John Schettler - Meridian

“We’ll just have to pull it through as best we can,” Paul encouraged him as he settled into a terminal next to Nordhausen and keyed in catalog searches. “Many hands make for light work,” he smiled, but the tension was obvious as the two men hunched over the keyboards. “What should I look for, Professor?”

Nordhausen balled his fist at his chin for a moment. “Why not run genealogy queries on the names we have on the note? Don’t bother with Lawrence, of course. But give that other fellow a try—what was it, Maeve?”

“Masaui. But don’t ask me to spell it.” They were both thankful for her memory of the note, as it lived only in their combined recollection now.

“I doubt if we’ll find much locally,” said Paul. “I better ask for an Internet search as well.” He was soon discouraged to find thousands of useless references, and began scouring his brain to try and narrow down his search. Nordhausen saw what he was doing and tossed in a few ideas.

“Include the word genealogy,” he said. “You should get some common name combinations that way.” He flipped open his copy of the Seven Pillars, glancing at the brief introductory poem Lawrence had written there.

“I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands, and wrote my will across the sky in stars, to earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house, that your eyes might be shining for me when we came…”

“What was that?” Paul was struck by the poignancy of the words.

“Lawrence,” said Nordhausen. “Funny how those same tides of men have now swelled the oceans with our impending doom. And the odd thing is, they’re still reaching for the same thing Lawrence wanted: their freedom. Why is it we can’t seem to understand that and find a way to give it to them?”

“Is it ours to give?” said Paul rhetorically. “If I’m not mistaken the Founding Fathers seemed to believe that all men were created that way—free. We’ve tried to be the guarantor of that over here, but I think this business with the Holy Fighters is more than a struggle for liberation. There’s hard vengeance in this act. You don’t go and do something like this without being dead inside; heartless and cruel. Nothing could condone the death of so many innocents.”

“True, this Ra’id Husan al Din is no saint, but who plunged the knife into his chest? This is a struggle that has been going on for a hundred generations, Paul. The Islamic world has lived in the shadow of the West for over a millennium. That shadow was once the threat of mounted knights on chargers marching to the holy land—now it has become something far more insidious. Face it, we’ve sucked the life out of these people like we’ve pumped the oil from under their desert. I would say they feel as threatened by us today as they ever did during the Crusades. They handled Pope Urban’s vigilantes easily enough, but how do you strike at something as all pervading as a culture? We don’t send soldiers to conquer our enemies any longer. We send television sets. These people have lived in the pristine clarity of their deserts for thousands of years until we came along with our thirst for petroleum. Now they’ve got McDonalds in Mecca, the Fifth Fleet plying the waters of the Persian Gulf, stealth bombers circling on standby over their heads and special forces teams out hunting down their heroes. I know, we see these men as murderers and terrorists, but to the average Moslem on the street, this Palma thing will be seen as holy retribution.”

“Hell, they killed their own people in the Western Sahara.”

“Martyrs,” said Nordhausen. “Yes, it’s a twisted thing in our minds, but that’s the way these guys see it. They won’t be satisfied until we pack up and leave them alone, and as long as they are sitting on the fermented remains of all those dearly departed dinosaurs—the oil—well, we want to be darn sure we get our daily deliveries. Something like this was bound to happen one way or another. Face it, the typical Arab ‘man in the street’ is a person without a credit profile. He wants to rise and take his morning prayer instead of running out to a one day sale event at Sears. They’re different. That’s the only thing we can come down to, and that difference has produced men like Husan al Din.”

“I can only imagine what the U.S. response will be to this if we fail to get it fixed. There was a desperate look in that fellow’s eyes—Mr. Graves, I mean. Whatever happened must have been terrible.”

“Let’s hope we never have to know about it. So… It all comes down to an ambush by Lawrence and his Arab freedom fighters at Kilometer 172. I guess it’s time for us to start writing our will across the sky in stars. We had better get busy.” He thought for a moment. “I’ll see if I can narrow that location down. It might help us figure out who this Masaui could be.” He began requesting period map searches from the cartography database while Maeve jumped on a third terminal and started calling up images of typical fashion and dress in the year 1917.

Time passed almost unnoticeably as they worked, each one hot on the trail of some key element that would be needed for the planned mission. It would normally take weeks or months to gather and refine this ‘Approach Data’ as it was called. They had taken five weeks to plan the Globe Theatre mission to 1612. Now, without the luxury of that time, they focused on rooting out the essentials for the mission: where should they go, and what role should they assume in the time they were entering? Beyond that, the problem of how to identify the key moment in time, the Pushpoint, loomed as an ever more daunting obstacle.

Nordhausen was the first to narrow in on some useful data. He was still reading from his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, using a convenient date indexing scheme Lawrence had appended to the pages to aid his search. Soon he managed to locate a reference to Kilometer 172 in the narrative. “Here it is,” he said jubilantly. “It’s on the rail line between Deraa and Amman. Deraa was the lynch pin, of course. The rail line split just above that point and one spur headed for the coast at Haifa while the main line reached up to Damascus and beyond. South of Deraa, the line ran all the way down through the Hejaz region to Medina in Arabia. Here’s a good map, Paul.”

Paul left his terminal and scooted over to Nordhausen’s where the amber gold of a map file was displayed. It was labeled ‘SKETCH MAP: Adapted from War Office material as embodied in G.S.G.S. 2957, by permission of Controller, H.M.S.O.’ Nordhausen was reading quickly through the narrative of his Seven Pillars .

“Apparently this attack was a bit of a fluke,” he said. “Look here, the date is very precise: November 10, 1917. The odd thing is this: when they set out on the operation that resulted in this raid, they had no intention of blowing up a train. They were after a bridge in the Yarmuk Valley, but they were discovered as they approached it and had to flee. After some argument the idea for an attack on the railway grew out of their frustration—almost on the spur of the moment. They seized upon it to salve their failure at the bridge, and it resulted in the destruction of a heavily laden troop train that was heading north from Amman.”

Dorland thought about the situation. “Any reference to Masaui in the narrative?”

“Not a hint,” said Nordhausen, “but he had to be there, on one side or another.”

“Well, that’s an Arabic name,” Maeve added. “Perhaps he was one of Lawrence’s men.”

“A likely conclusion,” said Nordhausen, “but I’m afraid there were thousands of Arab soldiers in the Turkish Army—whole divisions of them, in fact. They were broken up and had their battalions scattered through the ranks after the Arab rebellion began. Masaui could have been a Turkish soldier on the train as well. This is maddening! Even if we solve this first riddle, and figure out which side Masaui was fighting on, how will we find him? Suppose he’s on the train. First we have to find some way of blending in with the Turks. If we somehow manage that, then what will we do: go from train car to train car and call the man’s name?”