The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (71 page)

“Governor…” A thin woman thrust a microphone in his direction and a dozen shouted questions cancelled each other out, leaving only babble.

Raf waited. And when one photographer came in too close, Raf just stared until the man took a step backward.

“Ashraf Bey…”

“Excellency…”

The shouts kept coming until everyone finally realized that Raf still hadn’t said a word. And then came silence. It stretched out, distorted by the crowd’s expectation and broken only by the rhythmic thud of a grounded Sikorsky chopping to a halt on the Corniche behind him. He milked the silence, because that was exactly what the General would have done: and at the point their expectation was about to curdle into anger, Raf pointed at random to three people near the front, snapping out the order…

“One, two, three… Okay, your name, your station, then the question.”

As it turned out, number one was a good choice. She was American, on staff, not a freelancer, and represented C3N, biggest of the news channels. Or so Raf gathered from the gabble with which Helen Giles introduced herself.

“Excellence… Will you agree to hand over Hamad Quitrimala?” She managed to trip over both Raf’s honorific and Hamzah’s name.

“So that he can be tried in America and jailed?”

She nodded.

“Why would I do that?” Raf asked, his voice clear but cool.

“But PaxForce…”

“Are you saying we don’t have courts in El Iskandryia?”

That got another babble of questions, which ended the moment Raf chopped at the air for silence. He was beginning to enjoy this, Raf realized with something approaching shock.

“Well?”

The woman’s worry lines deepened.

“If Hamzah is to be tried,” said Raf, “he’ll be tried here in Iskandryia. And if the evidence goes against him, he will be found guilty…and shot.”

Raf walked through their shocked silence, while behind him Ahmed and Hakim ported their H&K5s and glared at anyone who got too close. As they approached the villa’s heavy front door it swung back and Raf found himself staring at the girl he should have married.

Flashguns firestormed.

“Excellency.” Zara stepped back to let him pass through into the hall.

“Zara…”

“Yes, Your Excellency?” She stood ramrod straight, chin up. Only the rawness that rimmed her grey eyes spoke of privately spilt tears. And one look into their cold depths was enough to tell him that the tears had been dried by hatred.

“Feeding them was a good idea.”

She said nothing in reply. Just waited, unmoving, for Raf to announce why he was there. Except that they both knew he was there because she’d said she wanted to talk to him—and now it seemed she didn’t.

“I’ll go,” said Raf and turned for the door, Hakim and Ahmed falling into position behind him. It was strange how quickly one could become used to having a shadow.

“Do you really intend to…?”

“Intend to what?” Raf asked, one hand on the door handle. He knew exactly what Zara was asking but he made her ask it all the same.

“Execute him…”

Not if I can help it, but somehow that didn’t seem the appropriate thing to say.

“If they extradite him,” said Raf, “you’ll never get your father back. You know that, don’t you?”

“At least they won’t kill him…”

“No,” Raf said, “they’ll just lock him up until he dies. Surround him with guards twenty-four/seven. Dismantle Hamzah Enterprises and break up the Midas Refinery to pay for court costs and reparations. You think that’s what he wants? Your father knew this was coming…”

“I’d worked that out,” said Zara, tears starting up in her eyes. “That’s why he wanted you to marry me.”

Raf nodded.

“The Khedive,” her voice was a whisper, “that meal.”

“He was trying to protect you in the only way he knew how,” said Raf, his smile rueful. “He even tried sending you back to America, he told me you refused…”

Her shoulders beneath his fingers were bony and she wore a scent he didn’t recognize and undoubtedly wouldn’t have been able to afford, had he wanted to buy her some more. And up close, with her arms tight round his neck and her face buried wetly in his shoulder, Raf could tell that Zara wasn’t wearing a bra. It was a shit time to notice something like that, but where Zara was concerned he always seemed to notice things like that at the wrong time. Like right then was a really lousy time to realize that he loved her.

Raf pushed Zara away, very slowly, until they stood a handbreadth apart, facing each other, their eyes locked. There was something she wanted to say.

“Anything you want,” said Zara. “I’ll give you anything you want, if you can save him.”

