The Fist of God

It was in China, in the company of the sympathetic George Wong, that he cracked it. It was the last equation he would ever solve.

Chapter 2

The big Ram Charger sped down the main highway from Qatar toward Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, making good time. The air conditioning kept the interior cool, and the driver had some of his favorite country-and-western tapes filling the interior with back-home sounds.

Beyond Ruweis, they were out in open country, the sea to their left only intermittently visible between the dunes, to their right the great desert stretching away hundreds of bleak and sandy miles toward Dhofar and the Indian Ocean.

Beside her husband Maybelle Walker gazed excitedly at the ochre-brown desert shimmering under the midday sun. Ray Walker kept his eyes on the road. An oil man all his life, he had seen deserts before.

“Seen one, seen ’em all,” he would grunt when his wife made one of her frequent exclamations of wonderment at the sights and sounds that were so new to her.

But for Maybelle Walker it was all new, and although she had packed enough medications before leaving Oklahoma to open a new branch of Eckerd, she had loved every minute of her two-week tour of the Arabian Gulf— what used to be called the Persian Gulf.

They had started in the north in Kuwait, then driven the off-road loaned them by the company south into Saudi Arabia through Khafji and Al-Khobar, crossed the causeway into Bahrain, then back and down through Qatar and into the UAE. At each stopover Ray Walker had made a perfunctory “inspection” of his company office—the ostensible reason for the trip—while she had taken a guide from the company office and explored the local sights. She felt very brave going down all those narrow streets with only a single white man for an escort, unaware that she would have been in more danger in any of fifty American cities than among the Gulf Arabs.

The sights enthralled her on her first and perhaps last journey outside the United States. She admired the palaces and the minarets, wondered at the torrent of raw gold on display in the gold soukhs, and was awed by the tide of dark faces and multicolored robes that swirled about her in the Old Quarters.

She had taken photographs of everything and everyone so she could show the ladies’ club back home where she had been and what she had seen. She had taken to heart the warning by the company representative in Qatar to be careful of taking a picture of a desert Arab without his permission, as some still believed the taking of a photograph captured part of the target’s soul.

She was, she frequently reminded herself, a happy woman and had much to be happy about. Married almost straight out of high school to her steady date of two years, she found herself wedded to a good, solid man with a job in a local oil company who had risen through the ranks as the company expanded, until he was now finishing as one of the vice-presidents.

They had a nice home outside Tulsa and a beach house for summer vacations at Hatteras, between the Atlantic and Pamlico Sound in North Carolina. It had been a good thirty-year marriage, rewarded with one fine son. And now this, a two-week tour at the company’s expense of all the exotic sights and sounds, smells, and experiences of another world, the Arabian Gulf.

“It’s a good road,” she remarked as they crested a rise and the strip of bitumen shimmered and shivered away in front of them. If the temperature inside the vehicle was seventy degrees, it was one hundred and twenty out there in the desert.

“Ought to be,” her husband grunted. “We built it.”

“The company?”

“Nah. Uncle Sam, goddammit.”

Ray Walker had a habit of adding the single word goddammit when he dispensed pieces of information. They sat for a while in companionable silence while Tammy Wynette urged her to stand by her man, which she always had done and intended to do through their retirement.

Nudging sixty, Ray Walker was taking retirement with a good pension and some healthy stock options, and a grateful company had offered him the two-week, all-expense-paid, first-class tour of the Gulf to

“inspect” its various outstations along the coast. Though he too had never been there before, he had to admit he was less enthralled by it all than his wife, but he was delighted for her sake.

Personally, he was looking forward to finishing with Abu Dhabi and Dubai, then catching the first-class cabin of an airliner aimed directly at the United States via London. At least he would be able to order a long, cold Bud without having to scuttle into the company office for it.

Islam might be all right for some, he mused, but after staying in the best hotels in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and being told they were completely dry, he wondered what kind of a religion would stop a guy from having a cool beer on a hot day.

He was dressed in what he perceived to be the rig of an oil man in the desert—tall boots, jeans, belt, shirt, and Stetson—which was not entirely necessary, as he was really a chemist in quality control.

He checked the odometer: eighty miles to the Abu Dhabi turnoff.

“Gonna have to take a leak, honey,” he muttered.

“Well then, you be careful,” warned Maybelle. “There are scorpions out there.”

“But they can’t leap two feet,” he said, and roared at his own joke.

Being stung on the dick by a high-jumping scorpion—that was a good one for the boys back home.

“Ray, you are a terrible man,” replied Maybelle, and laughed also.

Walker swung the Ram Charger to the edge of the empty road and opened the door. The blast of heat came in as if from the door of a furnace. He climbed out and slammed the door behind him to trap the cool air.

Maybelle stayed in the passenger seat as her husband walked to the nearest dune and unzipped his fly. Then she stared out through the windshield and muttered:

“Oh, my God, would you just look at that.”

She reached for her Pentax, opened her door, and slithered to the ground.

“Ray, do you think he’d mind if I took his picture?”

Ray was facing the other way, absorbed in one of a middle-aged man’s greater satisfactions.

“Be right with you, honey. Who?”

The Bedouin was standing across the road from her husband, having apparently walked out from between two dunes. One minute he was not there, the next he was. Maybelle Walker stood by the front fender of the off- road, her camera in her hand, irresolute. Her husband turned around and zipped himself up. He stared at the man across the road.

“Dunno,” he said. “Guess not. But don’t get too close. Probably got fleas. I’ll get the engine started. You take a quick picture, and if he gets nasty, jump right in. Fast.”

He climbed back into the driver’s seat and gunned the engine. That boosted the air conditioner, which was a relief.

Maybelle Walker took several steps forward and held up her camera.

“May I take your picture?” she asked. “Camera? Picture? Click-click?

For my album back home?”

The man just stood and stared at her. His once-white djellaba, stained and dusty, dropped from his shoulders to the sand at his feet. The red-and-white flecked keffiyeh was secured on his head by a two-strand black cord, and one of the trailing corners was tucked up under the opposite temple so that the cloth covered his face from the bridge of the nose downward. Above the flecked doth the dark eyes stared back at her. What little skin of forehead and eye sockets she could see was burned brown by the desert. She had many pictures ready for the album she intended to make back home, but none of a tribesman of the Bedouin with the expanse of the Saudi desert behind him.

She raised her camera. The man did not move. She squinted through the aperture, framing the figure in the center of the oblong, wondering if she could make the car in time, should the Arab come running at her.

Click.

“Thank you very much,” she said. Still he did not move. She backed toward the car, smiling brightly. “Always smile,” she recalled the Reader’s Digest once advising Americans confronted by someone