“No, everything’s taken care of.” He opened an envelope and took a document out. “I’ll return your pilot’s license.”
It was an excellent forgery, but Hussein made no comment on that. “My thanks. Flying down to Hazar, how long would it take in such a plane?”
“Two and a half hours, maybe three. How experienced are you at desert flying?”
“I’ve flown many times in Morocco and Algeria.”
“This is the Empty Quarter. Winds of great force can come out of nowhere, so be careful.”
“I have flown in the area south of here and I’m familiar with the landmarks and the airport.”
“Good. Anyway, I photocopied a section of the map for you, just in case you need it-the route there and the airport between Hazar town and the small coastal village of Kafkar on the bluff overlooking it.”
“Thank you. Right, let’s get on board,” Hussein ordered Jasmine and Sara. They went up the steps, followed by Khazid. Hamid and Hussein passed weaponry up to him, several AK rifles, some Uzi machine pistols and assault bags loaded with ammunition and grenades and three or four shoulder-fired missiles.
“Are you guys expecting a war or something?”
“I thought there was always a war of some kind in the Empty Quarter.”
“That’s true.”
“My family is Rashid Shipping. As I’m sure you know, piracy is not unheard of.”
“Tell me about it. If you’d just sign the manifest, you can be on your way.”
Hussein was the last to board, heaving up the steps and closing the hatch behind him.
Jasmine and Sara had already discovered a large basket and were examining it. “Plenty of food in here and good bread,” Jasmine said. Sara opened another one and took out a bottle. “You can tell he was American,” she said. “Wine, red and white, whiskey and brandy. Hardly what the Prophet, whose name be praised, would recommend.”
“I’ve always found the Prophet very understanding,” said young Hamid, who had been an artist before taking up the gun.
“Well, each man makes his own arrangements.” Hussein eased himself into the pilot’s seat. He unfolded the map Grant had given him and Sara said, “Can I get in the copilot’s seat?”
“Why not.”
She did and he said, “You can help navigate. Just follow the red line that the American, Grant, has drawn.”
“What’s this?” she asked and ran her finger a good hundred miles or more along the line.
“Saint Anthony’s Hospice. It’s a Christian monastery that’s served the trunk road across the desert since before Islam. There are only twenty or thirty men there now, Greek Orthodox in strange black robes. Fifty miles further on is the Oasis of Fuad with what’s called Saint Anthony’s Well. In ancient times, they served travelers of all religions.”
He pressed the starter and the engines rattled into life, first the port, then the starboard. “Fasten your seat belts,” he called, as he boosted speed and they roared down the runway. Sara was excited and grabbed his arm.
“Oh, this is so thrilling.” She stared out at great mountains of sand dunes extending into infinity.
“A bit different from Baghdad.”
“Oh yes, very different. No war.”
He leveled out at ten thousand feet and put the automatic pilot on. Although there was air conditioning, on such an old plane it was not perfect. Hussein was wearing dark aviator’s sunglasses and a tan suit of fine Egyptian linen. He removed the jacket and revealed a shoulder holster under his left armpit holding a Beretta pistol.
Sara looked upon him. Hussein had been very careful in his dealings with her during the months she had been at the villa. As far as he was concerned, she knew nothing of his background other than the fact that he’d attended Harvard to qualify as a doctor and the war had prevented it.
But she was a remarkably astute young lady, soon to be fourteen, as she was fond of pointing out to people, and could not fail to notice the enormous respect with which he was treated by other people, and not just at the villa. Even important politicians and imams treated him as special. The truth was that she loved her father very dearly and he had been the most important man in her life. He had strong principles; you somehow took it for granted that anything he did was exactly the right thing for you. No argument needed.
Hussein was exactly the same. By religion, she had been baptized and raised as a Christian. She had no intention of changing that, although she had never argued about it with her grandfather, being perceptive enough to realize it would get her nowhere, and intelligent enough to understand she was embroiled in a complicated problem. She liked Hussein very much as her cousin, but the idea that at an appropriate age it would lead to marriage was something she had no intention of taking seriously. Her father would find a solution; all she had to do was wait.
The war, of course, was the war, but she was in a strange position. It was on the television every time you turned it on and it was also on the streets, very real, and it wouldn’t go away. Even the death of her grandfather had failed to shock her. Many members of the household staff had been killed on the streets one way or another during her time in Baghdad.
The young men were already sampling wine behind her. When they offered a glass to Hussein, he refused, pointing out that he was flying, but he accepted salad sandwiches in leavened bread and sat eating a couple with Sara, who noticed that when his right trouser leg slid up a little it disclosed an ankle holster containing a Colt pistol. When she asked what it was for, he made light of it, stressing that though it was hardly likely that anything would go wrong, there were Arabs down there whose lives were hardly formal.
On the other hand, he omitted to mention that an ankle holster was the mark of the true professional.
For the moment, she was content and quite thrilled, and gradually, her head went back and she dozed.
CHARLES FERGUSON’S COUSIN, Professor Hal Stone, a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and Hoxley Professor of Marine Archaeology, had what was common to most academics in his profession: an almost total lack of money with which to conduct any kind of significant research.
At Hazar, a diving operation on a World War II freighter had disclosed beneath it a Phoenician trading ship of Hannibal ’s era. He could afford only one or two annual visits using local Arab divers operating from an ancient boat called the
The phone call from Ferguson had sent the good professor into a frenzy of delight. When he wasn’t there, he employed his Arab foreman, a man named Selim, as caretaker. He phoned him with the news that he would be arriving and packed hurriedly.
He hadn’t felt so cheerful in a long time and it wasn’t only because of the prospect of diving. His dark secret was that as a young man, he had worked for the Secret Security Services, and was well aware of the kind of thing Ferguson and his minions got up to. To be involved delighted him.
“Transport provided?” he asked Ferguson.
“Of course. We’ve got a Gulfstream these days. The boys will have to get rid of the RAF rondels. We’ll call it…a United Nations Ocean Survey. That sounds good.”
“Absolutely. So… the reason your people are going there. What is it this time?”
“Come by my flat and I’ll fill you in.”
Stone hung up and checked himself in the wardrobe mirror. The man who looked out at him was in his sixties, tanned, white-bearded, wearing a khaki bush jacket, khaki shirt and slacks and a crumpled bush hat. He produced a pair of dark Ray-Ban sunglasses.
“That’s better,” he said. “Not exactly Indiana Jones, but not bad. Here we go again then.”
He opened the door to his rooms, got a bag in each hand and left.
ROPER HAD HAD A FEW PROBLEMS running to earth the details of the charter plane flying from Kuwait with
