Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

CHAPTER 8

Wilson stood with his back to the wall, watching the ragheads dip the cans, one by one, in buckets of gasoline. He’d been in the warehouse all day, so the gas was in his clothes, in his hair, in his pores. He could taste it. Which was frustrating, because he desperately wanted a cigarette. But even if he went outside, he couldn’t just light up. If he did, he’d go off like a flare.

The other thing about going outside was his babysitters: Zero and Khalid. Around twenty years old, they wore boots and jeans and American T-shirts (“Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute!”), and carried Heckler & Koch submachine guns as casually as umbrellas. They went with him everywhere, thanks to Hakim, and it was getting on his nerves. The one guy’s English was almost nonexistent, but the other one spoke it well. The real problem was: They wanted to be his friends. They wanted to go to America! So they were constantly mugging in his direction, bobbing their heads and smiling insanely, as if to say, Death to America, but not to you, my friend! For you – falafel! For us, green cards!

He told Hakim: I don’t need a bodyguard, much less two – much less the Fukwitz twins! The Arab insisted, and maybe he was right. Beneath its veneer of Gallic and Arab civility, Lebanon was a tinderbox. Always had been, always would be. And Baalbek was just… so much kindling.

A flyblown crossroads in the Bekaa Valley, the city lay at the foot of a long, bare hill, crowned by the Sheikh Abdullah barracks. This was the fort where American hostages had been kept, chained to radiators and pipes, during the 1980s. Hakim wanted to show him the cells, but there hadn’t been time and, anyway, Hakim didn’t trust the Syrian intel people who were headquartered there. Which was too bad, because Wilson knew something about prisons, was interested in prisons – and he wondered about the cells. Had the hostages been able to see the ruins across the road? It would have made a difference – because the ruins were as spectacular as they were unexpected.

From an engineering standpoint, they were mind-boggling. There was a brochure at the hotel. It said they were the remains of a Roman sanctuary. The centerpiece was the Temple of Jupiter, a colossus assembled on a foundation so broad and deep that it contained more stone than the Great Pyramid at Giza.

It was a wreck now. Fifty columns lying in the grass, tumbled this way and that, as if a forest of stone had been felled.

To the Romans, it was “Heliopolis,” City of the Sun. The brochure said that it was here, on the trade route between Damascus and Tyre, that the apostle Paul saw the Light. You’d think there’d be a plaque or something, but there was nothing. Just a flyer on a telephone pole, advertising the summer music festival that took place each year amid the ruins. This year: Björk and Sting.

The warehouse in which Wilson stood, wishing he could smoke, was a prefab hulk with broken windows and rusting joints. Set back from the road on an acre of hardpan, it was cold inside – except where the welders worked.

There was a ton of hash in place – quality smoke, grown locally under the supervision of Hakim’s contacts in the Ministry of Defense. Even with an assembly line, getting the product ready to ship took time. Each “hand” weighed half a kilo and had to be packaged so that it would be undetectable as it moved across borders. This meant putting the product into small plastic bags, a pound at a time, then wiping down the bags with sponges soaked in gasoline.

When the bags were clean, a different set of workers would drag them on carts to the other end of the warehouse, where they would be put, one by one, in five-by-seven tins about an inch thick. The tins would then be taken to a separate room, where they’d be sponged down with gasoline, then placed in somewhat larger tins. The larger tin would then be filled with melted wax and soldered shut. After one last dip in a bucket of gas, the tins would be laid in the bottom of fifty-five-gallon drums. Then, a forklift hauled the drums to a large room at the far end of the warehouse, where each barrel was fitted with a metal plate, creating a false bottom, just above the hash. The drums were then filled with about fifty gallons of pomegranate molasses, and sealed. Finally, each drum was spray-painted with the words MELASSE DE LIBAN.

By Wilson’s reckoning, it was going to take upwards of two hundred drums to package it all. But when they were done, there wasn’t a sniffer-dog in the world who’d bark at it.

That night, he had dinner with Hakim. Though Wilson had been in Lebanon for nearly a week, he had yet to speak to the Arab for more than five minutes at a time. They’d come to Baalbek in separate cars, following the Bekaa Valley as it curved north, arid and blond, between opposing mountain ranges. Once in Baalbek, Wilson was left to himself (and his minders), while Hakim made arrangements about the hash.

