Welcome to Dubai (The Traveler) (32 page)

“Another traitor,” he told himself back inside the staircase.

He thought about helping his men back out onto the roof, but decided against it. He understood that his new foe would be too dangerous to leave behind, so he retreated to the lower floors.

Saleem continued to listen to as much as he could through all of the gunshots on the roof, but as more of Heru’s men continued to retreat to the twenty-seventh floor, he continued to shoot them down.

Meanwhile, Heru made his way down to the twenty-fifth floor and ran to the right staircase of the building to double back up to the twenty-seventh floor from the opposite side. This new traitor was in his way and stopping him and his men from securing the roof. But by the time he had made it back into the hallway, the man was gone.

Heru proceeded back up the hallway of the twenty-seventh floor cautiously and back toward the exit door to the roof. However, as he neared it, he could no longer hear the sounds of battle up on the roof, which was surely a bad sign. He knew that he had finally run out of able men. Not trusting the prospect of stepping back through the exit doorway, he picked up one of his dead men from the hallway floor and pushed the body through the exit. Shots rang out immediately and riddled the body.

Determined to win, Heru leaped through the doorway right afterward and fired several accurate shots up the stairs, hitting several UAE soldiers who had barely made their way into the building.

Heru dove down into the staircase right onto the backs and bodies of more of his slain men as he continued to fire bullets upward at more of the soldiers who were entering the building from the roof. And as he dove there onto the backs and bodies of the dead men, one of them moved and aimed to shoot him.

The traitor!
Heru told himself.

Close enough to grab the gun, he pushed it away in close range as more bullets riddled the staircase wall.

Heru then attempted to aim his own gun at the traitor, only for his foe to grab it and push it away as well, with more bullets ricocheting up the wall.

Realizing the soldiers were far too close for comfort to tussle with a skilled traitor, Heru dove down another staircase to retreat to the twenty-sixth floor. And to his surprise, the traitor followed him. Heru then smashed the man into the exit doorway before pulling out his pistol, which was much better to use in close range. But again, the traitor countered and grabbed his arm away, causing the pistol to shoot into the hallway ceiling.

Finally, Heru was able to get a good look at him.

“I know you. You are the construction worker recruited by Father.”

Saleem, the taller and stronger man, responded, “Yes. Mohd is a good man, and he will be brought down and killed because of the ideas of his
mad son.”

“He is an
old
man who was taken advantage of by the Emirates,” Heru told him with a right knee to his ribs.

Saleem took the knee, leaned forward and attempted to headbutt him but missed as Heru fell backward with a trip move and the Pakistani’s heavier weight, slamming him headfirst into the wall.

With no time to follow-up and shoot the traitor, the UAE soldiers were right on top of them as Heru fired several shots into the exit doorway.

He leaped back to his feet and ran down the hallway, continuing to shoot at the soldiers who pursued him. The reinforcement soldiers wore thick black helmets with shields and bulletproof vests, so Heru aimed for their necks and knees, injuring three of them in the front.

*****

Back down in the thirteenth-floor hallway, Gary caught up with Ramia and Johnny, who were overjoyed to see him.

“Gary!” Ramia let out, hugging him instantly. “I was so worried about you.” She squeezed him as if attempting to push all of the air out of his lungs. Johnny squeezed him as well to make it worse.

“Hey,
easy
,” Gary whined, cringing. His ribs and arms were sore from so much diving, rolling and fighting earlier. But he was still ready for more, if needed.

“I was concerned about you two. I saw you on the monitors in the basement. What are you doing in here?”

“The same as
you,
man. We’re trying to be
heroes,”
Johnny quipped.

Gary grinned and shook his head. “You’re unbelievable, man.” Even in the middle of turmoil, the guy was full of jokes and positive energy.

“No,
you’re
unbelievable!” Johnny said. “We saw how you got in here.
Everyone
saw it.” Then he whispered, “So, are you a secret agent?”

Ramia slapped Johnny on his chest. “Stop it. Even if he was, he could not tell you.”

