Final Flight

* * *

Jarvis was led into the room naked and blindfolded, in handcuffs, and a rope was lashed around his ample middle to hold him to the chair. A lamp had been placed on the table and shone directly in his face. Qazi and Ali stood in the shadows until the guards closed the door behind them. Sakol was not in the room.

“Welcome, Jarvis.” Qazi came forward and sat in the same chair that he had occupied when Sakol was in the room. A portion of his lower legs was in the lamplight, but he knew from careful experimentation that his face was hidden. He crossed his legs and began moving his toe back and forth slightly. He nodded and Ali stepped forward and untied the blindfold. Jarvis screwed up his face in the light and narrowed his eyes to slits.

“We know your little secrets, Jarvis. All of them.”

“Who are you? Where am I?” The voice was soft, hesitant, fearful.

Qazi uncrossed his legs, leaned forward and slapped him soundly. The man in the chair began to cry.

“All your little secrets, Jarvis. Each and every one of them.” Qazi slapped him again.

“Please …” Another slap.

“Get a grip on yourself, Jarvis, or this will go on all night.”

Sniff. Sob. Sniff.

“You are here to help us, Jarvis, and you shall. If you do your work diligently and well, you may live to return to your wife in Texas and your Tuesday evening meetings with the woman who supplies you with little boys. If you fail us, well … I need not go into that.”

Jarvis was at least sixty, with several long strands of brown hair which he normally combed over his bald pate but which now hung at odd angles and made him look pathetic. His jowls quivered when he breathed.

“You won’t tell my wife about … Will you?”

Qazi slapped him again. “You fool. Your wife is the least of your problems.” Wrong response, he thought. He changed tactics instantly. “You will do as we say, or indeed, we will tell your wife, we will send her pictures of you and several of your little friends, then we will pass the photographs to several newspapers. Every man, woman, and child in Texas shall know of your perversions and your wife’s shame. Do you understand me?”

Jarvis blinked continuously and his jowls quaked as he nodded his head.

“Answer me!”

“I understand.”

“Very good.” Qazi leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs again. He sat silently for a moment as Jarvis squinted to see his face, but finally began speaking when the prisoner began watching the foot that was in the cone of light. Qazi moved his toe rhythmically.

“I want you to build me seven instruments, Jarvis. These instruments shall be used to bypass the safety devices in Mark 58 nuclear weapons.”

“I don’t …” The toe stopped and Jarvis ran out of steam.

“If you were going to tell me that you know nothing of these weapons, it is well you saved your breath.” Qazi got the toe in motion again. “Your position as a design engineer at the factory that assembles these devices is your finest credential. We did not bring you here because you disgust us. You will build seven instruments that will bypass the safety devices in Mark 58 nuclear weapons. These instruments shall contain a source of electrical power that will energize the weapon and trigger it. One of these instruments will contain a radio receiver that allows it to be triggered from a distance. Do you understand?” The toe stopped again.

“Yes.” The toe began its back and forth motion.

“Are you agreeing with me merely to avoid unpleasantness, or do you really intend to help us and spare your wife the agony we can inflict?”

“You said … my wife …”

Qazi placed both feet on the floor, leaned forward and slapped the quaking man several times. “Bring in the other man,” he said to Ali in Arabic.

A cursing Sakol was dragged in by four guards and lashed to a chair. Ali removed the blindfold and slapped him into silence. He did it with vigor, Qazi noticed. The guards assumed a position at the door.

“Another man with a secret. You Americans seem to be up to your eyes in filthy little secrets.”

“Please, mister,” Sakol begged. “For Christ sake, let’s talk about this. I didn’t mean to hurt her. It was an accident—” Ali’s open hand on Sakol’s face made a dull smack. And another. He began to weep.

“Let me introduce William James Moffet, Jarvis. He is a technician with some experience and a taste for young women. Unfortunately for them, they rarely survive his attentions. Moffet shall assist you in assembling the instruments. Now I am going to have you taken back to your cell where you will be given food and water and a pencil and paper. After you have eaten, you will make a list of the material you will need to construct these devices. Tomorrow morning at nine o’clock you will be brought back here. I shall examine your list and question you about it. You had better have all the answers tomorrow morning, Jarvis, or your wife’s humiliation shall begin before the sun sets. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir.” He snuffled uncontrollably, in little gasps.

“I don’t think you do, Jarvis. I don’t think you do.” He produced a large black-and-white photograph which he held in the light. He watched the man’s eyes slowly focus. The picture was of Jarvis and a boy, about six or seven. Jarvis had the boy’s penis in his mouth.

“Guards, take them to their cells.”

6

The road ran south through a parched brown landscape. Heat mirages obscured the horizon in all directions. Still Qazi stared out the window at the barren earth as Ali kept the Mercedes at over a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. They passed an occasional truck, but no other cars.

Qazi’s boyhood had been spent in country like this, living with his uncle and his family. They had lived in a small village and his uncle had been a shepherd. Qazi’s earliest memories were of dust storms and foul waterholes and the aroma of sheep and camels.

He had been about thirteen when his uncle’s only three camels had been stolen. He had never forgotten the look of despair on the old man’s face as he examined the camels’ leather hobbles, severed with a knife. The family’s journey across the harsh terrain, following the flock as it grazed, would be difficult without the camels, if not impossible. A third of the assets his uncle had worked a lifetime for were gone into the desert. The old man had borrowed four camels from his neighbors and, together with Qazi and his two sons, had set off after the thieves.

* * *

They rode for a week across the rock and hardpan. The nights had been bitter, the sun merciless. The wind had an edge that chapped exposed skin, then opened it and scoured a bleeding sore. The wind had wiped out the tracks of the fleeing thieves by the second day. They followed the trail of dung thereafter, until it too gave out because the thieves weren’t pausing to let the camels graze on thorns. Not that there were very many thorns. The desert had become a hot, empty hell, a wasteland of smouldering stone under a pitiless sun.

His uncle stared at the featureless horizon while the boys fingered their Enfields and looked helplessly about, tired and frightened and desperately weary. “The well at Wadi Hara,” his uncle finally said and goaded his camel into motion. “Not the closest waterhole, which is Wadi Ghazal,” his elder cousin said, “but the closest uninhabited one. The Mami live at Wadi Ghazal, and they would not steal our camels.”

Never before had Qazi rode so long and drank so little. They were baked by day and frozen by night. His tongue became a lump of useless flesh and his lips bleeding sores. But day by day the excitement had increased. The thieves would be at Wadi Hara with the camels.

The men checked their Enfields every evening, and Qazi practiced aiming at rocks. How would it feel to aim at man? How would it be to hear the whine of bullets? How would it be if one struck him? Would he be able to stand the pain? Would he die? The emptiness of the desert now had a new taste, a new feel. He heard the