Manhunt Is My Mission

by Stephen Marlowe

  “Stays dead?”

  “Sure. He’d have to kill the king—really kill him this time—before anyone learns he’s still alive. And with the army back of him he could do it.” I scowled. “But look at it from the king’s point of view. Somewhere there had to be the right people, people Khalil knew he could still trust, otherwise we wouldn’t be flying to Qasr Tabuk.”

  “You’ve lost me there,” Dr. Capehart said.

  “He’s stricken with acute appendicitis, El Thamad is clued in on it, but he still sends for you. Any idea why? If Khalil wasn’t among friends, that would give El Thamad a golden opportunity to kill him or just let him die anyway and keep the assassination story intact. So you’ve got to figure Khalil’s among people who want him to stay alive. Who, I don’t know.”

  “Of course!” Dr. Capehart cried suddenly. “The Qasr Tabuk Giants!”

  “Now you’ve lost me,” I said. “The which?”

  “The Royal Bodyguard. There are, I think, five hundred of them. They’re incredible specimens, most of them close to seven feet tall. Like the Janissaries of the old Ottoman Empire, they’re orphans trained from birth to be fanatically loyal to the king. Khalil managed to reach them before he was stricken. He must have.”

  “Okay, try it this way. To pluck all the prizes out of the power grab-bag, El Thamad announces the king’s death prematurely. The bomb fizzles, Khalil hears the announcement and goes home to his Giants, tail between his legs. Then along comes the appendix thing. The Giants drag in the royal sawbones, and he shakes his head. The Giants put their heads together and come up with a name—yours. They can’t get in touch with you, though. But they know someone who can.”

  “El Thamad.”

  “That’s right. El Thamad. They give him the picture and tell him to bring you back to Qasr Tabuk. He’s got to play along with them. Five hundred fanatics armed to the teeth could cause him plenty of trouble in the first days of the new regime. What he hopes is that you’ll play ball with him. He does everything he can to save the king’s life, but the king dies. If that happens, he’s home free.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting the assassination that wasn’t? How does he explain that?”

  “Search me. Maybe he figures he’ll have time to dream up a new story. Maybe he even hopes to convince the Royal Bodyguard to ‘cling to the cord of Islam and be united.’”

  “We’ll find out when we reach the palace,” Dr. Capehart predicted.

  “No we won’t. At least, not if you save Khalil’s life.”

  “With El Thamad looking over my shoulder?”

  “With the Qasr Tabuk Giants looking over his?”

  Dr. Capehart massaged his hands together and smiled. In the near-darkness of the DC-3’s cabin, his eyes gleamed. He said: “Can you tell me why you talked me into this?”

  “You sorry?”

  “No, but I’d like to know. Once he let Taggert get a line on us, El Thamad’s hands were tied. We could have turned El Thamad down with a pretty good chance of getting away with it.”

  “That was before the big cheese up there found out the king was still alive.”

  “Even so.”

  The engines droned and changed their pitch. We banked hard right, and I saw the port running light rise with the wing.

  “Well?” Dr. Capehart insisted.

  “Let it lie,” I growled. “There are some things you don’t talk about.”

  “It was because of what happened to Falcon Pasha, wasn’t it? And because you thought he’d have wanted us to do what we’re doing?”

  We lost altitude fast. I felt my ears pop and swallowed hard to relieve the pressure. Almost, I could hear Falcon Pasha’s officers singing in the pre-dawn light. A brave man dies, and some small part of you dies with him.

  Sentimental bastard, I thought, what’s with your hard-guy reputation?

  Fifteen minutes later we landed in Qasr Tabuk.

  13

  TO GET THERE, you drive from the airport clear across Qasr Tabuk and a short distance out on the desert beyond. Then suddenly in the moonlight the crenelated walls of the palace of the Khalili looms. It was an ancient structure, built around the time of the Alhambra in Granada, and in less violent times, tourists came from Jordan and Lebanon and even Israel to see it.

