Blood Rules (35 page)

“We go north, inland.” Sharett’s voice cut through the air on the kind of command frequency nobody could ignore. “We’re in a wadi. We’ll follow it because it gives us a chance of water, and we have to find water soon or we’re going to die.”

The little party had unconsciously grouped itself into a

circle. Robbie and Neeman were watching Sharett as if

they expected great things from his leadership; Colin

wished he shared their confidence. The TV man’s expression was hard to read. Sharett had spoken in English and

perhaps he hadn’t understood, but whatever the reason,

he didn’t look like a team player. They would have to keep

tabs on him every second, when their only hope of safety

lay in trusting one another and working together as a

unit. The enemy within

“Do any of you have food?” Sharett interrupted Colin’s increasingly ugly thoughts. They shook their heads. “Nothing in your pockets, chocolate, nuts?”

More shakes of the head.

“Then we must look out for food, every step we take.”

“In the desert?” It was the cameraman; everyone turned to look at him.

“What’s your name?” Sharett barked.

For a moment the TV man looked as though he was going to refuse to answer. Then he said, “Mahdi,” as if owning up to a shameful secret.

“There is food in the desert.” Sharett spoke with surprising gentleness. “For those who know how to look for it.”

Mahdi gave a sullen shrug.

“What matters now is putting distance between us and the plane. We were all hurt in the crash, I know it. Better be hurt than dead. Now, let’s move. I’ll lead. Robbie, take care of your father, he’s hurt worst; you two Raleighs follow me, Mahdi next, Dannie last.”

Sharett struck off along the wadi, here no more than a shallow depression in the ground, gouged by season after season of monsoon rains. He kept the last rays of the setting sun on his left. Ahead of him, Colin could see how the low range of hills he’d observed from the plane became steeper, threatening to block their passage, but in the failing light there was little else he could make out. He’d never conceived of such a hostile landscape, never imagined a man could live in such heat. And this was sundown; what would conditions be like at noon?

He found he could cope best if he walked in a kind of shuffle, supporting his right forearm with his left hand. Everywhere he looked he saw only the horizon, gravel, rocks, an occasional withered tree that had suffered some terminal blast before petrification struck, its ghostly fingers pointing all the different ways to hell. The sides of the wadi were shoulder height, now, and slowly but steadily narrowing, although still a quarter of a mile apart. As they advanced, it became necessary to take ever greater care over where they put their feet: pebbles, in themselves enough to cause a painful ankle sprain, were giving way to boulders over which they had to climb, and some of these had razor-sharp edges.

The sun had disappeared, the last of the dusk was upon them, when from somewhere behind there came a shriek of such unearthly horror that Robbie and the man called Mahdi cried out together. Sharett stopped dead and wrenched around in the same awkward movement. Colin saw the fear on his face. His own heart was throbbing to a sickly, intermittent beat.

“What was that?” Dannie hissed.

As if in answer to him, the shriek sounded again, but muted this time, and afterward they heard a series of indecipherable sounds that echoed with eerie resonance. It was Sharett who first grasped the truth.

“Bullhorn,” he said hoarsely. “From the plane, I guess.”

“No,” Dannie said. “Wrong direction. They’ve found the chopper wreckage.”

Confirmation came swiftly. The sounds they’d heard a moment ago were repeated, only this time they dissolved into words. Colin could picture the man with the bullhorn turning to each quarter of the compass in turn, and whereas before he had been facing away from them, now he was addressing his message to the north, where they were.

“I know that you can hear me.” The language English, the speaker male, his accent Middle Eastern.

After a few seconds, Colin thought he recognized the voice as belonging to one of the terrorists. Not Fouad, who was dead. Colin had killed him.
Jesus Christ,
he prayed,
forgive me.

“I know that you can hear me,” the distant voice repeated slowly, deliberately. “Listen to me. I have found the wreckage of the helicopter. I have examined your tracks. Come back to the plane.”

“Bluff,” Sharett said tersely. “If he knew which direction we’d gone, he’d never have faced around and around like that.”

Colin reluctantly accepted this as true: reluctantly, because it was Sharett who’d seen it and he didn’t like Sharett now any more than he had in New York, two years previously, when they’d first crossed paths.

