“But damn it all, if they wanted to bomb him—” Falcon Pasha began. Just then a shell hit the roof of the building. Glass shattered in the window. I hurtled sideways and down, landing on one elbow and the base of my spine near the window. A shard of flying glass had ripped open Dr. Capehart’s cheek. He held a handkerchief to his face, stanching the flow of blood. He looked up at the plaster dust sifting down from the ceiling. “A man can get himself killed this way,” he said.
“If they wanted to plant a bomb on the Dakota,” I said, “they wouldn’t do it at Qasr Tabuk. Who’d be their fall guy then?”
“But if King Khalil really has reached Shughur City—”
“Okay, say he’s reached it. But he won’t stay here forever. He’ll watch the mop-up action, then fly back to the capital.”
“Which is when they’ll plant the bomb if they’re going to,” Dr. Capehart nodded. He paced back and forth, restlessly, a big shaggy albino bear, plaster dust white on his head and face and exposed arms. There was a first-aid station two blocks up the street, where the ambulance had been heading. Twice he’d tried to reach it, and twice been driven back by small-arms fire.
Falcon Pasha sent for Williams. “I need a battalion at full strength,” he said. “Take it out of the line if you have to.”
“Couldn’t get you a battalion, sir. We’d never disengage it.”
“Then a company.”
“We could get, I think, two platoons from B Company.”
“Two platoons,” Falcon Pasha said bitterly.
But a few minutes later he gave his instructions to B Company’s commanding officer. They were to break through El Thamad’s lines to the airport. Falcon Pasha scrawled a message for the king.
“You must get through to Khalil,” he told the officer. “What happens in Motamar for the next twenty years may depend on your getting through, and what becomes of all of us here in the harbor area.”
“I understand, sir,” the B Company CO said. He was a freckle-faced and red-haired kid from the north of Ireland. His name was O’Neill. At a quarter after one he left with his two platoons.
At two o’clock the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse said that Galib Azam had come roaring down from the hills with a fresh battalion to attack El Thamad’s tightening ring of steel from the rear. But an hour later an ominous silence cloaked the bright, sun-filled streets around the warehouse, punctuated only by sporadic volleys of rifle fire.
Dr. Capehart used the lull to make a dash for the first-aid station. He was gone less than half an hour. It was so quiet you could hear a donkey braying far off on the outskirts of the city. Falcon Pasha returned from the radio room next door. “No contact,” he said, his voice flat. “No contact with anyone. It’s over, Drum.”
“Not even O’Neill?”
“No. Not even O’Neill.”
Falcon Pasha went to the wall and fiddled with the little pins and the tiny blue pennants which represented his forces on the map of Shughur City. “It took a generation to build the Legion,” he said slowly. “A generation and the kind of cooperation between East and West that can change the World. But Her Majesty’s Government wouldn’t allow us any heavy weapons.” He took a battered box of Turkish cigarettes from his pocket. “Would you like a smoke? I have two left.” We lit up. “El Thamad got his tanks and guns from the U.A.R. A generation to build, Mr. Drum. And a day to destroy.”
That was when Dr. Capehart came back. Without a word or a look at either of us, he sat down at the desk. His head slumped down on his muscular forearms. When he finally spoke, it was so softly you could hardly hear the words. “A hundred wounded men in there. Direct hit. An 88 shell or something bigger. They’re dead. They’re all dead.”
There was a rumbling sound in the street. “Tanks!” Williams shouted from the radio room. We heard the sudden tattoo of rifle fire and looked out the window. Williams was wrong. No tanks came racing past the warehouse, but a single armored car did. Something hurtled from it—a round object on a stick. Then the armored car was gone and the rifle fire died away. Williams went downstairs.
Pretty soon he returned. His face looked strange. His lips worked, but he didn’t speak right away. He stood at the window. In a loud voice he said: “He was smiling. Jesus God, he was smiling.”
“Who, man?” Falcon Pasha demanded. “Who?”
“Captain O’Neill, sir.”
“He’s back? Did he get through?”
