H.M.S. Unseen (2 page)

The disgustingly dirty little garret he had rented for more than a year was on the top floor of a small block of apartments, less than 50 yards from his house, on the same tiny street. Within moments, Eilat had left the bicycle in the downstairs hall and climbed the three flights of stairs.

Once inside, he shaved his beard, leaving just a thick black moustache, and prepared his mind and person for his chosen new life—as a street peddler—which would see him plying his wares in Rashid’s copper and gold bazaars for at least the next month.

During this time, the president’s security men would place an iron grip on every airport, seaport, bus and rail terminal in the country, while they tried to run down Iraq’s most wanted Intelligence officer. The one with the three passports.

If they searched this land for a thousand years,
mused Eilat, as he cleaned his razor,
I suppose they’d never, ever look for me along the street in which I vanished. My last-known position.

One Month Later.

Baghdad had simmered for four days in flaming June temperatures of around 110 degrees. Not even the nights had brought in a cooling breeze off the eastern edges of the Syrian desert. There had been terrible dust storms out in the central plains all week, and the winds were hot, and Baghdad’s population of four million was wilting under the anvil of the sun. Nonetheless, Eilat had to go.

He waited until ten o’clock on the night of June 26, then gathered up his heavy cloth sack and cleared his room. He collected his bicycle from the downstairs hall, and the heat hit him like a blast from a furnace as he shambled out into the dark alley.

By the time he reached Al-Jamouri Street he was already sweating heavily. But once on the wide thoroughfare, he mounted the old bike and set off slowly, in a southeasterly direction, heading for the great bend in the Tigris, where it suddenly swings west around the university, and then east again, in a 9-mile loop out on the southern edge of the city.

Eilat was fit, but he was deliberately overweight. In the past month he had gained 14 pounds on a careful diet of chicken, lamb, rice, and pita bread at least twice a day. Finally, he was leaving, and, as he had remarked to the man whose life he had so carefully spared a month before, he might not be back for some time.

He pedaled gently, making for the long sweep of the Dora Expressway, right where it crosses the river. The city was darker and quieter down there, along Sadoun Street, and only a few people were walking in Fateh Square. Eilat kept going until he could make out the huge yawning overpass of the expressway, just as it becomes a truly spectacular bridge.

He dismounted there and turned off the public roads, pushing the bike in the dark until he came into the shadow of the bridge, where he dumped the bike under a clump of bushes and began his long lonely journey on foot, down the banks of the Tigris. It was the great river of his boyhood, and he was aware this might be his last walk beside its quietly flowing brown waters.

It would be a long journey downstream, 225 miles, the route laid out in detail, but without one name penciled in, on a hand-drawn map he carried in the pocket of his robe. It was a critical drawing to him, but complete gibberish to anyone else. He also carried with him a tiny military compass he had owned for many years. He intended to proceed at the speed of Napoleon’s army on its way to Moscow—four miles every hour with full packs and muskets. If he could find shade, he would sleep by day and walk through the dark, which was a little cooler, but not much. As he proceeded south toward the marsh, the humidity would become stifling, and he guessed he would lose weight every day. If there was no shade, he would keep walking, beneath the glare of the desert sun.

Eilat was a Bedouin by birth, and he possessed the Bedouin pride that he alone could survive in the pitiless summer climate of his homeland, that he could go without food for days if he had to, and that he was not intimidated by even the worst dust storm. Water he carried with him, but he would not require so much as other men.

He wished, not for the first time, that he still had access to one of his father’s camels. If he closed his eyes, he could easily imagine the tireless, swaying rhythm of the stride, the endless beat of the wide hooves on the desert floor. But that was all in his long-lost youth, out on the rim of the central plains, a long way north up the river, when life had been simple, and he had been a true son of Iraq.

Iraq—the country that had used him for years, often under circumstances of unthinkable danger, then betrayed him in the most brutal way possible.

