The Empty Quarter

by David L. Robbins

  The border with the Kingdom lay sixty miles ahead. Arif drove with an eye behind him, catching fleeting silhouettes, the last glimpses of his wife. He was grateful to the American captain for bringing his two vehicles onto the road. Arif was able to spend this final hour with her, watch her reach safety, know it was done.

  He watched, too, the immeasurable sky for the stars to blink out.

  Chapter 43

  The blacked-out GAARVs zoomed north at top speed. Mouse, missing part of an ear, and Dow both lowered their NVGs to drive behind infrared headlights, viewing the rushing road in green detail. Out front, Arif’s truck led the way, lighting up empty stretches of desert midnight. To the rear, the old tribesman hurried in a rickety pickup crammed with armed men. Overhead, Kingsman 1 rumbled in low circles, keeping an eye on the procession.

  LB sat in the windowless breeze, helmet in his lap, keyed up. Seated in front of him, Berko bent over the SADL display at his chest, tracking their position. In Team 2’s GAARV, Wally would be alerting Torres in the ROC, the SEAL team at the border, the private Saudi jet in Sharurah, coordinating all the mission assets.

  Nobody asked LB what Arif had uttered to the princess in his presence. They all knew LB well enough, even Berko; if LB wanted to tell them, he would.

  They still had fifty miles to get out of Yemen, but the distance was flying by on the paved road. A few tractor trailers swooped south, but the GAARVs made no imprint on the dark highway. Nothing lay ahead but a black expanse, constellations, the border, another hour, and Arif.

  Jamie rapped knuckles against LB’s leg, excited, wide-eyed. He wanted to wind down, talk, begin the transition from guns pointed at them all. LB leaned forward to knock big Berko on the shoulder for his first rescue. He undid his safety belt and shifted to his knees to face backward into the litter cage.

  Five minutes ago, roaring away from the mud hut, LB located no pulse in the princess’s wrist. He tried again and found the faintest of beats, the slow return of blood and warmth. The gauze wrapping around her hip showed its first scarlet stains from the slow leeching past LB’s suture.

  The diplomat lay in the Stokes litter secured next to her. LB patted him on the hand and got no response. Mouse had taped a ketamine popsicle to Josh’s thumb for him to suck on. This was self-medication; when the sedation grew sufficient, the thumb would fall away from his mouth, moderating the dose. Josh would drift in and out all the way to the Riyadh hospital. If the princess surfaced again in pain, LB and Jamie would decide if they could give her a pop, as well.

  LB turned forward in the seat, strapping on his helmet. Jamie tapped his own chest, saying he would take over the patients. LB could ease off.

  Time in the rumbling GAARV passed with the murky miles. Jamie pivoted every ten minutes to check on the patients in the cage. He plugged fresh blood and fluids into the princess’s IV and chatted with a half-conscious Josh. Wally hailed over the team freq to say LB might have done something extraordinary back there. LB didn’t engage, unable to shake his foreboding that the night was not done. Like the princess’s pulse, he could barely put a finger on it. LB fixed on Arif’s taillights holding steady thirty yards ahead.

  Halfway to the border, the princess groaned harshly, louder than the GAARV’s engine. Jamie whirled to soothe her. In the tight confines of the Stokes litter, he cuffed her to get a true blood pressure. She came out 85 systolic, still too low to sedate. The princess did not rock against her constraints but whimpered in pain for long passages. Jamie stayed on his knees until even he determined he could do no more, a hard choice, and turned away.

  LB reviewed the things Arif had asked him to tell his wife. The man was sending her away to save her. He’d gunned down Khalil and wounded the diplomat, so the PJs could spirit her off to a royal family who’d had to steal her to pry her away from him. LB wished himself out of the GAARV and into the pickup truck out front, where he and Arif could continue their discussion about hard choices.

  LB’s thoughts cooled with the sweat under his armor. The strains of the last hour began to unhook. He wasn’t happy that the PJs had been called into a kidnapping after being told it was a rescue, but he let this go as the taint of getting involved with anything CIA. You never got more than half the story from them, and half of that was a lie. From the sound of things, everyone had been suckered, even the princess, all of them, just a pretext to get to Arif. Were the Al Saud really eager to bring her home? Once they got her and fixed her up, how were they going to keep her away from him?

  Lights flashed from the desert. Mouse tapped his brakes and the mission, so out of whack, slid into its endgame.

  The GAARVs ground to a halt. Wally reported on the team freq that the SEALs had arrived to escort them over the Empty Quarter ten more miles, then across the border. Mouse and Dow idled on the road while communications flew back and forth.

  To the rear, the old tribesman pulled his pickup off the pavement. He shut down his headlamps so that he would see nothing secret under the moon. Ahead, Arif drove on.

  Mouse proceeded off the road, leading the way onto the silvery sands. Wally’s voice zinged across the radio.

  “Hold positions. Repeat, hold up.”

  Mouse braked to a jarring standstill, and behind him Dow.

  “Juggler, LB. What’s going on?”

  “Just got word from Torres. She says don’t move.”

  “Why?”

  “She says one minute.”