CHAPTER 38

Sudan

“Safety off,” said the gun.

Lying beside Lieutenant Ka, the ghost of Bec’s little sister said nothing. She’d taken to appearing at odd moments when Sarah wasn’t around, but now Sarah was gone and so Bec’s sister was smiling but silent. In fact, the whole world was silent except for a couple of green parakeets that squawked from a telegraph wire overhead, pretty much right above where he’d set up the thermoflage netting.

Of course, Ka knew what Bec’s sister wanted to say. What she’d been saying every night in his dreams, before she did what she once did, stood up from a long-dead fire and shuffled out beyond the big camp’s pickets to find a thornbush. Only it wasn’t her bowels she needed to empty but her head, which she did by sucking on a revolver.

They weren’t going to reach the source of the river. Nobody was going to turn off the Nile. The war and the river would keep flowing: the river wherever geography took it, the war wherever it wanted to go.

“Distance?”

“Five klicks and closing…”

Status and range. That was about all the H&K/cw could ever manage. And Ka really didn’t know why the manufacturer had bothered. Ka had a feeling he might have got cross about that before. He was finding it increasingly hard to remember.

The Nile was out of sight, across rock and thorn. Last time he’d seen it, the river had still been grand even though Ka was now south of Omdurman City, where the Bahr el-Abiad and Bahr el-Azrak joined to become the life-giver everybody knew.

Somewhere still further south, the river split again but either Ka hadn’t reached that point or he was past it.

The Colonel could have told him, only Ka wouldn’t ask. The last time he’d wanted an answer was half an hour before, when something dark had moved in the tall rushes of the riverbank. A simple question had elicited a long lecture on the habitat of the marabou stork.

Elaborate canals had once fed the area’s rich cotton fields but the narrow canals were mostly cracked open or filled with dirt, their bottoms broken and dry.

Ahead of him, when he’d first arrived, had been mud-brick ruins and beyond those foothills, backdropped by faded and cloud-covered mountains. Now the foothills were at his back and the enemy ahead.

The ruined houses behind Ka were all that remained of a town to which a handful of nineteenth-century Mamelukes had retreated, to live under the protection of Mek Nimr, Leopard King of Shendi, after their defeat by the Albanian warlord Khedive Mohammed.

But Mohammed Ali sent his son Ismail south to subdue Nubia. And in October 1822 Ismail demanded as tribute from Mek Nimr thirty thousand Maria Theresa dollars, six thousand slaves and food for his army, all to be delivered within two days.

And when Mek Nimr protested that the Sudan already faced famine, Ismail struck him in the face. The Leopard King’s reply came that evening during banquet, when his followers set fire to Ismail’s house, incinerating the prince, who died in the flames rather than be cut down like his fleeing bodyguard.

Word of this reached the Defterdar, Ismail’s brother-in-law. First the Defterdar burned Metemma and Damer, then every village along the Nile from Sennar to Berber. Finally he reached Shendi, where his troops threw down the walls and raped and impaled its inhabitants… But he failed to capture Mek Nimr or his family.

Fifty thousand died.

Next the Defterdar chased Mek Nimr south along the Blue River, torturing everyone he suspected of helping the fleeing king. Men were castrated, the breasts of the women were sliced away and every wound was sealed with molten pitch… Ka’s uncle had always insisted that things were better in the old days. But to Ka, from what the Colonel said, it just sounded like more of the same.

Ka needed to eat, only that wasn’t possible. The food was gone and so was most of his water. Actually, it was all the water, if he didn’t count a half litre sloshing round in Sarah’s old flask, the one with the cap jammed solid. He’d tried wrenching off the top and, when that failed, had tried punching a hole in the flask with his knife, but the mesh was too hard or he was too weak, one of the two, it didn’t matter much which.

“Weapons check…”

Whatever. Ka did a count in his head…twenty-one grenades, two Heckler&Koch OI/cw, an HK21e machine gun heavy enough to require a tripod, five assorted sidearms plus a dozen boxes of bullets, some of which might actually fit, plus a fat slab of ganja and a Seraphim 4 × 4, minus gas. Unfortunately, since there was only one of him, most of his riches were wasted.

