City of Veils (49 page)

He prayed that the camel would last at least until the worst of the storm had passed. Not only was it his main protection from the wind, but if it fell, he would be unable to lift it above the new layers of sand that formed every moment. Nayir pulled himself close to the camel’s face and felt for its mouth. Although it was choking on a fistful of sand, the camel seemed all right. Nayir pried open the sides of its mouth to swipe out the dirt but only succeeded in letting more in. It sputtered and clucked. Standing perfectly still, paralyzed by fright, it snorted mechanically through large sticky nostrils caked with a layer of sand and snot.

B
elow, Miriam stared at the knife tip poking down through the roof. She assumed it was an anchor of sorts, a means of finding her once the sandstorm had ended, but she had no faith that Nayir was surviving above her, that he wasn’t being strangled by sand. A few minutes later she noticed a thin layer of sand pouring in around the knife. It formed a small mountain in the backseat. She touched the sand packed around the knife, and it spilled to the side, letting in more.

Awakened by panic, she climbed up from the floor. She tried pinching the hole in the roof shut with her fingers. It took two hands to stop the downpour. After five minutes of exertion, she dropped her arms.

She pulled the tissue from her ears and stuffed it into the fissures. It wasn’t as strong as her finger, and it held for less than thirty seconds before popping out, sending sand shooting into her hair. She rummaged through the equipment for something sturdy and found a roll of electrical tape. Scraping her nail along the roll, she found the end and pulled a strip. Stuffing the tissue back into the hole, she then patched the whole area with what must have been six feet of tape. It seemed to be holding.

She climbed into the front seat. She wasn’t sure why she felt more comfortable there—perhaps because it was the most open space in the car. She fidgeted, wiping her eyes, trying not to think about how long she had left, how much oxygen remained. Occasionally she stared up at the knife, now bundled in tape, wishing it could bring her news from above.

*    *    *

N
ayir climbed higher. Small kinks in the rope marked the places where it had been bent in its packaging. He counted them with his hands, feeling each curve, ticking off numbers as he passed. He guessed he had risen two feet, and they hadn’t seen the worst of it yet. The wind, although powerful, remained directionless and choppy. The heart of the storm would be fierce, lashing him from one side with a force capable of lifting a car. The rope that tied him to the camel was cutting into his skin and now soaked in blood. He hoped that when they hit the center of the storm, he would still have the strength to hold on.

M
iriam wondered if Nayir was always this brave, or if he switched on only in dangerous situations. She closed her eyes. Suddenly hot, she stripped off her cloak. A minute later almost all her clothing was off and she lay across the front seat, gasping for air in the sand-choked car and in the odd moments of lucidity wondering why everything was so dark.

N
ayir was fighting unconsciousness when the vortex hit. Even though he had slipped into a dreamlike state, all orifices plugged by sand, he could sense that the worst was upon them. Like a large, clumsy hand the wind seized him and carried him aloft, way beyond the pinnacles of the mosques and the noble cube of the Kaaba. He felt his body slanting sideways, anchored only by the cord around his chest. He was a carpet, sailing in a fairy-tale dream. A thrashing kite. Between the moments of vertigo he was aware of a dead weight by his side: the camel, free-floating and whipping around him like the sand itself. He kept his eyes closed and prayed for the sky.

T
he hand that gripped the rope awakened and squeezed. He felt his shoulder respond. He was still attached to the rope. He lifted his head, shook it. The sand fell away. Eyes came open. Darkness became bluish. He blinked and felt the tears pushing crust from his eyes.

When he tried to move his legs, he could feel that they were buried. He wiggled his arms instead, freeing the right one that was tangled in the rope, and busied himself kicking and struggling until he managed to climb onto the new layer of earth.

It was dark, but the landscape was bathed in moonlight. He peeled the scarves from his face and saw that they were wet and dark: bloodstained. He continued blinking, letting the tears clean his eyes, and found the spot where the rope was sunk in the ground. He knelt unsteadily and began digging away, but the sand was too loose. Every hole he dug only filled up again.