  The SEAL team checked in to say they’d copied the order to stay in place far off the road.

  By now, Arif’s truck had stopped several hundred yards downrange on the vacant highway. He’d turned the pickup around to face south, and gotten out. In the shimmer of the headlights, his small outline dropped to its knees.

  LB stepped out into the renewed chill of the desert. Berko emerged from the GAARV to join him.

  Fifty yards behind LB, the door to the unlit pickup opened. The old tribesman joined him and Berko beside the road, transfixed.

  Young Jamie called from the GAARV. “What’s he doing?”

  Wally left his vehicle to stand beside LB.

  “Torres wants you to confirm that’s Arif al-Bahaziq up ahead.”

  Far ahead, Arif’s small silhouette touched his forehead to the road. Wally asked again.

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Wally punched the PTT for his sat radio.

  “JOC20, Juggler. Roger. Confirmed.”

  Kingsman 1 banked away to disappear over the clear desert dark.

  Arif prayed. As if in answer, a downward blur streaked to him out of the heavens.

  The Saudi disappeared in a massive flash of fire and concussion. Inside the blast, he kept his oath to shelter his wife. Flames climbed over themselves upward and out, sprouting hot orange and oily black. The carcass of Arif’s pickup flipped from the fury like a coin to land searing and gutted on its side. The princess would not come back to Yemen, would not share Arif’s fate, because he was gone.

  With nothing but desert and stars on all sides, the noise of the explosion settled quickly into the flitter of flames around the crater’s rim and the greasy throbs of burning tire rubber and tarmac.

  The old tribesman’s voice rose out of the dark. He knelt in the sand next to the road and laid his long beard down to it. He chanted in the moonlight and the blazes of the missile strike.

  Between the PJs and the wowed SEALs, the team freq became a babble. LB pulled out his radio earpiece.

  He climbed into the GAARV and faced backward, to the princess. She remained oblivious. Gently, LB reached above her head to pull down the veil.

  * * *

  20 Joint Operations Center.

  Chapter 44

  King Saud Medical Complex

  Riyadh

  Saudi Arabia

  LB let the limo driver get the door. The
Saudis probably paid him twice what LB made.

  He finished a virgin Bloody Mary, leaving the celery, and, with Jamie at his heels, stepped out. The driver closed the ebony door and like a daytime ghost floated in his long white robe to the driver’s side. Without a word, the car motored away.

  Jamie and LB stood before the facade of the biggest hospital in the Kingdom, on a pavement hotter than the desert. The massive medical building, all stone, steel, and mirrored glass, gathered the unrelenting heat and cast it off, herding Jamie and LB toward the front door.

  Overnight, the al Faisaliah Hotel had laundered their green and brown field uniforms, dusted and oiled their boots, and knocked this morning with brunch trays and a note requesting their presence at the hospital by noon. The signature belonged to the same Saudi doctor they’d briefed in the emergency room last night, when LB and Jamie did the handover, while ambulance crews wheeled the princess and the diplomat in.

  On the flight from Sharurah, she awoke briefly but not enough to talk with any sense. LB and Jamie took her vitals and decided she’d rallied enough to earn some rest and shut her down with a shot of ketamine. In the basket next to her, Josh kept knocking himself out with the popsicle.

  In the frigid air-conditioning of the vast hospital lobby, men and women kicked past in white or black robes down to their shoes, plenty of shiny-haired men in business suits skimmed by, and only the women lacked mustaches or beards. LB and Jamie, plainly American servicemen, garnered nods all the way to the patient information desk.

  “Joshua Cofield. He came in early this morning.”

  The slick Arab boy checked his computer.

  “Eighth floor. Post-op recovery. Gentlemen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “May I ask? Are you part of the Americans who brought back the princess?”

  “I guess.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You know about that?”

  “Anytime there is a member of the royal family in the hospital, we are all briefed.”

  Jamie gave that a hum. LB turned for the elevator banks.

  On the eighth floor, LB didn’t have to inquire where Josh was. Among the curtains, white linens, IV lines, monitors, gray faces, and baby blue scrubs, Josh’s private room would be the one between two Saudi army guards wearing berets and automatic weapons.

  “Fellas.”

  “No entry.”

  “Who says?”

  The larger of the two guards smirked. “Who’s asking?”

  The door opened. A short, spectacled man dressed in khakis and a tennis shirt poked out his head.

  “Sergeant DiNardo?”

  “And Sergeant Dempsey.”

  “Come in.”

  The pair of guards didn’t protest.

  Josh lay on an elevating bed sitting up. He wore a yellow hospital gown and white sock booties and had a drip line in one arm and fresh dressing around his upper chest. The man who ushered LB and Jamie into the room extended a hand, introducing himself as Ambassador Silva from Sana’a.

  “I was just leaving.”

  Jamie greeted him enthusiastically. LB gave a desultory shake. The ambassador smiled broadly, compensating for the lack of pressure in LB’s grip and his eye-to-eye skepticism.

  Silva grinned at Josh.

  “I see why you like him. He’s just like you.”

  The ambassador gave Jamie and LB pats on the shoulders along with quick, elusive words that included Good job and Well done. He swept out. The man had a definitive walk, like he knew where he was going.

