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.”
Hale found the locker, and after sloughing off his bloody, muddy old Bedu costume he put on the tan uniform, complete with name badge, of a Kuwait International Airport baggage handler. He bundled up the Bedu clothes and shoved them into the locker, and then he sat down cross-legged below a couple of bright steel bolts where a passenger seat could have been installed. He sipped at the warm vodka and tried to take satisfaction in the thought that he was now successfully injected into the opposition’s machine, and that Theodora would be pleased; but in his mind was droning the old refrain, You can’t relax yet.
The next twelve hours were a series of destinations and layovers, seen through a haze of intermittently renewed alcohol and persistent exhaustion.
At the Kuwait airport he simply walked from the helicopter across fifty yards of tarmac to a sleek British Aerospace commuter jet that the German had pointed out to him, and climbed aboard. The only crew members Hale saw were two young Arab men in snow-white Saudi-style robes and head-cloths, and they didn’t speak to him beyond ordering him in terse Arabic to take a seat in the cabin and, in English, “Belt up.” When the plane had taken off and reached cruising altitude, somewhere down the gulf coast over Oman, he was given a Savile Row suit to change into, and a shaving kit, a French passport, and an Alitalia Airlines ticket. Four hours later the jet landed at Benina International Airport near Benghazi, and he followed the directions he’d been given and got right aboard the next Alitalia flight bound for the Ciampino Airport in Rome, having spent less than forty minutes in Libya. Slumped in a window seat in the turboprop Alitalia Vanguard, he drank Canadian whiskey and watched twilight darken to full night over the purple expanse of the Mediterranean; and he kept reminding himself of what Ishmael had said to the djinn in the sulfur pool-He will be flying tonight west over the sands, to the western sea-your brothers and sisters are awake, but they will not approach him…
At the Alitalia gate in Ciampino he was met by a cheerful young couple who greeted him by the name on his new passport and drove him to a modern apartment in the Parioli district of Rome, and behind drawn curtains he managed to eat most of a quick, hindered dinner of lukewarm gnocchi and red wine even as the woman was cutting his hair in a bristly brush cut and then dyeing it and his eyebrows dark brown. When his hair was dry they took his photograph, and a couple of hours later he was given a British passport in the name of Charles Garner, with his new picture in it. The sky was pale above the electric trolley lines when he was bundled out of the apartment building and boosted into the back of a newspaper delivery van, and he fell asleep among bales of the daily Corriere della Sera as the van sped north up one of the new autostrade express highways. Finally at noon a dark-haired Charles Garner walked haggardly into the Malpensa Airport outside Milan and boarded a TWA flight for Beirut.