“My ass is tired,” Rafi said from the backseat.
“That cannot be helped, my brother,” Abdullah replied from the driver’s seat. As driver, he deemed himself to be in temporary command.
“I know that, but my ass is still tired,” Rafi observed.
“We could have taken horses, but they would be too slow, and they can also be hard on the ass, my friend,” Mustafa observed. This pronouncement was greeted by laughter, and Rafi went back to his copy of Playboy.
The map showed easy going until they reached the city of Small Stone. They’d have to be fully awake for that. But for now, the road wound through pleasant hills covered with green trees. It was quite a change from northern Mexico, which had been so much like the sandy hills of home . . . to which they would never return . . .
For Abdullah, the driving was a pleasure. The car was not so fine as the Mercedes his father drove, but it sufficed for the moment, and the feel of the wheel was sweet in his hands, as he leaned back and smoked his Winston with a contented smile on his lips. There were people in America who raced cars like this on great oval tracks, and what a pleasure that must be! To drive as fast as you could, to be in competition with others—and to defeat them! That must be better than having a woman . . . well, almost . . . or just different, he corrected himself. Now, to have a woman after winning a race, that would be pleasurable indeed. He wondered if there were cars in Paradise. Good, fast ones, like the Formula One cars favored in Europe, hugging the corners, then really letting it go on the straightaways, to drive as fast as car and road allowed. He could try that here. The car was probably good for two hundred kilometers per hour—but, no, their mission was more important.
He flipped his cigarette butt out the window. Just then a white police car went zipping by, with blue stripes on the side. Arkansas State Police. Now that looked like a fast car, and the man inside had a splendid cowboy hat, Abdullah thought. Like every human being on the planet, he’d seen his share of American movies, including the cowboy sort, men on horseback herding cattle, or just shooting it out with handguns in their drinking saloons, settling issues of honor. The imagery appealed to him—but that was what it was supposed to do, he reminded himself. One more attempt by the infidel to seduce the Faithful. To be fair, though, American movies were made mainly for the American audience. How many Arab movies had he seen showing the forces of Salah ad-Din—a Kurd, of all things—crushing the invading Christian Crusaders? They were there to teach history, and to encourage manhood in Arab men, the better to crush the Israelis, which, alas, had not yet happened. So it was, probably, with American Westerns. Their concept of manhood was not all that different from the Arabs’, except that they used revolvers instead of the manlier sword. The pistol did, of course, have superior reach, and so Americans were practical fighters, in addition to being very clever at it. No braver than Arabs, of course, just cleverer.
He’d have to be careful of Americans and their handguns, Abdullah told himself. If any of them shot like movie cowboys, their mission could come to a premature end, and that wouldn’t do.
He wondered what the policeman in the passing white car carried on his belt—and was he a proficient shot? They could find out, of course, but there was only one way to do that and it would endanger their mission. So, Abdullah watched the police car pull ahead until it faded from view, and he settled down to watching tractor-trailers whiz past while he cruised eastward at a steady sixty-five miles and three cigarettes per hour, plus a grumbling stomach. SMALL STONE 30 MILES.
“THEY’RE GETTING excited over at Langley again,” Davis told Hendley.
“What did you hear?” Gerry asked.
“A field officer got something strange from a source-agent over in Saudi. Something about how some suspected players were out of town, so to speak, location unknown, but he thinks Western Hemisphere, like ten or so of them.”
“How solid is that?” Hendley asked.
“A ‘three’ in terms of reliability, though the source is ordinarily well regarded. Some headquarters puke decided to downgrade it, reason unknown.” That was one of the problems at The Campus. They were dependent on others for most of their analysis. Though they had some particularly fine people in their own analysis offices, the real work was done on the other side of the Potomac River, and CIA had blown its share of calls in the past few years—make that decades, Gerry reminded himself. Nobody hit 1.000 in this league, and a lot of CIA bureaucrats were overpaid even with meager government salaries. But as long as their filing was properly done, nobody really cared or even noticed. What was significant was that the Saudis had a way of deporting their own potential troublemakers by allowing them to go elsewhere and do their crimes, and if they suffered for it, the Saudi government would be cooperative as hell, thus covering all of its bases quite easily.
“What do you think?” he asked Tom Davis.
“Hell, Gerry, I’m not a gypsy. No crystal ball, no Delphic Oracle.” Davis let out a frustrated breath. “Homeland Security has been notified, and so that means FBI and the rest of their analytical team, but this is ‘soft’ intelligence, y’know? Nothing to hang a hat on. Three names, but no photos, and any bonehead can get ID in a new name.” Even popular novels told people how to do it. You didn’t even need all that much patience, because no state in the union cross-referenced birth and death certificates, which would have been an easy thing, even for government bureaucrats to accomplish.
“So, what happens?”
Davis shrugged. “The usual. Airport security people will get another notice to stay awake; and so, they’ll hassle more innocent people to make sure nobody tries to hijack an airliner. Cops all over will look for suspicious cars, but that’ll mostly mean that people driving erratically get pulled over. There’s been too much wolf-crying. Even the police have trouble taking it seriously, Gerry, and who can blame them?”
“So, all of our defenses are neutralized—by us?”
“For all practical purposes, yes. Until CIA has a lot more field assets to identify them before they get here, we’re in a reactive mode, not a proactive one. What the hell,” he grimaced, “my bond trading has been going great the last two weeks.” Tom Davis had found the money business to be rather to his liking—or, at least, easily mastered. Maybe going into CIA right out of the University of Nebraska had been a mistake? he asked himself every so often.
“Any follow-up on the CIA report?”
“Well, somebody over there has suggested another talk with our asset, but it hasn’t cleared the Seventh Floor yet.”
“Jesus!” Hendley swore.
“Hey, Jerry, why are you surprised? You never worked there like I did, but down on The Hill, you must have seen this sort of thing before.”
“Why the fuck didn’t Kealty keep Foley as DCI?”
“He has a lawyer friend he likes better, remember? And Foley was a professional spook, and therefore unreliable. Look, let’s face it—Ed Foley helped some, but a real fix will take a decade. That’s one of the reasons we’re here, right?” Davis added with a smile. “How are our two hit-men trainees doing down at Charlottesville?”
“The Marine is still having a conscience attack.”
“Chesty Puller must be rolling over in his crypt,” Davis opined.
“Well, we can’t hire mad dogs. Better to ask questions now than out in the field on an assignment.”
“I suppose. What about the hardware?”
“Next week.”
“It’s taken long enough. Testing phase?”
“In Iowa. Pigs. They have a similar cardiovascular system, so our friend tells us.”
How appropriate, Davis thought.
SMALL STONE turned out to be not much of a navigation problem, and after dipping southwest on I-40, now they were going northeast. Mustafa was now back at the wheel, and the two in back were dozing after filling up on roast beef sandwiches and Coca-Cola.
It was mostly boring now. Nothing can remain captivating for more than twenty hours, and even dreams of their mission a day and a half in the future could scarcely keep their eyes open, and so Rafi and Zuhayr were sleeping like exhausted children. He motored northeast with the sun behind his left shoulder and started to see signs indicating the distance to Memphis, Tennessee. He thought for a moment—it was hard to think very clearly after being in a car so long—and realized that he had only two more states to go. Their progress was steady, if slow. It would have been better to take a plane, but getting their machine guns through the airports would probably have been difficult, he thought with a smile. And as overall mission commander he had more than one team to worry about. That was why he’d selected the most difficult and distant target of the four, to set the example to the others. But sometimes leadership was jut a pain in the ass, Mustafa told himself, as he adjusted himself in the seat.