The Sand Men (40 page)

The sun had risen an hour earlier and the abandoned houses were still bathed in apricot light. The climate was more temperate here, with muddy streams crossing the ruptured earth.

The group possessed the wired energy of youngsters who had spent the night awake. Dean and Arendt took turns driving. Lea could not be allowed to take the wheel in case someone saw them—no woman would drive males through small villages. Arendt lurched the Subaru out of the shattered ghost town and onto the blacktop that crossed the valley floor.

After seven kilometres they came within sight of a pair of grey boxes, positioned on either side of the road. Directly in front was a car park filled with traders’ vehicles.

‘Shit—border police patrol,’ said Dean. ‘Go around it.’

‘I can’t. We haven’t seen a turn-off for miles.’

‘It’s okay,’ said Cara, checking the contents of the box they had been left. She held up a handful of false ID cards. ‘Pull into the car park.’

‘How did your friends manage this?’ asked Lea, examining the cards in amazement. Cara ignored her.

Their vehicle was identical to dozens of others. Dotted between the cars were trucks and vans filled with produce. Cara opened the carton and produced two
burkhas
. Lea’s was too short. She checked her appearance in the wing mirror and noted that it hid her identity well enough.

‘If they ask anything, you’ll have to do the talking,’ Cara told Arendt, who was the only one who spoke any Arabic. ‘If they speak to you, show them your ID and get out of the car, but keep them away from the rest of us. They’re fat old guys, they won’t want to move around too much.’

‘That’s not going to be enough,’ said Lea. ‘They’re experienced. They’ll be less interested in ID cards than how you behave, whether you’re suspicious in any way. If they look in the back of the van they’ll see all the laptops.’

‘We can’t get rid of them,’ said Cara. ‘We need them on the other side. They’re our lifeline.’

The two middle-aged border policemen had machine guns strapped to the backs of their beige uniforms. They were moving from one vehicle to the next, checking the contents. The boys had donned ragged brown shirts, caps and jeans, and looked like local agricultural workers. Lea watched the traders, trying to think of a diversion.

‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she told Cara. ‘I have an idea.’

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Dean warned her. ‘Stay in the van.’

‘You have to trust me on this. I’m not going to try and turn you in. I came this far with you, didn’t I?’ She studied his eyes, but a man she barely knew stared back at her.

‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘Go.’

Chapter Fifty-One

The Border

A
RENDT AND
C
ARA
stood beside the mud-caked Subaru as the border guards approached. Lea watched as the guards finished chatting with a man selling eggs and dried beans. There seemed to be a surreptitious trade taking place, the usual covert commerce that existed at borderlines. The farmer parcelled up a packet of shrivelled-looking greens and handed it to one of the guards, who buried his levy within a voluminous pocket and moved on toward the Subaru.

Lea felt sure they would be found out. The guards were bored and in no rush, and that was dangerous. Right now, a hastily erected roadblock would present less of a problem. The one thing the group had in its favour was youth; in their makeshift clothes and caps Dean and Arendt looked like every other farmhand in the region. The
burkha
was making Lea’s face sweat. She had applied kohl around her eyes, and hoped that it wasn’t running. Her dark colouring helped.

The guard who had taken the farmer’s bribe was talking to Arendt. The Danish boy was very good at affecting a level of bored indifference. The other guard had badly puckered skin on the right side of his face, either from a burn or a serious childhood illness. He was walking around the vehicle, idly examining the tyres. Perhaps he wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but was just killing time. The faces of the security guards at Dream Ranches had always proven unreadable. These ones were more amiable and dangerous.

‘What is he looking for?’ Dean whispered.

‘There’s yellow mud everywhere,’ said Lea. ‘He knows we’ve been through the date valley. They have trouble with looters stealing from the ghost towns.’

‘But if nobody wants the stuff—’

‘I don’t know, maybe they want everything left exactly as it is. Don’t do anything to piss them off, okay?’

The guard with the burned face stopped by Cara and asked her something. Arendt quickly stepped in and replied for her, indicating her mouth—he was saying she couldn’t speak. The guard listened with hooded eyes for a minute, growing visibly bored, his interest waning. Finally he stepped away. Neither of them appeared to notice Lea. In the
burkha
she was middle-aged and sexless, a homemaker and mother, modest and invisible.

