Blood Rules (41 page)

After a while Colin took the hand away. Of course Robbie wouldn’t have slept: too hot, too humid, with nowhere to lie down except the bone-hard desert floor. And what grisly thoughts must have been powering his brain though the dark hours?

“Yesterday, you said you knew,” he said. “About Mother.”

Robbie’s shoulders shook, but he did not speak. “How?”

“Worked it out.”

“You … can you explain that?” A pause. “Please?”

Robbie slowly turned around, though still he did not look at his father. “Mum disappeared in New York,” he said, kicking a stone. “We went home. I thought about things. Nobody said anything.
You
never said anything.”

“So how did you know? The papers didn’t get hold of it.”

Colin simply couldn’t understand how his son might have found out: Sharett and his kind, desperate to keep their failures a secret, had ensured total news censorship.

“I … you never seemed to have any contact with her,” Robbie said. “No ‘access,’ isn’t that what they call it? Normally there’s access. … She didn’t want that, I thought. Then I began to think, Maybe she
can’t
have it.” He shrugged.

“I see. Look … I’m sorry I didn’t say anything sooner, but—”

“Me too. I hated you for lying. I ran away once, did you know that?” “I never—”

“No, of course you didn’t!” Robbie’s voice began as a shout and trailed off as he realized other ears would hear. “If only you’d paid more attention. You let me think she was just another cow, gone off with some man, didn’t you? You were happy to have me believe that. Or sometimes I thought… perhaps she’d stolen something and had to run away. But Christ! I didn’t think she was a terrorist! Until on the plane, when they did what she wanted, those gunmen; they seemed to care about her more than the rest of us. … Oh,
shit!”

He rocked to and fro for a moment, then suddenly threw himself into his father’s arms, oblivious of the wounds on his back. Colin screamed … but inside. He clutched the boy to him, stroking his hair, and he said, “I am so sorry. I am so very sorry. I love you, Robbie. And because I always loved you, I was afraid you might turn out to be like Feisal and Halib; perhaps something in their blood would find its way through to you.” He swallowed, scarcely able to go on. “Just as when I first met them,” he choked out, “I was afraid that one day … one day, Leila might turn out to be like them too.”

“Dad. …” Robbie muttered the word into Colin’s chest. He drew back his head and repeated, “Dad?”

Colin got a grip on himself. “Yes?”

“I’m going to ask you something. I want you to tell me the absolute, utter truth, okay?”

Colin nodded.

“Did you love
her?”

Looking down into the boy’s eyes, filled with anguish and yearning, Colin found it easy to answer. The truth slipped out of him in simple words.

“I loved her more than I loved myself. My one and only true love.”

“Do you love her now?”

Joy and simplicity dissolved into chaos. Yes: sitting there in first class beside her, smelling her body smell, he had wanted her and he had remembered what it meant to love her. He had loathed Leila, but still he loved her.

“When someone’s been very great …” His voice tripped over the words. He had not tasted water for many hours, his throat was parched, yet he knew he had to find a way of talking to Robbie, talking until he dried out and fell down dead. “When someone’s been as great, as beautiful, as Leila … you don’t just stop loving her, like turning off the TV. Things get… muddy.”

He’d meant to say “muddled,” but “muddy” did the work much better.

“Colin.”

He wheeled around to discover that Sharett had crept up on them and was regarding Robbie thoughtfully, like a scientist preparing to do an experiment on an animal in his laboratory. Robbie had no independent existence for Sharett.

“Is the boy all right?” he asked Colin.

“Damn you, he’s a person.” Colin could scarcely speak for rage. “Treat him like a human being, you hear me? Now ask
him:
‘Are you all right?'”

But Sharett merely did a Raful and turned away.

It was nearly light now, or would have been but for the thin mist that had come up overnight. Colin found his thoughts straying to the plane, and his heartbeat quickened. Would she blow up the aircraft and everyone aboard, as she’d threatened? “Watch the sky tomorrow at first light"; that’s what the man with the bullhorn had said.

“Rouse up,” Sharett called. Not that it was necessary; none of them had slept. “We are in bad shape.” No preliminaries, no words wasted on the desert air. “But we must move if we are to survive.”