The hashish was a recent development, and it was an unpleasant surprise. During their time in Allenwood, Bo had assured him that finding money for Wilson’s project would not be a problem – money was never a problem. At the time, Hakim’s military operations had been subsidized by a prince who occupied a high position in the Ministry of the Interior in Riyadh. In return for the prince’s financial assistance, Hakim had promised to restrict his operations to targets outside the Happy Kingdom. And so he had.

But all that changed after 9/11. The prince was killed in an automobile accident (or so the Saudis claimed), and Hakim’s money supply dried up almost overnight. By the time Wilson was released from prison, operations were being funded with cloned and stolen credit cards, bank robberies, kidnappings, and drugs.

Just as Hakim had once worked with a prince in the Saudi Ministry of the Interior, he now worked with a general in Lebanon’s Ministry of Defense.

The Bekaa Valley was quilted with fields of marijuana grown on large and modern farms. Harvested with tractors and dried in barns, the plants were hand-rubbed through sieves of cloth, creating a resinous dust that was easily compressed into blocks of hashish.

It was up to Hakim to package the product and move it – that’s where Wilson came in. He would have preferred to be given a suitcase full of cash, and sent on his way to carry out his operation. Instead, he found himself having to earn the money the hard way, plunging into a Triangle Trade of drugs and guns and diamonds.

Moral issues didn’t bother him. He was beyond that. What worried Wilson was the fact that he was putting his life in the hands of a man who hated Americans. All he really knew about Hakim was what Bo told him. And Bo was insistent that the less Wilson and Hakim knew about each other, the better it would be for both of them. Still, he’d learned a few things about his dinner companion.

According to Bo, “Aamm Hakim” was a Jordanian. An Islamist, he’d attended universities in Iran and the United States. In the 1980s, he’d fought with the Taliban against the Russians in Afghanistan, and with Hezbollah against the Americans in Beirut. When the Lebanese civil war wound down, he formed his own organization to carry out operations under contract to foreign intelligence agencies and others requiring deniability.

Were Hakim and his group a part of al-Qaeda? Wilson asked. Bo turned the question aside. Al-Qaeda isn’t like that, he told him. There’s a big al-Qaeda, and a little al-Qaeda. The big al-Qaeda is more of a network than an organization. It’s like the Internet, he said, a cloud of constantly changing connections, with no central command, a loose association of people with shared affinities. Some know each other, most don’t.

Does your uncle know bin-Laden? Wilson asked.

Uncomfortable with the question, Bo replied with a non sequitur: “They don’t call him bin-Laden. They call him the Contractor.”

The FBI’s “Most Wanted” website had its own version of Aamm Hakim. According to the Bureau, Wilson’s dinner companion was an Egyptian, né Hakim Abdul-Bakr Mussawi, aka Ali Hussein Musalaam, Ahmed Izz-al-Din, and half a dozen other names.

He had a degree in accounting and was “the alleged military operations chief of the Coalition of the Oppressed of the Earth.”

Wilson had clicked on the FBI link that explicated the ideology of various al-Qaeda splinter groups. The Coalition was composed of Salafi jihadists “who believe that ridding the world of modernity will result in an Islamic Revival, returning Muslim peoples worldwide to Islam’s most righteous path. While not rejecting technology as such, Salafi jihadists do reject Western (and especially U.S.) cultural hegemony. Orbiting the true believers at the center of the Coalition,” Wilson read, “is the usual assortment of mercenaries and foot soldiers.” According to the website, the Coalition was responsible for “attacks on American facilities in West Africa and the Far East.”

Wilson and Hakim sat in the dining room of the Hotel Dumas, a dilapidated relic with high ceilings and dusty chandeliers. If anything, the guest rooms were even more decrepit, with wooden beds little better than pallets. In its heyday, the place had been a destination of considerable glamour, hosting the likes of Josephine Baker and Charles de Gaulle. But that was then; now the Bekaa’s dust had taken hold. Pipes clanked. Doors creaked. Towels and rugs were threadbare.

But the food was delicious.

With the exception of Zero and Khalid, sipping tea at a table near the door, Wilson and Hakim were alone. Their party seemed to be the hotel’s only guests, though whether this was by accident or design was uncertain.