The disembodied voice continued. “Come back to the plane, I say, and this will not go against you. But if you fail to return … at dawn tomorrow we shall blow up the plane and every living soul aboard. Our promise is not an idle one. Should you doubt us, watch the sky tomorrow at first light and learn the burden of sin you carry.”

By now it was too dark for them to see one another’s faces. Colin felt an overwhelming desire to know the worst, to winkle out whatever each was thinking. As the seconds ticked by, his frustration mounted. He could feel the words on the back of his tongue. He tasted their bilious, metallic flavor, yet he could not bring himself to utter them, to condone mass murder by saying, We can’t go back. Mahdi saved him.

“We go back now,” he gibbered suddenly. “Yes, back to the plane now, out here nothing to drink, nothing to eat; in the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful, think what you are doing! You cannot condemn so many to die! You are not God, may Allah forgive my sinful tongue,
you are not God!”

Mahdi’s last word whined upward into a scream as Sharett unhurriedly struck him a backhander on the mouth, swinging his whole arm and putting beef into it.

“And you?” he said equably to the pathetic huddle at his feet. “Were you God when you filmed the murder of the South African, when you connived at the taking of a planeload of passengers? Come on, God, tell us a thing or two. Tell us why so much concern for the innocent and the good when you didn’t give a shit before.”

He swung back his foot and kicked Mahdi in the stomach. Robbie cried out, forcing his knuckles against his lips.

“You didn’t give a shit before and you don’t give a shit now.” Sharett’s voice had turned ruminative and low: a judge meditating sentence. “It’s because you know that as long as you stay with us those scum will seek you wherever you run, so they can kill you. That’s why you dread the morning—because then they will start their pursuit. They will come after us.
She
… will come.”

In the silence that followed, Colin held his breath, praying that Robbie would not have heard, not understood. But then the boy said, “She? Who is ‘she?’ ”

Silence.

“Which ‘she?’ “ A pause.
“Which ‘she?'”

Sharett hesitated. Then: “School starts early this term,” he said. “So let’s begin with ABC. Your mother, Leila Hanif—”

“No!”
Colin’s cry rebounded off the side of the wadi.

Everyone jumped; everyone, that is, except Robbie, who announced, in a small, clear voice, “I want to hear it.”

“Your mother,” Sharett said, “is one of the five most wanted terrorists in the world. She planned and led this hijack because she wanted one thing, and one thing only: you. That is why we are here. That is why Van Tonder had to die, and others will have to die. And that is why, as soon as there is light tomorrow, she will come. She is ready to pursue you into hell, if only she can get you back. So she will come. She will.”

Robbie’s face was invisible in the gloom, but Colin knew, could
feel,
his son was smiling. “Yes,” he heard him say; and then, after a pause that seemed as long as life itself, “I know.”

Twenty-nine seconds, that’s all it took, from bedroom to Mercedes, five of them, Nunn and four bodyguards, two ahead, two behind, walking as fast as fit men can without breaking into a run, another trio waiting for them behind the swing doors where the service elevator was ready, a concierge with his key in the lock to guarantee nonstop descent to the second floor; then down two flights of stairs, past the hotel’s health club, into the back seat of the car parked down a side alley, long before the telephoto lenses and multidirectional mikes fifty yards away, barricaded next to the front entrance, could focus; sirens, motorcycle escort, pilot car forcing a path through the crowd: a comically gesticulating bunch of sweaty western faces strung with cameras and video recorders and tape decks, comic because the car’s bulletproofing shut out sound as well.

Nunn removed his dark glasses and began a review of what he would say to them in the British embassy when he arrived there in—he glanced at his Cartier Tank—four and a half minutes.

He was still breathing heavily from his recent jog through the Inter-Continental Hotel’s nether recesses, which had done nothing to improve his temper. For the first time ever, retirement beckoned with all the attractiveness of Letuce’s maître d’ extending his hand to an old and favored client.

