I grabbed the royal physician’s surgical gown near his throat, twisted it and pulled him toward me. His eyes widened. I shook him until his teeth clicked. With my free hand I picked up the bottle of chloroform, pulling the cork with my teeth.
“Maybe you’d like to drink it,” I said.
He shook his head. Fear showed white all around the pale irises of his eyes. I thrust the chloroform bottle into his hand.
When I let go of him he put on his glasses, picked up the gauze pad and went to work.
“That’s enough,” Dr. Capehart said after a while. His powerful hands had never stopped working, as gracefully as a girl’s over the warp and woof of a tapestry.
Fifteen minutes later, Dr. Capehart held up a little red sack the size and shape of a small but swollen finger. Then he ducked his head and was busy again.
From the other side of the operating table, his voice muffled by the surgical mask he wore, El Thamad said:
“The nurse understands only enough English to obey your surgical commands, Doctor. She cannot understand me now. The royal physician, as you have seen, believes as I do—that King Khalil has outlived his usefulness to Motamar. A pity, isn’t it, that you didn’t let the royal physician do your work for you? By now it could all have been over.” He stopped talking. He must have been smiling. The surgical mask moved on his face.
“Will the king live?” he asked.
“I think he has a good chance.”
El Thamad leaned forward. “It is time you made the good chance a very bad chance, Doctor.”
Dr. Capehart said nothing. He slipped strong black gut through the eye of a curved suture.
“No needles yet, Doctor. One time more—the knife.”
Swiftly Dr. Capehart put the first stitch into the abdominal wall.
“Your behavior is quite foolishly, impetuously Western,” El Thamad said chidingly, as if passing casual judgment on Dr. Capehart’s manners at a tea-party. “Assume that you succeed, what happens then? I promise you, you won’t leave Motamar alive.”
Dr. Capehart put in the second stitch.
“And even if you did, would that help King Khalil? Because once you finish here, he will be in the hands of the royal physician.”
Dr. Capehart put in the third stitch.
“Death or life and freedom for yourself. Death either way for the king. Have you any real choice? The knife, Doctor. The knife.”
When Dr. Capehart put in the fourth stitch, El Thamad barked an order at the masked nurse. She looked uncertainly at the royal physician, who nodded his head. She turned and went out through the swinging doors.
“And now, Doctor,’” El Thamad coaxed, “there are no witnesses. A slip of the knife, a doleful statement issued by the royal physician for local consumption, another issued by yourself and Mr. Drum for the benefit of the outside world … and, as I believe you say in America, we are all home free.”
My mouth was dry. I felt the muscles in my forearms tensing and my nails digging into the palms of my hands. Dr. Capehart went on with his stitching. If he didn’t cooperate—and obviously he wasn’t going to—El Thamad would have to make some kind of a move soon. I stood at the foot of the operating table, facing him, ready for anything.
His chin moved down half an inch and then up.
That was when I knew I was facing the wrong way. On entering the palace, we had all been searched by Omar Al Hadji’s Giants. El Thamad couldn’t be armed.
But the Giants wouldn’t have searched the royal physician. The old man had been a member of the palace staff for years.
I turned toward him. He was holding a small automatic in his right hand. It had a mother-of-pearl handgrip. It was no more than thirty caliber, a belly-gun.
“If you refuse to cooperate,” El Thamad said softly, “try this. You have a secret grudge against the king. What it is no one will ever learn because suddenly—here, right now—you plunge your surgical knife into the royal stomach. The royal physician shoots you dead—too late. Mr. Drum attacks him, and the royal physician is forced to use his gun again.” El Thamad seemed to sigh. I realized he was laughing. “Of course in reality the time sequence would be the reverse, you and Mr. Drum dying seconds before, rather than seconds after, the king. But that no one will ever know, as they will never know who actually plunged the knife into the royal stomach.”
It was nifty. You had to give him that. He had us coming and going. Either way the king died, either way El Thamad would be a hero. If Dr. Capehart played ball, the Scourge of Allah’s chieftain had moved heaven and earth to bring the best available help to the stricken king. Should Allah intervene, was that his fault? If Dr. Capehart refused, the Arab gangster still had done his best. Should a mad dog of an infidel suddenly go berserk, was that his fault? Who could read the handwriting on a Western unbeliever’s forehead?