“Impaled on a sword,” Williams said, his voice rising. “His head—on one of those curved ceremonial swords that … Jesus God, he was smiling.”
Williams turned away from the window. His lips parted. He almost seemed to be smiling too. Then, rackingly and chokingly, he was sick.
Falcon Pasha was still comforting him when El Thamad’s Scourge of Allah tanks rumbled up in front of the warehouse.
“Your name?” demanded El Thamad. His once-green twill uniform was dusty and looked gray. His sleepy eyes studied me from deep sockets in a gray face. He was a small man, extremely thin, with a head as hairless as a marble statue’s. He had no eyebrows and a small, prim, pessimistic mouth. He spoke English well enough, but the deep voice seemed to, bear no relationship to the gray, bloodless lips that formed the words, as if he was a cleverly animated gadget wired for sound. His skin, even the skin of his hairless head, had a seamed and withered look like leather left too long in the desert sun. I have seen some beauts, but he was the ugliest man I ever met. He could have been forty or four hundred years old. There was no way of telling. The sepulchral voice, the punched-in, half-shut eyes, the withered gray skin that made him look like a black and white photograph in a technicolor world—they gave the overall impression of a corpse that had forgotten to die.
“Your name?” he repeated, and smiled a little because he saw the way I was staring at him.
“Drum,” I said.
“You’re in civilian clothing.”
That wasn’t a question. I didn’t answer it.
“You are British?”
“No. American.”
That got a rise out of him. His eyelids lifted a sixteenth of an inch. “You are in Motamar for what reason?”
I told him what my mission was. His startling ugliness so dominated the room that I was hardly aware of the men seated on either side of him, the two other members of the triumvirate who had that afternoon taken all power in Motamar into their hands. One was Galib Azam; short-cropped hair neatly brushed, uniform-creases sharply pressed, big dark eyes intent, arrogant hawk-nose thrusting as he leaned forward to listen. The other was Baki Osman. He was fat and unkempt, with graying hair, swarthy skin and unctuous eyes that darted nervously in El Thamad’s direction whenever the gray man spoke. He was ugly in the accepted patterns of ugliness, but next to El Thamad he looked like an overweight Adonis.
Galib Azam said something in Arabic. Awaiting my turn before the packing crates that served them as desks in the large basement room of the warehouse, I had seen them confer before as each member of Falcon Pasha’s headquarters staff paraded in front of the packing crates. Osman hardly said a word. When he wasn’t fawning all over El Thamad, he seemed to be waiting for something. But Azam and the gray man conferred on every man brought before them. An impassive Arab in a green-twill uniform took notes. Those already interviewed, British and Motamar Legion officers mostly, had been herded into one corner of the large room. Light from two bare bulbs that must have been five-hundred watters shone down pitilessly on their defeat. A dozen Scourge of Allah soldiers guarded them. They were disarmed. Falcon Pasha had ordered them to throw down their weapons when El Thamad’s mechanized army reached the warehouse.
El Thamad said: “Colonel Azam would like to know who helped Samia Falcon reach Shughur City last night. Did you?”
“Is she here?” I asked blandly.
He brushed the question aside with a gray, leathery hand. “Did you help her?”
“If Colonel Azam wants to know, why doesn’t he ask me?”
“
Dr. Capehart and a woman answering to Samia Falcon’s description and a small boy were driven through the gate last night. They were ordered to stop. They didn’t. The driver of their car was a big man carrying an American passport.”
I shrugged. “Okay. I drove them.”
“Why, Mr. Drum?”
“Because they asked me to.”
He smiled. That made him look like the little warning sign on a bottle of tincture of iodine. “Very well. And where is Samia Falcon now?”
I thought fast. They probably knew the answer to that one already. No reason for Samia’s old man or Dr. Capehart to keep it from them, for Samia was safe in international waters. And if I told them a truth they already knew, they might swallow a lie or two more easily later on. Because I thought I knew what was coming.
“I took her aboard the Oban just before it sailed.”
The death’s-head smile again. “Perhaps you wish you remained aboard with her?”
“What for? I told you why I came to Motamar. I told Colonel Azam last night. It still goes.”
