Final Flight

6

The road ran south through a parched brown landscape. Heat mirages obscured the horizon in all directions. Still Qazi stared out the window at the barren earth as Ali kept the Mercedes at over a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. They passed an occasional truck, but no other cars.

Qazi’s boyhood had been spent in country like this, living with his uncle and his family. They had lived in a small village and his uncle had been a shepherd. Qazi’s earliest memories were of dust storms and foul waterholes and the aroma of sheep and camels.

He had been about thirteen when his uncle’s only three camels had been stolen. He had never forgotten the look of despair on the old man’s face as he examined the camels’ leather hobbles, severed with a knife. The family’s journey across the harsh terrain, following the flock as it grazed, would be difficult without the camels, if not impossible. A third of the assets his uncle had worked a lifetime for were gone into the desert. The old man had borrowed four camels from his neighbors and, together with Qazi and his two sons, had set off after the thieves.

They rode for a week across the rock and hardpan. The nights had been bitter, the sun merciless. The wind had an edge that chapped exposed skin, then opened it and scoured a bleeding sore. The wind had wiped out the tracks of the fleeing thieves by the second day. They followed the trail of dung thereafter, until it too gave out because the thieves weren’t pausing to let the camels graze on thorns. Not that there were very many thorns. The desert had become a hot, empty hell, a wasteland of smouldering stone under a pitiless sun.

His uncle stared at the featureless horizon while the boys fingered their Enfields and looked helplessly about, tired and frightened and desperately weary. “The well at Wadi Hara,” his uncle finally said and goaded his camel into motion. “Not the closest waterhole, which is Wadi Ghazal,” his elder cousin said, “but the closest uninhabited one. The Mami live at Wadi Ghazal, and they would not steal our camels.”

Never before had Qazi rode so long and drank so little. They were baked by day and frozen by night. His tongue became a lump of useless flesh and his lips bleeding sores. But day by day the excitement had increased. The thieves would be at Wadi Hara with the camels.

The men checked their Enfields every evening, and Qazi practiced aiming at rocks. How would it feel to aim at man? How would it be to hear the whine of bullets? How would it be if one struck him? Would he be able to stand the pain? Would he die? The emptiness of the desert now had a new taste, a new feel. He heard the sounds and felt the wind as he never had before. He felt …

An hour south of the capital, Ali slowed and turned from the main road to an unmarked track that wound across the natural contours of the land. Immediately beyond the crest of the second ridge away from the highway they encountered a roadblock. Uniformed soldiers approached the car cradling submachine guns. Ali rolled down his window to show his identification. The smoldering air filled the interior of the car.

They rolled on through the sand and rock. After another fifteen minutes a military post appeared. Ali stopped before an unpainted, rambling two-story wooden building and both men got out of the car. Qazi stretched and let the furnace heat engulf him. “It feels good, eh, Ali?”

“Personally, Colonel, I wish we had some rivers and trees and grass.”

“Explain the device again.” Qazi stared across the waist-high table at Jarvis, who had cut himself several times that morning when he had been allowed to shave for the first time. Pieces of toilet paper clung to the gouges in his jowls. The men stood in a large room. The only illumination was the summer sunlight coming in the three open windows. Even with the breeze it was very hot and Jarvis was sweating.

“The weapon has numerous safety devices placed in the firing circuit. Upon release from the aircraft, a jolt of 220-volt direct current ignites a pyrotechnic squib. The heat from the burning squib is converted into an electrical current that charges a lithium battery. It happens quickly. The safety devices are between the battery and the detonators.”

Jarvis picked up a bundle of leads with alligator clips attached. “These attach to the battery. Basically, I have rigged up a timer, so you set these dials,” he touched them, “and at the end of the set period, current will run from the battery directly to the detonators.” He picked up another wire bundle with alligator clips on the end. “These attach to the detonator circuits.”

“What about the weapon’s safety devices?”

“Oh, they are still in the weapon, but they are bypassed. Once this thing is properly hooked up, the bomb will go nuclear at the end of the period set on the timer.” He pointed to the seventh trigger. “The radio in that one will receive the signal and that will start the timer. So you could initiate the firing sequence by radio and have whatever time was set on the timer to leave the danger zone.”