By now Wilson was not shocked by the arrival of the bottle of wine or the pleasure Hakim took in the ritual. Despite the Islamic ban on alcohol, the Arab liked to peruse the label, take a careful sniff of the cork when the waiter presented it, and judiciously taste the small splash of wine poured into his glass.

Hakim smacked his lips, nodded, and dismissed the waiter. He poured a glass for himself, then Wilson.

It was as if Hakim had read Wilson’s mind. Holding his glass up to the light, he sent the liquid into a slow, centrifugal spin. Finally, he took a sip. “I’m Takfiri,” he explained, his voice low and matter-of-fact. “You know this word?”

Wilson shook his head.

“It means that for us, the rules don’t matter. Wine, a girl, even pork – everything is allowed. Nothing is haram.”

“Sweet,” Wilson remarked.

Hakim ignored the sarcasm. “It’s not ‘sweet.’ Everything is different for us. It has to be.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re in a war,” he said, “and because we’re ‘behind the lines.’” Hakim said this as if he were explaining the obvious. “For us, sin is a kind of disguise.”

Wilson nodded.

“It makes me invisible,” Hakim said.

Wilson got it, but he didn’t buy it. After a week in Lebanon, it was obvious that the Arab knew how to enjoy himself, whatever the Koran might say about it. Their second night in Beirut, Hakim had gotten drunk in the bar of the St. Georges Hotel, eventually wandering off with an expensive-looking girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Was that an exercise in cover?

Either way, there was no denying Hakim’s commitment to “the cause,” and even to the plan at hand. However skeptical he may have been of working with an American, however doubtful he may have been that Wilson’s project would work, Hakim had come through on every promise. And why shouldn’t he? Wilson wondered. It wasn’t as if the Arab was doing it for shits and giggles. Once the two of them hooked up in Antwerp, Hakim would walk off with seventy percent of the take. So even if Wilson’s own operation went nowhere, the Arab would make a great deal of money. And Wilson would be taking all the risks.

Hakim drained his glass, then poured another. The waiter came and went in a blaze of smiles, distributing a mezze of small dishes around the table. Hakim swirled his wine, somehow managing to do so without ever seeming to move his hand.

“You haven’t said anything about Belgrade,” Hakim remarked.

Wilson shrugged. “Not much to tell. I did what I went to do. It snowed.”

“And then you came here.” It didn’t sound like a question, but it was.

“No,” Wilson told him, wondering how much the Arab knew. “First, I went to Lake Bled. Then I came here.”

“Lake Bled?”

“Slovenia.”

Nodding to himself, Hakim tore a chunk of pita in half and, using it as a scoop, slid a mound of baba ghanoush into his mouth. “And what’s in Slovenia?”

“A notebook.”

“Oh, yes, the famous ‘notebook’! Bo told me about it. You found it!?”

Wilson nodded. “I did. Many notebooks.”

Hakim smiled encouragingly, humoring the man across from him. He didn’t really understand what the American was up to. Bobojon had explained it to him months before, but none of it made much sense. The operation had something to do with this crazy scientist, Tesla, who’d been dead fifty years. Some lost books. A bomb that wasn’t a bomb. The way his nephew told it, the American was going to “stop the motor of the world.” Hakim laughed. The motor of the world!

“What’s so funny?” Wilson asked.

The Arab shook his head. “I was thinking of something else,” he lied. There was no point in insulting Wilson. Even if he was crazy, he’d been tested – and he’d passed. So he was a serious man and the important thing was to humor him, as a favor to Bobojon. Bobojon was doing serious work. And besides, Hakim needed help moving the hash. He paused. “I have good news for you!”

“What’s that?” Wilson asked, trying not to sound suspicious.

“Tomorrow you’re going to Tripoli.”

Wilson was puzzled. “Libya?”

Hakim shook his head. “Not that Tripoli,” he said. “This one’s in Lebanon, fifty miles north of Beirut. It’s the main port. Everything goes through there. Molasses, too.”

Wilson’s annoyance vanished.

“I’ve arranged a car. You’ll leave in the morning.”

“What about them?” Wilson lifted his chin in the direction of his babysitters.

Hakim turned in his seat and waved to the boys, whose faces lit up in smiles. “They go where the cans go.”