Although barely visible in the half-light, they could see how straight he stood, with Neeman at his shoulder: two pillars of rock rising sheer from a barren landscape. These men were leaders. Yet Sharett’s voice twanged in strange fashion. Earlier, Colin had watched him restlessly patrol their resting place and at one point heard him retch.

Sharett was ill.

“We are in a wadi,” Sharett continued. “Here it is broad and shallow. My guess is that as we go north it will deepen and become narrower. A trap, in other words: a bottleneck. But if we climb to higher ground and hug the top of what may become a cliff, we shall be visible for miles. And remember: she wants the boy. She’ll come after him, take him, and kill the rest of us.”

He paused to let them consider the implications. Robbie was shivering. By now there was enough light to let Colin see how his son’s white face throbbed with patches of color.

“We have one hope,” Sharett continued. “That the hijack will soon end. Now that the terrorists have no helicopter to bring supplies, the world will act. Leila Hanif is isolated. They’ll pursue her. If we can stay ahead of her, we’ve won. In order to do that, we must hide. Which means we will follow this dried-up water-course, where there may be caves, boulders, even trees. Up on the desert floor, we are dead; while we stay here, below it, we have a chance. There is another reason. Here, we may find water.” He pounded a fist into his palm. “That is our first and only priority: water. Food, we have only this.”

He held up a small cardboard container.

“Nuts, cocktail snacks, taken from the plane. I have one tub, Neeman has another. It doesn’t matter: in the desert, a man can live a long time without food.
But water he must find, or he will die!”

“So how do we find it?” Colin asked roughly. He resented the way that the Israeli had calmly assumed autocratic leadership of the group.

“You see this mist?” Sharett waved his hand. “Moisture. You can feel it in the air. There is monsoon in this part of the world. There may be rain today; even if there is not, moisture surrounds you. Dew. Condensation. Look for the stones with dew and suck them.”

Robbie was gazing at him incredulously. “This is the
desert.
There’s no water.”

“What do you think a desert is, then? Sand? Palm trees? Look around you and tell me what you see.”

Thin yellow light permeated the mist, showing them a ridged and uneven gravel floor, boulders, a limestone wall that here was about twice the height of a man, some dusty scrub.

“Keep your eyes open for date palms,” Sharett went on. “Dates contain both water and sugar, the best thing we could hope for. Look for signs of habitation, but be wary—we don’t know who’s in these parts, whether there are tribesmen, and, if so, whether they’re friendly. We will move only for one hour at a time, then rest. If you lose sight of the others and become separated, seek the horizon: you’ll see a blue tinge in one place and that will be where the sea is; walk in the opposite direction, north. We shall all keep going north; you’ll be able to find us that way.”

He looked at each person in turn, judging his resistance, facing him down.

“It’s past dawn,” he said at last. “She will be starting out, and we don’t have much lead time. You will notice that, despite her man’s promise last night, we’ve heard no explosion. It was bluff.”

Without another word he turned on his heel and stalked away, willing them to follow, knowing they would. Even so, Neeman brought up the rear, for Sharett would take no chances.

By the time they’d been going for half an hour, the sun was up and they could see the worst.

This wadi was about a quarter of a mile wide, its gray-black floor scattered with boulders and trenches where water had flushed through in past years. Scrub-coated hollows alternated with stretches of gravel. They hugged the eastern wall, anxious for any patch of shade; even this early in the day the sun was roasting hot. But the wall posed its own problems, for there scree lay thick on the ground and they had to pick their way carefully for fear of turning an ankle.

Here and there, single fan-shaped trees sprouted from the flatter places, their feathery, dust-covered foliage moving listlessly in a foul breeze that siphoned up from the coast with its burden of sand. Colin examined one of these trees and found dark seed pods but did not dare taste them. Sharett, already far ahead, showed no interest, and when Neeman urged him back into line Colin obeyed with a shrug. For now, what mattered was staying together and ensuring that no one harmed Robbie.

Another half hour, and thirst was making him dizzy. Clouds of tiny flies buzzed around his head, settling on his lips, his eyelids. At last Sharett raised a hand, and with a groan of relief Colin sank to the ground.

