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Clouds of sand scooped up into the air a hundred yards ahead. The helicopter was apparently settling down for a landing, its tail elevated as if the pilot was afraid of hitting one of the low sand dunes with the tail rotor.
The camels began hitching and lifting their heads as they pounded closer to the hovering aircraft, and when they were still fifty yards short of it they wobbled to a halt and balked at going any farther.
"-not bothered by a bloody genie," Hale snarled as he gripped the rifle and the.45 and simply jumped from the saddle. He knocked his chin with one knee when his bare feet hit the hot sand, but a moment later he had got up into a crouch and was limping to bin Jalawi's mount.
And Salim bin Jalawi rolled off of his saddle, slid facedown across the glistening water-skins and thumped heavily to the sand on his hip and shoulder. He was facing Hale, and the front of his robe was bright red with blood.
The sunlight seemed to dim, and there was a shrill keening in Hale's head. Ignoring several crackling, megaphone-amplified shouts from the helicopter, Hale crouched helplessly beside the dying Arab.
"Salim!" Hale's breath wavered in his throat. "Salim!"
The Arab opened his eyes. The flap of his kaffiyeh had been pulled away from his white-bearded face, and Hale saw blood on the man's teeth when he grimaced. "Get out of this, bin Sikkah," he whispered. "These men-traffic with devils-"
"Salim," said Hale urgently in Arabic, "I am still working for Creepo, under deep cover. This is a pretense, a trick, to confound this lot's plans. Are you hearing me? I-I pretend to kiss the enemy's hand, the better to be sure of cutting it cleanly off."
Bin Jalawi's mouth opened in what might have been a pained smile, as if he were trying to laugh. "'You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din,'" he said in English, quoting the Kipling poem that Hale sometimes used to recite when drunk; and then he shuddered and died.
Hale looked back the way they'd come-the riders who had been pursuing them appeared to have stopped and dismounted several hundred yards back, and Hale thought there were fewer of them now. They weren't shooting.
The Mutair and 'Awazim with whom Hale had ridden here were somewhere to the east, on the far side of the small sandstorm around the hovering helicopter-they or these southern tribes would no doubt take possession of the camels and, being Bedu, give bin Jalawi a Moslem burial.
Hale got to his feet and jogged painfully across the sand toward the drifting helicopter. Squinting against the stinging sand kicked up by its whirling rotors, he could see in the cargo doorway a short-haired man with sunglasses and earphones, waving at him; the man had apparently put down the megaphone, and the steady booming of the rotors was too loud for Hale to hear anything the man might have been shouting. Hale forced his aching legs to run faster over the uneven sand, and when at last he exhaustedly set one bare foot on the metal skid and grabbed the edge of the door frame, the man took Hale's free hand and dragged him in to sprawl onto the corrugated steel cargo deck between two.60-caliber machine guns mounted on pylons.
Hale's rescuer, who was wearing dungarees and a sweatshirt and appeared to be European, waved toward the pilot's station, and then Hale felt heavier as the big rotors thudded more loudly with their pitch angle increased for a fast ascent. There was no shaking or vibration from the engine, and Hale realized that it was some kind of turbine, not one of the piston engines that had powered the old Sikorskis and Bristols he had flown in after the war. He got cautiously up on his hands and knees and only then realized that he had at some point dropped both the BAR and the.45.
After several seconds the helicopter banked to the north, tilting the open cargo door up toward the sky, and Hale impulsively crawled forward and gripped the bottom edge of the steel-and-ceramic laminate of the craft's exterior armor, and he peered over the door sill, down through a hundred feet of swirling sand clouds, at the rippled desert of the Kuwait-Saudi border; he could make out bin Jalawi's camel, though he couldn't see his friend in the beast's shadow, and farther west he saw the shadows of other camels and the scattered white dots of robes sprawled on the reddish tan ground. Not far away to the north was the sulfur pool, though it was a featureless black disk from this height and distance. Farther off he could see the white of the salt flats, and dimly beyond them the long shadow of the Ash Shaq valley, while the tan horizon was the broad interior deserts of the Summan and Nafud.
The man who had pulled him into the aircraft now grabbed him by the ankles and dragged him back from the door.
"They still have rifles," the man told Hale, shouting to be heard over the rotor noise through the open door. "Come up by the pilot's station." Even shouting, he had a German accent. He pulled the heavy door closed along its track, and in the relative silence after it had slammed shut he said, "You look like hell. Are you shot already?"
"No," said Hale, bracing himself against a gun pylon as he got wearily to his feet.
The two high-backed seats up in front were nylon mesh strung across aluminum frames, and in the right-side one the pilot was hunched over the cyclic control stick-Hale saw that as he moved it, the stick in front of the empty left-side seat moved too, and for one childish instant, before he realized that the control sticks were linked, he nearly flinched.
"Ishmael killed himself?" asked the man standing beside Hale, still speaking loudly.
"Yes," said Hale, wondering if these men would believe a description of the action at the pool. They appeared to be in their late twenties or early thirties-and Hale, stiff and sore after sleeping on the ground in the rain and riding a camel for two days, felt incalculably old and decrepit and unreliable. "I didn't see it, but-I heard it."
The pilot nodded. "Years now, that old man's been looking for an excuse."
The German gave Hale a quizzical look. "The genie ate him?"
Hale found that he was laughing, though not hard enough to justify the tears that were blurring his view of the switches and circuit-breakers on the console in front of him. "That's what it sounded like, yes." You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. "Do you gentlemen have any drink aboard?"
The pilot groped by his left knee and then, without looking away from the Perspex windscreen, lifted over his head a half-full pint bottle of Smirnoff vodka that swayed in his hand with the motion of the aircraft. "Bung ho, eh, what?" he said in an affected British drawl.
"Skol, Prosit," agreed Hale absently, catching the swinging bottle. He unscrewed the cap and took several deep swallows of the warm, stinging liquor. In his mind he saw bin Jalawi as he had been in 1948, dark-bearded and whipcord-thin; and then as he had looked two days ago, his beard white now, listening to the radio in his Al-Ahmadi house with the electric range and refrigerator in the modern kitchen. Hale thought, It was not a good day for you, old friend, when I came back into your life. "Where are we-going?"
" Kuwait International Airport," the German told him. "Ishmael said you have been confirmed, so now you are to get on an airplane, a private jet, there."
"To go...where?" Hale asked. "Do you know?"
The German gave him a blank stare. "Somewhere intermediate, I suppose. Probably several intermediate places. You are at home in them, I think."
Hale nodded and tipped the bottle up for another couple of swallows. "Oh sure," he said hoarsely. "Me and intermediate go way back."
"Soon we will be at the airport," said the pilot. "There are airport staff clothes and shoes in a locker in the cargo bay-get into them now." He glanced back at Hale with a cold smile. "You can take the bottle."
