by K J Griffin
Chapter 25: Madinat Al-Aasima, Ramliyya: October 23, 5:30 p.m.
Sophie was among the first to step out of the first class cabin of Ramli Airlines flight 235 from Cairo. Behind her jostled a collection of white-robed Arabs and their black-veiled wives. The young English girl, a rare sight in the sequestered Sultanate, had also covered her hair and western dress with a black abaya, which had been waiting together with connecting ticket at the Ramli Air counter in Cairo airport.
At first the warm and humid early-evening air of Ramliyya felt exotic and invigorating; but as she descended the gangway and walked across the tarmac towards the terminal building, Sophie was already respectful of its all-stifling power.
Hasan was waiting for her inside, a sandal step ahead of a phalanx of police and customs officers. Sophie was glad of Hasan’s presence, for the Egyptian woman at the Cairo check-in desk had warned her about the unmitigated severity of Ramli customs and immigration.
Hasan gabbled several quick commands in Arabic; in no time Sophie’s passport was stamped, luggage retrieved, and she was whisked unchecked through long-faced, cheated customs officers.
Hasan led her through the terminal to the back-seat comfort of a black Mercedes. He muttered something to the chauffeur; the driver flicked a button on the dashboard, blowing icy jets of air from the AC vents that cut into the moist skin of Sophie’s forehead. Then they sped off silently into the dusk.
From every direction mosques started to wail the plaintive summons for maghreb prayer. Glass-fronted officer towers glinted pale colours of thankful relief in the orange aftermath of the sun’s setting. Madinat Al-Aasima was a city of whitewashed buildings, large, beetle-shelled American cars, few pedestrians and fewer women.
They took a five-lane motorway leading out of the city and into the bare rocky hills behind.
Sophie asked for news of Omar; Hasan, as ever, was monosyllabic with his replies.
After a half-hour drive they arrived in front of a pair of black metal gates inlaid into a high stone wall. The driver pressed a key on his mobile and the gates drew back automatically. Behind the gates two uniformed, armed guards watched sullenly as the Mercedes purred up the raised drive to stop in front of a flight of white marble steps.
Sophie waited for the chauffeur to open her door and gasped in amazement when Hasan walked round to join her on the steps leading up to the entrance.
There were no walls. The mansion was quite simply carved backwards into the rock of the hillside, the sort of fantastical, reclusive retreat favoured by all the corniest of Hollywood megalomaniacs. The luxury of the front lobby was uncompromising. Carpets of similar texture and design to those in the Oxford mansion adorned the marbled floor and bare rock walls. The lighting, as ever with Al-Ajnabi, was dim and discreet.
Hasan ushered her through several rooms that pierced through the heart of the hillside before opening onto a wide, marbled terrace overlooking a sheer drop into the dark valley below.
Omar was sitting there. He was wearing casual western clothes; the habitual crystal of whisky glinted in the candlelight, cupped in his right hand.
‘What can I offer you, Sophie?’ he asked without averting his gaze from the dark drop below. ‘You will find that my drinks cabinet pays no attention to the restrictions imposed upon my compatriots.’
Hasan summoned an Indian servant and Sophie ordered a beer. When they were alone, Omar asked his young guest for the details of her flights, but seemed little interested in listening to her replies. Sophie noted the stilted formality that had returned to his voice. That was always a bad sign.
It didn’t take long to exhaust trivial conversation; in any case, Sophie soon lost all appetite for frivolity when she sensed his restlessness. Omar stayed silent for some time, peering intently into the valley below before moving to the far end of the terrace, where he started to pace back and forth. From high up on the darkness an eerie screeching cry pierced the void, a bird of prey, perhaps?
‘I will be leaving for the city early tomorrow morning,’ Omar announced abruptly. ‘And you will not see me before evening. However, Hasan will be here to attend to your needs. He will show you the swimming pool, and anything else you may require. At midday he will bring you to a TV lounge, where I would like you to watch very carefully an event that will be screened live on our local TV station. Promise me that you will watch it through to its conclusion, whatever feelings it may inspire in you.’
