“Answer me!”
“I understand.”
“Very good.” Qazi leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs again. He sat silently for a moment as Jarvis squinted to see his face, but finally began speaking when the prisoner began watching the foot that was in the cone of light. Qazi moved his toe rhythmically.
“I want you to build me seven instruments, Jarvis. These instruments shall be used to bypass the safety devices in Mark 58 nuclear weapons.”
“I don’t …” The toe stopped and Jarvis ran out of steam.
“If you were going to tell me that you know nothing of these weapons, it is well you saved your breath.” Qazi got the toe in motion again. “Your position as a design engineer at the factory that assembles these devices is your finest credential. We did not bring you here because you disgust us. You will build seven instruments that will bypass the safety devices in Mark 58 nuclear weapons. These instruments shall contain a source of electrical power that will energize the weapon and trigger it. One of these instruments will contain a radio receiver that allows it to be triggered from a distance. Do you understand?” The toe stopped again.
“Yes.” The toe began its back and forth motion.
“Are you agreeing with me merely to avoid unpleasantness, or do you really intend to help us and spare your wife the agony we can inflict?”
“You said … my wife …”
Qazi placed both feet on the floor, leaned forward and slapped the quaking man several times. “Bring in the other man,” he said to Ali in Arabic.
A cursing Sakol was dragged in by four guards and lashed to a chair. Ali removed the blindfold and slapped him into silence. He did it with vigor, Qazi noticed. The guards assumed a position at the door.
“Another man with a secret. You Americans seem to be up to your eyes in filthy little secrets.”
“Please, mister,” Sakol begged. “For Christ sake, let’s talk about this. I didn’t mean to hurt her. It was an accident—” Ali’s open hand on Sakol’s face made a dull smack. And another. He began to weep.
“Let me introduce William James Moffet, Jarvis. He is a technician with some experience and a taste for young women. Unfortunately for them, they rarely survive his attentions. Moffet shall assist you in assembling the instruments. Now I am going to have you taken back to your cell where you will be given food and water and a pencil and paper. After you have eaten, you will make a list of the material you will need to construct these devices. Tomorrow morning at nine o’clock you will be brought back here. I shall examine your list and question you about it. You had better have all the answers tomorrow morning, Jarvis, or your wife’s humiliation shall begin before the sun sets. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, sir.” He snuffled uncontrollably, in little gasps.
“I don’t think you do, Jarvis. I don’t think you do.” He produced a large black-and-white photograph which he held in the light. He watched the man’s eyes slowly focus. The picture was of Jarvis and a boy, about six or seven. Jarvis had the boy’s penis in his mouth.
“Guards, take them to their cells.”
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.”