  The Khalili had inherited it late. King Khalil’s grandfather had fortified the walls with cannon, his father had installed twentieth-century plumbing, and Khalil himself—taking his cue from the Greek shipowner’s white yacht—had built a hospital and a small operating room in that part of the palace that had been called the Court of Lions for five hundred years. Guns, to toilets, to a hypochrondriac’s whim; maybe the successive stages of palace improvements were symptomatic of the decline of the Khalili.

  We drove ten miles from the airport in a motorcade with sirens screaming and outriders on powerful motorcycles trailing their choking plumes of dust. Dr. Capehart and I couldn’t talk. El Thamad shared the back of one of the royal, armor-plated Cadillacs with us. I didn’t know if we could monkey wrench his second assassination attempt. That would depend on the Qasr Tabuk Giants.

  Dr. Capehart kept rubbing his hands together and darting glances out either side of the Caddy at the moonlit desert. He was nervous. I couldn’t blame him. If he operated and Khalil lived, El Thamad would never let us leave the palace alive. If he operated and Khalil died, the Qasr Tabuk Giants might decorate the walls of Khalili Palace with our heads.

  When we drove through the wall into the palace grounds, Dr. Capehart winced. The great iron gates clanged shut behind us. Allah, as compassionate as the desert and as merciful as an executioner, watched us climb out of the Caddy.

  “Strong soap and hot water. Plenty of it,” Dr. Capehart said crisply. His attitude had changed once we entered the washroom adjacent to the surgery. Steam billowed from the cast-iron sink as he scrubbed his own hands. Watching El Thamad and me wash, he rolled on tight, thin surgical gloves. He conferred in Arabic with a stoop-shouldered old man who was the doctor attending the stricken king. The old man kept shaking his head and clucking his tongue. You didn’t have to understand Arabic to know he already had Khalil dead and buried. The gloomier the old man became, the more sure of himself Dr. Capehart seemed to grow. Finally he waved the royal physician aside impatiently.

  “They’ve got the king in ice packs,” he said. “Fever’s high and white blood count very high. There’s a good chance the appendix has already burst. I’m going to operate immediately.”

  “Allah will guide your hand,” El Thamad said.

  “Peritonitis used to be fatal every time,” Dr. Capehart told no one in particular. “But now with wonder drugs … the old man says they’ve got penicillin.…”

  The medical problem completely absorbed Dr. Capehart now. “Where’s that nurse? I want to check out the instruments.”

  The nurse appeared. Dr. Capehart was jabbering away at her in Arabic as they disappeared together through the swinging doors of the surgery. King Khalil hadn’t been wheeled through on his stretcher yet. El Thamad glanced at me and at the doors of the surgery, then pushed through them like the heavy in a TV western going through the batwings of a saloon on a false-front street.

  I had two visitors in the washroom, one right after the other. The first was a man named Omar Al Hadji Something or Other. He wore a white uniform with gold epaulets, gold buttons, a gold belt and the only pair of gold leather boots I have ever seen. He just missed making George Mikan look like a midget. He wasn’t eight feet tall and they didn’t have to widen the washroom doorway to accommodate his shoulders, but that was because he came through it sideways. In English a little better than my Swahili, of which I have none, he told me he was the commanding officer of the Qasr Tabuk Giants.

  He grabbed my arm up near the shoulder and grinned at me. His teeth looked the size of ice cubes.

  “You the doctor are?” he boomed.

  “Wrong,” I said. “But if I was and if you didn’t lego my arm, we’d have to call th
e operation off. I couldn’t operate with gangrene.”

  “Good,” he boomed. “You the doctor are.”

  I wiggled my arm. He showed me his ice cubes again and let go. “I happy are, you know it,” he said.

  “I know it,” I said.

  “Save king,” he shouted.

  “Try,” I shouted.

  He stopped grinning and managed to bring his voice down to a dull roar. “I unhappy, you go smash.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Effendi doctor go smash,” he said stubbornly, and for some reason patted my arm almost delicately. “El Thamad friend effendi doctor?” he asked.

  I took a chance. I snarled, “Hell, no.”

