Declare (30 page)

Hale took a deep breath and opened his mouth—and then discovered that he had an almost physical difficulty in telling Ishmael the answers. As recently as yesterday, Hale would have undergone torture rather than tell a Rabkrin operative these things.

He exhaled without speaking, aware of a chill of sudden dampness on his forehead. But it’s
all wrong
, he told himself, you can tell this man the old math because it’s—apparently—invalid;
but!
—but it is nevertheless the math I put together,
discovered!
—to deceive and checkmate Ishmael’s people—and it’s so internally consistent, so convincing—

Ishmael was staring at him with eager attention, and Hale realized that his own hesitancy here was obviously genuine… and he knew that Theodora had arranged all this so that it would be.

And so at last Hale began talking, haltingly telling his questioner everything the Declare operatives had known in 1948, and describing, as if it were the still-current plan, his own earnest, painstaking strategy for countering that Soviet attempt to awaken what slept uneasily on the top of Mount Ararat.

The birds appeared to want to listen, and Ishmael had to summon the boy and make him beat the cages with a stick to get them all shouting and cawing again.

Ain al’ Abd, 1963

… it was noticeable that whenever the Church of England dealt with a human problem she was likely to call in the Church of Rome.

—Rudyard Kipling,
Kim

When the stars had begun to fade in the east, Hale and his host shared a breakfast of hot saffron rice with eggs beaten into it, accompanied by a choice of beer or camel’s milk, of which Hale chose beer; and then Ishmael gave him a clearly secondhand set of Bedu clothes to change into: a patched cotton
dishdasha
smock with an
aba
robe to drape over it, and a once-white
kaffiyeh
headcloth and an
agal
cord to tie it on with. Ishmael looked like a prosperous town Arab in his long white shirt and robe and white
kaffiyeh
, while Hale’s smock had been patched with so many different fabrics that he sourly thought he looked like a dervish; and his bare feet were obscenely white, and soon achingly numb with cold from standing on the dewy flagstones.

In the frosty overcast dawn Salim bin Jalawi returned with the jaunty blue Chevrolet, and Hale and Ishmael climbed into the back as Ishmael gave bin Jalawi directions to a place off the highway south of Magwa.

Bin Jalawi was moody, and several times frowned at Hale in the rear-view mirror. Hale had gathered that they were to travel to some desert location to consult some very old person.

Hale thought about how to phrase a question. “Is it a place I
know?” he asked finally, leaning forward over the seat back. They were driving down a big new divided highway under a clearing sky, and for nearly half a minute now had been gunning around the perimeter of a traffic circle almost wide enough to contain another airport; but the interior of the circle was just tractor-leveled sand, as were the expanses on either side of the highway, and the only other vehicles between the flat north and south horizons were a couple of miles-distant water tankers.

Bin Jalawi spat against the inside of the windscreen. “It is a place you have heard of. It is to the south, in ’Awazim country, and I am Mutair. We will meet guides at Magwa.”

“Are the ’Awazim at war with the Mutair?” asked Hale. “Do we need a
rafiq?”
When trekking through hostile country, it was the Bedu custom to talk a member of the local tribe into coming along as a guarantor or peacemaker, known as a
rafiq
in these northern countries around the gulf.

“We wouldn’t want a
rafiq
from the tribe of the one we go to see,” said bin Jalawi in a tight voice.

“And the only tribe at war with us here is the KGB,” said Ishmael, his watery old eyes blinking ahead. “Khrushchev is not hostile to my agency, but the Presidium is growing tired of Khrushchev, and Semichastny of the KGB is pursuing Stalin’s old line toward us.”

“Horror at the wrath of God,” recalled Hale.

They had been speaking in English, but now bin Jalawi burst out, “
Yahrak kiddisak man rabba-k!”
It meant
Burn the saint who brought thee up
, and Hale, startled, met his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Bin Jalawi glowered back at him. Still in Arabic, he said to Hale, “Speak you of horror at the wrath of God?”

And Hale almost smiled, for he realized at last that bin Jalawi was, illogically, angry at Hale for giving in to his cut-off-the-hand-or-kiss-it argument and turning double for this Russian. I have disappointed you, Hale thought, haven’t I, Salim? Were you dutifully waiting for me to condemn your duplicity?

“Allah is all-beneficent,” Hale told him mildly. Look to him for reproof, not to me.

A few miles south of the palms and apartment blocks and petrol stations of Magwa, bin Jalawi slowed the car and then steered it off the pavement onto a rutted dry-mud track, and through the jolting windscreen Hale could see, a hundred yards ahead, the glint of sunlight reflecting from the bumpers of several jeeps parked on the sand. Around the vehicles stood the old familiar silhouettes of robed Bedu and baggage-laden camels.

“These are Mutair and ’Awazim,” said Ishmael rapidly in Arabic, “there is no enmity among them. Our destination is on the Saudi border, at the southern edge of the Neutral Zone—motor vehicles or helicopters in that region would draw the attentions of all the nations involved in this, so we will travel with these Bedu, as Bedu. They understand that you are a Frank”— Hale smiled, recalling that Bedu somehow always confused all Westerners with the French— “but do try to behave as one of them. They have each a
khusa
dagger and a rifle, naturally; you have no weapon; try to make up for that with an air of authority. You have the advantage of having more experience, than they, with the sort of thing we go to consult.”

Hale could feel his scalp prickling. He remembered the man he and bin Jalawi had encountered at Wabar in 1948, the lower half of whose body had so long ago been transformed to stone that the immobile knees had been weathered to grotesque flattened flipper shapes by sandstorms; and for the second time in three days his right hand twitched in a reflexive impulse to make the sign of the cross. He made a fist instead, and took several deep breaths, and because bin Jalawi might be looking at him in the rocking rear-view mirror, he kept an impassive expression on his face.

