by Philip Dole
He helped her stand, and with the sleeping bag around her ankles, she put some weight on her left foot. As soon as she did, she winced and sucked in a sharp breath. She looked at him with tears in her eyes. “Damn it. She can’t walk. How can we possibly catch up now?”
Tyler couldn’t carry 110 lbs. for who knows how long. He needed a sturdy tree branch. When he had been at the N.O.L.S., a person had sprained his ankle, and they had made a workable crutch from a forked tree branch. That would slow them down, but they had no other option. Luckily not having to tend Ishmael freed Little Bo to hunt for the kind of forked branch that Tyler described for him.
Meanwhile Tyler massaged Lei’s ankle. The forest had thinned out dramatically since they had left Ahmed’s farm, and the remaining trees grew mostly in the lowest part of the wadi. Little Bo left to search and found two possibilities. Tyler thought one was quite suitable. He used his Swiss Army knife to saw the branch off at the height right for Lei. Then he wrapped his jacket around the branch’s fork to cushion it so Lei could lean her weight on the fork. She tried it out tentatively. It was clumsy, but it worked. She could limp along with it but couldn’t go very fast. Tyler helped her until she got accustomed to using it.
Meanwhile Little Bo rolled up the rug and laid it across his shoulders. He tied the sleeping bags and the backpacks to the ends of the rolled rug. He used it like a balancing pole. He got so nimble he jumped on and off boulders like a mountain goat.
The trio soon found a rhythm, but it was at a much slower pace than Tyler wanted. They were hiking up, down and across shallow valleys formed in a past eon when there had been more water, carving gulches as rainwater ran off the mountains on its way down to the sea. Thanks to plentiful donkey spoor the trio had no trouble following Wu’s route. They wondered if they were closing the gap fast enough to catch up before the rendezvous happened.
Tyler looked down at the petite woman, hobbling along as fast as she could. The left side of her face was still puffed with swelling from her beating. Her skin was discolored, dark purple from the coagulated blood under her skin.
Tyler wanted to distract her from her discomfort. “Tell me about your granduncle. He certainly has lived a fascinating life. A Chinese boy, all alone, makes a fortune in a strange world. How’d did he do it?”
“Well, he was not alone. You forget he had Grandmother Cherry. She helped him, a lot more than he will admit. I do not think he could have done it by himself.
“And think about her. A small child. She was only five when she left China. So hard, but they never blamed their parents for sending them away. Rural China in 1930 was a horror. Starvation and disease were rampant in Canton. Our village suffered, and many died. The only future Hing Ling children had was an early death.”
“But how did Sunny make a fortune from nothing?”
“In the beginning he worked on the docks. Soon he began recruiting other Chinese to work on the docks, and so he became a labor leader. He invested all his money in real estate. And as you know, we are now the biggest dry cleaners in Europe.”
“Boy, what a story! Rags to riches. The reward of honest effort.”
She made no response and instead changed the subject. “What time is it? I don’t want to miss my next call to Sunny.”
“It’s ten to nine. I sure hope he’s been able to learn something more about Abdul from his inside source. That guy gives me the creeps.”
“Me too. I will ask him. But don’t worry about Abdul. Wu is the one we must focus on. Remember that.”
Tyler nodded in agreement as Little Bo scampered back from farther down the dry riverbed.
“I found it, Sidi Tyler.” He was flushed with excitement. “I found their campsite. About two hundred meters.”
Tyler hurried forward in the direction of Wu’s campsite, sharing Little Bo’s excitement. “I’d sure like to catch up with them this afternoon.”
Lei sat on a boulder with the satellite phone, calling Sunny while they examined Wu’s campsite. They found three dead fires, each larger than the little ones they had started. Based on the fire remains Tyler estimated Wu was not far ahead.
“Lei, I’m pretty sure we’re right on their heels. We ought to be able to catch them this afternoon.” She had finished her call with Sunny. “Did you hear me? I think we can catch up this afternoon.” She nodded without enthusiasm. Her attitude made him fearful Sunny had given her bad news. “What did he say? Did he have any news about Abdul?”