El Thamad tapped Baki Osman’s shoulder. The fat man’s face came to attention—lips stiffening, triple chin jerking up and quivering, nostrils flaring, eyes widening.
“You know this man?” El Thamad asked me.
“Sure. I heard the soldiers talking. He’s Baki Osman.”
“Did you ever see him before?”
“No,” I said, and that was the truth.
“You didn’t see him last night?”
“I wasn’t in Shughur City until a couple of hours before dawn.”
“You didn’t see him in Al Saydr?”
“Right. I didn’t. The first time I ever laid eyes on him was right here.”
“Not at Galib Azam’s house in Al Saydr?”
“I already told you.”
“Then why did you go there?”
“Already told you that too. Ask Azam.”
“At any other time, Mr. Drum, you would delight me. You are so typically American. But for your own good please realize a war was fought and won today.”
“Okay, you named it. If I’m a prisoner of war, all you get is name, rank and serial number. You’ve got them now. What I get is the chance to make a call to the American consul.”
El Thamad didn’t bat an eye. “A paid professional spy in the services of a foreign power—or in your case, of a revolutionary army that was defeated—has no recourse to his consul. He has, in fact, no rights at all.”
“Who was I supposed to have spied on?”
“You used Dr. Capehart as an excuse to visit Colonel Azam last night. There is a ridiculous rumor circulating that an attempt will be made on King Khalil’s life and—”
“Khalil Zindabad!” Baki Osman cried devoutly.
“—the only way that rumor can be circulating here today in Falcon Pasha’s headquarters’ staff is if someone brought it from Al Saydr last night.”
“I guess that means it isn’t so ridiculous.”
“Please don’t fence with me. There are two possible sources of the rumor. Yourself. Or Samia Falcon.”
For the moment Samia was safe, but the Oban wouldn’t be on the high seas forever. El Thamad probably could reach out all the way to England if he had to, and if King Khalil was slated for death at his hands, the gray man wouldn’t be wild about leaving anyone alive who could quote chapter and verse on the assassination plot. But at the moment I was up to my eyes in hot water, and Samia wasn’t. I saw El Thamad watching me: a death’s-head hovering over a packing crate.
I said: “Me or Samia, hell. If there’s any truth to the rumor, it could have been circulated by Azam’s cook or his gardener’s wife’s maiden aunt or his number-one houseboy or his—”
“Everyone else has been accounted for. You or Samia Falcon, Mr. Drum. We want to know which. If your tongue cleaves to your palate, I assure you we have ways to—”
He didn’t get the chance to wax explicit on the Motamar torturer’s art. A man in green twill ran up and shouted something in Arabic, gesturing wildly. Heads swung toward us. The name Khalil was mentioned. Baki Osman lunged to his feet and smote his fat breast and tore at his hair.
Galib Azam got up too. His jaw was clamped tight. Tears of rage welled in his eyes. He was a magnificent actor. Neatly turned out in a fresh uniform complete with riding boots, he strode toward Falcon Pasha and his staff officers. His boots creaked. He took a riding crop from one of them. It was very quiet in the large room.
“King Khalil was on his way back to Qasr Tabuk,” Azam shouted. “A bomb exploded on the royal plane. At the airport they found the assassin. He was almost torn to pieces, but he still lives. He confessed, Englishman. He admitted in whose pay he was. King Khalil is dead. You killed him, Englishman.”
With the last word, Azam brought his riding crop down across Falcon Pasha’s face. Falcon Pasha flinched and backed up a step. He didn’t make a sound. The crop left three red streaks on his cheek. Azam hunched his shoulders and rose on tiptoe and used it again. This time the force of his blow drove Falcon Pasha to one knee. The Englishman looked up. Blood was dripping from his chin. “You can stop acting now, Galib,” he said mildly. “You’ve made your point.”
Azam struck again. Falcon Pasha’s calm seemed to infuriate him.
“I suppose,” Falcon Pasha said, “this is the time I am supposed to say I always tried to be like a father to you.”