“Which way must it be?” El Thamad asked, his voice barely more than a whisper.
Dr. Capehart’s answer was to thread another suture.
At the same instant I went for the royal physician.
He had time to fire one shot. It went wild. I scooped up the chloroform bottle and smashed it across the side of his head.
He screamed. Glass and chloroform flew. He dropped the gun. El Thamad and I both dove for it—away from the operating table.
That was when Omar Al Hadji burst through the swinging doors like Gulliver in Lilliput.
First he picked El Thamad up, one massive hand on the scruff of his neck and one on the seat of his pants, and shook him. Then, his huge face about an inch from El Thamad’s death’s-head, he said something in Arabic. Whatever it was, he emphasized it by shaking the wielder of the Scourge of Allah until his eyes rolled and only the whites showed. After that, he set El Thamad on his feet in a corner of the operating room. The little gray man stood there. He was shaking, but otherwise didn’t bat an eyelash. You didn’t have to understand Arabic to know what he’d been told: the American doctor is busy sewing up the royal stomach; there can be no disturbance in here. I don’t know who was trying to do what—we’ll smash some heads and find out later—but right now if you flick a pinky you’re a dead man—like that.
By the time Omar came for me, I’d retrieved the royal physician’s belly-gun. I felt hopeful. After all, Omar had gone for El Thamad first, hadn’t he? I felt about as hopeful as a drowning man who spots a ship—twelve miles away on the horizon.
Omar Al Hadji’s mouth gaped in a smile that could have swallowed the belly-gun including my arm up to the elbow. He raised a hand about twice the size of an entrenching tool. I turned the belly-gun around, butt-first, and slapped it against that massive hand. It was like hitting a brick wall with a feather-duster.
“Just testing,” I said. “We’re on the same side, Shorty.”
Omar’s smile widened to show a gold tooth not quite as big as a pack of cigarettes. His fingers closed on the belly-gun and made it disappear. I didn’t move. He didn’t move. I sucked in my gut and stood at attention, but I was up on the balls of my feet. If Omar tried to make like a terrier shaking a rat again, I wasn’t going to be there.
The royal physician wiped a hand against his bloody cheek and started yammering in Arabic. Omar cocked an ear. Dr. Capehart continued sewing the royal stomach. My diaphragm went on doing pushups inside my ribcage—for a while.
“The old man says you tried to shoot the king while I was working on him,” Dr. Capehart told me.
“You tell Shorty here I was searched when I came in. Tell him the old doc wasn’t. Tell him you were brought down from Shughur City by El Thamad to kill the king on the operating table. Tell him when you refused, the old doc pulled a gun. I tried to get it away from him and it went off. Tell him if killing the king was what we had in mind, all you had to do was let the knife slip a fraction of an inch. Make it good, Doc. In words of one syllable and capital letters. If you don’t, it’s liable to be your epitaph.”
Dr. Capehart started talking. He finished sewing and talking at the s
ame time. There were impassioned interruptions from the mouth of the royal physician. El Thamad didn’t say another word. Neither did I.
Time went galloping by like a snail migrating from Alaska to Patagonia.
“I’ve done all I can do,” Dr. Capehart finally said in English. “He has, I’d say, a good chance. I’ve given him two million cc.’s of penicillin. He’ll need more. He’ll also need the best care he can get. He’ll be critical for four or five days. At any time he could either start getting stronger or go out like a light. Fever is still high. Pulse is weak.”
“Fifty-fifty chance?”
“Something like that.”
“How did Shorty take your oration?”
“Like a desert soaking up a drizzle.”
The swinging doors swung again. Two green-clad Scourge of Allah soldiers marched in with their Stenguns. El Thamad smiled.
Two Qasr Tabuk Giants in the palace white and gold marched in behind them. El Thamad stopped smiling.
