Declare (49 page)

Hale had come up with the plan to cart a genuine Shihab mete-orite way up into the Ahora Gorge on Mount Ararat, and use ankhs to summon the djinn down to the stone, and then explode it in their midst. It would be an SOE operation rather than an SIS one—and since the SOE no longer officially existed, the only person whose clearance he needed was Theodora’s. The decipher-yourself code message okaying the plan arrived at Hale’s CRPO office in the Al-Kuwait British Embassy less than an hour after he had telegraphed the proposal.

And so the twenty-five-year-old Captain Hale of the Combined Research Planning Office had set about finding a Shihab meteorite.

He learned that there was a covert traffic in the objects in the black-magic Al-Sahr shops down by the Ahmadi docks south of town, but the stones offered for sale in those furtive establishments had no real provenances and were often simply smoked sandstone or granite. He had turned to historical records then, hoping to find mention of a meteor strike that might be said to have killed a djinn.

It proved to be easy to find, in a book called
The Empty Quarter
, published by Holt as recently as 1933; and the very name of the
author was intriguing—the book had been written by H. St. John Philby, the father of Kim Philby. In the book the senior Philby recounted his expedition into the Rub’ al-Khali desert to find the lost city of Wabar.

Many passages in the Koran described Allah’s angry destruction of the city of the idolatrous A’adites, and Arab folklore recalled the city as having been called Wabar or Ubar, and placed it in the great southern Arabian desert. St. John Philby had trekked by camel caravan to the reputed site, but instead of ruined foundations he had found the black volcanic walls of two meteor craters; in his book St. John Philby described black pellets of fused glass which his Bedu guides had thought were the pearls of perished A’adite ladies, and he mentioned a Bedu legend that a big piece of iron lay somewhere in the area, though Philby had not succeeded in finding it.

The elder Philby had assumed that the vaguely constructed-looking black crater walls must have been the only basis for the Bedu identification of the site as the legendary Wabar; apparently it had not occurred to him that the fabled city might actually have stood there, and literally have been destroyed by fire from the heavens.

Several times during Hale’s research the old, half-welcome excited nausea had kept him fearfully reading all night, drinking contraband Scotch and wishing he could bring himself to follow Elena’s example and return to the Catholic faith.

In the chapter on Wabar, St. John Philby had described the dreams he had had as his caravan had approached the craters— nightmares of the desert spinning around him in radiating rays of gravel, while he tried uselessly to take bearings with a surveyor’s instrument.

And in the fragmentary
Hezar Efsan
, Hale was troubled to read the story enigmatically preserved as “The Fisherman and the Genie” in the
Thousand Nights and One Night
. In the ancient story, a genie tricked a fisherman into catching fish from a miraculously preserved lake in the desert; when the fish were put into a frying pan, a solid wall opened and a black giant described as “a mountain,
or one of the survivors of the tribe of A’ ad” appeared and asked the fish, “O Fish, are you constant to the old covenant?”—to which the fish replied, “Return, and we return; keep faith, and so will we.”

Clearly, in his childhood end-of-the-year nightmares, Hale had been
in touch
with some hidden world—a disturbingly contrarational world, perhaps older than rationality, but still secretly alive and active.

Hale was nervously certain that the A’adites had been fallen angels, and that Wabar had been a kingdom of djinn, destroyed by some kind of meteor strike—and he resolved to find the meteoric stone that St. John Philby had failed to find there.

And so Captain Andrew Hale had quietly taken a vacation from the CRPO—while, as the Canadian Tommo Burks, he had flown to Al-Hufuf and begun outfitting an expedition to the Rub’ al-Khali region of Saudi Arabia, under forged authorization documents from the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C.

In the Jafurah desert settlements outside Al-Hufuf he hired ten Bedu tribesmen for the expedition, including several from the ’Al-Murra tribes to act as guides and
rafiq
escorts, and he set his agent Salim bin Jalawi to assembling thirty desert-bred ’
Umaniya
camels and purchasing enough rice, dates, coffee, first-aid supplies, and ammunition for a month-long trip.