Confronted by the maze of Middle Eastern politics he’d applied his techniques in the usual way, drawing back from the brink of disaster, careering around dangerous corners at high speed, never letting the ball drop. First fix Shehabi, then Bahrain, then Kuwait, then Saudi, then the British, the Germans, the Israelis, then
whoops!
back to collect Kuwait again, and then
whoops!
don’t let Saudi get upset… on and on it went, round and round, until at last he was where he wanted to be, no longer one protagonist among many but the Grand Wizard himself, with Her Majesty’s minister of state on line ready to do his bidding, and Feisal Hanif himself, Goliath to his David, emerging from the shadows to join battle. Until Halib’s call the afternoon had evolved into immaculately timed segments: Feisal was on his way to Damascus airport, he was airborne, he had landed, he was on his way to the Delmon, he was in his suite, he was ready. He was
not
ready, but soon would be. In an hour.

That was when Halib had phoned with the news about Sharett.

The Mercedes swung in through the gates of the British embassy—no more fooling around in Lloyd’s offices; this was for real—the soldiers in their blue-and-white sentry boxes saluted, another opened the car door, two men in front of him, two behind, walking at the same quick pace, stairs, the conference room on the northwest side, overlooking a weary garden, usual crowd, no new faces.

“He’s gone,” he said, lowering himself into the chair at the head of the table. He poured himself a glass of ice water, draining it down in a series of gulps while he waited for the bodyguards to plug in and test his portable fax, waited for the rest of them to pounce.

“Gone?”

Philip Trewin’s voice, rendered neutral by fatigue, conveyed no hint of criticism or anger. Nunn sensed he’d been expecting to hear this news; no, he’d
already
heard it.

“Meeting was scheduled for twenty hundred. Feisal Hanif had it put back to twenty-one; no show, nothing, minister not best pleased. Phone call to Hanifs suite elicits no reply; hotel manager suffering from palpitations, entourage left twenty minutes before.”

They were so tired, all of them, that they could no longer form coherent grammatical sentences but instead had been reduced to a kind of languid telegraphese.

“Meaning what?”

Nunn looked down the table at all those tense faces turned toward him, and for the umpteenth time he wondered what on earth he was doing here, what they wanted of him, the ones who were really pulling the strings; he would hear later, of course, maybe years later, whose game it had been: Iran’s, Iraq’s, Syria’s, Yemen’s, but by then he’d have forgotten most of it anyway and it would be a struggle to remember half the names. He would not leave this place any the wiser than when he’d come, that much he knew.

Halib had not said categorically whether by now in Tel Aviv they realized one of their agents was aboard NQ 033. Maybe the Israelis had known and maybe they hadn’t. What taxed Nunn was whether he’d been right to ring them up and tell them. Too late to worry about that, he’d already done it.

“Recap,” he said wearily. “Last night the chopper brought out that diabetic boy, Iranian frigate landed him in Oman, gesture of goodwill to facilitate, et cetera and so forth. Chopper goes back this morning, repeat flight this afternoon, no more heard of same. Radio silence blankets NQ oh-double-three, despite attempts by Iranian frigate to raise her. Feisal Hanif abruptly aborts negotiations, leaves Bahrain, no forwarding address.”

What was he doing here? What on earth were any of them supposed to be doing?

“Stalemate,” he muttered sourly.

Major Trewin looked down at his hands. “Perhaps,” he said.

“Meaning?”

“I’m informed that South Yemen has been subjecting the position to ‘in-depth dialectical analysis.'” “And?”

“They might just be prepared to let Hadhramaut province be used as springboard for a home run by the SAS.”

“Conditions?”

“Thumping big bribe. Aid. Grants. Hardware. Moscow’s been leaning on them. Most of what we hand over to Aden will find its way back into the commissars’ pockets, of course, but the Yemenites don’t know that.”

Nunn was staring at him. “Why should Moscow be leaning on South Yemen to put an end to a hijack?”

“Because they’re upset.” It was the M16 spook who interjected; Nunn struggled to recall his name before remembering that he hadn’t ever given one. “Sources there have finally confirmed that this hijack diverted Soviet resources in breach of guidelines.”

“Translation?”

“Leila Hanif is off on a frolic of her own. Halib was right.” There was a bemused silence, broken only by the rustling of men creaking their weary bones into new positions.

“How reliable are your sources?” Trewin inquired, after a pause.