The Scorpion’s Bite (9 page)

Chapter Nineteen

They drove on toward H5, bumping along the track that followed the pipeline, veering occasionally to avoid one of the black boulders scattered across the open plain.

As they approached the pumping station, they heard the noise, like distant thunder, echoing among the hills long before they realized what was happening. Jalil lifted his field glasses, turned his head to sweep the horizon.

Closer to the pumping station, the sound was more distinct, a steady series of blasts muffled, in part, by a wind that blew toward Iraq.

A mile from H5, they pulled to the side of the road, and stood next to the Jeep openmouthed, watching dust and smoke erupt from the ground near the pumping station.

Jalil peered through the field glasses again. “Vichy French fighter.” He lowered the binoculars. “He doesn’t see us yet.”

Squinting, Lily could barely make out the outline of an airplane in the distance, saw it bank and turn, spew red tracer bullets, and leisurely bank again.

“How do you know who it is?” she asked.

“Body painted yellow, with the tricolor roundel near the tail. Glubb gave us photos, silhouettes of planes to identify.”

This time, the fighter banked and flew directly at them in a flurry of noise, firing, churning fountains of dirt and dust as it came.

“He spotted us,” Lily said.

“Quick,” Jalil shouted over the roar of the engine, “under the Jeep.”

“Shouldn’t we make a diversion?” Lily turned her back on the oncoming plane. “Draw him away from H5?”

“He’s coming at us. We’re the diversion. Get under the Jeep.” Gideon grabbed her sleeve. “Now. It’s our only cover.”

“We could drive in the other direction,” Lily still ignored the looming plane. “Slalom around the boulders.”

“There’s no cover here,” Jalil said. “It would be suicide. After he kills us, he’ll go back to H5. We’d be dead for no reason.”

She looked around at the open field, bare and gray and dusty. “But….”

Gideon grasped her arm. “This is no time to gawk. He’s shooting at us. Come on, come on,” he shouted.

“We have no anti-aircraft weapons,” Jalil said.

“You have rifles.”

“Are you crazy?” Jalil asked her. “You can’t shoot down a plane with a rifle.”

The airplane bore down on them, firing, kicking up columns of dust.

“He’s strafing.” Jalil turned away. “Under the Jeep. It’s our only chance.” He disappeared beneath the vehicle.

Finally, she ducked under the running board, and crawled into the oily underbelly of the Jeep.

She heard the fighter climb, bank, come in lower, the shriek of the engine receding, banking, returning again, lower.

The Jeep vibrated, swayed under the strident attack of the plane.

Dust clotted the air. The plane’s engines screamed. Its machine-gun chattered.

It banked again, roared lower still, gripping the Jeep under its shadow, shooting a blast of sound, shattering a nearby boulder.

A piece of the boulder rocked the Jeep with the impact. It ripped the canvas water bag hanging from the side, spewing water onto the desert-hard ground.

The plane circled, banked for another strike. Lily held her breath, dug her nails into the dirt, watched the water spurt from the bag into a mud-soaked puddle.

The fighter dove again, the rancorous roar deafening them.

A wing dipped, almost scraped the Jeep.

He’s flying too low. So close I can touch it. If he’s not careful…

The plane hit the ground, flinging sparks in every direction, skidding on its crumpled belly.

“My God,” Lily said, watching flashes fly off the ground. “Flint and steel. My God.”

Gideon gasped. “It’s going to blow up. Got to get him out.”

He scrambled out from under the Jeep, ran toward the plane.

“Get back. It’s going to blow,” Jalil called after him, but Gideon still ran toward the plane.

Jalil started toward him. “Gideon!”

The plane erupted with a whoosh and a deep rumble, exploding in a blast of fire and smoke. The hulk kept moving, momentum carrying it forward, black smoke and orange flames trailing in its wake. Gideon stood, arms stretched out, silhouetted by the bright raging inferno.

“Flint and steel.” Lily crawled out, tried to steady her legs to stand.