He had planned to leave at the end of January in 1948, and had applied to King Saud for permission to travel in the Saudi interior—but on January 6, his birthday, Hale had received word that the king had forbidden the trip. The ’Al-Murra tribes were at war with the Manasir, Hale was told, and the situation was complicated by the fact that the king’s tax collectors were in the area collecting the
zakat
tribute. But the ’Al-Murra tribesmen Hale had enlisted for the trip had not heard of any fighting with the Manasir, and Hale knew that the
zakat
was always collected in June and July, when the summer’s lack of grazing forced the Bedu to camp on their home wells.

“He doesn’t want a
Nazrani
out in the sands,” said bin Jalawi philosophically, sipping coffee at a sidewalk café in the Al-Hufuf
town square. “Not when the spirits have got everybody stirred up in this way. Even the
yakhakh
are animated. Perhaps, Tommo Burks, it is the end of the world.”

Yakhakh
were locusts, and in fact a net had been draped over the café’s awning poles to keep the flying grasshoppers off the tables; every three or four years the insects migrated up from Abyssinia, and today the sky was actually darkened by clouds of them passing overhead toward Kuwait, as if the sun were eclipsed.

Hale drummed his fingers on the wooden table. “National Geographic he treats this way!” he said angrily. “I wish I
were
a journalist,
I’d
write a story about him.” He frowned at bin Jalawi. “Can you… sell off the supplies we’ve bought, and the camels, and dismiss the men we’ve hired? I think I’ll be buying a plane ticket back to Kuwait.”

“Certainly.” Bin Jalawi cupped his hand and rubbed his thumb across the inside of his index finger in a universal gesture. “The men will want pay for the time they’ve waited—I can distribute it.”

I’ll bet you can, Hale thought. “But could you secretly
hold back
some of the supplies, after making a big scene with trying to get the best prices in returning the rest of them?—and quietly keep a couple of the best guides on our payroll, after noisily firing the rest?”

“Alahumma!”
said bin Jalawi; the phrase meant
to be sure
or
unless possibly
. “This would be in order to disobey the king—to be subject to arrest, in the company of an infidel
Nazrani
in the sands. A greater pay-scale would be required from the Creepo.”

“ ‘You limpin’ lump o’ brick-dust,’ ” sighed Hale, quoting Kipling’s
Gunga Din
at him, as he often did. “Yes, double the pay—it’ll still be cheaper than hiring all ten of them at the old rate. And keep back six or eight of the best camels. Eight. I’ll get somebody to board the Kuwait plane as Tommo Burks. And then I’ll meet you and the camels and the two guides at the Jabrin oasis in… what, a week?”

“If we ride hard. And how are you going to get to Jabrin?”

“I’ll drive a jeep there. The camel route from Hassa to Jabrin would be navigable in a jeep.”

“The journey will destroy the jeep.”

“Well, I haven’t got to drive it back, have I? I’ll ride one of the unburdened supply camels on the return trip, and just abandon the vehicle at Jabrin. And when you sell back the supplies,
don’t sell the sled
, understand? Nor the ropes and shovels.”

Hale had bought a sand sled that could be pulled by camels, and he was hoping the meteorite could be dragged to a gravel plain where an RAF aircraft could land.

“If the tribes get word of a
Nazrani
in the sands, it will be all they will talk about. Ibn Saud’s men will hear of it.”

“We’ll be fast,” said Hale confidently, “and if we meet any Bedu I’ll speak only in order to return greetings, in Arabic with some northern accent like Ruwala—”

“And not get off your camel,” added bin Jalawi. He had often told Hale that his huge English feet left monstrous footprints in the sand.

The 150-mile camel route from Hasa to Jabrin was mostly polished tracks slanting across gravel plains, but a number of times Hale did have to drive the commandeered RAF jeep over dunes, with the big 900-x-15 tires spinning heavily and sand thumping like deep water in the wheel wells. He had left Hufuf in the frosty dawn, but by the time he drove the jeep around the last sand ridge and finally saw below him the palm plantations of Jabrin, the sky was red with twilight, and a bandage from the jeep’s first-aid kit was wrapped tightly around a splitting radiator hose, and the radiator itself had been patched by a helpful Bedu family at the last well, with a paste of flour and camel dung. The generator had been screeching for the last hour.