Eilat inwardly seethed at the injustice of the treatment handed out to him by the President. He had seen the coldness in the man’s eyes when he presented the Medal of Honor, and he still failed to understand why he should have been singled out for summary execution, after all he had done to achieve greatness for his nation.

In the past, they had paid him, and paid him well. He still had close to $1 million on deposit in four banks around the world. And he had some cash with him, dinars and rials. But the thought kept returning: The President had not just rejected him, he had wished him dead. And in the space of just one month, he, Eilat One, had redirected all of the hatred in his soul, the hatred that had sustained him through the loneliest years, to a new enemy.

In the Arabian mind, the great flagstaff of pride stands tall. In the Bedouin mind, it is unbending. The biblical concept of revenge is universal in Iraq, accepted by all. Time is no barrier. There is no time. In a land which has survived for 6,000 years, a year is only a heartbeat, a decade just an interval. Eilat would have his revenge. Of that he was certain. He had spent his life in the service of his country, never marrying, never loving, except once. And the realization of the years wasted, squandered on an unfaithful master, burned into his mind as he walked steadily along the eastern bank of the dark Tigris.

The moon was bright by midnight, and it lit his way. Out to the left he could see car headlights in the distance, on the main road connecting Baghdad to the southern port of Basra. If he had crossed the sparse sandy flatlands between the river and the highway, he could probably have picked up a ride, or even a bus, and the flat terrain of the road, and its hard shoulder, would have been easier to walk upon. But Eilat was a wanted man, on the run in his own country, and he did not wish to be seen up close by anyone. He supposed the Army and the police had descriptions of him, and that he was now branded a murderer and an enemy of the state. Which, he considered a bit depressing but considerably better than being dead.

He smiled when he imagined how long and determinedly they must have searched for a smartly dressed, bearded businessman, in Western clothes, heading abroad. The chances of anyone connecting such a man with this scruffy country Arab, walking south, with his peddler’s sack and the stooped gait of an old man, were, he knew, remote. But Eilat was not into remote. He operated only on cold-blooded near certainty. If no one saw him, he could not be recognized. And he continued through the hot night, moving over the sands as swiftly as he could, but not so fast as Napoleon.

The sun came throbbing up into the eastern sky shortly before six. In the distance Eilat could see the ancient remains of the Parthian city of Ctesiphon, which lay on the banks of the river, 20 miles south of Baghdad. The great vaulted arch that was built in the second century
B.C.,
still dominated the ruins, and he could just make it out in the dawnlight. He still had forty-five minutes more to walk, and took his first drink of the new day, swallowing almost a pint of water. He could, he knew, refill his two leather flasks somewhere in the old city.

By eight o’clock the sun was high, the temperature on its way to 110 degrees. Eilat found the only café deserted, and he sat alone in a corner facing the wall, devouring a large breakfast of eggs, toast, and chicken with rice. He drank orange juice and coffee, and paid them to fill his water holders. The price was minimal compared to the city.

The next stretch of the river, winding all the way down to Al-Kut, a distance of 100 miles, was not a walk which held any appeal for Eilat. The flat landscape, hammered brown by the sun, was practically bereft of life, human or plant. He knew he would occasionally pass scattered date palms close to the water, tended by kind and generous rural families, who would perhaps offer him a drink. And they would want to talk. But he had nothing to say to them anymore. The President had made him an outcast in his own land, and he already felt foreign, as if he must hide all of his inner thoughts even from simple country people, people for whom he had once been prepared to die.

But perhaps that had been inevitable anyway, because he had spent so many years away, and now the men in power felt he could never be completely trusted. He could understand that thought process; just. But the blind injustice of it represented to Eilat a violation of his honor. And that he was unable to live with.

He left the café before ten and wandered out to the ruined outskirts of Ctesiphon, avoiding people, searching for a quiet, sheltered, north-facing place to sleep until the late afternoon, when he would eat and drink again, before setting off on his second night trek.