The other thing he had, of course, were his spectacles and his radio. The radio and the spectacles would only work together, although it had taken Ka days to figure this out. In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure he had figured it out; he had a feeling the radio might have told him. Sometimes Colonel Abad spoke through the radio and other times he showed Ka things through the spectacles.

As for the ganja, that was some good shit, as Sergeant Sarah would have said. He wore her bone cross now, along with both of Saul’s amulets and that bundle of feathers Zac kept pinned to his shirt. Taking Sarah’s luck had been theft but he did it to protect her. She shouldn’t have been wearing a cross in the first place and Ka didn’t know on which side the doctors would be. So he’d taken her luck just to be safe and borrowed her gun because it was so much better than his.

The doctors would make her well again and that was more than the Colonel could manage. Maybe it had been the river water or perhaps too much sun… Whatever it was, she’d taken to greeting each new day on her knees, vomiting. And she wouldn’t talk to Ka or even look at him, though he gave her all the food and kept every watch himself.

Now she was in a camp and he was here, staring down on a road with ruins behind him, a jagged rock off to one side, sticking up through the earth like a broken shoulder blade, and a long line of enemy trucks directly ahead.

“Approaching,” said a voice in his ear.

“Yeah, the gun’s already told me,” Ka said crossly. It wasn’t exactly news: the Colonel had first warned him an hour ago that troops were due. He’d also informed Ka that he must stop the troops in their tracks. Those were the Colonel’s words… Looking at the converted 4 × 4s and purpose-built half-tracks coming down the road towards him, Ka decided that was meant to be some kind of joke.

“You know what you have to do?”

Yeah, he knew. First he had to fit a
feldlafetten
to the HK21e, which was its tripod, and then fit a Zeiss scope, after that he had to lift the safety gate or whatever it was called and slot in a new belt of 7.62/51. (What Colonel Abad always called .38.)

The HK21e took either a 20-round mag, which was plain stupid, or a 110-round belt box. Only Ka wasn’t planning to use either of those. He had been busy knitting together a couple of belts at a time, until he had a mountain of brass all ready for the HK21e’s roller-locked bolt.

They skinned people alive, the enemy. Ate them alive too, if Bec was to be believed. Raped the youngest prisoners to ward off wasting sickness. Mind you, that happened everywhere. But eating human flesh, that was part of a fire ritual: brain for intelligence, heart for courage, liver for cunning. Bec had told them all about it, one night months back round the campfire.

“Establish…”

Yeah, right. Establish a position. Ka shifted the heavy gun across to a gap between two rocks, then crawled back for the long, snaking belts. To win he had to keep under the protection of the thermoflage nets, Colonel Abad was very definite about that. After the belts, Ka unwrapped an HK/cw. This was really two weapons in one and could be broken into an upper section that fired airburst munitions, colour-coded for convenience, and a lower pull-away section that functioned as a basic light machine gun.

“Distance,” Ka demanded.

Reading this off from the HK21e would have been easy enough, but Colonel Abad judged distances better. Besides, Ka liked to make the Colonel work.

“Half a klick,” said the voice in his ear. “You should be fitting the belts now.”

With trembling fingers, Ka fed the first of the bullets into the HK21e, checking again that the belt could feed in smoothly. A single kink might jam the machine gun and bring the ambush to an early end. The Colonel would hate that.

Then Ka reached for the HK/cw and slid a mag’s worth of 5.56 kinetic into a narrow slot on its underside, following this with a fat clip of bursters. Except, the first burster he fed to the upper slot wasn’t a blue meanie, it was orange with a red tip, whizbang rather than airburst.

“Take out the…”

He knew, God knows. The Colonel had already been over this more times than Ka could stand. “I know. All right?” Ka said flatly.

Absence whispered down the static. A silence as impossibly distant as it was brief. And then Colonel Abad was back, sounding concerned. “You’ll be all right,” he promised. “You’ll come out of this a hero.”