Someone did! A youngster in soiled fatigues broke hesitantly away from his five-man squad, squinting in the still dim but growing light, drawn by the sight of the odd-looking person at the left side of the huge chained double gate. As he drew nearer he walked faster, his expression slowly changing from the quizzical to the astonished.
‘Azra?’ he cried. ‘Is it you?
‘Be quiet!’ whispered Blue, pressing both palms repeatedly through the bars. The teenager was one of the dozens of recruits he had instructed in the basic use of repeating weapons and, if he remembered correctly, not a prize pupil among so many just like him.
‘They said you had gone on a secret mission, an assignment so holy we should thank almighty Allah for your strength!’
‘I was captured—’
‘Allah be praised!’
‘For what?’
‘For your having slain the infidels! If you had not you would be in the blessed arms of Allah.’
‘I escaped—’
‘Without slaying the infidels?’ asked the youngster, sadness in his voice.
‘They’re all dead,’ replied Blue with exasperated finality. ‘Now, listen to—’
‘Allah be praised!’
‘Allah be quiet—you be quiet and listen to me! I must get inside, quickly. Go to Yateem or Ahbyahd—run as if your life depended on it—’
‘My life is nothing!’
‘Mine is, damn it! Have someone come back here with instructions. Run!’
The waiting produced a pounding in Blue’s chest and temples as he watched the sky, watched the light in the east about to inflame this infinitesimal part of the earth, knowing that when it did he would be finished, dead, no longer able to fight the bastards who had stolen his life, erased his childhood with blood, taken his and Zaya’s parents away in a burst of gunfire sanctioned by the killers of Israel.
He remembered it all so clearly, so painfully. His father, a gentle, brilliant man who had been a medical student in Tel Aviv until, in his third year, the authorities deemed him better suited to the life of a pharmacist to make room for an immigrating Jew in the medical college. It was common practice. Remove the Arabs from the esteemed professions was the Israeli credo. As the years went on, however, the father became the only ‘doctor’ in their village on the West Bank; the government’s visiting physicians from Be’er Sheva were incompetents who were forced to make their shekels in the small towns and the camps. One such physician complained, and it was as if the writing were stamped on the Wailing Wall. The pharmacy was shut down.
‘We have our unspectacular lives to live; when will they let us live them?’ the father and husband had screamed.
The answer came for a daughter named Zaya and a son who became Azra the Terrorist. The Israeli Commission of Arab Affairs on the West Bank again made a pronouncement. Their father was a troublemaker. The family was ordered out of the village.
They went north, towards Lebanon, towards anywhere that would accept them, and along the journey of their exodus, they stopped at a refugee camp called Shatila.
While brother and sister watched from behind the low stone wall of a garden, they saw their mother and father slaughtered, as were so many others, their bodies broken by staccato fusillades of bullets, snapping them into the ground, blood spewing from their eyes and their mouths. And up above, in the hills, the sudden thunder of Israeli artillery was to the ears of children the sound of unholy triumph. Someone had very much approved of the operation.
Thus was born Zaya Yateem, from gentle child to ice-cold strategist, and her brother, known to the world as Azra, the newest crown prince of terrorists.
The memories stopped with the sight of a man running inside the gates of the embassy.
‘Blue!’ cried Ahbyahd, the streaks of white in his hair apparent in the growing light, his voice a harsh, astonished whisper as he raced across the courtyard. ‘In Allah’s name what happened? Your sister is beside herself but she cannot come outside, not as a woman, not at this hour, and especially not with you here. Eyes are everywhere—what happened to you?’
‘I’ll tell you once we’re inside. There’s no time now. Hurry!’
‘We?’
‘Myself, Yosef, and a man named Bahrudi—he comes from the Mahdi! Quickly! The light’s nearly up. Where do we go?’
‘Almighty God… the Mahdi!’
‘Please, Ahbyahd!’
‘The east wall, about forty metres from the south corner, there’s an old sewer line—’
‘I know it! We’ve been working on it. It’s clear now?’
‘One must crouch low and climb slowly, but yes, it’s clear. There is an opening—’
‘Beneath the three large rocks on the water,’ said Azra nodding rapidly. ‘Have someone there. We race against the light!’
The terrorist called Blue slipped away from the chained gates and with gathering speed, slowly, subtly discarding his previous posture, quickly rounded the south edge of the wall. He stopped, pressing his back into the stone, his eyes roaming up the line of barricaded shops. Yosef stepped partially out of a boarded-up recessed doorway; he had been watching Azra and wanted the young leader to know it. The older man hissed and in seconds ‘Amal Bahrudi’ emerged from a narrow alleyway between the buildings; staying in the shadows, he raced up the pavement, joining Yosef in the doorway. Azra gestured to his left, indicating a barely-paved road in front of him that ran parallel to the embassy wall; it was beyond the stretch of shops on the square; across the way there was only a wasteland of rubble and sand grass. In the distance, towards the fiery horizon, was the rock-laden coastline of the Oman Gulf. One after the other the fugitives raced down the road in their torn prison clothes and hard leather sandals, past the walls of the embassy into the sudden, startling glare of the bursting sun. Azra leading, they reached a small promontory above the crashing waves. With sure-footed agility, the world’s new crown prince of killers started down over the huge boulders, stopping every now and then to gesture behind him, pointing out the areas of green sea moss where a man could lose his life by slipping and plunging down into the jagged rocks below. In less than a minute they reached an oddly-shaped indentation at the bottom of the short cliff where the huge stones met the water. It was marked by three boulders forming a strange triangle at the base of which was a cavelike opening no more than three feet wide and continuously assaulted by the pounding surf.
‘There it is!’ exclaimed Azra, exaltation and relief in his voice. ‘I knew I could find it!’
‘What is it?’ yelled Kendrick, trying to be heard over the crashing waves.
‘An old sewer line,’ roared Blue. ‘Built hundreds of years ago, a communal toilet continuously washed down by sea water carried up by slaves.’
‘They bored through rock?’
‘No, Amal. They creased the surface and angled the rocks above; nature took care of the rest. A reverse aqueduct, if you like. It’s a steep climb but as someone had to build it, there are ridges for feet—slaves’ feet, like our Palestinian feet, no?’
‘How do we get in there?’
‘We walk through water. If the prophet Jesus can walk on it, the least we can do is walk through it. Come. The embassy!’
Perspiring heavily, Anthony MacDonald climbed the open waterfront staircase on the side of the old warehouse. The creaking of the steps under his weight joined the sounds of wood and rope that erupted from the piers where hulls and stretched halyards scraped the slips along the docks. The first yellow rays of the sun pulsated over the waters of the harbour, broken by intruding skiffs and aged trawlers heading out for the day’s catch, passing observant marine patrols that every now and then signalled a boat to stop for closer inspection.
Tony had ordered his driver to crawl the car back towards Masqat on the deserted road without headlights until they reached a back street in the As Saada that cut across the city to the waterfront. Only when they encountered streetlamps did MacDonald instruct the driver to switch on the lights. He had no idea where the three fugitives were running or where they expected to hide in the daylight with an army of police searching for them, but he assumed it would be with one of the Mahdi’s more unlikely agents in the city. He would avoid them; there was too much to learn, too many contradictory things to understand before a chance confrontation with the young ambitious Azra. But there was one place he could go, one man he could see without fear of being seen himself. A hired killer who followed orders blindly for money, a stick of human garbage who made contact with potential clients only in the filthy alleyways of the el Shari el Mish kwayis. Only those who had to know knew where he lived.