means to transport him to Sana’a, I am at the Bilqis Hotel.”
Of course you are. And the hotel is not charging a PSO colonel a rial for the room. Life is good if you’re a policeman in a police state. It occurred to me that I had the right job, but in the wrong country.
Brenner said, “Thank you, Colonel. I’ll let you know.”
Actually, if we found The Panther, the only thing we’d have to transport was his pinky finger, and the rest of him could rot in these hills.
I hate long good-byes, so I said, “Good-bye.”
But Kate, a compassionate lady, asked Colonel Hakim, “Did you tell Altair that his family would be taken care of?”
“Ah, yes, I did that. So we will need to discuss that as well.”
I didn’t think Uncle Sam was going to pay a terrorist’s family a hundred grand, but they might pay Hakim something and Hakim could take care of that. Good-bye.
But Hakim had more to tell us, and he said, “The family name of Altair-it is al-Darwish.”
I hardly knew what to say, so I said, “See you later.”
Colonel Hakim and Mr. Brenner exchanged salutes, and the PSO guys got back in the Humvee I bought for them.
So, here we were. Alone at last.
They say the journey is the destination, but it is not. The journey is the journey; the destination is the end. And we were near the end of this journey-and so was Bulus ibn al-Darwish.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE
We took what we needed from the Land Cruiser and began hoofing it.
The direct route to the head of the trail, if the trail existed, was through the Al Qaeda camp, but the camp was a hellish landscape of bomb craters, smoking earth, and dead bodies, not to mention unexploded munitions. So we began our way around the rim of the flat basin with the sloping hills to our right and the smoking camp to our left.
Every hundred yards or so, Zamo would look through his nightscope, checking out the terrain around us. He also looked down into the camp and told us, “I see the old man. He’s wandering around.”
Just as Zamo said that, there was a loud explosion and we all hit the ground.
Zamo said, “The old guy set something off.”
Well, I hope he’s on his way to a better place than this.
We continued on and the terrain was a challenge, with ridges of loose shale-like rock that gave way under our feet.
It took us half an hour to circumvent the Al Qaeda camp, and we were now approaching the far side of the camp where the trail was supposed to begin, according to Altair, who could not be re-questioned about that.
We stopped and took a break. Zamo passed his rifle around so we could look through the nightscope and do what he called “terrain appreciation and orientation.”
I looked through the scope, which lit up the night with a weird green glow, like I was wearing tinted glasses. I’d trained on a similar nightscope, so my eye and brain adjusted to the monochromatic image, and I was able to fully appreciate that this whole place was a wasteland, deader than the moon. Not even a goat. Also no sign of Noah’s Ark.
I looked across the smoking basin at the place where we’d started, and I could see our white Land Cruiser still there, which was a good sign that our deal with the devil was intact.
I passed the rifle to Kate, who focused on the sail-shaped peak and said, “Maybe another two kilometers.”
We moved on, looking for the trail that we would have to intersect as we continued around the rim of the basin, but the ground was so rock-strewn that a foot trail wouldn’t be noticeable. Also, the thought occurred to me, and probably to everyone, that Altair had pulled a fast one on Colonel Hakim, or Hakim himself had pulled one on us so he could get out of here and go someplace nicer and safer. Did I promise him the money for services already rendered? Or for results?
The A-team separated and doubled back, looking for the trail, but we kept one another in sight as we closely examined the rocky ground in the dim moonlight.
I realized that this trail, if it existed, would not be well trodden. I mean, I doubted if The Panther invited a hundred jihadists up to his cave every night to play bridge and have a cigar, and I doubted, too, if The Panther made the trip down to the camp very often. So we weren’t looking for an actual trail but more of a starting point into the hills.
It was Kate, with her obsessive attention to untidy floors, who spotted something, and she said in a quiet, enemy-territory voice, “Look here.”
We went over to where she was standing and she pointed the muzzle of her M4 at something that would not be noticeable or remarkable in most places, but which here, on the moon, showed evidence of human presence; it was, in fact, a plastic bottle cap.
Kate picked it up and passed it around like a found diamond, and we all agreed that it was fairly new, and that the litterbug, whoever he was, had left us a trail marker.
So with our backs to the Al Qaeda camp, we had our starting point for the route that would take us where we needed to go.
We moved away from the basin and toward the hills to our front.
Kate, who’d kept the bottle cap as a souvenir, was looking for more, like Hansel and Gretel looking for shiny pebbles in the moonlight.
We also looked for the plastic water bottle that had been attached to the cap, but that seemed to be it for litter.
We had no second point to connect to the bottle cap, but as we moved on, the route became more clear because the terrain started to narrow between two ridgelines, like the narrow end of a funnel.
The ground rose more steeply and the loose rock was making noise as it slid beneath our feet, and noise was not what we wanted, so we slowed up.
As we came around a bend in the rising trail, it suddenly ended, and in front of us was a huge pile of rock, blocking the way.
We approached the rock pile and it was obvious that this was a recent slide, caused either by God telling us to go back, or by twenty-four thousand pounds of high explosives shaking the earth like an erupting volcano.
Zamo volunteered his rock-climbing skills, and Brenner held his rifle as Zamo picked his way up the broken rock with his Colt.45 automatic in his hand.
There was no doubt that The Panther, if he was in his cave when those bombs hit, had heard and felt the airstrike, and I imagined that he knew he’d lost a base camp and everyone in it. His unanswered sat-phone call to the camp would confirm that.
I had no idea what this psycho was thinking or feeling when his cave started shaking around him, but I hoped he realized that his world had gotten much smaller. That, and the lack of news from the goat herder’s hut, told him he was alone, with a problem. Maybe Perth Amboy wasn’t so bad after all.
Zamo called down in a loud whisper, “Clear.”
Brenner slung Zamo’s rifle across his back and we all picked our way up the rockslide.
At the top we could see the continuation of the trail and the sail-shaped peak off to our right.
Zamo took his rifle and scanned the terrain, saying, “Nothing moving… no scope looking back at me… There’s like a deep gorge ahead that cuts through the trail… about six hundred meters… I see a stone hut…” He focused in and said, “Nothing moving around the hut…”
Brenner took the rifle and looked through the scope, saying to us, “It could be a sentry hut-between the base camp and the cave…”
“Could be,” which meant we were on the right track.
Brenner said, “We can go around it.”
