*****
"Allahhhhhhhhhhhhh, hu akhbarrrr alllahhhhhhh, aahhhhh, hu akhbarr . . .”
Cameron sat bolt upright in the bed, confused, wondering where he was and how he’d come there. Outside the sound of the call to prayer continued in a fine, clear, high tenor whose quality was only slightly diminished by the loudspeaker system it came through. He thought himself dreaming, dreaming of the year almost ten years before when he’d lived in Saudi Arabia and the family was back home in Ohio. The memory was acute, friendly, comfortable, but he was surprised by it since in his time there he could not remember a room like this—except maybe that compound where the US guys lived in Dhahran? The rich draperies were similar, the cool polished stone of the floor almost as he should remember it, but the whole thing seemed in this dream to have been done with better taste altogether. Much more pleasant, even if that made it better than it’d really been. Still, it was a dream, his dream, and it was only right that in a dream one could imagine better carpets, better furniture, better art on the walls and decent sheets made of Egyptian cotton and not polyester.
But as the last notes of the haunting verses died and he continued to study the dream, his eyes came to rest on the window and the last bit of twilight slanting through it, and he was awake. Fahd’s house, or his compound and a house in it, and it was no dream. It was Saturday, late April and he was here, on what he had to remind himself was a very extraordinary piece of business that had nothing to do with the Air Force. He lay back to think, no hurry. Fahd and the Arabs would be at prayer for at least twenty minutes, the last prayer of the day would come in another hour or so, and dinner was therefore at least that far off.
The last four hours of the journey were a miserable, bone-jarring blur of desolate dunes and wide flat spaces of shattered flint strewn over the hard, bare ground, the vehicles snarling along in low gear and four-wheel drive, nothing to break the monotony of it once they’d exhausted all possible topics of conversation. Finally striking the paved road was like a reprieve from flogging, and another hour at nearly a hundred miles per hour had brought them to the dusty but tolerably large town of al-Ha’il. He’d had one fleeting glimpse of what had to be the old city wall, mud bricks and round turrets thirty feet high, and then all around him what he remembered to be the usual jumble of the old, the crumbling, the ratty and the brand new buildings all crammed together in odd juxtaposition, ancient stone next to worn sixties marble veneer, next to eighties or nineties steel, aluminum, and glass, everything covered with fine brown dust.
They’d gone straight through the central square, or what he supposed was a central square, then turned a couple of times, finally driving down a long, straight road toward a large compound in white marble on it’s northern edge, deep dry wadis setting the place off like a plateau, and on either side steep gorges forty feet deep or more. The exterior wall was tall, probably fifteen feet, and stuccoed in white, although in places he’d seen a few bits missing and the concrete blocks underneath showing through.
He looked at his watch: about 6:45 in the evening. It would be 10:45 a.m. at Langley, a good time to call Jones.
He rolled to the other side of the bed and reached for his bag on the floor, fumbled for the Iridium phone, and dialed. It made a bunch of strange beeps and squeaks, then a normal-sounding ring on other end, and he waited.
“Jones,” was the one-word greeting.
“Phoenix,” Cameron said, just to sound spook-like.
“Funny. How’s things there, Colonel? You guys settled in? Had a nap, maybe?”
“As a matter of fact I have, smart ass, and I hope you’ve been up since four this morning and no coffee.”
“Hey, I was kidding. I’d have taken a nap if I was you, that drive had to be a bitch.”
“Right, it stunk. Nice place here, though. How’s Langley?”
“Everything fine here,” Jones said. “Boss is happy, so everybody’s happy. You’ll probably be famous over half of the Eastern Hemisphere: he’s less happy about that, but whattya gonna do? French have been nice, but a little pissy as usual. I met their number one once, you know? Scary guy . . .”
“Yeah, great,” Cameron threw in. “Just what I need next time I try to take my wife to Paris. So, do you have anything interesting, or maybe worrisome, to tell us? Please, just say no, I’m ready for a nice, quiet couple of days.”