Gary noticed their short but important work together had given them a chemistry, as if they had known each other for years. And it was good.

“I’ll tell you both later. But how did
you
get in?”

With the soldiers passing by them in the hallway with more hostages, Ramia answered, “We’ll tell you that later,” and grinned, mocking him.

Gary chuckled. “All right, it’s a deal. We’ll trade secrets later. But I just wanted to let you guys know that I was all right.”

Ramia became concerned again. She grabbed on to the hem of his shirt and asked him, “Where are you going?”

Gary took a deep breath. “To finish something.”

Stealing the moment, Ramia pulled him into her and kissed his lips, forcefully.

“You come back in one
piece,
Mr. Stevens. We want to know who you are.”

Gary nodded thoughtfully. “Okay. That’s a deal.” But as he ran off through the exit door and back down to the lower-level floors to avoid the soldiers, who he assumed would stop him from going up, Gary was concerned about facing Heru with a gun in hand.

That guy seems lethal,
he mused as he hustled up the hallway of the eleventh floor toward the service elevator.

What if that tough guy can’t take him?
he thought of Saleem. The two of them still hadn’t exchanged names. And although Saleem knew that Gary was obviously an American, Gary had no idea what nation Saleem was from. He looked like a million other men from the Middle East, with added height and ruggedness.

Nevertheless, the Egyptian Ra-Heru Amun appeared to be an expert assassin on a serious mission to kill as many UAE soldiers as one man could.

When the service elevator arrived, Gary quickly stepped inside with the dead bodies and climbed to the top as his ally had done earlier. Only he didn’t know how to get off when it reached the top faster than he expected.

Gary jumped clumsily onto the wires beside him and nearly fell to his death.

“Shit!” he yelled, holding on for his life. He then swung his legs back and forth until he could reach the elevator doorway and pull it open.

After climbing into the hallway of the twenty-seventh floor, Gary dove to the ground in a pile of dead men as he spotted more UAE soldiers up at the opposite hallway. They looked down in his direction but failed to check it out.

“It was probably one of the guests at their door,” one of the soldiers commented. “But we are not to help them escape until we find and kill Heru. That is the commander’s direct orders. It is too dangerous to be concerned with the tourists at this time.”

Nevertheless, they kept two men on the floor to watch over it, forcing Gary to inch his way toward the nearby exit staircase until he could make it out unnoticed. But once he had made it, he froze. Someone was hustling back up the staircase straight toward him, and it was a lone man and not soldiers. With more dead men inside of the staircase, Gary thought of blending in and playing dead, but the man was too close to him, and Gary was certain that his white skin and light-brown hair would stand out too much amongst the brown immigrant bodies on the floor.

With fight-or-flight instincts, Gary rolled back into the exit door and dove through it, returning to the hallway with the soldiers. But he remained low to the ground, climbing over the dead bodies. It was a perfect move that saved his life.

Ra-Heru Amun burst into the hallway shooting straight at the soldiers down the hall. He had a much stronger assault weapon that blew them backward like toys. Realizing how fast he had to move, Gary had already grabbed a weapon from the floor and fired back in Heru’s direction. But he did it too fast to aim correctly, with bullets flying overhead into the ceiling.

Heru dove back from the fire and repositioned his big gun to shoot at the unexpected assailant with white skin and light hair.

That must be the American!
Every thought and recognition was lightning fast with Heru.

Before Heru could aim his powerful weapon and return fire, Gary shot at the guestroom door to his left and broke inside like an American football player sacking the quarterback. He planned to apologize to whoever was inside the room, hoping that they would not be injured by him, but when he flipped and rolled over into the bedroom, he found that the room was empty.

Gary quickly looked over to the wall behind the bed as a buffer for a possible shootout with Heru, and he spotted a wall full of black bombs.

“Oh, my God!” he whispered to himself. Heru’s final plan unfolded before his eyes. “He’s gonna blow up the building from the top and let it burn down.”