“And after the cans?”

“They go everywhere.”

Pushing a wedge of pita into a soft dune of hummus, Wilson brought it up to his mouth. “And once I’m in Tripoli, how do I find the ship?”

“No problem,” Hakim told him. “It’s in the port. Turkish flag. More rust than paint. The Marmara Queen.”

“And they’re expecting me?”

Hakim shrugged. “They’re expecting ‘the shipping agent’ for Aswan Exports. That’s you. It’s your molasses.”

“What about visas?”

“You won’t need any. Belov will meet you on the docks in Odessa. It’s all arranged. He’ll walk you through.”

Wilson frowned.

“What?” Hakim asked.

“I was thinking about Belov,” Wilson said. “Why doesn’t he rip me off? Just take the product, and walk away?”

“He won’t do that,” Hakim told him.

“Why not? Who’s going to stop him, Zero and Khalid?”

“Maybe not, but… I wouldn’t underestimate them,” Hakim said. “They’re good boys.”

Wilson chuckled ruefully. “You realize I don’t know shit about guns, right?”

Hakim shrugged. “So what? We do a lot of business with Belov,” Hakim said. “He won’t try to cheat us. It wouldn’t be smart. And Belov’s very smart. He’s Russian, but he works out of Sharjah. So we have a little influence. His planes are there, and he has a couple of warehouses. It’s a good place for him. He won’t risk that. Not for something like this.” He brought the tips of his thumb and forefinger almost together. “Anyway, if I’m wrong, you’ll be the first to know.”

“That’s what worries me.”

Hakim smiled, then popped an olive into his mouth, worked it around, and spat the pit onto the floor. “I’m going out of town for a few days,” he announced. “So maybe you’ll get to Antwerp first. Either way, get a room at De Witte Lelie Hotel. Can you remember that? ‘The white lily.’ Like the flower.”

Wilson nodded. “Then what?”

“When I get there, we’ll go to the diamond exchange. You and me. There’s a Jew we do business with.” He closed his eyes and shook his head, then opened his eyes again. “He’ll take the diamonds, arrange the wire transfers. As we discussed: It’s seventy-thirty. You get the thirty. After that? You’re on your own.”

Wilson forked a chunk of lamb kebab into his mouth, and savored it on his tongue. “What about Bo?”

Hakim looked puzzled. “What about him?”

“Will he be there?”

“Of course not.”

“Why not?” Wilson asked.

“He does special work. Even I don’t see him.”

Wilson dipped a chunk of pita into a dish of gray puree, and brought it up to his mouth. “What is this stuff?”

“Lamb tartare.”

Wilson set the bread aside. “What does ‘special work’ mean?”

Hakim considered the question. Finally, he smiled and said, “My nephew, he’s good with computers. So he helps us with communications.”

“How?”

The Arab sipped his wine, then carefully set the glass on the table. Folding his hands in his lap, he said, “Let me give you a bit of advice.”

Wilson raised his chin.

“We’re in business together,” Hakim told him. “You and me and Bobojon. Which is good. But you’re not one of us. And the way things work, it’s better if you’re not too curious. People get nervous. I get nervous. And that could be bad for you.” When Wilson said nothing, the Arab sat back in his seat and frowned. “Tell me something. Why are you doing this?”

Wilson rolled his eyes in a way that said, It’s complicated.

Hakim wagged a finger at him. “You know what I think? I think you’re an intellectual.”

Wilson grinned. “I’m an engineer,” he said. “It’s not the same.”

“Of course, but… when you were in prison, my nephew says that you were reading – always, you were reading. He says you read Qutb. Is that true?”

“Yeah.”

“Which book?”

“Milestones.”

The Arab nodded to himself. “What did you think?”

Wilson pursed his lips. Until he was hanged by Egypt’s Nasser, Sayyid Qutb was a revolutionary who preached a return to Islamic purity and the overthrow of corrupt Arab regimes. More than anyone else, his views had shaped the thinking of people like Osama bin-Laden. “I think Qutb is fine,” Wilson told him, “if you’re an Arab.”

“And if you’re not?”

“If you’re not, you need to look for someone else.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Hakim exclaimed. “To each his own! So what about you? If not Qutb, who?”

Wilson shrugged.