A belt radio crackled and the guards listened. Lea moved back against the side of the car, trying not to draw attention to herself. If they crossed successfully here, they would be free to reach Muscat.

The burned guard had moved to the back of the van and was making a gesture, turning a key in a lock. He was asking them to open it.

‘Shit,’ said Arendt, ‘the four laptops are still stacked in the back.’

‘Did you shut them all down?’ Cara asked.

‘I didn’t have time. There won’t be a connection open.’

‘No, but the Dream World screen-savers are on the desktops,’ said Dean. ‘Fuck, even an idiot could tell what they are.’

Arendt was improvising, saying something about a lost key, but he clearly wasn’t being believed. Now the other guard had sensed resistance and had joined his friend, and they were both ignoring him as they tried the rear door handle.

The door sprang up. The laptops were sitting right in front of them, piled in a stack, but on top was a wooden tray filled with dozens of bright yellow baby chicks. The moment they were released into the light they began chirruping and hopping out of the tray, spilling all over the back seat, tumbling down onto the tarmac. Lea ran forward and gave a startling banshee shriek.

The guards were as alarmed by the cry as they were by the sight of the runaway chicks. Cupping their hands they ran back and forth, but it was like trying to hold sand; the chicks slipped through their fingers and shot under the van, while Lea harassed them, yelling and darting about, increasing the confusion. Taking their cue from her, Cara and Dean indicated to the guards that they would only be in the way if they stayed. They bore them no grudge, they would clear up the problem themselves.

With thankful gestures, the guards beat a hasty retreat. Most of the chicks had dispersed beyond hope of retrieval, but some of the farmers came to them with the tiny yellow creatures palpitating in their cupped hands, and they could not turn down the offer. The Subaru sped away with its interior still resounding to the chirping of tiny birds.

T
HE LANDSCAPE HAD
changed now. It was greener and cooler, and they had entered an area of well-made new roads. Even so, they were surrounded on all sides by signs of ancient civilisation. Human settlement here dated back to the Stone Age. The country existed in distinct Muslim faiths and tribal zones, roughly matching city, desert and woodland. After its civil war ended in the mid-seventies Oman began to enjoy a new prosperity, and the first signs, most noticeable in the form of ubiquitous plastic water bottles, had begun to mar the landscape.

‘The Sultan brought in social housing, cheap healthcare and good roads,’ said Cara. ‘At least, for as long as the oil holds out. Eventually he’ll have to give in. This will become another playground for the rich unless someone can stop it from happening.’

Lea looked at them in wonder. To hear this small group of dust-caked teenagers speaking as if they had the power of an international peacekeeping force was oddly touching.

The Subaru coasted down into the town of Nizwa, their last stop before Muscat. As always, there were few women in the streets, mostly men drinking coffee outside their shops or playing checkers. They turned into the main street and found the pavement lined with immaculately dressed Omani boy scouts holding tall red banners.

‘What the fuck, man?’ Dean looked about. Another troop of scouts was heading toward them. Arendt picked one of the smallest and had a word with him.

‘The King of Sweden is visiting the country,’ he reported back. ‘Apparently he’s the head of the World Scouting Federation.’

Arendt laughed, and the tension between them broke. They parked under a fig tree, and bought fresh supplies from a kiosk at the edge of the town’s souk.

‘That was fast thinking back there,’ Dean told Lea. ‘Where did you get the tray of chicks?’

‘I bought them from one of the farmers,’ Lea replied. ‘I didn’t understand what he was saying so I just stuck a pile of notes in his hand.’

‘He probably got most of them back,’ Dean said. For a moment it looked as if he might smile.

Even Cara seemed less grudging. She leaned against the side of the van, fanning herself in the shade. ‘We need to find an empty café where we can check what happened last night on the laptops,’ she said, pointing across the road. At the shadowed entrance to the souk, the proprietor of a small coffee shop sat dozing in the sun. Above his head was a red plastic sign that read
Kahwa – Halwa – Wi-Fi.
‘Over there.’