The car began to slew like a boat in the loose sand when they were still some distance from the jeeps, and bin Jalawi sighed theatrically and trod on the brake; and when he switched off the engine, Hale heard and remembered the windy silence of the Arabian desert.

They levered open the doors, and bin Jalawi plodded around to unlock the trunk, from which he lifted two rifles which Hale recognized as old U.S. Army .30-caliber BARs, with blocky magazines protruding down in front of the trigger guards. Bin Jalawi handed
one to Ishmael and held on to the other himself, and he ostentatiously did not look at Hale as the three of them began striding bare-foot over the cold sand toward the jeeps.

It was clearly meant as a snub, so that Hale would lose face in front of these Arabs—but the tops of the low sand hummocks were furred green with the desert grasses that the rains always conjured up in the winter, and when Hale saw the yellow blossoms of the
Alqa
waving in the wind, he forgot his naked feet and his lack of a rifle and was cheered simply by this promise of good grazing ahead; and this very Bedu thought gave him the confidence to smile easily at the Arabs around the jeeps.

Two of the camels were white, clearly from the herds of the Dhafir, and the other five were the characteristic red-brown beasts of the Mutair and ’Awazim; all were laden with saddlebags and glistening water-skins and northern saddles with tall pommels fore and aft.

The camels were being tugged away into a walk toward the open desert to the west—apparently the party was to set off immediately—and one old graybeard by the jeeps was jangling a set of car keys impatiently; in Arabic he said to Hale, “An ill welcome to a face that will never prosper!”

Now the smells of old sweat and camels and automobile exhaust on the clean desert breeze had at least for the moment completely shaken away all memory of the years at Weybridge, and when one of the Bedu held out the reins of a Mutair camel to Hale, he took them and automatically tugged to bring the walking camel’s head swinging heavily down.

And as Hale took a long step forward to set his bare right foot on the camel’s neck and then was lifted up past the swaying saddlebags to the height of the saddle, he looked over his shoulder and called back to the man, “
Ya ibn al-kalb! Kaif halak?”

It meant
O dog-son, how have you been?
—for Hale had recognized the man’s voice as that of a Muntafik shepherd who had long ago been given the nickname Al Auf, which meant The Bad, because of his deceptively gruff manner.

Hale settled onto the flat saddle platform, kneeling far back as the
Bedu did, and he heard Al Auf wonderingly call after him, “Bin Sikkah?”

Hale waved without looking back. He had been given the nick-name bin Sikkah by the Mutair tribe when he had traveled with them in the winters of 1946 and ’47. It meant Son of the Iron Road, which was the railway—the Arabs had always identified Europeans with the trains and rails that transected the coastal regions, and the steel rails were said to confound the attention of djinn.

Several of the Bedu had mounted their camels, and now as they rocked along up on the saddles they were peering curiously across at Hale, and he heard them mutter to one another, “It is bin Sikkah, back from the land of the Franks!” “It is bin Sikkah the
Nazrani!”

Nazrani
was almost a synonym with Frank, but it meant specifically Christian, and at least in Hale’s day Christians had been held in very low esteem among the Bedu; so Hale decided to force a defining greeting before the despised term could be fully considered.

He glanced at the Bedu nearest him, a young Mutair to judge by the red mare he was riding, and nodded and said, “
Al kuwa,”
a common Bedu greeting which was a short way of saying
God give you strength.
If the man responded in kind, he would be nearly as bound to Hale as if he had invited Hale to drink a cup of coffee in his tent.

The man looked away from Hale toward his companions, but they were all absorbed in scanning the bumpy western horizon far out beyond the long blue shadows that stretched ahead of them across the reddish sand. At last the young Bedu nodded at Hale and gave the reply, “
Allah-i-gauik,”
which meant
May God strengthen you.

After that the other three whom Hale had not met swung their camels into closer parallel around him as they rode west, and as soon as the customary pious greetings had been exchanged, Hale was included in the conversation as they reviewed the news of the last ten years or so. He learned about deaths and births and winter rainfalls and botched circumcisions, but altogether it appeared that most of the Bedu he had known were now living in new cement
houses out near the airfield, and apparently all owned American trucks. His new companions in turn asked about the health of the Frank queen, and Hale assured them that she was well. From behind him, Hale heard the car and jeep engines start up and recede, sounding very far away because of the desert wind in his face.

The tufted, placid head of Ishmael’s camel bobbed into view on Hale’s left, and Hale saw that the old man was riding astride the saddle, rather than kneeling on it; from experience Hale knew that in this posture the saddle edges would eventually bite uncomfortably into the thighs, and he wondered if the old man would get down and walk beside his camel after a while. Ishmael carried his rifle slung over his shoulder, military fashion.

“We ride west,” said Ishmael crossly in Arabic, “to the Ash Shaq valley, which we will follow south along the Saudi border, to avoid the Burgan oil fields. Nothing should obstruct us before we camp for the night, which should be at the mouth of the valley but nowhere near the Dughaiyim water hole; do, therefore, nothing of a
signaling
nature, am I understood?”

Hale nodded impassively; but he wondered what sort of signal the old man imagined he could give, from here, and to what sort of entities. As to camping away from the water hole, that was simply common sense—a known water hole was likely to be the destination of any travelers out on the desert, and the custom was to refill the water-skins and let the camels drink as quickly as possible and then to move off before any other, unknown parties might approach the place.