Through the jolting, dust-powdered windscreen he squinted around at the Jabrin basin. Though some of the tracts of palm trees were still flourishing in orderly rows, most were decimated and choked with wild acacia bushes, and several stretches showed only toppled, dry trunks. Until the jeep clattered down to the level of the oasis he could see the broken walls and foundation-lines of ruined buildings.

Salim bin Jalawi’s party was camped on a flinty steppe by three well mounds, and out of sheer mercy for their eardrums Hale tromped on the brake pedal when he was still a couple of hundred feet away; and at long last he switched off the jeep’s laboring engine.

The shrill whine of the generator blessedly squeaked to a halt, but in the sudden desert silence he felt even more conspicuous. He climbed stiffly out of the driver’s seat and plodded around to the back, and as he unstrapped his two cases he squinted over his shoulder at the campfire and the tents and the humps of camels grazing beyond, and his nostrils flared at the warm aroma of boiled rice and butter on the alkali breeze.

The three men by the fire had stood up when the engine died, and Hale straightened the dusty
kaffiyeh
on his head and then hefted his cases and stepped away from the jeep. In spite of the head-cloth’s protection and the cloudy sky throughout the long day, he could feel the sting of sunburn on his nose and forehead.

He trudged slowly across the gravel to the fires, noting that the camels had already been watered—the nearest well mound had been cleared of sand and its cover of lumber and skins had been pulled away, to be conscientiously replaced before leaving tomorrow morning, and the mound, a cement of sand and a hundred years of accumulated camel dung, glinted with muddy moisture in the firelight.

“Al Kuwa,”
he called.
God give you strength.
These men knew he was English—a Frank, a nominal Christian, a
Nazrani
—but he wanted to say nothing to emphasize it.

“Allah-i-gauik,”
the three of them replied, civilly enough.
God strengthen you.

“You camp right at the well?” Hale went on in Arabic when he had laid down his cases and embraced bin Jalawi. From one of the other men he accepted a small cup of hot coffee made from the well water, and drank it—it tasted fresh, but he knew that a laboratory analysis would show high concentrations of albuminoid ammonia, indicating contamination of camel urine in the well water.

“We are on the border of the desolation of A’ad,” said the man who had handed Hale the cup. He was a lean, black-haired ’Al-Murra tribesman with a leather cartridge belt over his shoulder and what looked like an old single-shot .450 rifle propped against a camel saddle beside him. “Even the Saar tribes will have the sense to stay out of the Rub’ al-Khali in these nights.” He laughed quietly.

“Or even in the days,” said bin Jalawi helpfully, crouching to sit by the fire again. “Men’s hopes are confounded when angels bend their courses down to earth.” Squinting up at Hale, he said, “I’ll wager the
dibba
came to Hufuf, after we left?”

“Yes,” Hale admitted.
Dibba
was the Arab term for locusts in the wingless, crawling stage, and armies of them often followed the airborne migrations. “Nothing extraordinary.” In fact the
dibba
had advanced on Hufuf from out of the southern desert in a front four miles wide and two miles deep, and black masses of them had stripped the date trees so bare that they appeared to have been burned. When Hale had driven out of town at dawn, he had seemed to be driving over crunching black snow, and on the road he had seen half a dozen dog-sized monitor lizards springing up in the chilly air to catch strays from the low-flying last wave of winged locusts.

“ ‘Nothing extraordinary,’ ” echoed bin Jalawi in a thoughtful tone, and the other two Bedu muttered to each other as they spread their robes and sat down. “Perhaps to the Franks the end of the world is nothing extraordinary.”

Hale found a place to sit on the windward side of the fire, and he accepted a plate of rice ladled from the pan that would recently have served as the camels’ drinking trough. He dug in hungrily with his right hand, licking his fingers, for he had brought only bread and cheese to sustain him during the day’s jolting drive.

“A few million bugs don’t make the end of the world,” he said to bin Jalawi around a mouthful of rice.