Welcome to Dubai (The Traveler) (34 page)

Unfortunately for Heru, the room faced the front of the hotel, where the crowd, the police force and the soldiers were all able to see him up high—an open target. Even the helicopters were over top of them. But Heru shot the helicopters off.

The soldiers jumped on the military phones for the commander to order the snipers.

“Heru is flying away in a parachute right above you!”

*****

Back down at street level, inside the armored truck headquarters, the commander and Tariq heard the urgent report and ran out of the truck to get a good look at the ringleader flying through the sky.

“Horus or Heru was also know as half-human and half-falcon,” the commander commented to his intelligence force.

“Well, let’s go shoot the falcon down,” Tariq advised him.

In anticipation of the volley of bullets that he could expect while floating down in a parachute, Heru began to fire down on the armored truck headquarters and at all of the police and soldiers, forcing Tariq and the commander to duck for cover. But there were simply too many men outside with guns to miss a floating target, no matter how the ambitious Egyptian tried to maneuver around them. And after killing nearly fifty of their men by himself, the UAE soldiers and police finally had their chance at retaliation, more like a fifty-one gun salute.

Ironically, Ra-Heru Amun saw his death as an obvious need for an entire army to kill him rather than any one man or a group of snipers. So he accepted his death like a legend of war that he imagined himself to be.

The crowd watched it all unfold, including Basim, who had just arrived to witness the shooting by air, up close. Inside the truck headquarters, Mohd watched the camera monitor and heard all of the bullets being shot up into the air at his oldest son. He then closed his eyes to say a silent prayer, not only for his son, but for the souls of all the victims who died that day.

“Wow … what a way to die,” Gary commented from the window from the top floor of the building as they all watched the dramatic conclusion before them. Then Gary snapped them to attention. “All right, we need to find the rest of those bombs in the rooms and get the people out of here.”

The soldiers moved fast as if the American was briefly their commander of the moment. But he was right—they had no time to marvel and gloat.

Saleem pulled Gary aside as the soldiers went on about their work. “It’s been fun fighting with you, my friend,” Saleem said, “but had it not ended that way with Heru, I don’t know if either one of us, or both of us together, could have ever really beaten him.”

Gary smiled and nodded. “Well, now we don’t have to.” He then wrapped several bathroom towels around his arms and wrists to stop his bleeding. Saleem did the same with his wounds.

“So, where do you go from here, my friend?” the Pakistani asked the American. He figured the man had come a long way that day. Maybe he would be ready for more antiterrorism.

Gary shrugged and didn’t think of any missions as Saleem thought of them. He wasn’t really a military man. So he answered, “Back home, I guess, after I spend a few more days in Dubai to heal my wounds. What about you?”

Saleem shrugged and didn’t believe the American. He figured he was young enough to participate in a lot more dangerous missions. “I no longer have a home,” Saleem said. “So I’ll go wherever my next job takes me.”
Maybe this is my best job,
he told himself without voicing it,
special mission warfare. It’s much better than the disrespect of construction.

“Yeah,” Gary said, thinking of his own minimal ties back at home, “I know just what you mean.” He still felt as if he would do more traveling …
alone.

Chapter 34

The Death toll from the siege and battle was one-hundred and seventy-eight. It could have been much worse had Ra-Heru succeeded in his plan to detonate the top floors of the building. Soldiers found bombs on four of those floors.

Once the immigrant men inside the lobby found that Heru had been shot down and killed in his escape, several more of Mohd’s loyal guard shot down Heru’s lieutenant to take over the room. They were then able to release the rest of the hostages, but the damage had already been done.

The Union Defence Force took the heaviest loss with seventy-one killed, mostly by Heru, including his plan to assassinate the UDF commander. Sixty-four immigrant gunmen had been killed, along with twenty-eight UAE police officers, including Chief Ali Youssef. Of the tourists, fifteen hostages had been killed, including two elders who had died from massive heart attacks.