“Flint and steel.” She couldn’t stop saying it, a formula for fire, for sparks of molten metal, for death in the bare desert.

“Fuel was in the wings,” Jalil told her.

“Flint and steel,” Lily chanted as the smell of gasoline and burning hair and flesh beat against her in waves of unbearable heat.

She stared at the blaze shimmering behind a haze of heat, the firestorm belching black clouds that billowed skyward, and horror chilled her skin.

“
Ma’a es salaam
,” Jalil murmured. “Go in peace.”

Lily’s legs wobbled; she could hardly stay on her feet. She crept toward the back of the Jeep, leaned her head against the doorpost, climbed inside, shoved the binoculars aside, and huddled against the seat.

She shook, tremors of shock disturbing the thick dust on the seat, her hands and fingers moving in circles. Her knees rattled and she clamped her hands between her knees to force them still.

She shivered as Jalil pulled Gideon back to the Jeep. “Hurry,” he said. “Get in.”

“We can’t just leave him,” Gideon said.

“Too late,” Jalil told him. “Get in. Have to check the damage to H5.”

“Back there,” Jalil said as he drove toward H5 in a cloud of dust, “you were going to rescue the pilot before the plane blew up?”

Gideon nodded.

“Even though he tried to kill you minutes before?”

“He was a human being,” Gideon said.

In the back seat, Lily, calmer now, unclasped her hands and gripped the side of the Jeep tenuously, bouncing with each jolt.

The fort guarding the pumping station at H5 was small, with irregular walls, built by the Desert Patrol. When the Jeep drew up, a soldier from the Desert Patrol emerged from a detached shed-like building.

“You all right?” Jalil called to the soldier.

“
Hamdulillah
,” he answered. “I took cover. Nothing I could do. Tried firing at them, but all I had was a rifle.”

The soldier looked around and grunted. The walls of the fort were pockmarked, otherwise undamaged.

“No damage to the pipeline, the pumping station?” Jalil asked.

“No. I checked the gauges. I’ll check again.”

He turned back to Jalil before he disappeared into the shed. “The fighter pilot was not a good marksman,” the soldier said, then added, “Not a good pilot either.”

As he waited for the soldier’s report, Jalil slapped his hand against his leg impatiently. “Have to get back to Azraq, have to radio Glubb.”

The soldier emerged from the shed and told them that everything seemed to be in order.

“You’ll be all right here?” Jalil asked him.

“
Inshallah
,” the soldier said. “I could use reinforcements, anti-aircraft guns. If the planes come back….” His voice trailed off and he shuddered.

“I’ll check with Glubb.” Jalil climbed into the passenger seat of the Jeep.

As Gideon started the engine and turned the Jeep, Jalil said, “We’ll wait at Azraq for Glubb. Time we went to Tadmor.”

Chapter Twenty

They sat outside, eating a Bedouin breakfast of fresh dates, Bedouin bread, and tea.

Hamud picked another date off the stem and squeezed it to pop out the sweet meat from the skin. “This is the food that is best. Did you know The Prophet himself broke his fast every morning with dates?”

The dates were delicious, sweet and succulent, and Lily kept eating, popping them with sticky fingers until her mouth was raw.

Hamud said to her, “You know, if you eat dates and drink water at the same meal, your stomach will explode.”

“Seems reasonable.” Gideon said as Lily backed away from the tray of dates and wiped her fingers on the towel in her lap.

And then Hamud told them that he had seen drawings of animals pecked into black basalt boulders in the Wadi Rajil. “All kinds if animals, animals with horns, animals with long necks. They have them there, in the Black Desert.”

“We’re here to do an archaeological survey of Trans-Jordan,” Lily said.

Gideon nodded. “That’s what they tell us.”

“While we sit around waiting for Glubb, we could go to the Wadi Rajil.”

Gideon nodded again and smiled.

***

Gideon emerged from the fort carrying field glasses, a notebook, a 1-10,000 map of the Wadi Rajil area, with a pocket transit hung around his neck.