When he said that, I was already running. A voice shouted behind me. I reached Azam as he poised the crop for another blow. I wrenched it from his hand. He turned toward me.
The crop seemed to come alive in my hand. It whistled in a savage six-inch arc and lashed against Azam’s enraged face. He wasn’t so stoic as Falcon Pasha. He cried out.
So did Dr. Capehart: “Look out, Drum!”
I turned in time to see a green twill uniform and a pair of elbows and the glossy walnut stock of a rifle.
I swung the riding crop, but the soldier was quicker.
8
THE HEALTHY HEART pumps, and the diaphragm rises and falls, and the lungs fill the chest cavity and contract and fill it again, and the deep red, oxygen-rich blood flows through the body and the limbs, and that part of the brain which lies dormant and mysterious during your waking hours is unfettered to prowl in an alien place during sleep or unconsciousness.
An apparently healthy man dies in his sleep for no reason at all except that his heart stops beating. There are those among the head-shrinkers who say he has dreamed the final nightmare and, just like that, frightened himself to death. They may be right. He will never wake to refute them. Or if he wakes, sweating in the night, adrenals spurting and heart clop-clopping and all of him scared clear off the trolley tracks, the headshrinkers will say he is lucky, he has won, his conscious mind eluded the final nightmare. He lives to dream it again.
What I dreamed about was betrayal. In a world where what you have to sell—aside from a modicum of muscle and a smidgen of brains—is integrity, betrayal is the final nightmare.
“All you have to say …”
I listened. Cock an ear, old cock-of-the-walk Drum. The voice is like oil on stormy waters.
“All you have to say, effendi.…”
The voice is oily.
It rides the waves and slickly soothes them.
Fat man on an oil-slick, lips dripping.
There is light, and then something stings my arm, and Baki Osman’s fat face, wearing the cone of light like a witch’s hat, leers at me.
“His name is Haroun Totah. Opium seller in Shughur City, effendi. But he gambles. He needs the money. He asks Falcon Pasha for the money, and Falcon Pasha says of course, it is written on both our foreheads, it is our kismet. I will pay you the money and you in turn will deliver this bomb to the royal aircraft. And so it is agreed. Greedy and desperate, Haroun Totah delivers the bomb—may Allah smite him and crush his genitals for a thousand times a thousand years. King Khalil is dead.…”
Something stings my arm a
gain. The light goes away. Baki Osman’s, oily voice says: “All you must do is say that you overheard their plans, the Englishman and Haroun Totah, the opium merchant of Shughur City. I swear by Allah and my hope for the fountains of heaven, where honey flows, you will be richly rewarded.”
I see the cone of light once more. It spins and dances, and Osman is there, a fat man, smelling of sweat because—though I can’t see its walls—the room is small and hot, his green uniform blouse ill-fitting, his small plump hands fidgeting with his belt until one of them rises and a fat finger points and another pair of hands appears, steady and precise, and a needle hovers, darts, stings.
Conscious mind eluding the final nightmare. It is no dream. I am conscious.
“You will say … you owe the Englishman nothing … he paid the opium merchant.…”
I sleep, and this time I do not dream. When I wake, parched as the Mahgreb and weak as a kangaroo cub outside the old girl’s pouch, I know I have not been dreaming at all.
My confession would have been window-dressing. They didn’t need it. What they did need they already had, but they took the kangaroo cub to the kangaroo court to watch the proceedings.
What they needed and had was the opium merchant, Haroun Totah.
“Three hours ago at Shughur City airport,” one of the judges began, and an interpreter translated his words into English for the benefit of Falcon Pasha’s officers, who sat under guard on camp chairs in the big basement room and watched their man take his medicine.
After the stage was set, I got my first look at Haroun Totah. The opium merchant was fatter even than Baki Osman. He started talking even before they swore him in. They couldn’t shut him up. Purple and yellow bruises covered his face. His left eye was swollen shut, its lid almost the size and color of a ripe pomegranate. But that was all right. Their story was he had been beaten almost to death at the airport. His story was the one Baki Osman had, tried to sell me. He told it beautifully and with feeling.
Manhunt Is My Mission Page 5