to do with her question Freya didn’t know, but she sensed it was important to him and so didn’t interrupt.

  ‘I went in just after I finished my doctorate,’ he said after a brief silence. ‘1994. Did a couple of years on a desk in London, then got posted overseas. First to Cairo, which is where I met Molly. And then on to Baghdad. Trying to get the inside track on Saddam and his weapons programmes. Not exactly an easy nut to crack – you wouldn’t believe the level of fear and paranoia Saddam generated – but after I’d been there about a year I had a breakthrough with a guy from MIMI: the Ministry for Industry and Military Industrialization. He approached me, said he was willing to pass on info, top-level stuff-just what we needed.’

  He looked up at Freya and down again. A jackal howled somewhere in the distance.

  ‘As you can imagine he was pretty jumpy about the whole thing, insisted on using his daughter as a go-between, said it would minimize suspicion. From the outset I was against it – she was only thirteen, for God’s sake – but he wouldn’t do business any other way and it was just too good an opportunity to miss, so in the end I agreed. He copied papers from the Ministry, she took them with her on her way to school, slipped them to me as she walked though Zawra park in central Baghdad. Simple, only took a couple of seconds.’

  Two jackals were howling now, calling to each other out in the dunes to the east. Freya barely noticed them, absorbed in what Flin was saying.

  ‘For a while the whole thing worked fine and we got our hands on some good material. Then, about five months in, I missed a rendezvous. These things happen, of course, but in this instance it was because I’d been on a bender the night before and overslept. I was drinking pretty heavily by that point, had been for some time, Scotch for the most part, although when I got up a head of steam … Christ, I’d have drunk paraffin if someone had poured it out and stuck a couple of ice cubes in it.’

  He s
hook his head, rubbing at his temples. The jackals’ high, ululating wail, more melancholy than threatening, provided a strangely appropriate soundtrack to the narrative he was spinning.

  ‘We had an absolute rule with the handovers,’ he went on. ‘If one of us wasn’t in the park the other just kept going, didn’t hang around. The Mukharabat – Saddam’s intelligence services – were everywhere, always watching, and it was crucial not to do anything that might look out of the ordinary. I don’t know why Amira – that was the girl – broke the rule, decided to wait, but that’s what she did. She was spotted, picked up, taken in. So were her dad and the rest of her family.’

  He let out a deep sigh, screwing his coffee cup into the sand beside him. The jackals were suddenly silent. Everything was silent.

  ‘Christ alone knows what they put them through, but they never named me. I got out safe and sound, they all disappeared into Abu Ghraib – that Abu Ghraib – and were never seen alive again. Apparently Amira’s body turned up a month later. On a rubbish dump outside the city, gang-raped, teeth pulled out, fingernails … you just can’t imagine.’

  He leant his head back and contemplated the rock, his voice a monotone, dull, emotionless, as if he was trying to hold what he was describing at arm’s length, avoid engaging with the full horror of it. It clearly wasn’t working. His hands, Freya noticed, had started to shake.

  ‘There was an internal inquiry, of course. I resigned, went back into Egyptology, came out here, really started drinking. Would have kept right on going if I hadn’t met Alex. She pulled me back from the brink, got me dry again. Saved my life, basically. Not that it was worth saving. Thirteen years old, for God’s sake. You just can’t imagine.’

  He brought his knees up and rested his elbows on them, pressing his forehead into the palms of his hands, the now fully risen moon bathing the desert in a soft mercury glow. Not really sure why she was doing it, hardly even aware that she was doing it, Freya stood, moved around the fire and sat down beside him, laying a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Molly’s right, of course,’ he said. ‘It’s what all this is about: Sandfire, Girgis, the oasis – what it’s always been about. Trying to make amends in some way, redeem myself for sending a thirteen-year-old kid into Saddam’s torture chambers. I can’t bring her or her family back, undo the agony she suffered, but at least I can … you know … try to …’

  His voice was cracking and he broke off. There was a pause, Flin breathing heavily, then he lifted his head and looked across at her.

  ‘I tell you, Freya,’ he said. ‘Whatever else I might think about the Iraq invasion – and none of it’s particularly good – I can’t condemn Bush for toppling Saddam, however badly he botched it. The guy was a monster. A fucking monster.’

  He looked away. Stretching out his legs, he pulled his cup from the sand and drained its contents. Freya wanted to say something, to try to comfort him in some way, but everything that came to mind just seemed so pathetically glib and inane, wholly inappropriate to the enormity of the story he’d just recounted. Instead she did the one thing she could think of that would show she understood what he was feeling, that she too knew what it was like to have your every waking moment – and most of your sleeping ones too – corroded by guilt and regret.

  ‘Did my sister ever tell you what happened between us?’ she asked, removing her hand from his shoulder and hugging her arms around her. ‘Why we didn’t talk for so long?’

  He glanced across at her again. ‘No. She never spoke about it.’

  Freya nodded. Now it was her gaze that was fixed on the fire’s embers, the burning wood pulsing and twinkling as though it were alive. There was another silence – she had never discussed this with anyone, ever, it was just too painful – then, taking a breath, she told him.