  Gazing down his cheeks, Josh considered the two PJs at the foot of his bed. His head tipped back and he looked a little loopy.

  LB pulled up a chair on one side, Jamie on the other.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Tuckered. Good. Morphine. I recommend it.”

  “That your boss?”

  “Yep.”

  “What did he have to say?”

  “I might be under arrest. I might not. I did kidnap a Saudi princess.”

  “Did he know?”

  “He says he didn’t.”

  “You believe him?”

  “Don’t care. He says he’ll get me out of here.”

  “He probably will. I don’t think the Saudis want you talking.”

  “Not my strong suit.”

  LB chuckled. Jamie joined without understanding the reference. Josh’s voice carried a sweet drawl missing last night in Yemen.

  “Silva thinks I’m a spy.”

  “Are you?”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Josh pushed a red button held in his fist. Two clicks sent more morphine dribbling into his IV. Jamie and LB waited for him to refocus on them. He gasped a little.

  “No. I’m not. How’s the princess?”

  “We’re on our way to find out.”

  “You did an amazing thing out there, LB. All of y’all did. I’m sorry for my part in it.”

  “No worries.”

  “When do you head back?”

  “We got a commercial flight this afternoon.”

  “They dug my bullet out this morning. Guess where they found it.”

  “Where?”

  “In my ass. My right ass cheek.”

  Jamie liked this. “LB’s been ass-shot.”

  LB and Jamie didn’t know Josh well, and though the awful event they’d shared bound them, it provided little for idle talk. They couldn’t do more; LB and Jamie were both on lockdown from Torres until they got back to Djibouti for a debrief.

  They rose to leave.

  “You need anything?”

  “Nah. I got morphine.”

  Josh flicked a hand to stall them.

  “You seeing the princess now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell her I feel like a turd.”

  “Roger.”

  “I’m going to quit, LB. Do what I said. Join the PJs.”

  “It’s not as easy as saying it.”

  “I’ll make it.”

  “Did you tell Silva yet?”

  “I’ll send him a postcard from Louisiana.”

  The VIP wing on the sixth floor also had guns outside a room. These hung around the shoulders of three shining Saudis, bareheaded in white robes, trim beards, and sunglasses. LB asked Jamie to pick up a magazine. Jamie protested but LB stopped him.

  “Arif’s dead.”

  LB said it as if the fact shifted Arif to a different category, to whom keeping a promise was an absolute.

  Jamie took a seat while LB presented the doctor’s note to one of the guards. This one knocked, paused, then disappeared behind the heavy hospital door while the other two turned their shades on LB.

  “You guys think it’s too bright in here?”

  “Go sit down.”

  LB had not awakened in a cranky mood, but the silent limo driver, the smarmy ambassador, guns in a hospital, Josh and his morphine, and these two chesty Arabs caused him to stand his ground. He waited, defying the goons’ shaded glares, imagining a fistfight. The door opened and the third guard emerged, followed by a tall, thickset, older Saudi.

  This man pushed across the polished linoleum. Broad, ringed hands extended from a black, gilt-edged robe. His round face, crowned by an ebony headpiece, sported a gray mustache and bulbous nose.

  The third guard approached, but the big Saudi dismissed him with a flapping gesture, overly grand in the flowing robe. The guard did an about-face.

  The man offered both hands to LB.

  “You are the miracle worker?”

  “Sergeant DiNardo. US Air Force.”

  “I am Prince Hassan bin Abd al-Aziz. Princess Nadya’s father.”

  The royal gave LB’s hand a hearty shake.

  “How’s she feeling?”
/>   The prince squeezed LB’s hand. “Speak with me privately.”

  Before LB could resist or remark, the prince pulled him away from the guarded door to a sunny, remote corner beside a potted palm. The prince held LB’s hand longer, to press it again between his rings.

  “Thank you for saving my daughter.”

  “It’s my job.”

  “I understand. But many men would not have attempted such an operation under those conditions, much less accomplish it. The surgeons who repaired her artery found it equally incredible. She is alive and whole because of you. I do not know how to repay you.”

  “My hand.”

  “Of course, Sergeant. Pardon my enthusiasm.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Beyond what you have already done, very little. Only one small item.”

  “All right.”

  “I will receive a full report after you are debriefed by your superiors.”

  “Okay.”

  “Before that, I have one personal question to ask. Only one.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “This is difficult to ask. Did you see with your own eyes the death of Arif al-Bahaziq?”

  “You mean her husband?”

  “Yes, Sergeant. My daughter’s husband. The terrorist. Can you confirm it?”

  “I already did that once. Why do you need me to do it again?”

  “My business requires such morbid accuracy. I apologize. So?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.” The prince glanced at his feet, as though suddenly humbled. “I do not rejoice, Sergeant. I spent many years trying to bring Arif into my family. But he would not be tamed. Like you, I have responsibilities to my country. What you witnessed was, as you say, my job.”

  “I prefer mine.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’d like a few minutes alone with your daughter.”

  “I’m afraid that cannot happen. She is under strict isolation.”