A memory of the Twin Towers in New York rushed to mind, where two airplanes had struck the top floors with tanks full of flammable fuel. And with a highly flammable explosion at the top floors of a building, because of the obvious height and the dangers of collapse, it was nearly impossible to put out as opposed to battling a bomb from a lower floor.

Heru was making
certain
that the world would not ignore their revolt. And as the thoughts of paranoia ran rapidly through Gary’s mind, he felt fortunate that he had found the bombs before the plan was set in motion, but he also realized that he was trapped inside with him.

“I don’t know who you are, my friend. But you just involved yourself in something that you will regret from your cremation,” Heru spoke into the room from the hallway.

Gary responded, “I don’t know who you are either. But it looks like you haven’t set your bombs yet, unless you planned to have them all in one room.”

He was assuming the room was a distribution point, but Heru laughed at him.

“You are wrong, my friend. Those are only the
leftovers.
But too bad you will not be able to tell anyone before you die.”

Gary looked and thought of jumping out of the window with bedsheets. But while on the twenty-seventh floor, he would need to shoot his way back into a lower room, where he would surely endanger a family.

That’s not gonna work,
he told himself.
These sheets will only reach about three to four floors down.

Fortunately, Heru had more soldiers to deal with as he began to fire back down the hallway at more men, so Gary seized the opportunity to shoot his way back out, aiming at the walls of the room where he felt Heru would be standing inside the hall.

Heru responded by shooting through the room’s walls, forcing Gary to crash to the floor. But he was determined to blast his way out with the help of the soldiers.

Just keep shooting,
he told himself.
He can’t afford to stand there in the hallway. We all have to force him to retreat.

Gary continued to fire up through the hotel room wall until he ran out of bullets. But his calculated hunch was right. Heru could not possibly hold his position for long. The soldiers would all know his position.

In fact, Heru had already remained there too long. And by the time he had returned to the staircase to escape from the twenty-seventh floor, the stairs were flooded with more soldiers behind him. Undeterred with his powerful assault weapon, Heru cleared a path with bullets that tore apart the staircase, forcing the surviving soldiers to retreat again.

*****

Back down at the armored truck headquarters at the hotel’s entrance, the commander of the UAE Defence Force was incredulous. He couldn’t believe the continued reports.

“You mean that
one man
continues to rebuff you?
Ludicrous!
You are an
army!
So act like one!” he yelled at his men through their hi-tech military phones. The communications scramblers had no effect on them.

But as the commander of the Union Defence Force stepped back out into view, along with his second in command, Chief Ali Youssef and Tariq Mohammed, another secret plan was being hatched. Just as it was the UAE Defence Force plan to take out Heru as the head of the immigrant rebellion, Heru had a plan of his own to take out the head of the army. And out of the crowd, a woman wearing a full white burqa dress with a fully covered headdress, aimed a pistol and shot it at the commanding officer.

Tariq saw the assault in time and reacted quickly enough to push the commander out of the way. But Ali and the second in command officer were both hit with bullets before the police and the UAE soldiers could shoot the woman down.

Realizing that his good friend had been hit, Tariq quickly moved to him to lift him up. But without a vest and several shots to his chest and neck, Ali’s death was imminent.

He then jabbed his friend Tariq in the chest with his finger and in his dying breath told him, “You’re the new chief.
En sha Allah.”

Tariq cried out loud, while cradling his dead friend. “AAAHHH! Merciful Allah! Merciful Allah!”

The commander of the Defence Force was incensed as his men tended to his second in command, who was also dying from bullet wounds. The commander then shouted to his men in reference to the dead assassin, wearing the white burqa, “Take it off! Take it off!”

As the largely Muslim crowd watched in alarm, the soldiers found a scarred-face man under the clothing.

“Merciful Allah,” some of the men commented and cringed at the sight of the severely burned face.

The commander had a look of his own and immediately understood that a full covering was the only way the man could hide his hideous face. But when Tariq saw him, he knew exactly who he had been.

“He was the accomplice with Heru two nights ago in Deira when they slit the throats of two elders who knew of their wicked plans. One of the attackers was hit in the face with hot fish oil. And it was
him
.”