The camel was lying some distance away, its head poking out of the sand like a gravestone. Nayir’s eyes were still blurry, but he went to the animal. It was dead. Sticking his arms into the sand, he could feel that the beast was lying on its side. Reaching even deeper, he was able to find the animal’s pack and retrieve the Swiss Army knife he’d stowed there after he’d tried to coax the camel into the trunk.

He made a thin cut along the camel’s neck. The trickle of blood that came out was enough to dampen the sand, and in minutes he was able to excavate the animal’s trunk enough that its stomach was half exposed. He had a crazy idea, something he’d once heard from a Bedouin. He released the pack and hauled it onto the sand. Removing the canteen, he took a long drink, then picked up the knife.

Slicing deep through fur, peeling back skin and muscle, he exposed the camel’s belly. Now that his eyes had adjusted, the moonlight seemed sufficient and he was able to liberate a long section of the animal’s intestines, scooping them out with care and laying them on the sand. It took him a while to unwind them and find the ends, but when he did, he sliced them off cleanly and turned back to find an artery. A minute later he was drawing the animal’s blood into the channels of the intestines by sucking one end like a straw. When he started to taste blood in his mouth he spat, knotted both ends, laid the length of guts out like a rope, and dragged it back to the place where he had dug himself free.

He swept away the sand and, cutting a hole in one end of the intestines, squeezed them to spray blood on the sides of the small hole. Aiming it like a garden hose, he pushed the sand back, widening the hole wherever possible. He dug with relentless concentration, throwing bloody sand to the surface in handfuls, until he felt the hard metal of the Rover beneath his feet. He looked around. The top of the hole he had dug barely reached his hip. He scraped enough sand to kneel down and bang on the roof. “Miriam!” he shouted. “Miriam!” He wiggled the knife and felt the metal shudder slightly.

Jerking out the knife, he plunged it in again and began to saw, grunting with the effort, all the while shouting Miriam’s name and getting no response. He wasn’t strong enough to penetrate the roof, and neither was the knife. It snapped, the handle breaking cleanly. Cursing, he stood up and fumbled for the intestines. There was a little blood left, and he began to work on the sides of his trench, widening it toward what he hoped was the rear of the car. He finally reached the side window in back. Digging down, he took out his Swiss Army knife and began banging on the glass. It took three tries before it cracked. He pushed the pieces inward, careful not to let in too much sand.

He stuck his head in and looked around. A crumpled form lay in the front seat. He could see the faint white of her skin in the darkness. He dove in, plowing through the heap of sand on the floor. Miriam was lying there in her underclothes. He placed a hand on her neck, felt the soft thump of blood. A pause. Thump.

He rummaged for his canvas tarp. He shoved his gear off the backseat and spread out the canvas. Angling his hands beneath Miriam’s shoulders, he lifted her over the front seat and laid her gently on the canvas. He wrapped the ends around her and knotted them. She didn’t stir. The air around him smelled of her scent, green like trees in a morning dew.

A few minutes later he had her out of the car and was lifting her up, pulling her to the surface until the moonlight hit her body and she rolled to the ground with a thud. Then, before the tunnel collapsed, he went back below, pulling up water and rations, her clothing, his cell phone, and the tent. He poured a trickle of water down Miriam’s throat, but she didn’t respond.

Face caked red with blood, hair sprinkled white, he wandered off to perform a different kind of ablution, to scrape the dirt from his clothing and body with sand and spit, if he had any left.

T
here were two aspects of silence, one transcendent, eliminating the ego and filling a person with sensations of connecting to a universal spirit of consciousness. The other was a negation of everything, a frightening loss of one’s sense of time and identity, a cruel sensory deprivation. He was experiencing the latter now. Beside him, Miriam lay in a semiconscious daze, a sheet of wet canvas rolled around her head, intermittently moaning or asking for water, but mostly unresponsive. The periods of silence were filled with the worrying whisper of the djinn.