Heading across the road, they awoke the owner and ordered bitter coffee flavoured with cardamom and dates. Lea ate
lokhemat
, deep-fried dough-balls served with sweet limes, while the boys tapped into their connections and solemnly viewed the news reports.

It felt unreal, the sunlight dappling over the little sepia-painted coffee shop, the smell of roasting
Kahwa
in the kitchen, the fat little café owner dozing on a fraying wicker chair, the scent of sticky sweet
halwa
in rosewater, the
Muezzin
call in the distance and four intense young people furiously typing, muttering to each other, operating as a single organism.

Beside a thorny, ancient myrrh bush stood a kohl-eyed old man, older than anyone she had ever seen before, leaning on his cane, dressed in a traditional tribal cloak, his withered brown arms bare to the shoulders. His left forearm bore the diagonal scar of a terrible burn, long-since healed. The mark of the Ka’al.

And there, just behind him, were two policemen.

‘Look,’ whispered Lea.

Dean glanced up, annoyed at being interrupted. ‘Shit, the fucking scouts. The king of Sweden. He’s probably being escorted by someone from the royal family. Heightened security.’ They closed their laptops as one and rose, pulling her up, but the police had seen them.

‘They’ve got machine guns on their backs,’ said Cara. ‘File out slowly.’

Lea placed money on the table for the coffees and led the group out, but as they left the officers began calling to them.

The group broke into a run, heading into the deeply shadowed souk. Sunlight filtered through the wood slats overhead, casting matchstick stripes across the confluence of narrow alleyways. In front of each store sat a boy with nothing to do, too many vendors selling the same things, shoes and bags and lamps, shopkeepers peering out of the gloom to collar passing trade.

The police called out to shopkeepers to stop the infidels, but on Dean’s command they broke apart, and Lea found herself running hard to keep up with Cara. Arendt and Dean darted off into one of the many winding alleys filled with carpenters and metalworkers.

Lea glanced back and saw Arendt sprawling across an angled spice display, the great wooden trays of cardamom, marjoram, caraway and sumac tipping and bursting clouds of eye-stinging spice into the air, ochre and crimson, ginger and jade.

A young man popped up in an opened panel among the spices, so that he appeared to be buried to his shoulders. Rubbing his saffron-covered face, he started yelling and grabbing at the boy. Arendt was seized by one of the officers and fought hard, kicking and twisting until strong arms came around his chest and held him still.

Cara hurtled into an alley festooned with wheels of electrical cable, charging through reeking puddles between ducks and flea-riddled cats, around a cart stacked with hundreds of bubble-packed purple plastic dinosaurs. She knew the officers would be calling for more help to seal off the other end of the alley.

‘Here,’ she shouted, catching up and pulling Cara into the musty interior of a carpet shop. They climbed between the folded towers of rugs woven in burnt oranges and reds that rose from floor to ceiling all around the narrow shop, and ran for the stairs at the rear, pushing past a confused shopkeeper.

Every inch of space was filled with silks, tapestries, scarves, tablecloths, runners, and cloths graded by shade and shape, endlessly refolded and arranged. On the second floor was a small wrought-iron balcony. Here, the sides of the streets were so close that the opposite balcony was not much more than a metre away. Pushing Cara ahead of her, she clambered onto the railing and jumped across, praying that the ironwork would hold.

Somewhere below they could hear the two policemen shouting to one another as they tried to track the dispersing Europeans. Lea was still dressed in her burkha, and Cara could have been mistaken for any black-nailed youth toiling in the dense, dust-filled air of a workshop, except that she had lost her hat and now her sun-bleached hair tumbled about her face. Lea grabbed a brown woollen cap from a pile and jabbed it onto her head.

‘Tuck your hair in,’ she instructed as they made their way downstairs, through a dingy room where cross-legged boys sat carding twine on wooden frames. They headed into a quieter part of the souk where few might notice their flight.

‘What do we do now?’ Cara asked when it was safe to stop running. ‘Arendt had the keys to the van.’

‘We have to keep going,’ said Lea.

‘We can’t get caught.’ Cara was bent over with her hands on her thighs, breathing hard. ‘There’s a lot more to do yet.’