“That’s all you’re bringing?” Lily asked.

“This is a preliminary survey, just rough, to get our archaeological bearings. First we find a few sites. Then, we can go on from there.”

“Where did you get the map?” Lily asked.

Gideon just looked at her. “You drive. Take the track east along that wadi. Hamud will tell you the way.”

They set out along an eastward track, with Lily driving, Hamud in the back seat giving directions, Klaus aiming his camera at the sea of black boulders surrounding them, and Gideon leaning over the side of the Jeep to scan the surface. From time to time, he swept the horizon with the field glasses.

“This is how you do the survey?” Lily asked. “Just riding along the track?”

“Just drive,” Gideon answered. “Do I sense a tone of disapproval?”

She nodded.

“If nothing has changed, the same routes were used in antiquity, so there’ll be sites along here.”

“But something has changed. There were volcanic eruptions.”

“Some other time you can walk the desert inch by inch. For now, this is enough.”

They rode further into the forlorn landscape of Wadi Rajil, skirting the basalt boulders that loomed across the track, with cinder cones all around them and black cliffs in the distance.

“Over there.” Gideon lowered the field glasses and indicated a group of basalt slabs forty yards away, close to the edge of the wadi. “Crude images of gazelle and ibexes pecked into the rock surface.

Hamud pointed toward the slabs. “Strange animals. You see them?”

Lily veered in the direction of the petroglyphs. Klaus alit first, braced his camera against a steady boulder, and focused on the rock drawings.

Gideon picked up two small bladelets and rested them in the palm of his hand, fingered them thoughtfully. “There was water here once.”

“Well, it’s a wadi,” Klaus said.

Gideon moved the basalt boulder aside. Underneath was a cache of small blades, geometric microliths, and bladelet cores.

“A knapping workshop.” He looked up at Lily. “Epipaleolithic. Kebaran.”

“Here? In the middle of nowhere?” Klaus asked.

“They were hunter-gatherers,” Lily told him. “Moving all the time, following the food, just small bands, following gazelle and ibex, gathering grains. They didn’t grow their own yet. They didn’t even store it for the time of the year when food is scarce.”

“When was this?” Klaus asked.

“Before the volcano erupted.”

She wondered if the hunters cowered here when the volcano spewed fire, whether they fled in fear before inescapable lava, to be buried beneath it or to survive and have tales of the terrible day carried through time around magical campfires.

Suddenly, her stomach began to cramp, and her legs felt weak. She regretted eating too many dates.

“It was after the glacial maximum, but before agriculture,” Gideon said.

He went back to the Jeep and pulled out some small drawstring canvas bags stamped with the words “Bank of Cincinnati,” a British ordinance map, a prismatic compass, and a pocket transit from a box in the back and called to Lily. “Help me shoot this in.”

“I can’t.” The cramp was more severe now, and she had to hurry. “Ask Klaus.”

She grabbed her trowel and a roll of toilet paper from the Jeep and looked around for a place that would give her privacy. She spotted a small rise close to the cliffs and hurried toward it.

She was on the far side of the rise, just rebuttoning her jodhpurs when a mass of blue cloth enveloped her from behind, covered her head, wrapped around her arms. She struggled, and the cloth tightened.

She could hear Gideon’s voice calling from a distance.

“Hello, Lily.”

She tried to answer through the material pressed against her mouth.

The cloth tightened around her arms, around her chest.

Gideon called again.

“Hello, Lily.”

The sound bounced off the cliff behind her, swirled against the boulders.

“Hello, Lily,” echoed again.

She bent her leg and kicked backward, almost losing her balance. The impact reached up her heel through to her knee. For a moment, the cloth loosened. She managed to move her arm, reached for the trowel in her pocket, jabbed the cloth with it, and ripped open a slit.

Gideon called again, and now Hamud’s voice was added,

“Hello, Lily. Lily. Lily,” in ululations that rebounded all around her.