She looked dispirited. She hesitated and then shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. Nothing. Nothing at all about Abdul.”
Chapter Twenty
Toward the coast in the vicinity of
Torres de Alcala, Morocco
Thursday, December 8, 2005
9:18 a.m.
“We’ve got to move faster,” Tyler told his compatriots. They had trekked until nearly midnight and had slept late. “If we don’t pick up the pace, we’ll never catch them before the rendezvous. Little Bo, you’ll have to pass out breakfast as we go.”
Little Bo got busy distributing almonds, dates, and water. Lei declined her share of sardines, and the men devoured them with relish. Ishmael’s absence was a positive because if they had to feed him another day on the trail, they would have run short of water and food.
As the sun heated up the mid-morning air, promising another scorcher, they trekked on. Their sole focus was catching up with Wu. Tyler knew he might have misjudged how close they were. His experience was in human trekking, not donkey trekking. But if Ishmael had fled to the coast and knew the rendezvous location, Wu would have had plenty of time to set a trap.
They hiked into the early afternoon. The sun in a cloudless sky beat down on them for the second day.
“We are close. We are catching up,” Little Bo assured them after returning from a scouting sortie. “The donkeys’ spoor is fresh.” And the good news spurred them on to maintain a killing pace. By the early afternoon Lei had to take more frequent rest stops to rest and re-establish circulation in her armpit. It was wearing her out.
About one-thirty p.m. Tyler and Lei were resting in the patchy shade of a tall scrub bush while Little Bo poked around ahead of them.
“A road. Just over that rise,” Little Bo yelled. “It must be the coast road to Al Hoceima.”
Tyler realized Little Bo’s discovery meant danger. A road meant vehicles, and their pursuers used to have a black Citroen van. It had been two days since they had set the oil booby-trap on the road to Ketama, and that was plenty of time for them to have repaired any damage or gotten a replacement.
“The good news is it doesn’t appear anyone is here waiting for us.” For the benefit of their morale Tyler intentionally skewed his comment to the optimistic side, but he was skeptical. “Little Bo, why don’t you search for donkey dung on the road?”
He reported in five minutes. “They turned east and stayed on the road.”
Tyler looked east and saw nothing but empty road.
“Damn, I wished we had caught up with them before they got to this road.” Tyler and Lei started eastward down the road. Being exposed on the road made him uneasy, and he kept checking both directions.
Little Bo shouted from atop a rock outcrop. “Good news, Sidi Tyler. There’s a small village down there.” Little Bo pointed east. “Not more than a kilometer. And the sea is right there,” Little Bo grinned as he swung around and pointed north with his other arm, “less than half a kilometer. We made it.”
Lei reached out with her free arm, gesturing for Little Bo to come closer. When he was near, she put a hand behind his neck, pulled him to her and kissed him on his cheek.
“We made it. But where is Wu?”
“Don’t worry, Lei. Wu can’t be far. We’ll find him soon. Enshallah.”
A little more than a hundred meters down the road, they came to a stream with enough water to forc
e Tyler to take off his boots to cross. As he got barefoot, so did Lei. She dunked her injured ankle in the cool water’s gentle current. The swelling had gone down a little, and she moved it around in the water. All three of them splashed the refreshing water on their necks and faces. Little Bo filled three empty water bottles and at Tyler’s insistence scratched their labels off to distinguish them from the remaining bottles of drinking water.
Having bathed her ankle in the cold water, Lei wanted to put on her boot and try putting some weight on it. So Tyler helped her while Little Bo checked out the way to the ocean. She could put some weight on her foot, and she took several steps without the crutch. She walked with a distinct limp and couldn’t move very fast. But she could do without the crutch.
The rocky coastline at this location consisted of cliffs fifty meters high. Constantly pummeled by waves, boulders from the crumbling cliffs piled at the base of their sheer faces. Clearly this coast offered no harborages. A rendezvous here needed a vessel able to moor off this coastline safely.