“Bobojon said you have Indian blood,” Hakim persisted.

Wilson said nothing.

“Forgive me,” Hakim said. “I know nothing about Indians. Just the old movies.” He paused. “But tell me, does your tribe have anyone like Qutb?”

“My ‘tribe’?” Wilson repeated. “No, ‘my tribe’ doesn’t have anyone like Qutb. No tracts, no pamphlets, no Fiery Flying Rolls.”

Hakim laughed. “Then what? What do you have?”

“Laments.”

“Laments?”

Wilson nodded. “Yeah, there’s a lot of sad songs.”

“That’s it?”

“No,” he said. “We have the Ghost Dance.”

Hakim laughed, and poured each of them another glass of wine.

“Sad songs and dances! What a people!”

The Arab’s sarcasm struck a nerve. But even as the adrenaline curled through Wilson’s chest, his features remained as neutral as a sundial. After a moment, he said, “I didn’t know my parents. I grew up in foster homes. So I didn’t have any history – none that I knew, anyway. Someone said I was Indian, and I looked Indian. But it never meant anything. The first time I heard about the Ghost Dance, I was just a kid. I was in the dentist’s office, and there was an article in a magazine.”

“Yes?” Hakim looked confused, perhaps a little drunk.

“It was just an article. And pictures of a man they called Wovoka. He was all tricked out in a ghost shirt, with stars and moons on it.”

Hakim frowned. He had no idea what the American was talking about. Ghosts?

Wilson continued: “It turned out, we had the same name. Not ‘Wovoka,’ but the same real name. I guess I kind of forgot about it, you know? Until later, when I went to prison. My second year in Supermax” – he laughed at the memory – “I’m sitting in my cell, watching the wall. And it hits me! This thing with the name – it’s no coincidence. It’s who I am. Literally! So it’s my past, my future. Everything.”

Hakim nodded absently. Wilson could see his confusion draining to boredom, the boredom to irritation. “What are you talking about?” Hakim glanced around for the waiter.

Wilson cocked his head. The Arab didn’t have a clue. And then he realized why. Hakim didn’t know his real name, or if he did, he’d forgotten it. To Hakim, he was “Frank d’Anconia” – and that was that. So there was no point in telling him about the other Jack Wilson. For Hakim, the coincidence didn’t exist.

Finally, Wilson said, “I’m talking about the Ghost Dance,” he said. “It’s what we have instead of Qutb.”

Hakim frowned. “But you haven’t told me what it is.”

Wilson leaned forward. “Wovoka… he had a vision. He saw the Indians begin to dance. By themselves, at first, and then with their ancestors. After a while, the earth shook and the dancers… well, in the vision, the dancers went into the sky. Just floated up. Then the earth swallowed everyone who was left. Which was the whites. All the Indians’ enemies. After that, the world began to heal.”

“To heal.”

“Yes. It went back to the way it was, the way it had been,” Wilson explained.

Hakim stared at him, blinking dully. Finally, he said, “I think you’ve had too much alcohol.”

Wilson took a deep breath. The fat bastard in front of him would never understand.

Then the Arab did something unexpected. With a wave of his hand, he brushed the conversation aside, and reached into the shoulder bag on the floor beside his seat. Removing a small black jewel box, he set it down upon the table, and pushed it toward Wilson. “This is for you,” he said, and lowering his head, touched his fingertips to his chest.

Wilson eyed the box. It was one of those velvet-covered cases used for wedding rings. “I didn’t know you cared.”

Hakim smiled. Open it, his eyes said.

For a moment, Wilson hesitated. Then he reached for the box and, prying it open, found a bloodred capsule in the silk niche that was meant for a ring. It wasn’t a vitamin.

Hakim chuckled. “Till death do us part.” Lifting the left side of his shirt collar, he offered a glimpse of an identical capsule taped to the collar’s underside, where a collar stay might have been.

Wilson stared at the capsule. “You think I’d take this?”

Hakim shrugged. “That’s up to you,” he said. “But if you’re caught, they’ll hurt you.”

Wilson closed the box, and put it in his pocket. “It’s painful?”

Hakim shook his head. “No. You see pictures from Jonestown? Afterward? Everybody’s smiling.”

Wilson leaned forward. “That was rictus. It’s different.”