By the time she’d awakened, dawn had broken. She’d drunk water and fallen asleep again. Now she lay inside the tent he had pitched above the Rover to protect them from the sun. He didn’t have the strength to carry her back to Mabus’s house, and he didn’t want to leave her alone. She was too weak. Anyway, he wasn’t even sure where Mabus’s house was, or if Mabus would be there, and in what state. But they couldn’t stay here. According to his keychain thermometer, the temperature was already reaching 39 Celsius, and it was only eight o’clock. The problem was that they didn’t have transportable water; they had a five-gallon jug, which was too big to carry, since he’d also be carrying Miriam. Otherwise, they only had the small canteen and a couple of plastic bottles in the Rover, not enough to last them. In daylight, with the water they could carry, they could walk maybe seven kilometers before collapsing. By night they could do forty. They would strike west at nightfall, or a little sooner if the wind picked up. Hopefully, they could reach the main road.

The tent was a canvas tarp with four poles; it formed a three-sided enclosure like the Bedouin tents he loved so well, and he was grateful to the Amirs for having thought to pack it. The open side of the tent had a dark blue screen that rolled down yet let in some air. It was sweltering, but it would have been worse without the screen.

“No one’s coming,” she rasped, lifting her head.

“They know I’m out here,” he said, sitting up at the sound of her voice. “They have the coordinates.” But as he said it, he felt the shame of lying. No one knew where he was, not even Samir. He at least ought to have called his uncle before leaving, but it had been too early in the morning, and by the time he’d thought it would be prudent—just as he’d reached Mabus’s house—he’d been out of cell phone range. The chances of anyone stumbling on them in this part of the desert were close to zero.

He glanced at the sand outside the tent door. The ridges of their footprints were just beginning to move in the first stirring of wind. The fairy tales he’d heard as a child always began with the words
kan ya ma kan
—it was, and it was not. He’d come to associate those words with the desert. One moment a foot would break the sand and the next it would be gone, wiped away by an oblivious wind. Like his Rover, now sitting beneath three feet of sand. Like the camel, blackening in the sun. And like some part of himself that, two days ago, had thought prayer and propriety were antidote enough to what ailed the world.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“We’re in the desert,” he said.

She shut her mouth and closed her eyes. Nayir did the same. He fancied he could hear something coming from the west, but after a moment he decided it was only his imagination.

Outside, a noise.

Nayir scrambled out of the tent. If it was a plane, it would already have gone past. He had one flare, and he didn’t want to waste it. He began systematically scanning the sky.

Suddenly a Toyota Land Cruiser bounded over the dune in front of him. Nayir reached for the flare, his only weapon in case it was Mabus, but as the truck came closer he saw two uniformed officers in the front. They looked relieved, and one of them leaned out the window.

“Salaam alaikum!”
the man yelled. “Nayir Sharqi?”

A few minutes later Nayir was lifting Miriam into the SUV.

O
sama stared across the interrogation table at Apollo Mabus. The suspect held his hands at his temples in an aspect of prayer. He certainly wasn’t a Muslim, but that’s what it looked like. His eyes were shut and his mouth moved as if muttering to angels on his shoulders. Every now and then his head fell forward as if in submission.

He didn’t seem so tough anymore. Fortunately, the police in Qaryat al-Faw had caught up with Mabus just before the sandstorm struck and just after he had unloaded two bodies from his trunk and left them lying in the desert. The police had actually spotted him driving away from the site. The tracks his truck left in the sand were enough to indicate that he was the only one who could have dumped the bodies there. When they’d arrested him, he’d claimed he had no idea what they were talking about, then that he’d gone out there only to find the bodies, because he’d received an anonymous phone call saying they were there. A forensics sweep of his trunk proved that he was lying.

After the sandstorm, they had done a thorough search of his desert house as well. The storm hadn’t damaged the interior; it had only blown a truckload of sand into the garage. Osama hadn’t gone out there, but he had seen the photos of the sad little shed that stood behind the house, with one of the local forensics guys bent over the dirt floor. Mabus claimed he had no idea that Eric had been held there, but the hair and fibers they’d collected showed that he had.