The brutal glare of the desert sun in Abu Dhabi came as a relief to the cold, damp misery he’d experienced for the past couple of days. It felt as if his bones would need weeks to dissipate the chill of his plunge into the icy water while escaping from Petromax’s oil rig. He carried only a small bag of hastily purchased clothing from Kennedy Airport, so he was through customs in minutes, past the enormous duty-free shopping mall in the airport, and out onto the strip of road abutting the international terminal.
Waiting for his contact, a colonel named Wayne Bigelow, Mercer set his bag at his feet, ignoring the taxi and limousine drivers soliciting fares into Abu Dhabi City, and closed his eyes once again, nodding off as he stood against a lamppost. After he got the chill from his body, his next order of business would be to pay back more of the tremendous sleep debt he’d incurred.
A car horn sounded close by and dragged him back to consciousness. Mercer had formed a pretty good impression of Colonel Bigelow from the telephone call he’d placed back at Sea-Tac Airport and more than half expected to see the old soldier driving a battered Land Rover, one with its top hacked off and a heavy tire bolted to its hood. Instead, Bigelow leaned from the open window of a new Mercedes 600 SEL sedan, its glossy black paint radiant in the sunlight.
“Dr. Mercer, I presume?” Bigelow’s accent was strictly Colonial English, like a voice from a bygone era. His silvered mustache was waxed to needle points, and his face was as dark and weathered as tree bark. Even seated in the luxury automobile, he retained a rigid military bearing. Mercer guessed that when Bigelow died, rigor mortis would actually loosen his spine. He liked the older man immediately.
“What’s left of him.” Mercer pushed himself off the lamppost and, grabbing his bag, walked to the car.
“Sorry I’m late, but I wanted to catch the fireworks this morning. Damn impressive those Hornets your navy uses. Scream like the bloody hounds of hell, they do.” Bigelow noted how slowly Mercer walked around the Mercedes and how gingerly he eased himself into the leather passenger seat. “Looks like you and Khalid Khuddari have the same tailor.” Mercer’s right arm was in a cloth sling to lessen the tension on his more severely torn shoulder tendons.
“It’s amazing the sympathy you get with one of these. Hell, even the Air France flight attendants were civil.”
“Should have come down on BOAC.” Bigelow still used the old name for British Airways. “But I’m sure the flap at Heathrow has mucked them up for a few days.”
“So everything went as planned?” Mercer asked. Between the time spent waiting in airports and on planes and the hours he’d lost traveling thirteen time zones east, a full day had passed since he and Captain Hauser had prevented the destruction of the Petromax Arctica.
“Like clockwork,” Bigelow replied with a grand smile. The Mercedes purred along at about a hundred miles an hour on the ribbon of asphalt bisecting the white desert sand. “I’ll let Minister Khuddari fill you in on the details.”
“I understand from my conversation with his secretary that he was severely injured in London during an attack at the British Museum and later at Heathrow.”
“Siri has a soft spot for him. She made his wounds sound worse than they are. He caught a bunch of shrapnel fragments, nothing even remotely life threatening, and he gave himself a nasty spinal dislocation jumping from an airplane.” Bigelow then added fondly, “The pansy fell ten feet and pinched off a nerve for a couple of hours. I’ve known men who’ve leaped from five thousand feet without a parachute and walked away with nothing more than a mild limp. I knew he should have gone to Sandhurst rather than Cambridge and the London School of Economics. Lad’s too soft by far.”
“Known him long?” Mercer smiled at Bigelow’s gruff affection.
“Since his father brought him in from the desert when he was a boy. Men like him are the future of the Gulf. They can function in the Western world yet still retain their traditions and their faith, giving each the proper due and maintaining true balance. The fundamentalism so popular now isn’t the answer. Whether it’s belief in Allah or in modern civilization, the Arabs have to learn not to rush headlong in either direction. Unfortunately, they are so passionate about everything they do that they lose sight of life’s subtle compromises.”
Mercer chuckled. “I just gave that same speech about environmentalists.”
“It applies to everyone,” Bigelow replied.
Once in the city, Bigelow parked them in a garage under a modern glass and steel office tower, the space he took having his name on a plaque affixed to the poured concrete wall. “You can leave your bag. In fact, the car is yours while you’re here in Abu Dhabi. I hope you enjoy it more than I do. I much prefer my old Rover to these Kraut leather-lined bordellos.”
While the building could not have been more than a few years old, Bigelow led Mercer into an area that had the feel of an old Victorian edifice, plaster walls, dark woodwork, and ceilings at least twelve feet high. The effect was disorienting but very welcome in the otherwise sterile city. The doors to Khalid al-Khuddari’s office were solid pieces of mahogany, each four feet wide by nine feet tall. Mercer knew they had to be antiques because trees that size were just not found anymore.
The outer office was large, richly decorated, and inviting, the colors hued to those of the outlying desert and the azure of the Gulf to the north. The desk at its far end was as large as a pool table but spotlessly organized, even the cables running from the computer were tightly wrapped to reduce their ugly functionalism. Mercer assumed that the woman coming from behind the desk was Khalid Khuddari’s secretary, Siri Patal. He wasn’t ready for her exquisitely delicate beauty. He’d expected a heavy, matronly woman like the ones he knew from the Indian restaurants around Washington. Siri Patal could have been a model; her fluid movement and her reed-thin body were exceptional. Thinking a purely chauvinistic thought, Mercer hoped that Khuddari had the sense to have an affair with this woman. He would have, in Khuddari’s position.
“Hello, Colonel,” Siri said respectfully to Bigelow, who ignored her professional demeanor and gave her cheek a tickle with his mustache.
“Hello, darling. How’s my girl?”
“Colonel, please,” she blushed and nodded to the corner of the antechamber.
Seated on one of the two leather sofas and leafing through an oil industry magazine, Jim Gibson looked up and smiled broadly. “Don’t you mind me, little lady, you just carry on.” His Stetson and cowboy boots looked appropriate once he spoke in his booming Texas voice. “Well, jerk my lizard! They told me you was comin’, Mercer, but I said naw, couldn’t be. Mercer is a miner, I said, and the only resource this country’s got other than oil is sand. Since the bottom fell out of the hourglass market, there’s no sense mining that.”
Mercer shook Gibson’s hand awkwardly with his left, his whole fist vanishing in the Texan’s big paw. “Thanks, Jim, for everything. I think the world would be a different place if you hadn’t put me in touch with Colonel Bigelow.”
“Hell, I haven’t talked to you since Nigeria, and the next thing I know, you’re calling me up about government plots and sabotage. When I heard about the flap at the Alaska Pipeline and knew you hadn’t gone round the bend, I did what any hero woulda done.” Gibson laughed. “Taking a lesson from the Duke, John Wayne, when the Indians are circling, begging your pardon ma’am, but when they’re circling, you call in the cavalry, right? I’m just glad I was able to help. And speaking of which, it’s time for this hero to get his reward.”