‘You’re asking me to make another false commitment, Omar. Shouldn’t you at least tell me what it is I’m going to see before you make me stick to a promise?’
He glared at her for some time, the whites of his eyes now and then catching a flicker of candlelight, like ship wreckers’ lanterns on a rocky promontory. ‘No,’ he replied emphatically. ‘Explanations will come later. Tomorrow evening you will know why.’
‘So you’re not going to tell me anything about this ‘event’?’
‘It will explain itself easily enough. Just remember one thing, Sophie: however shocking or repulsive you may find what you will see, I urge you to watch carefully to the very end. Try as hard as you can to become a detached observer; look beyond the specific circumstances to the greater issues involved. I assure you, you will learn more from this one spectacle than from reading any of the university texts you may have brought with you.’
She shrugged with confusion. ‘If this ‘event’ is really so important, why won’t you be watching it with me, Omar?’
Sarcasm had crept back into her tone. The tenderness of the night before in Oxford seemed further away than the sum of all the miles she had flown.
‘Oh, I will be watching,’ he smiled bitterly. ‘But not here. Now, dinner is ready, I think. Will you follow me?’
He said it with all the curt hostility in which he usually dropped cumbersome conversations. Sophie knew she would get no more from him for now.
The dining room, or dining cave, was the heart of the lair. More than ever, Sophie had the impression that she was sitting at the epicentre of a magical domain. There were no windows, apertures or decorations in the bare rock. Rugs and cushions were strewn in casual abandon over the floor; torches had now replaced the ubiquitous candles to wrestle with the fidgeting darkness.
They both ate little, talked even less. Sophie picked at the superb food, appetite killed by Omar’s return to sullen malevolence. He was scheming again. They were back to the cool hostility of the early meetings.
She stood up while he was still eating and asked to be shown to her room. He rang a bell, muttering the briefest goodnight when the Indian servant appeared.
******
Madinat Al-Aasima: October 24: 11:00 a.m.
Thank God it was only a quick in-and-out job, Douglas Easterby consoled himself when the chauffeur from the Ramli Ministry of the Interior collected him at the airport. He had an evening booking for the British Airways night flight that would get him back to Heathrow by tomorrow morning. Never a pleasant destination at the best of times, on this occasion Ramliyya seemed ever closer to a life-like recreation of Hell.
The driver took him to a private mansion near the Red Sea, towards the northern fringe of the city. The owner, the driver informed him, was Prince Fahd, the minister of the interior.
Inside, the prince subjected his guest to the usual interminable ritual of cardamom coffee and dates. The hook-nosed host’s English was limited; Easterby began to fidget, bored of the present and apprehensive about what was to follow.
Shortly before noon, the pudgy Ramli prince scooped himself from the French antique sofa and urged his guest to follow him outside. In the comfort of the host’s chauffeur-driven Bentley, the two men headed downtown along broad, palm-fringed roads. It was Friday, holy day. Noon. The most important of the week’s thirty-five prayers.
The first mosques were already seething at the minarets. Robed and bearded figures strode sombrely along empty pavements to fulfil their pious duty. Easterby recognized the lagoon and huge jet fountain at th
e heart of the city’s commercial centre. On the other side of the lagoon stood the largest and most ornate of Madinat Al Aasima’s many mosques, its gold-plated minarets shimmering in the noon heat.
The chauffeur approached a cordon of policemen guarding the only entrance to the mosque’s spacious car park. The police ranks broke respectfully before the prince’s plates, and the Bentley pulled up in the far corner, next to the mosque. In no hurry to proceed with an unwelcome duty, Easterby waited for the chauffeur to finish with Prince Fahd before his own door was pulled open to reveal what would become an amphitheatre with no lions and no gladiators, just two men and one sword.
In no time the colonel’s collar started to stick uncomfortably to the base of his neck. But it wasn’t just the thirty-eight degree heat that induced the heavy sweating. In the intense glare of the Ramli midday, Easterby was rapidly losing appetite for an event he would have paid handsomely to watch only twenty-four hours before.