  The ice cubes almost came out of their tray. “Is good. In Lion Court El Thamad watching him.”

  “Who?” I said.

  He bludgeoned my chest with a forefinger the size of a large cucumber. “Him,” he said, meaning me. “Outside, Omar Al Hadji watching El Thamad. Him need, him call. No?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I unhappy El Thamad,” he said in a stage whisper they would have heard clear out to the bleachers in Yankee Stadium. Then he stationed himself in a corner of the washroom, patted the golden holster at his side and crossed his arms over his chest like a wooden Indian.

  My second visitor was the Thousand and First Night of the Tales of the Arabian Nights, the one that made the thousand other nights worthwhile.

  She was a little thing, and very much brunette. Her long hair, that hung down almost to her waist, was the lustrous black which looks blue in strong light. She wore a white silk robe and sandals. One wide sleeve of the robe she held in front of the lower half of her face. It was the sort of intensely dramatic, beautiful face they seem to have stopped making when silent pictures went out. The eyes were large and the same blue-black as her hair. The brows were thick and arched so that she always seemed on the verge of asking a question. The white silk robe clung to her high sharp breasts but tented the rest of her formlessly. She looked as nervous as an ingénue taking a screen test.

  “Are you the American doctor?” she asked. Her voice was low, husky and loaded with inadvertent sex appeal. Looking at her, I wouldn’t have expected anything else.

  “No,” I said. “But I’ll be in there with him. I’m his friend.”

  “I shouldn’t be here, I know,” she said. “But I had to come. What’s your name?”

  I told her and she repeated it, making Chester Drum sound like a vocal caress. That was inadvertent too. There was nothing meretricious about her. “I am Princess Farat,” she told me.

  “His daughter?”

  “No, Mr. Drum. I came here to marry King Khalil. I am of the Husseini in Jordan. Is the king going to die?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “And I,” Princess Farat said so softly I could barely hear the words, “don’t know if I should ask Allah for his life or for his death.”

  The sleeve of the robe fell. A slender arm appeared and a small hand flew to her red lips. “I don’t know why I said that,” she murmured. “I did not mean it. Of course I want him to live.” She spoke rapidly now, arguing with herself: “We will marry, and the Husseini and the Khalili will be one, and some day our children will rule all the land from Jordan to the sea.” She asked: “Is he very fat?”

  “The king? Don’t you know him?”

  “I have never seen Khalil, no.”

  “Me neither,” I said, and watched how her grave, dark eyes filled with tears.

  “Of Khalil there are so many stories,” she told me. “That he is fat and slothful. That he drinks himself into a stupor each night. That he has … habits which only a slave-girl would satisfy … that he …”

  Her face flushed. She knuckled a tear away from one eye. “If he lives I will be his wife. I don’t know him. I don’t know him. My life will be over, my life will be his life, and I have never met him. Have you ever been to Switzerland?”

  “No.”

  “I went to finishing school there. In Montreux. For two years only, but I learned French and English and the ways of the West,” Princess Farat said. “In the West even a girl from the poorest quarter of the city can choose her mate, but here, though I am the daughter of a Husseini, or perhaps because I am the daughter of a Husseini, I must cloak my spirit in purdah. Do you have a wife in America who selected you as you selected her? Who loves you?”

  “I’m not married,” I said.

  “I am twenty,” she said. “I am twenty and a princess. He is fifty and a king. He is fifty and fat and they say …” She was crying openly now, and not caring. “Shall I ask Allah for his life or for his death? Can you tell me that?”

  I couldn’t tell her. I said nothing. Omar Al Hadji stood in his corner motionless.

  Princess Farat said: “You must forgive me … in the women’s patio of the palace they are teaching me, I will be ready for the delight of the king if he lives … I have never talked like this before, like a wadi all year dry under the cruel sun and then suddenly in the mountains it rains and the water comes flooding down.…” Her voice trailed off. Her big eyes looked at me. I felt as helpful as a slab of cement.