She slashed with the trowel, opened a tear in the cloth around her face, and saw the man with the straw colored hair, with his stainless steel knife poised, ready to strike.

She kicked again. Missed.

“Hello, Lily.”

This time it was Klaus’ voice.

Another echo? But the man turned. “Oh, it’s you,” he said to Klaus.

Lily lashed out once more, and Klaus twisted back the man’s arm, wrested the knife from his hand.

Klaus stabbed the man in the chest, once, twice, and again. The man staggered, coughed, fell to his knees. Klaus stabbed him one more time before the man collapsed between two black boulders.

“Who is he?” Lily asked.

Klaus stood over him. “He was going to kill you.”

“Do you know him?”

Klaus shoved the man tentatively with his foot. He didn’t move.

“Next he would have killed Gideon. And after that…” Klaus turned away.

“Do you think he killed Qasim?” Lily asked.

“The others are waiting,” Klaus said. “Time we went back to Azraq.”

Chapter Twenty-one

From where she sat in the shade of the fortress, Lily watched Glubb arrive at Azraq in a homemade armored car: a Jeep wrapped in slabs of sheet metal. It caromed over the palmary near a pool of water where flocks of ducks drifted, argued, and dove for food.

Glubb parked the vehicle near the heavy basalt door of the fort. Awadh and Hamud emptied the Jeep. The car was loaded with more sheet metal for Gideon’s Jeep, tins of food, two machine guns with mounts and magazine strips, three gelignite explosives with blasting caps, and what looked like an overnight case.

Glubb first showed Hamud how to hammer the sheet metal onto Gideon’s Jeep to transform it to an armored car, and started him on it. Second, he grabbed the overnight case. Finally, he called Jalil inside.

Lily and Klaus followed.

The case contained a portable radio. Glubb showed Jalil how to operate it.

“I know how to work that,” Lily said.

Glubb gave her a quizzical look. “You do?”

“If it’s like the one we had in Tangier.”

“This one is rather tricky.” Glubb wrote down the frequencies for transmitting and receiving and handed them to Jalil.

All the while, Klaus watched carefully, focusing his camera on Glubb.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Glubb asked him.

“Taking record shots.”

“Records? For what?”

“My memoirs.”

“You’re writing a memoir?”

“When all this is over.”

“Go away,” Glubb told him.

Glubb closed the radio case and went back outside, where Hamud and Awadh sat in the shade.

All three, Lily, Jalil, and Klaus with his camera followed Glubb out.

“More record shots?” Glubb asked.

Klaus pointed the camera at him, “Say cheese,” he said, snapped the shutter twice, stopped to reload, and started a new roll.

Glubb glared at him and turned away.

“It will take us at least a day to get things ready,” Glubb said to Jalil.

He began working on the machine guns, aiming them at a target near a black basalt castle beyond the grove of palms.

Gideon came out. “Move the target. Have a little respect for history,” he told him. “The foundation of that building dates to Diocletian. The upper portion is from the Crusades.”

Grumbling, Glubb moved the target a few feet.

“We have to figure this out by trial and error.” He squatted on the ground next to the guns, unable to conceal his disappointment.

“They gave us Hotchkiss machine guns from World War One, not the new Brens. These are not much good and nobody knows how to use them.”

“I know the gun,” Awadh scurried toward Glubb. “Lawrence used these.”

“You were with Lawrence?” Glubb asked.

Awadh flashed a proud smile. “At Aqaba.”

For a moment Lily saw a strong young fighter instead of the old man she knew, who sang tuneless songs to keep away djinns.

Glubb lifted one of the Hotchkiss guns and, fumbling, placed it on the bipolar mount.

“
Laa, Laa
,
”
Awadh told him. “Not that way.”

He sat down next to Glubb, showed him how to set it up, then tried to load a magazine strip, bungled, and tried again. After an hour, with both of them working, the guns were assembled, loaded, and ready to go.