Omar Al Hadji jerked a thumb the size of a grappling iron in the direction of the doors. The Scourge soldiers looked at El Thamad. When he nodded, they marched out. The royal physician and Dr. Capehart followed them, then the two Qasr Tabuk Giants, then El Thamad and me. Omar salaamed at the inert figure on the operating table, then brought up the rear.
Two white-gowned medics wheeled a stretcher in for King Khalil.
“What happens next?” Dr. Capehart asked me.
I shrugged. “You think Omar believed you?”
He shrugged back at me and peeled off his surgical gloves. “I’d hate to have to play poker with him.”
El Thamad smirked. “Even if he believed you, he can do nothing. He has the palace and five hundred muscle-bound Giants. I have the country, and tanks and planes.”
Princess Farat, who had been waiting outside all that time, came over to me. Her face was pale. It made her grave dark eyes look enormous. “I heard a shot,” she said. “They wouldn’t let me go in. Is the king dead?”
I shook my head and told her what had taken place inside the operating room. “Trouble is,” I finished, “we can’t tell if Omar here bought our story or the royal physician’s.”
“And if he believes Dr. Malik?”
The old man’s head jerked up at the sound of his name. “Then the king will be left in Dr. Malik’s care,” I said bluntly, “and the Doc will be able to kill him at his leisure.”
“That must not happen.”
Omar Al Hadji and El Thamad were talking together. Princess Farat walked to them, her head bowed, her arms stiffly at her sides. Just before she reached them she turned to me. “I am of the Husseini,” she said. “I know what my duty is now.”
Then she was standing in front of Omar Al Hadji, her head barely reaching his chest, and talking softly. Omar listened, and salaamed. After all, if King Khalil lived, the girl addressing him would one day be queen of the realm.
At first I didn’t know what she wanted. Then I did. I’d told her everything that happened inside, including the little detail about the belly-gun.
When Princess Farat stopped talking, she held out her hand. Omar glanced down at it. The princess wanted the belly-gun.
Omar stared over her head. I saw the gleam of his gold tooth. His huge hand covered her small one.
She turned away from Omar holding the belly-gun.
Her hand wasn’t steady. She raised the other one and gripped the butt of the belly-gun with that, too.
El Thamad grunted an order. His two soldiers reached for the Sten guns slung on their shoulders. Omar took a single enormous stride and struck out lazily with his open hand in a motion like a swimmer breast-stroking underwater. The edge of his palm caught one of the soldiers high at the bridge of his nose. The soldier bellowed and hit the wall and fell.
I grabbed the second one’s Sten gun as he brought it off his shoulder, my left hand on the short barrel, my right on the stock. I jerked the left forward and pushed hard with the right. That drove the butt of the gun into the pit of his stomach. He wheezed and collapsed, which left me with the Sten gun. I whirled around, but no one was moving except Princess Farat and she had just come to a stop in front of Dr. Malik, still holding the little belly-gun in both hands. Her dainty slipper-shod feet peeped out below the hem of the white silk robe. A strand of her long dark hair had fallen over her forehead and hid one eye. She said a few words in Arabic, her voice sounding as much like a caress as ever.
Dr. Malik looked like a man who had lost something and was trying desperately to find it. His eyes fastened on Princess Farat. No help there. He swung his head so fast that one ear-piece of his glasses came askew. He fumbled with it and squinted myopically at El Thamad. The Scourge of Allah chief lifted his shoulder in the tiniest suggestion of a shrug. Dr. Capehart and I weren’t the only ones who knew too much. The royal physician could qualify too, and the royal physician had failed El Thamad.
Still looking like a man who had lost something and knew he had only split seconds in which to find it, Dr. Malik turned his myopic stare to Omar Al Hadji. Again I saw the glint of the Giant’s gold tooth.
What Dr. Malik lost was his life.
Princess Farat crouched in front of him, her slim back arched and her hands extended.
The first bullet sent Dr. Malik’s glasses flying and pulped his left eye. His head jerked up. The second entered his neck just below the chin. He stumbled. The third drilled a neat, small round hole in the exact center of his forehead. He was dead by then, but Princess Farat either didn’t know that or didn’t care. Two more shots missed, and then the firing pin clicked three times.