Other VIP cars joined their position in the inner sanctum. A mixture of robed and uniformed Ramlis greeted the colonel coolly, each maintaining a reserve worthy of the occasion.
From the mosque’s loudspeakers, the muezzin was working his sermon to its frenzied conclusion. Easterby listened to the censorious ranting that seemed to search out unseen faults hiding undiagnosed inside the hearts of the early onlookers.
The colonel had seen death often enough during his army days, but always only the placid aftermath of death. Twisted bodies, however gruesomely mutilated, had the decency to lie calm and still before the onlooker’s eyes. This was something quite different, an invitation to witness the agony of death, the split-second of transition from animated life to component parts. And even after all the headaches Goss had so recently thrust upon him, the colonel would have preferred to read of his former sergeant’s public beheading over Times and toast in the comfort of his Oxshott mansion. This was all too premeditated, and Easterby’s disciplined stomach was starting to mutiny.
The colonel stood waiting beside the growing line of Ramli officials, feeling hotter and guiltier as the noonday prayer chanted away Goss’s last minutes. The sodden collar and tie constricted his throat with a will of their own. Pull yourself together man! he admonished himself. Once the prison van gets here, it will all be over in minutes. All the barbaric horror will seem worth enduring once you’re safely back in London and the ink dries on the new contracts. And why sweat for Goss? After all, it’s no more than the ugly brute deserves. And convenient too, for there would be other secrets buried along with Goss’s mutilated carcass in the dust of Ramliyya.
Judging by the succession of Allah Akbars, the midday prayer was nearing conclusion. Streams of excited, bearded spectators began to pour from the raised steps of the mosque and flood to the barriers around the car park. Easterby remembered someone telling him that Ramli prisoners were always blindfolded for execution. At least Goss wouldn’t catch sight of his former commanding officer standing callously to attention in front of the hostile crowd.
The babble of voices around the car park rose in crescendo. The crowd had spotted the prison van entering the car park, flanked by an escort of police cars.
At first the rear door of the prison van remained closed. Four policemen broke from the security cordon, hurried to the front of the van and hauled out a large green mat, which they carried into the centre of the parking lot. They unfurled the rug clumsily, with a good deal of puffing and gesticulation. A fifth man crowned their efforts with a transparent length of plastic sheeting.
Looking to the left of the van, Easterby set eyes for the first time on the executioner, a tall, dark man dressed in white robes. Hanging limp in his right hand was a long, thin sword, its blade looking implausibly narrow for the chunky neck it was soon to bite.
Finally, the rear door of the prison van swung open, and to his horror, Easterby found himslef looking straight into Goss’s face, red, uncovered and bulldog angry.
Goss jumped out as he might have bailed out of a plane, thrashing his manacled hands into the air in a whirlwind of testosterone energy. His eyes furiously scanned the ranks of his tormentors. Then he saw his target. His chest puffed out, his face reddened, and the roar came all the louder for the abrupt silence of the minaret.
“Cuuurrrnnell! Cuurrrnell Eeesterbeee, you bastard! I know what you did. I know you set me up, you scum! You’ll rot in hell for this, Colonel! You’ll rot in bloody hell!”
It took five of the puny Ramli policemen to restrain the fearsome sergeant as Goss summoned up every last reserve of raw strength to fight against his fate. The Ramli crowd had evidently never seen anything like it before. Some murmured in outrage, others with unreasoned fear.
Two more policemen rushed up to help. Now and then Goss jumped up to shoulder height, kicking anywhere he could, lashing into the policemen’s heads and chests. The group staggered to and fro across the car park, propelled by Goss’s blasts of blind fury. Easterby felt his leg muscles start to twitch as more policemen arrived.
The struggle intensified, but as the protagonists edged step by step closer to the green mat, Goss’s prodigious strength began to fade and his breath came in convulsions. Finally, he sank defeated to his knees, a spent and gasping force in the outrageous noonday heat. The policemen saw their chance and rushed to scoop the prisoner up, frenziedly bundling him the final few yards onto the green mat before desperation could summon up final, untapped reserves of strength.