  How after their parents’ deaths in the car accident Alex and her fiancé Greg had moved back into the family home so she could take care of her younger sibling. How Greg had always been attentive to Freya, joking and flirting, and how that flirting had increased once he was living under the same roof. How initially it had been Greg who made all the running, but after a while, flattered, Freya had started to make some running of her own. How what had started as kisses and fondles – wrong, of course, but salvageable – had rapidly spiralled into something altogether more sordid, she and Greg hopping into bed together the moment Alex had set off for work each morning and staying there until just before she returned home in the evening. How it had continued even as Alex and Greg were planning their wedding, until her sister had come back early one day and, inevitably – crushingly – caught them together, Greg at that moment going down on Freya, which had somehow made the whole betrayal even more grotesque and humiliating, although she omitted that particular detail in her description to Flin, the memory of it still too eviscerating to share, even after all these years.

  ‘She wasn’t angry,’ she said, swiping a forearm across her eyes. ‘When she came into the bedroom. Shocked, yes, but not angry. It would have been better if she had been, had screamed and shouted, launched herself at me, but she just looked so sad, so lonely …’

  She choked, wiping at her eyes again. Flin reached out and took her hand, a reflex gesture, comforting, the two of them sitting there in silence, hypnotized by the flickering tongues of flame. The jackals started up again, behind them now, to the north, their wails drifting across the night like some mournful aria.

  ‘Is that what the Hassan thing was about?’ he asked after a while. ‘Agreeing to strip for him. A way of …?’

  ‘Balancing things out?’ Freya shrugged. ‘I guess we’ve both got stuff we’re trying to put right.’

  His grip tightened.

  ‘Your sister loved you, Freya. She talked about you all the time, your climbing – she was so proud of you. Whatever happened, it was in the past. She’d want you to know that. Want you to know how much you meant to her.’

  She bit her lip, touching a hand to her pocket, to the outline of the letter Alex had sent her.

  ‘I do know that,’ she whispered. ‘What hurts is that I never got the chance to say the same to her.’

  She sighed and looked across at him. This time their eyes met and held. For a moment they remained like that, Flin’s hand still clasped around hers. Then, slowly, their faces started to come together. Their lips made fleeting contact, then they broke away. Freya reached out and touched his face. Flin brought a hand up and ran it through her hair, before as one they pulled back and stood, knowing this wasn’t the time or the place. Not now, not after all that had been spoken.

  ‘We should try and get some sleep,’ he said. ‘We’ve got an early start.’

  Together they built up the fire, shook out the blankets and settled back down – on opposite sides of the blaze now. Their eyes met again briefly. Then, with a nod, they rolled away and disappeared into their own thoughts, the jackals still calling in the distance.

  Four hundred metres away, the figure adjusted his night vision binoculars. He watched for a while longer before sliding down behind the lip of the dune, switching on the transceiver and radioing in. It only took a moment: they’ve turned in for the night, no movement, nothing else to report. Within a minute he had resumed his vigil – binoculars clamped to his eyes, M25 sniper rifle resting on the sand beside him – oblivious to all save the two motionless forms curled innocently beneath the towering arch of stone. The fire between them slowly burnt itself down until it had reduced to almost nothing, a tiny orange smudge on the vast moonlit desert.

  It had been three days since Freya had had any proper rest, and her sleep was deep and dreamless, free from thoughts and worries, an empty black void into which she gratefully sank, as though her mind had been swaddled in dense black velvet. Only as dawn was starting to colour the east, a soft band of pinkish grey drifting up off the horizon, did she slowly return to consciousness. Not because she had slept enough – she could have gone on for a good few hours more – but because she became aware of a curious
droning sound that even in the fog of slumber she sensed was at odds with the remote desert setting.

  For a while she lay listening, still only half awake, pulling the blankets tighter around herself against the early morning chill, trying to work out what was going on. The sound faded and then strengthened, as if whatever was causing it was moving back and forth, sometimes nearer, sometimes further away. Rolling onto her side, she looked across at Flin to see if he was aware of it too. He wasn’t there. She rolled the other way, looking for the microlight, but that too was gone. She jerked fully awake and leapt to her feet, spinning around, scanning the sky.

  In the few minutes since she had first woken the world had already grown noticeably clearer and she spotted the microlight immediately, soaring over the Gilf like an enormous white-winged bird. How Flin had taken off without waking her she didn’t know – she really must have been out of it – and for the briefest of instants she felt a shock of alarm, convinced he was abandoning her. The thought disappeared before it had even properly lodged itself for he was clearly flying in a circle rather than away. Wheeling and swooping over the flat tableland on the top of the Gilf, he headed south and then north in a broad circuit whose central axis appeared to be on a westward line from the rock formation beneath which she was standing.

  She stood watching as the microlight flew right out to the very extremity of her sight, dwindling to a barely visible dot against the greying sky before slowly enlarging and once more coming back into focus. Ten minutes passed, then the aircraft swung away from the plateau and, dropping low above the desert, roared directly overhead. As it did Flin tipped the sail slightly and shouted, gesturing at something on the ground. Freya threw up her arms to show she didn’t understand, forcing him to loop round and come back over again. Dropping even lower and gesticulating towards the fire, he mouthed the word ‘coffee’. She smiled and gave him a thumbs-up. Flin held out a hand with fingers spread, indicating he’d be another five minutes, then picked up height again and headed back towards the Gilf. The gargling drone of the microlight’s engine slowly receded as he resumed his survey of the massif.