“Nothing really new. Your transponders show you at the compound I’d picked as the one from the overheads. By the way, which house are you in, figure looking down the lane from the gate toward the mosque for reference?”
Cameron thought. “From the gate, second on the right. Four bedrooms on the second floor, another for a maid on the third floor, empty, and a stairway to the roof. All three of us are on the second floor, fourth room will be empty. Roof is open and flat, parapet all around it about three feet high.”
“OK, got it. Looked to me like all four villas on the other side of the lane are occupied, and the two on your side closer to the mosque also. Anyone in the one on your side closest to the gate?”
“Not that I could tell, but I’ll ask Fahd at dinner. Hey, you expecting trouble?”
“No, nothing specific, just like to be thorough,” Jones said. “The DCI will have my ass if you even scrape your elbow. We’ve been getting an overhead shot or two every 8 hours for the last 24, everything looks nice and normal. We think we’ve got the “normal” pattern pegged for the street, so if anything really unusual happens we should know reasonably quickly. Is Allen there, or Ripley?”
“Have to look, wait one.” Cameron got up and slipped on a pair of khaki slacks. Out in the hall, he saw both the other guys’ doors were open, nobody inside. He called down the stairs, no answer. Into the phone, he said, “Nope, seems like they went out. Allen’s probably killed someone by now. I’ll have him call you back if it was anybody important.”
Jones didn’t even try to stifle the laugh. “Colonel, you are one in a million. Please do have him call when you can, I have a couple of professional questions to ask him, and if they’ve been out, they’re probably doing a little more recon to get the lay of the land. Are you, uhhh, armed, Colonel?”
Cameron was back in the room, he glanced to where he’d left the pistol on the nightstand and said, “Yeah, I’ve got one of the ten millimeter Smith’s. Jones, you’re not holding out on me, are you?”
“Nah, just checking to make sure the boys hooked you up is all. Like I said about the DCI . . .there is one thing, maybe. The cell phone we originally tracked down there in Saudi Arabia? Well, it moved from Dhahran to Riyadh to Taif to Jeddah in the last few days, and then it went silent yesterday. So did every number we’d got from tapping it. Safe to say the network there in Saudi knows they got blown hard in Europe and Jordan, and they’ve trashed those phones, got new ones probably. So we don’t have anything up-to-date-operational on them. Doesn’t mean they’ve got you fingered, but we don’t know what they’re up to, so it pays to be careful.”
“Great, but I’ll presume they’re clueless. Nobody followed us across the desert, nobody followed us into town. We should be fine. Anything on the passports for all those Saudi-Americans we’re looking for? I still got a bad feeling about that.”
Jones paused, then said, “Narrowed down to about two thousand possibles, Colonel. Relatively small haystack, but a haystack nonetheless. We’re still working on it. But, you can take some comfort in this: the experts at Langley, CTC, Homeland Security, DNI, FBI and everyone else got a look at some charts we made on your theory. The consensus is that nobody’d do it. Too small time, not enough news appeal, not enough publicity or glamour. Whatever these guys are up to, it won’t be that. Bad news is it’ll be something else, something bigger. Still, if they try to enter the US, we should find them all, or at least most of them. As long as they use the airports. I probably don’t have to tell you there are a lot of better, easier ways to slip in for someone who know
s how and has the stones to do it.”
“God willing they have neither” Cameron hoped aloud. “I’ll have Allen or Ripley call when they come back in. See ya, Jones.”
“Later Colonel.” They both hung up.
Cameron sat on the bed, thinking. “Great, and nobody would ever use a truck bomb on a building, what idiot would crash a jumbo jet into a skyscraper?” A glance back at the gun on the night stand, and he reached for it. It was a big pistol, bigger than he liked. With his left hand he pulled the slide all the way back: a round ejected up and right and landed on the bed. “Have to talk to Ripley about that,” he thought. He let the slide come forward to chamber a new round, then thumbed the magazine release and dropped it out the bottom into his left hand. He reloaded the ejected round on top, pushed on that one just to check—room for another one. He got up to go see if Ripley had a box somewhere in his room, betting he did.