“We don’t want this bomb to blow up in our faces while we handle it or as we hook it up. Is there any way to leave the safety devices installed and still allow the weapon to be triggered remotely?”

“No way.” Jarvis shook his head and his jowls quivered. “Absolutely no way. The installed circuitry requires that you drop the bomb, let it free-fall for over ninety seconds continuously. Then the radar altimeter in the weapon is enabled, and when the weapon reaches the preset height above the earth, it detonates. There are over a dozen safety devices in all. There is no way to physically satisfy all those parameters unless the weapon is used as it is designed to be used — that is, dropped or tossed by an aircraft. So these safety devices must be bypassed. And once bypassed, there are no safety devices.”

“And how do we ignite the pyrotechnic squib that charges the weapon’s battery?”

“This thing down here.” Jarvis led the way to the end of the table. “I’ve rigged four automobile batteries in series and used a voltage regulator and a capacitor. The juice is stored up and then fired as one brief jolt of direct current.”

He paused and looked at the device. “You wire this contraption to the battery in the weapon. The timer triggers it. That’s all there is to it.”

“Will these things work?”

Jarvis mopped his brow with a shirttail. The bits of toilet paper looked grotesque against his pasty skin. “Yes, they’ll work.”

“Will they, Moffet?” Qazi asked Sakol.

“They should. Actually both these things are pretty simple.”

Qazi bent down and examined the wiring and workmanship on the battery charger. Finally he straightened up. “Show me.”

It took only a minute to rig the battery charger to a voltmeter. Jarvis performed the task smoothly, with no lost motion, as Qazi and Ali watched. When all was ready, Jarvis used a portable voltmeter to check the charge on the automobile batteries. Then he pushed a switch on his device. The needle on the voltmeter on the output wire swung and stopped. Qazi examined the reading.

“See, I told you it would work.”

“Now the safety bypass device, please.”

This instrument took several minutes to rig. All the input wires were connected directly to the battery charge device since Jarvis had no battery capable of storing the energy required in only a few milliseconds. Separate voltmeters were connected to each of the dozen output wires. Colonel Qazi dialed in one minute on the timer and watched it tick down. While it ticked, Jarvis triggered the battery charger. At the end of the minute, the voltmeters on the output wires pegged, Qazi examined each one. “Satisfactory,” he said at last. “Now build me six more of each of these. Then we will test them all.”

Jarvis mopped his brow again with his shirttail, which by now resembled a cleaning rag. “Listen. You have what you wanted. Anyone can duplicate these. Moffet here is quite capable.” He stopped as his lower lip began to tremble uncontrollably.

Qazi stood silent, expressionless, his hands limp by his sides. Ali moved toward a wall and Jarvis followed him with his eyes.

“Go on.”

“I’m Jewish,” Jarvis blurted.

Qazi slowly folded his arms. In the silence you could hear the bleats and cries of children coming through the window from the huts across the empty street.

“I don’t know where you are going to get these weapons. Maybe you have them already.” Jarvis took a step forward. “But for God’s sake, man, don’t make me a part of it. You can’t.”

“Get on the floor.”

“What?”

“On your knees. On the floor.”

Jarvis looked desperately from face to face. Sakol was staring stonily out a window, oblivious to the scene. Ali stood in the shadows with a trace of a smile just visible on his lips. Qazi’s face was expressionless, without mercy or emotion of any kind.

“I will not repeat myself,” Qazi said softly.

Jarvis slowly sank to his knees.

Qazi stepped forward and looked down on the man. “In this position you forfeited your rights as a man, as a Jew, as a human being. You forfeited your life. Now you will obey my orders or you will force us to smear your wife with your slime.”

Jarvis was sobbing.

“You will do as you are told. You will do precisely and exactly as you are told and you will attempt no evasions or subterfuges. You will concern yourself only with performing the tasks I set for you. You have lost the right to make moral judgments on the affairs of men. You have cut yourself off from your fellow Jews and from your family. We are all that you have left.”

Qazi seized Jarvis’ chin and forced his head up. He stared into the watery eyes. “I’m all that you have now.”