Less than five minutes after they had resumed hiking, Little Bo saw a donkey. Tyler hustled his friends off the road, knowing they had finally caught up with Wu. Little Bo disappeared through the scrub bushes in a flash while Tyler and Lei hid.
Five minutes later Little Bo returned. “I climbed up as high as I could and got a good look around. There is another dry wadi just ahead, and the donkeys are strung all the way to the sea. And there are at least a dozen men just standing around.”
“Did you see Wu or Abdul?”
“No. The men were too far away.”
“Let’s find someplace safe and take a good look.”
Little Bo led them closer to the cliff edge. The bushes were more than a meter high all the way to the cliff’s edge. Tyler helped Lei to stoop over so they wouldn’t be seen. At the very cliff edge they found a narrow ledge lower than the rest of the cliff top. It afforded an unobstructed view of the shoreline. The ledge, about four meters long and two meters deep, was covered with bushes.
From their vantage point the trio was only seventy-five meters from the water. Tyler counted thirteen men, most of whom were wearing djellabas. Two large motor yachts, similar but not identical, were riding at anchor offshore. Both yachts were at least thirty or thirty-five meters overall.
“Why don’t you get out your equipment and check what you can see? This is going to be a trickier shot than yesterday’s.”
Lei attached her telephoto lens and mounted her camera on her tripod. She swung the behemoth around, turning the lens collar back and forth as she focused. Meanwhile the men cleared off some bushes for more elbow room leaving enough to still screen them from sight.
“Can you see Wu? Or Abdul?” Tyler asked. “We can’t call Hacker until we’re certain Wu is down there.”
“Not yet. Give me a chance.” Tyler tapped Little Bo on the shoulder and jerked his hand over his shoulder, signaling him to follow. They climbed onto the cliff top and worked their way back toward the road. “What’s the best way to get out of here?” Tyler asked for Little Bo’s input.
“I don’t want to stay on the road in daytime.”
“No, I agree.” But when they looked down the road, they abruptly stopped.
In the middle of the road stood a black Citroen van.
Chapter Twenty-one
On the coast in the vicinity of
Torres de Alcala, Morocco
Thursday, December 9, 2005
3:06 p.m.
“Shit, this is bad. I was hoping we’d lost them for good. Let’s get back to Lei. I want to get our photos to that village before dark. But we’ll have to wait until we get the photos we need. What do you think?”
“Waiting for darkness will make harder walking but will be a lot safer.”
Tyler slapped his thigh in frustration before turning to Little Bo. “Do you think we can hire a taxi in that village?”
“If we pay them enough, we can persuade someone to drive us, at least as far as Al Hoceima. We can hire anything we need there. Even if there’s no grand taxi in the village, someone with a vehicle will want to make some easy money.” Little Bo rubbed his thumb against his fingertips.
“Do you think we can find someplace to send our photos to Hacker?”
“Not there. But we can in Al Hoceima.”
“If Abdul’s men catch our scent, we’re in trouble. The sooner we get out of here, the better.”
They hurried back to their hiding place on the ledge. Lei was on the satellite phone. Tyler checked his watch and gave her a thumbs-up, crediting her for keeping their call schedule without even having a watch.
While he waited for her to finish, he watched the laborers below. Some men were unloading the donkeys, and others were carrying the hashish bundles to a growing stack at the water’s edge. Each bundle took two men to carry. The bundles were heavy, awkward loads. The men lugging the bundles struggled to keep their balance.
When Lei rang off, Tyler noticed again she looked depressed.
“No good news from your granduncle? Did you tell him we haven’t seen Wu yet, but we think we’ve caught up with him again? So why the long face, Lei? We’re back in business.”
“Sunny is not sure he can get in touch with the right people here. Wu’s got all these drugs, right in his hands. Sunny wants to arrest him right now with the drugs. Then we would not have to worry about the Pengs for a long time.”