He found a small, low, dusty building of only three stone sides and a roof, a building that faced back up the river, the way he had come. It was hot and gloomy inside, but it was in deep shade. Eilat was exhausted, and breakfast had made him sleepy. But first he turned toward the back wall on a bearing of two-zero-five, a line down which, more than 800 miles distant, lay the most holy Muslim city, Mecca. Eilat faced that way as he knelt in the dust and humbled himself, seeking the forgiveness of his God.

He slept for eight hours, undisturbed, his head on his soft water bags, his right hand on the handle of his desert knife beneath the robe. The ground was rough and hard, but he lay still and ignored it.

Because the deprivations of life are the heritage of those who spring from the sands of Arabia, no matter how far he had journeyed, Eilat was always aware of that unspoken truth, that he could withstand anything in this wild, burning hot land of his birth. It was as if some distant call from the Syrian desert of his forefathers could still be heard within him…
Remember who you really are. You will always be a Bedouin.

By eight he was under way, walking along the river, wishing it ran a straighter course, hoping not to meet anyone, cursing the ground upon which the President of Iraq walked. Eilat wondered what the future held for him. He had a plan, but it might not work. For the first time in his entire life he faced the world alone, entirely alone. The cord that had joined him for so long to Iraq was severed, and it could never be repaired.

He walked generally southeast with the river—and he walked for almost four days, alone and, so far as he knew, unobserved. He spoke to no one, and eked out his water and his pita bread. The sun was pitiless during the day, but shade was so sparse his planned schedule went awry almost immediately. And so he just slept when he could and walked the rest of the time, making on average 25 miles a day, without incident, and with the loss of some 10 pounds in body weight.

On the first day of July, late in the afternoon, six miles north of the riverside town of Al-Kut, he spotted up ahead his first potential problem. There on the edge of a small grove of date palms was a camouflaged Iraqi Army jeep. He could see no sign of local farmers, there was no house, and the area seemed completely desolate. But there were two uniformed soldiers leaning against the vehicle, about 200 yards ahead of him. It was just too late to stop or turn off the path. They must have seen him, and, despite the comforting sanctity of his Arab robe, complete now with the customary red-checkered headdress, Eilat knew they might very well ask to see his identification documents.

By then he was walking with a long wooden stick he had cut, and he slowed slightly as he made his approach, limping, stooping forward. He did not avert his gaze and continued walking, straight at the jeep, straight toward the soldiers, each of whom carried a short-barreled machine gun, probably old-design Russian.

He was almost level when the senior man spoke, brusquely, with authority.

“Hey, old man…Iraqi?”

Eilat nodded and kept going, moving past them, exaggerating the limp. For a split second, he thought they would ignore him, but then the soldier spoke again.

“WAIT!”

Eilat was not surprised. He was moving into a particularly sensitive area of his country. Al-Kut was the town where the Tigris splits, and where the great drainage program to dry out the marshes had been in place for many years. It was a program designed to destroy the wild wetland homes of the ancient Marsh Arabs, who were believed to have lived there for the entire 6,000 years of the region’s history. In the opinion of Saddam Hussein, those watery miles had become a haven for deserters from the Army, and even for Iranian insurgents. Gangs of ex-Army personnel still roamed the vast overgrown areas where water remained. Eilat knew the place was crawling with soldiers because it was still believed to be somewhat out of control. Drier, but still out of control.

He obeyed the command of the Iraqi officer, turning slowly and saying softly the traditional greeting of the desert, “
Salam aleikum,”
Peace be upon you.

The officer was a man of around thirty-five, tall and thin, with a hooked beak of a nose, hooded dark eyes, and a full mouth. He did not smile.

“Documents?”

“I have none, sir,” replied Eilat in Arabic. “I’m just a poor traveler.”

“Traveling to where?”

“I’m looking for my son, sir. I heard from him last in An-Nasiriya three years ago. I have no money except for a few dinars, enough for some bread in Kut.”

“And then you plan to walk right down the Shatt al Gharraf…120 miles?”

“Yessir.”

“On a loaf of bread, on your own, with no documents?”

“Yessir.”

“Where do you live?”

“In Baghdad, sir. In the south of the city.”