At last he removed his hand and motioned to Ali, who seized Jarvis by an arm and jerked him to his feet, then propelled him toward the door. After the door closed behind them, there were only the dusty shafts of the early afternoon sun.

Qazi bent to the devices on the table. “Nicely played, Colonel,” Sakol said. “Your reputation for manipulating overweight sexual deviates is well deserved.”

The amplified call of the muezzin came through the windows and filled the room. “Allah is most great, I testify that there is no god but Allah, I testify that Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah, come to prayer, come to success, Allah is most great, there is no god but Allah.” Even here, at this army base in the desert, the call of the faithful was part and parcel of life.

The workmanship was excellent, Qazi decided finally. Each wire was of equal length, each was connected with a conservative little solder dollop, nothing sloppy or makeshift.

“But it’s all an act, isn’t it, Colonel? Just an act to impress Jarvis and Ali and whoever Ali whispers to. You have no intention of really using a nuclear weapon.”

Sakol sensed movement behind him and turned to see that Qazi had an automatic pistol leveled at his face, a lethal little Walther PPK, Sakol noted professionally.

“El Hakim is insane, but you aren’t, Qazi. You know that Israel has nuclear weapons and, if pressed too far, will use them. You know that pushing the nuclear button would remove the Arabs from the human race. You know all that, Qazi. So what’s your game?”

“You talk far too much, Sakol. I understand now why the Americans left you to die in that prison in Afghanistan.”

“They were playing games, too.”

“Just one more word and I will finish what the Russians started.”

Sakol stared at him. Finally he said, “You would. I believe you.”

Qazi stepped forward and slashed the front sight of his pistol across Sakol’s cheek, then quickly stepped back. As the blood dripped from Sakol’s cheek onto his shirt Qazi pocketed the weapon. “You’ll be returned to the cell with Jarvis. You’ll ensure he performs as required.”

Just then the door opened and Ali stood there, framed in the opening. Qazi issued orders to Ali in Arabic as Sakol walked toward the door.

“How do we know,” Ali asked Qazi later in the corridor, “that the electrical outputs those instruments produce are the proper ones?”

“That is why we have Sakol working with Jarvis,” Qazi answered offhandedly, his mind still on Sakol and the possibility he might speak frankly to the wrong people. Keeping Sakol alive was a large risk, a much larger risk than he had previously believed. Sakol’s attitudes and opinions should have been anticipated. There was just no margin in the plan for errors of that magnitude. “Sakol has assured me Jarvis is giving us the correct voltages.”

“Can we not verify the voltages through other sources?”

Qazi stopped on the stairs and faced Ali. The black eyes were not evasive. “That information is classified Top Secret by the Americans. One would need the actual technical data manual for the weapon. That manual is one of the most closely held American secrets.”

“So we must rely on Jarvis and Sakol.”

Qazi resumed his descent of the stairs. “That would be a very slender reed, indeed. No, I have a source that will supply the manual.”

“I suspected as much, Colonel. And what is the source?”

“The traits that make you valuable to me, Ali, are your unquestioning faith and your discretion. Keep exercising both.”

The two men stepped into the desert heat and walked across the courtyard to the waiting Mercedes, where Ali slid behind the wheel.

In the car Qazi sat in the front seat with Ali.

“Why does Sakol hate you so?”

Ali laughed. “I call him a whore, selling himself for money. I ask him to do sexual things for me. He is not amused.” His face grew serious. “I think when he was a prisoner in Afghanistan, the Russians forced him to do sexual things with other men. Or the Russians did it to him. The Russians are such pigs.” He made a spitting motion.

Ali was on the main road now, heading north. To the west the afternoon sun caused the dust-filled sky to glow red. Perhaps they would reach the capital before the dust storm struck. Qazi turned off the air-conditioning and rolled down his window. The heat filled the car. He took a deep breath. He, too, loved the smell of the desert, the smell of purity, the smell of nothing at all.

Along the road ahead he saw a bedouin on a camel. The mounted figure shimmered in the heat as the car approached. As the car went by Qazi saw that the rider did not even deign to give them a glance. Qazi adjusted the rearview mirror on his door and watched the receding figure until it was lost in the heat mirages rising from the stony emptiness.