It was cool and dank beneath the stone overhang that Sharett had chosen. Robbie sat with his arms curled around his legs, head down so that Colin could not see his eyes. He was panting. Colin assessed his own condition. His arm and shoulder had almost ceased to hurt, but his back was smarting painfully in the wet heat and he wondered how long he could go without hospital treatment.

A hand came down lightly on his shoulder. “My friend.” Sharett had come to squat beside him. He spoke softly, allowing no one else to hear. “I can guess what you’re thinking.”

“Can you?”

“You can blame me for this, yes, but don’t blame yourself. You did what was
right.”

Before Colin could respond, Sharett had risen and was striding off to talk with Neeman. Colin looked at them through bloodshot eyes. I’d like to kill that man, he thought.

He took stock. Robbie was all right, thank God, albeit distrustful. Sharett and Neeman were tired, but they were on their feet and talking with heads close together. Mahdi—Mahdi had disappeared.

Colin rose silently and surveyed the wadi. The barren floor yawned empty, although there were several large boulders the Iranian might be crouching behind. Above him, the sky shimmered with a white intensity that hurt his eyes. The cliff walls, bleached of all color, had risen to about fifty feet, with nothing that even a goat could have used as a foothold.

Colin turned back the way they’d come, brushing away the cloud of flies that had descended the moment he left the shadow of the rocks. Just before Sharett had called a halt they’d rounded a sharper than average outcrop. Was Mahdi behind it, perhaps?

Colin made an effort to approach quietly. By the time he was within a few feet of the crease in the cliff wall he knew he’d found his man, because he could hear somebody slurping liquid. He broke into a run; stones crunched beneath his feet; the drinking noises stopped. As he rounded the outcrop, Mahdi was in the act of picking up a rock. Colin shouted and Mahdi staggered back, but he did not drop his missile. When Colin continued to advance he waved the rock high above his head. Colin’s sideways glance showed him that Mahdi had discovered a small pool of emerald-green water in a hollow, saved from evaporation by the shade.

Mahdi threw the rock, but because he was weak it flew wide. As he bent down to find another, Colin launched himself forward, remembering too late his burns and wrenched shoulder. He crashed into the Iranian as a leaden weight, unable to fight or do anything but scream out his agony. It was enough: pain brought blissful seconds of unconsciousness and by the time Colin had recovered, Mahdi lay pinned to the ground with Sharett and Neeman on either side.

“Water,” Colin croaked. “Bastard found water.”

“Useless,” Sharett snapped. “It’s been lying here for weeks; think of the flies.
Look at it!
Green!”

Colin wasn’t listening. He saw that the two Israelis were involved with Mahdi and jumped for the rock hollow, still half full of water. But as he put his face down a noise penetrated the muddle inside his head. Retching. Somebody was being violently sick.

He came to himself with a jolt, to find his eyes mere inches above the water. It stank of sulfur; funny he hadn’t noticed that before. The bodies of half a dozen flies floated on the scummy surface. He stood up, wiping a hand across his brow. His head felt so strange, so strange. …

Mahdi had stopped vomiting. He lay on his side, chest heaving and a wild look in his eyes. Fear.
Terror.

“We’ll leave him.” Sharett stood up. “We can’t carry him, and he’s in no state to walk.”

“No!” The shock was patent in Robbie’s voice. “You can’t!”

Sharett shrugged. “You want to be the one to carry him?”

“I’ll help, of course,” Robbie said.

“And evaporate two liters of sweat when before you lost only one? Don’t be stupid.”

Robbie turned to Colin. “Help me, Dad?”

It was clear from his expression, from his tone, that he regarded this as a token question, capable of receiving only one answer. So when, after a long pause, Colin said no, it rocked the boy on his heels.

“Son, he’s got a much better chance lying here to rest, in the shade, than if we force him to march with us.”

Colin watched the boy’s face, and it was like looking through a window. Intellectually, Robbie had grasped the situation: he understood that although a sacrifice was necessary, he didn’t have to be the one strapped to the altar. Faced with the starkest choice,
him
or
me,
he saw deep down inside how he was going to choose
me
and hated it.

“Robbie.” Sharett spoke. His voice sounded tolerant, compassionate. “In cases of desert survival, there is only one way to save a sick colleague. You seek help in the fastest way possible; then you go back and rescue him. That’s what we have to have the courage to do.”