When Abdul received the final reports in Abu Dhabi at the home of his uncle Sheikh Al Hassan—where he and Hamda were ordered to remain—they were both devastated. Not only did Abdul understand that he had no right to fight his punishment of suspension of his construction and development licenses, he cried and prayed for hurt of the innocent families, the UAE police and for the Defence Force soldiers, who had lost their lives. He also hurt and prayed for his young nation and pondered what the fallout would mean for the future of Dubai. And he and his wife understood that they had a lot of amends to make in the country to ever regain respect for their good names.

As for Mohd and the rest of the surviving immigrants, they would have to deal with the
Sharia
law of the United Arab Emirates and the strong emotions of the people involved who had lost the lives of their loved ones.

*****

After the dust had all settled that evening, the Prime Minister and the President of the United Arab Emirates met with the commander of the Union Defence Force, private investigator and counsel Tariq Mohammed, the American traveler Gary Stevens, the Pakistani Saleem, the Sri Lankan Johnny Napur, the Jordanian Ramia Farah Aziz, and several more of a large group of heroic men and women in the royal chambers to discuss honoring them all with a Bravery Medal,
Nut al-Shaja’at.

Tariq was immediately considered to take over the UAE Chief of Police position, an honor that he asked to think about to discuss with his wife and children at home. The Defence Force honorees were asked to fill higher positions of command as well. As for the civilians, they were also to receive an undisclosed amount of “honor money,” and their choice of a stay at the best hotel in Dubai, which was Gary’s idea. He told the President and Prime Minister that he would offer any monetary award to the tourists and families, and that he would add a significant contribution of his own to the police and soldiers. He only asked that he and his new friends could have their private rooms at the famous Burj Al Arab hotel for the remainder of his stay there.

“I’ll take the Burj Al Arab over a hospital any day,” he joked.

“That can be easily arranged and granted,” he was told.

That evening after midnight, Gary lay gingerly on a royal-sized bed at the seven-star Burj Al Arab hotel, an honor that billions around the world could only dream about. Words could not begin to explain the opulence of the room. But Gary felt that he actually deserved it, not through his inherited wealth, but through his selfless and heroic service to the people of Dubai who needed it. He had put his life on the line for them. However, his service did not stop there. He knew that there were many other places around the world that he could travel to, and many more people in need to help.

“Unbelievable,” he moaned to himself as he nursed his injuries through a personal medical staff at the hotel. All he needed was to call them, like room service, to help change his bandages. The Emirates had even replaced his phone. However, they had no idea how complicated his broken phone was to replace.

I’ll call Jonah in the morning,
he told himself. He knew she would be worried sick about him, yet he did not have the same feelings of urgency to call his girlfriend, Karla, in Washington.

I guess that’s my answer then,
he thought.
I just don’t have strong enough feelings for her.

On cue, the doorbell of his hotel room rang. With the advancements of room technology, there was a camera at the peephole where Gary could immediately view his visitor on his large flat screen television that was high above the bed. He also had a remote control to open the door with. Such amenities were needed in a room the size of a public swimming pool.

Once Gary saw that it was Ramia, he quickly buzzed her in to keep her from getting into trouble with the Muslim nation’s restrictive culture on open sexuality, particularly with Muslim women.

He sat up as she walked into the room and asked her, “What in the
world
are you doing here? I thought you shared a double room with your cousin. He let you sneak out?”

She smiled and said, “I am a grown woman, whether my cousin accepts it or not. And I wanted badly to see you tonight. I could not sleep without it.”

Her hair was out, clean and blow-dried, and she smelled of the exotic body oil and perfume that she had used after a long cleansing bath inside of a whirlpool. Her dress was nearly see-through under her robe, where she wore no panties or bra, like a liberated woman of the West. And as the beautiful Jordanian woman popped up on the bed with Gary, with her hazel eyes aglow, seeming to reflect all of the colors in the expensively decorated room, Gary took a deep breath and composed himself, realizing that he was in need of strong discipline. She then tossed her robe to the floor.