Goss must have known at that moment that he was beaten, but with one final spit into the eye of the storm he let out a pitiful howl, raging against the injustice of his fate, raging against the whole world, the next world, and, above all, against the man who was sending him there.
******
Sophie shot up from her chair. There was no longer any need to ask Hasan for a translation of the Arabic commentary. The shocks were pounding too quickly one after the other. First the prison van and the swordsman. Then the British prisoner screaming his furious abuse loud and clear across the airwaves. And the name he was shouting! Surely it couldn’t be the same? Wait a minute… The camera switched angles. Oh my God, it is! That’s Marcus’s father, Colonel Easterby, standing with the Ramli officials below the steps of the mosque!
She froze on the balls of her feet; her mouth tasted dry. She wanted to tear herself away from the gruesome spectacle, but found herself powerless, for morbid curiosity was stronger than fear. Surely someone would stop it all? Colonel Easterby, for example? Whatever insults the condemned man had just heaped on Marcus’s father, a respectable man like the colonel could never stand by and watch a fellow countryman put to the sword.
Or maybe Omar was going to stop it? Yes, that was it! Omar had gone to stop the execution. But then she remembered the true nature of the man she was portraying as silent rescuer and she shuddered despite the hot flush on her face. Oh my God, it’s got to be him! Yes, it’s all Omar’s doing! He dragged me here to see this. And the irony is, I don’t even want to know why. I just wish he were standing right here in front of me now so that I could scratch his eyes out.
The man on the mat had given up the struggle. Triumphant in the victim’s inevitable defeat, the TV camera now focused in close-up on his fat, sweaty face. The lips were mumbling, the eyes hazy, chest heaved in deep, sobbing gasps. Now came the swordsman. A cold terror paralyzed Sophie, making her cheek muscles tingle and her neck stiffen.
But just then the camera swung round again. Instead of gloating on the pathetic figure of the condemned man, an amateurish hand swung it in wild orbit across the crowd, where it swooped in gruesome detail onto Marcus’s father’s face.
Colonel Easterby looked sweat-soaked and haggard. His eyes were roving anywhere but straight ahead into the car park. Suddenly, they froze on something forty-five degrees to the right across the car park. The camera captured an indescribable look of shock and horror that could have won any number of photojournalism awards, so still and intense was the flabbergasted expression on the Marcus’s
father’s face. And that single still hit Sophie with a dread and revulsion far greater than anything she had witnessed in the car park so far.
She heard sandal slaps on the bare stone floor behind her. Hasan was standing next to her, for Sophie could smell his distinctive perfume. He stretched out a hand and grasped her wrist with feverish intensity, but neither of them looked round. It was one of those instinctive things—she could feel Hasan’s fear palpitating in heartbeats stronger than her own. But in her own alarm, she gave no thought to why the detached, unemotional Somali should suddenly have become so upset.
Back on screen, the camera had flipped position yet again to catch the climax of the drama. The commentator had stopped speaking; the crowd, too, was heavily silent.
The strength of Hasan’s grip on her wrist mirrored the swordsman’s next few movements. Two steps forward. Sophie caught a flash of the thin blade. More pressure on her wrist. Swordsman standing arm’s length from prisoner. Abrupt stop. He seemed to be hesitating.
Wrist now starting to burn. Executioner gives prisoner abrupt prod into small of back with point of sword. Prisoner’s head bobs up out of shoulders. Glint of steel in the sun. Sword arm thrashes down. Head rolls from shoulders, landing lazily, almost comically on the mat. Hasan’s grip now burning her wrist. Prisoner’s torso still kneeling in macabre upright position. Dark blood pulsing from base of neck, spewing in soft jets onto the plastic sheeting on the top of the rug. Body still kneeling.
Stop it!’ Sophie shrieked at Hasan, struggling to pull her wrist from his grip. He let go, and Sophie saw the emotional turbulence boiling over on his face. He took a step towards her and clasped her in a tight hug. But there was nothing sexual in the embrace. It was the passion of life, the passion to be alive and to have survived death. Life and nothing but.