Two at a time, the men practiced firing, lying on the ground and aiming at the target, stirring birds that fled, flapping and calling, out of the palm trees behind them.

“Six of us.” Glubb spoke over the incessant chattering of gunshots. “That’s enough for a raid.”

“Seven,” Lily said.

Glubb looked at her. “Seven?” He shook his head. “There is no place for….”

Gideon eyed Lily. He raised an eyebrow, smiled, and then said, “Seven.”

“I’m not sure,” Glubb said.

“Seven,” Gideon repeated.

“We’ll see.” Glubb waved a hand toward one of the machine guns and said to Lily, “Let’s see what you can do.”

She lay down on her stomach the way the others had, and pulled back on the trigger.

The recoil was more than she expected, and she reared back with a jolt.

A bird dropped out of the sky and landed in the pond amid a mutiny of startled ducks.

“You’re aiming a little high,” Jalil told her. “Have to correct that before we leave.”

***

Lily, Gideon, and Jalil breakfasted outside in the cool of the morning, escaping the airless heat inside the fort. Glubb had brought rolls, cucumbers, and tinned kippers, and it felt like a feast.

A man on a camel appeared over the hill, approaching slowly, with calm dignity. When he reached them, he slid off the camel and couched it. An embroidered vest covered his long white cotton galabeyah. A knife in a silver scabbard hung around his waist from a thick scarlet cord.

He gave a formal bow, “
Salaam aleikum
,” he said to Jalil with a flourish.

Jalil replied, “
Wa aleikum es salaam
,” almost automatically, without changing his quizzical expression.

“This is a formal occasion,” Gideon murmured to Lily as the Bedouin and Jalil exchanged more greetings in Arabic, “
Sabach al kheer
,
Sabach al nur
,” wishing each other a bright, shining morning.

When Lily turned to go back inside the fort, Gideon stopped her. “Don’t leave. I think this concerns you.”

Closer, Lily saw that the Bedouin’s knife hilt and scabbard were made of tin; his galabeyah was frayed at the hem, the black cloth of his vest had faded to a dark greenish gray.

The Bedouin told Jalil he was a Howeitat named Mahmoud ibn Nazeem.

“
Ahalein wa Sahalein
,” Gideon said. “Welcome.”

Ibn Nazeem bowed again, looked over at Gideon, and addressed Jalil.

Jalil listened and turned to Gideon. “He is speaking for a friend.”

“He is speaking for a friend,” Gideon said to Lily, and ibn Nazeem spoke again.

“His friend has been watching,” Jalil relayed to Gideon. “Your sister is very strong.”

Gideon turned to Lily. “His friend has been watching you, and you are very strong.”

Lily felt her face flush.

The Bedouin nodded and spoke again.

“He says she will make a good wife,” Jalil said to Gideon, and Gideon repeated it to Lily.

“His friend will pay a bride-price of two camels and a donkey,” Jalil said.

“No goat?” Lily asked.

“That’s a very good price. They must think a lot of you.” Gideon turned to Jalil. “No goat?” and Jalil transmitted the question to ibn Nazeem.

The Howeitat nodded and held up two fingers. “T’nane.”

“Two goats,” Jalil said.

Lily took a deep breath. “But how will I finish my dissertation?”

“Tell him,” Gideon said, “that the offer is good. But I must warn him that she has a terrible temper.”

Jalil passed on the message and continued with wide gestures, looking as if he was giving instance after instance of her appalling disposition.

“
Shukran
,” ibn Nazeem said to Gideon, thanking him. He bowed again, gave Jalil a heartfelt speech, took his leave, went back to his camel, untied its feet, and mounted.

“He’s grateful that you were so honest,” Jalil told Gideon.

“Am I really that bad?” Lily asked as they watched the Howeitat disappear over the ridge.

Gideon shrugged, and then smiled at her.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “They couldn’t have paid the bride-price anyway. You saw how poor he was.”

“And even if they could,” said Gideon, “what would I do with two goats?”