Dr. Malik’s hands clutched at Princess Farat’s silk robe. He folded in front of her, forehead and hands touching the floor, as if prostrating himself to Mecca. She dropped the gun and started to fall. I caught her. She was trembling all over and cold.
“Insh’allah,” El Thamad said.
But I’d had enough of Allah’s wishes. If Allah and his self-styled agent on earth had their way, the least Dr. Capehart and I could expect was to languish somewhere that would have been a great place for throwing old razor blades.
“The hell with that,” I said, thinking out loud.
I had a Sten gun in my hands to back me up.
15
PRINCESS FARAT WAS CLINGING to my left arm and breathing raggedly. “I couldn’t help it,” she said over and over again. “I had to kill him. I couldn’t help it. If I didn’t he would have killed the king. I couldn’t help it.”
Those big eyes of hers looked up at me. She was crying.
“Of course you couldn’t,” I said. “They ought to pin a medal on you.”
Omar Al Hadji sighed, making a sound like a blacksmith’s bellows collapsing. He reached—not very fast and only half-heartedly—for the gold holster on his hip.
“Hold it, Shorty,” I growled at him, raising the Sten gun. “That’s liable to stunt your growth.”
He understood the gesture and the menace of the Sten gun, if not the words. He froze. I backed against the door. Princess Farat came with me, moving like a sleepwalker. She stumbled once. Dr. Capehart supported her.
When I felt hard wood behind my back I realized how crowded the room was. The princess and Dr. Capehart stood near the door with me. The royal physician’s corpse, as corpses will, was bleeding slowly in its corner. El Thamad’s two Scourge of Allah soldiers were showing signs of life. Omar’s pair of royal bodyguards were waiting for orders from their chief. Omar himself, all three-quarters of a ton of him, stood uncomfortably close. El Thamad smirked down at the corpse of the medical henchman who had failed him. The fewer people who knew what El Thamad had planned for the king, the better he’d like it. But with Malik dead that still left two of us, and three if you counted Princess Farat.
The cogs and wheels and gears must have been meshing with precision inside El Thamad’s bald gray dome. We’d known of the bomb attempt, and that was bad enough. We’d been part of the operating room scheme too. If we e
ver got out of Motamar, people would bend an ear. Dr. Capehart was famous. He’d be mugged and printed, and his story reported by every wire service in the Western world. El Thamad still wanted King Khalil dead, but his hands would be tied unless the desert jackals were picking at our flesh first.
Omar we couldn’t trust any further than we could throw, and it would take a derrick just to lift him. The big man had his own future to think of. He’d played ball with us this far and half-heartedly because his first concern was the king’s life. But all he had were five hundred oversized sidekicks and if he leaned too heavily on El Thamad, he’d face an army armed to the teeth. All we could rely on was that he’d do his best to keep Khalil alive. We’d served our purpose. Whether we lived or died meant nothing to him.
As if reading my mind, Dr. Capehart said: “Where do we go from here?”
“Out,” I said.
El Thamad’s smirk left the royal physician’s corpse and fastened on me. “You’d never leave the palace alive.”
“Then you won’t either,” I told him. “You’re coming with us.”
His eyes darted to Omar’s impassive face. You could see what he was thinking: if we took him along as a hostage, that might give Omar the chance to have him killed.
“Make your peace with Shorty,” I suggested. “Because if we don’t get out of the palace alive, you come back in feet-first.”
El Thamad shrugged. “Even if you got out, what then? You don’t seriously think you can make your way to the frontier without being stopped, do you? You don’t have a chance.”
He was right, of course. South of Qasr Tabuk was desert as bone-dry as any in the world. A hundred miles south of that was the Red Sea, but it might as well have been a million. North and east of Qasr Tabuk was a moonscape of soft tufa-stone, its cliffs and crags and eroded mountains guarding the Jordanian frontier. A few roads, and the word was used loosely, twisted and climbed through the mountains. These El Thamad’s soldiers, armed to their molars, would patrol twenty-four hours a day.
“I suggest,” El Thamad said coolly, “that you put down your gun, Mr. Drum, and accept the inevitable. A dead hero,” he added sententiously, “helps no one, least of all himself.”
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