“Sounds perfect to me. Then Hacker can have someone question Wu in jail. Whether Wu cooperates or not, if Niko gets credit for fingering Wu, it should clear your brother.”
“But Sunny is not optimistic about getting the Moroccan authorities to move fast enough. Too much bloody red tape. Do you believe it? We might miss this golden opportunity. Tyler, we cannot that let happen. We can’t! We must delay him somehow.”
“But how?” Lei’s notion to delay Wu sounded like another crazy idea. Her ideas hadn’t killed them yet, but they had been too close for comfort. Their luck was bound to run out. “Let me call Hacker and see if he can get the police moving. He might be able to get some results. I’ll report we’ve located Wu again and see what he says.
“But hanging around here one more minute after we get our photos and disclose this exact location is nuts.” Little Bo nodded his head in agreement, but Lei gave no reaction. “By the way, have you spotted Wu? I can’t call Hacker until I’ve seen him with my own eyes.”
“No, not yet. I can see the faces of the people on shore fine, but there is no sign of Wu or Abdul.”
It was unlikely Wu had left the rendezvous, but it was a possibility. Just because the donkeys, hash, and yachts were there, it didn’t mean Wu was there. Maybe a vehicle had been waiting at the rendezvous point to whisk him away to an unknown location.
Tyler decided to call Hacker immediately and then again as soon as they saw Wu.
“If Wu stays below deck, we won’t get the photos we need. Hacker wants indisputable proof,” Lei reminded them. “I can see their faces on the yachts but not as well as the people on shore. I should be able to get Wu if he shows his face. Don’t worry.”
They had come too far to end up empty-handed, and their sine qua non was a positive identification of Wu. In Hacker’s eyes without solid proof Tyler’s messages were nothing more than an “Arabian Nights” adventure.
“Keep focused on the yachts in case Wu shows,” Tyler requested unnecessarily.
“You do realize I cannot watch both yachts at the same time.”
Tyler knew he’d forget to bring something key, and now he knew what it was. Binoculars. He rebuked himself for not bringing a pair of binoculars to complement Lei’s telephoto lens.
At least he could tell Hacker exactly where they were thanks to Sunny’s foresight in obtaining satellite phone with GPS for them. Their Iridium satellite phone gave their exact position, accurate within
a hundred meters. The phone’s GPS reading gave their position as 35 degrees 10’N, 4 degrees 18’W.
“Damn, I wish I knew the name of that village,” Tyler mumbled.
“Do you mean the one down the road, Sidi Tyler?”
“Yes, I’d like to be able to give Hacker a name he might be able to find on a map.”
“I do not know the name of the village.” Tyler was only half-listening because he didn’t expect Little Bo to know. “But I know where we are.”
“You do? Do you have a name?”
“Yes, Sidi Tyler. See that over there?” He pointed at a solitary island twice as far from shore as the yachts were. The island appeared uninhabited. “That used to be a Spanish prison. The name of the island is Penon de Velez de la Gomera.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, Sidi Tyler. We memorized in school the eight places that belong to Morocco that Spain holds illegally. And that island is one.”
“Little Bo, you are the best.”
With a place name to go with a plotted location Tyler felt more comfortable leaving his message. He told Hacker they had followed Wu and Abdul cross-country from a hashish farm in the mountains down to the coast at Penon de Velez de la Gomera. He informed him Wu was holding two thousand kilos of hashish.
He reported to Hacker that the conspirators had been met on the coast by two large motor yachts. He couldn’t see their names on the sterns because they were riding bows toward the shore as the tide ebbed. He pleaded for Hacker to persuade the proper Moroccan authorities to act immediately. To underscore his point he described the situation as Lei had “a golden opportunity” to break up a major drug deal and take Wu into custody without any direct American action. He gave Hacker their global positioning reading and indicated they would flee as soon as they got new photos of Wu.
When Tyler finished and stowed the phone away, Lei asked calmly, “Why do you think it’s such a bad idea to delay Wu?”