Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

In spite of himself, Hake was intrigued. “Why do you want them to stay on the ground?”

“Why does one want to eat? They are excellent protein. And nearly gone, like your whooping crane. This pitiful remnant! In the time of my father the swarms would blacken the sky for days, horizon to horizon. When they alighted they would break the limbs of trees. Then the Europeans came with their insecticides, and our children fall to kwashiorkor for lack of protein.”

He would have chatted on forever, but Reddi snapped his notebook closed and fixed the pilot with his stare. “Now you will shut up,” he said. “Here. These are coordinates for where you are to land. I will then go on with you, while these two remain.” When the pilot looked stubbornly blank, Reddi added, “Hake, translate.”

Hake scowled. “Why do you want to split up? Why are we going there instead of A1 Halwani?”

“Because I wish it.” He did not wait for a reply, but straightened up and fastened his seat belt again. Only the top of his head was visible over the seat-back, shiny black hair slicked straight back, and it did not invite discussion.

Hake recognized the wisdom of at least part of what Reddi had said—the pilot had already had to be taken into their confidence far more than was reasonable, for what was supposed to be a super-secret operation. But he didn’t like it. He leaned to Leota’s ear. “Do you know the bit about Mahomet and the camel?”

She looked at him. “He let the camel’s nose into his tent, and the rest of the camel followed? Yes, that’s the way it is with the Reddis, Hake. I thought you found that out in Italy.”

“Well, I did. But I didn’t have much choice—”

She grinned suddenly, the first smile he had seen from her since her rescue. She leaned forward and kissed him quickly. “I’m not complaining!”

She dabbed at her face once more with a wet-packed tissue, then sighed and gave up. Putting the cosmetic case away, she said, “I was real ready to get out of there,

Horny. Mean bugger, that old sheik. Do you know how he got me out of Rome? With one of his boys holding a knife at my throat as we went through the port at Ostia. He had me believing he would have used it, too.” The smile was completely gone now. She said, “I hope Alys is going to be all right.”

“She said she could handle any man alive, Leota.”

The girl looked at him. “Yeah. That sounds like her.”

The pilot looked around, having returned to indignation. “Effendi, you and the woman should now have your safety belts secured,” he pointed out in Arabic. He did not wait to see that they complied, but slammed the plane into a tight turn.

Twisting to keep his seat while fastening the belt, Hake could get only glimpses out of the tiny window: sand and wide, empty roads; dunes, and the broad sea beyond them; a cluster of one-story buildings that looked as though they had been put together out of used gasoline tins. They bounced in to a rough and ill-kept runway, and the pilot swerved off it at high speed toward a small building next to the stilted control tower. He cut the engines and turned around. “Now what?” he demanded. “If you wish me to take off, we must do it within a half-hour. This pig-pen is not equipped for night operations.”

“How lawful you are,” Reddi commented, when he understood. “Have the kindness to bring the luggage in— all but my own bag, the brown one.” He opened the door and crawled out over the wing, gave one contemptuous glance at the airport structures and then ignored them. When the pilot was safely away on the far side of the nose of the plane, grumbling as he pulled the baggage out of the compartment, Reddi said, “I will leave you here. I will take the plane; please pay the pilot whatever is necessary, including an extra three hours of flying time.”

“For God’s sake, why?” demanded Hake, managing not to add that it was, after all, his plane.

“You and Pauket will go to the city by ground. There are buses, but perhaps you will want to walk; it should take you no more than a day, and you can purchase hiking equipment at the hostel here. This is best. First, because your objective is along the coastal road and you can study it. Second, the customs will be far less thorough here than in the city airport, and I do not suppose Pauket’s credentials are in very good order. Third, I have arranged to meet my brother there, and it is not desirable that you be present.”

“And, fourth,” said Leota, “you want a chance to conspire with him in private.”

He glanced at her. “Do you blame me? I have done as I undertook, and I have not been paid. My brother and I must make arrangements to be sure we are not cheated.”

“I’d give something to know what those arrangements are,” she said.

He was silent for a moment, regarding her. Then he sighed. “In spite of our occasional association, Ms. Pauket,” Reddi said, “you have learned very little. Would you have four of us go in with guns? It would not succeed. But much can be done. Persons the Team considers their own are not. Parties of opposed interest may be induced to work together. This is where I am in charge, and when it is necessary you will be told what to do. Of course,” he added, “all depends on my brother’s decision.”

“The hell you say, Reddi!” Leota flared. “A lot depends on what we decide.”

“No. Very little. What choice do you have?” He waited for a moment, then nodded. “Very well. I will be in the Crash Pad tomorrow night—”

“Crash Pad?”

“The hotel,” Reddi said impatiently. “The sign on it says Intercontinental, but ask anyone for the Crash Pad and they will direct you to it. Do not ask for my room. Go to it. It will be high up, on the top floor if I can arrange it, otherwise as close as possible to the top. You will know the room because it will have a Do Not Disturb sign on the door with the opposite corners bent back. Is that understood? Good, now pay the pilot.”

Hake looked at Leota, who nodded. He shrugged and moved to intercept the Egyptian as he returned from dumping the luggage at the door marked, in several languages, Customs and Passport Control. They haggled for the obligatory few minutes, then returned to the plane. Hake was beginning to feel actively good. The desert afternoon air burned his lungs and throat, but it was a good heat, familiar from his childhood; and Leota was beginning to seem more at ease.

Reddi was already standing on the wing of the plane, impatient. He said, “Are you quite sure that the pilot understands he is paid in full and that there will be no gratuities?”

“He understands,” snarled the pilot, adding a sentence in Arabic that Reddi did not comprehend and Hake tried not to. He had no desire to learn of the pilot’s sudden death.

The hostel had probably once been something else; at least, it was not very good as a hostel. Its advantage was that neither the veiled Bedouin woman who showed them their room nor anyone else seemed to care much about IDs. It had very few other advantages. Two cots with Army blankets. Bare walls. Two sand-frosted windows that did not open. Signs in ten languages—not all of them repeated in all the languages: “No Alcoholic Beverages” was only in three Near Eastern languages and, curiously, in German; “No Smoking in Bed” was only in English.

Leota gathered up an armful of clothes and headed for the showers, pausing only because Hake insisted on taking her photograph first. He heard the distant tinny rattle of the pipes as he laid out the rest of the contents of Jessie’s do-it-yourself ID kit. Passport and visas, no problem; he sealed the photographs on them and added appropriate stamps. He assembled metal type to read JFK-CAI and CAI-KWI, added airline and flight indicia, tapped the type into alignment and pressed them onto a ticket form: result, a perfect ticket showing that one Millicent Anderson Self-ridge had flown from New York to Kuwait; he then threw away the ticket itself and left the used carbon copy to add to Leota’s documents. For the sake of completeness he made her a set of credit cards, a Massachusetts driver’s licence, a Blue Cross card and one for Social Security. It took three-quarters of an hour to finish it.