“So, who are you?” she asked him. “You still owe me plenty of answers.”

Her beautiful, soft skin, with a natural tan that matched her eyes and hair color, was right there in front of him to touch and take advantage of. And it was what she wanted him to do, to possess her like a romantic American. Yet Gary fell back in his mountain of pillows and relaxed.

“I’m just a regular guy,” he told her, “who’s trying to figure out where he is in life.”

Seeing him lying there with bandaged wounds and no shirt made Ramia feel comfortable enough to caress him softly and wrap her right leg over his.

“This does not hurt you, does it?”

Her body felt like another pillow, only warmer and slightly heavier, with a heartbeat. He felt like he had died and been taken to a Muslim heaven, yet he continued to feel uneasy about it. She was still so young, in a very expensive Arab hotel room with him where he was quite sure they had cameras. He figured that they could haul him away to jail for this.

But he told her the truth anyway. “No, it feels wonderful.” And he wrapped his sore arm around her, tempted to massage her naked body through her paper-thin dress.

She asked him with her head in his chest, “Have you ever made love to a Middle Eastern woman before?”

“You mean a
Muslim
woman,” he clarified.

“We are not all Muslim,” she said.

“Well, I never have.”

The heat from their bodies began to rise, but Gary continued to compose himself.

“How about we just hold each other while I tell you my story?”

Ramia closed her eyes, feeling sexy and womanly, but she was also exhausted from an extremely long day of walking up and down stairs. But she had what she wanted. She was finally able to relax without the anxiety of losing it.

“Okay,” she moaned. And she slightly increased her grip on his muscular but injured body as if he were her pillow.

Gary began to tell her the long story of his life, knowing that she would fall asleep on him long before he would finish.

“I was conceived in a Jackson, Tennessee, hotel room, when my mother was fresh out of high school and not much younger than you.”

Hearing another slight to her age, Ramia squeezed his injured ribs and was apparently not ready to fall asleep.

“Ahhh,” Gary responded.

She looked up into his eyes with the fierceness of her recent experience. She decided that she would no longer allow herself to be denied of anything, otherwise she would have never been there with him. So she told him, “I am a
woman.
And you will
treat
me like a woman. Now continue,” she added softly, with a gentle scratch of his abdomen.

Gary thought,
Oh, my God! I don’t know if I’ll make it out of this one.

*****

In the morning, Ramia returned to her room only to be confronted by Basim inside their foyer. He had been up all night, worrying and praying again, and he even wanted to send her back home to Jordan. But before he could get out a word, Ramia placed her finger to his lips and said, “Look, Basim, we now will have enough honor money from the Emirates to move and live the way we want to. But I no longer want to remain here in Dubai. So if you do not want to move with me to Britain, Canada or America, then I understand, and I will give you some of the money to make your own choice. But I am
not
going back home to Jordan.”

Basim remained calm. “Fine, we can decide on it later. But where did you sneak out to last night until this morning?” He had a hunch but did not want to say it.

Ramia said it for him. “Basim, I am my
own
woman. And I will make my
own
decisions from this moment on and until I am
dead.
So if I want to see the American and talk to him, then that’s what I will
do
.”

Basim’s eyes widened and his body tingled with tension as if he was ready to strike her. But Ramia’s eyes looked fierce enough to kill him, and she had the favor of the Emirates and a friend in a resourceful American, so he fought to compose himself under the name of Allah.

But then he asked her cautiously, “You did not … you only
talked
to him, right?”

“Yes, of course. And he was a complete gentleman. He only let me into his room because I would not leave his doorway until he would talk to me about who he is and why he did what he did. The man
inspired
me so I wanted to understand him. That is all that it was.”

Basim wanted to trust her story with all of his heart. He felt that only the most honorable man should ever have her in marriage, and not some traveling American vigilante. So he took a deep breath. “Thank you. Allah is Magnificent.”

Ramia grinned and told herself,
And I would never tell you more.