  Doing an emotional about-face, she asked: “Will he like me? I am only twenty and except for Montreux have not lived outside the palace walls in Amman, and he is fifty and knows Monte Carlo and Paris and the Riviera. Will he like me?” She “shook her head. “If he lives? If he lives …”

  Just then an old battle-ax in a black robe and with a face like a blob of putty with two eye-holes poked deep in it stalked into the room. She jabbered at Princess Farat. She gave me the kind of look that was supposed to dehydrate me and make me slither out under the door. Princess Farat’s eyes flashed. She jabbered back at the old battle-ax, arms akimbo. The battle-ax turned to Omar Al Hadji and did some more jabbering. She pointed at Farat and the doorway. Omar Al Hadji stared three feet over her head disdainfully. The battle-ax stalked out again. Princess Farat stayed put. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw Omar Al Hadji winking at me.

  In a little while the nurse came through the swinging doors and gave me a white surgical gown and mask. Princess Farat touched my arm lightly and smiled at me. Her lips were trembling.

  I followed the nurse into the operating room.

  14

  WITH HIS HEAD LOWER than his body and legs on the tilted operating table, King Khalil resembled a man seen feet-first in a trick mirror.

  The royal physician hovered anxiously over his face, dripping chloroform onto a gauze pad. He wore glasses. His breath rising through the surgical mask, or his sweat, or both, made the glasses fog over. He took them off and stared owlishly at Dr. Capehart, who had just taken a scalpel from the nurse’s tray of instruments.

  Under the bright overhead light, the scalpel flashed in Dr. Capehart’s hand. A thin red line followed the scalpel three inches down the royal abdomen. El Thamad’s gray face hovered close.

  Dr. Capehart cut again, like a draftsman drawing a line deftly with a red pencil.

  “Clamps,” he said. His eyes never left the incision he had made, never strayed to the leader of the Scourge of Allah hovering across the operating table on the other side of the royal abdomen. El Thamad looked more like a death’s-head than ever, but why should that worry Dr. Capehart? He’d operated before, hadn’t he? Here in Motamar, he’d operated under far more primitive conditions. And death always hovers near a surgeon’s knife, doesn’t it? Waiting for the fatal slip?

  But this time, if it happened, the fatal slip wouldn’t be accidental.

  Cutting through a thick layer of yellowish, blubbery fat, Dr. Capehart exposed the veined wail of the peritoneum. Scalpel poised, he waited a long moment. Red streaks radiated from a point on the peritoneum. You didn’t have to be a doctor to know that blood poisoning had set in.

  Dr. Capehart’s blade slit the peritoneum. Softly the royal physician moaned, as if cold steel had parted the fibers of his own flesh.

 
; I looked at Dr. Capehart’s fingers. Deftly they were tying off veins. They never stopped moving. Under the stretched rubber of the surgical gloves, you could see thick hair, dark and matted, on the backs of those fingers. They say a surgeon’s fingers, like a pianists, should be long and slender. But Dr. Capehart had a truckdriver’s large, heavy hands. His fingers were thick and stubby. They looked powerful enough to bend a horseshoe out of shape.

  On their skill and deftness, King Khalil’s life depended.

  The royal physician said something in Arabic. Dr. Capehart ignored him. The royal physician said something else, complainingly. A quiver passed through King Khalil’s body.

  “Give him more, damn you,” Dr. Capehart said.

  The royal physician stared at the bottle of chloroform, the gauze pad and his glasses, that were on a small table near King Khalil’s head. Then he stared up at Dr. Capehart.

  “No, effendi,” he said.

  It hit me then that El Thamad could have an ally in the operating room. The royal physician, as anesthetist, could administer too much chloroform or not enough. Too much was sure death but about as subtle as using a sledge hammer on the royal skull. Not enough was tricky. The king might survive it and then again he might not. Brought too close to the edge of consciousness, he might die of surgical shock.

  “God damn it, I said more,” Dr. Capehart shouted.

  Three strides brought me to the side of the royal physician. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead like droplets of oil.

  “Pick them up,” I said.

  He looked at the chloroform and the gauze pad, shaking his head.

  King Khalil groaned.