When he awoke, the room was dark. But it wasn’t late. Not really. Rolling out of bed, he crossed the room to the minibar and broke the seal on the door. Inside, he found a couple of bottles of Slavutych Pyvo, which looked like beer.
And was.
Picking up the remote, Wilson snapped on the TV, then flicked through the channels until he found one in English. It was a live feed from Iraq. Half a dozen kids were kicking the shit out of a dead soldier, lying next to a burning Humvee while a mob danced in what looked like a pool of blood. In a voice-over, President Bush counseled the world that democracy was “hard work.”
Wilson snorted.
Meanwhile, images flashed upon the screen. More smoke, this time from a suicide bombing in Kabul. Men running with stretchers. Women and sirens wailing. Nervous soldiers looking on through identical pairs of polarized Oakleys, M-16s at the ready, guns pointing at heaven. Then a trauma ward. A man on the floor, looking as if he were bleeding out, a woman thrashing in pain-
This is nothing, Wilson thought. This is bullshit. If they think this is bad, wait’ll they get a load of me.
The idea made him smile. It’s like an orchestra, he told himself. The mayhem on the tube was the visual equivalent of the noise that an orchestra makes as it gets ready to play, with each of the images corresponding to an instrument being tuned. The cacophony was massive and uncoordinated, a traffic jam of noise and violence. But then – soon – the conductor would tap the podium with his baton, and the first note of every symphony would descend: silence.
Then the storm.
Wilson took a long swig of Slavutych. Duty called. He hadn’t checked his messages since he’d left the ship. He plugged his laptop into the telephone, and waited for the computer to boot up, musing all the while on the idea of himself as a kind of conductor. An artiste! If you listened hard enough, you could almost hear the applause, people shouting Maestro! Maestro!
He clicked on the Internet Explorer icon, went to my.yahoo.com and signed in. Clicked on Mail, clicked on Draft – and there it was, a single note dated two days earlier, the address line left blank:
I can’t find Hakim.
CHAPTER 15
The Antonov rumbled down the tarmac, flaps at attention, the plane shaking and shuddering, roaring toward liftoff. A wall of pine trees loomed behind the fences, growing taller and taller and then they were gone. The plane’s vibrations faded to a pulsed thrum as Tiraspol dwindled beneath the wings, a toy slum in a wintry landscape.
Sitting in the cockpit with Belov, the pilot, and the engineer, Wilson relaxed as the plane banked to the south. The Russian lighted a cigar, puffed mightily, and cocked his head toward the engine on the port wing. “Exhaust! You see?”
Wilson glanced out the window, where a stream of turbulence poured over the wing. “What about it?”
Belov made a graceful gesture with his hand, creating a sine wave in the air. “Russian genius puts engine on top, not under wing – so makes possible short takeoffs. Also, landings! Crappy fields, this is no problem. In Africa, I’m using grass airstrips, always. So… is big deal. Normal plane, no way.”
“What’s the trade-off?” Wilson asked.
Belov shrugged. “Not-so-big plane. If I have Antonov-twelve, I haul twenty tons – not ten!” He waggled a finger in the air. “But then I need good runway, mile long, plus.”
Wilson looked out the window. As the plane climbed, he could see the engine on the left side of the plane. It was sitting on the leading edge of the wing, and he could see the exhaust flowing over the ailerons.
“Okay if I go back – check out my friends?”
“Sure! Is okay!” Belov said. “But no cooking!”
Wilson stared at him. “What?”
“No cooking! What you don’t understand?”
“You’re kidding.”
Belov shook his head. “Look at floor! Sometimes Arab peoples, they think because it’s metal, no problem! I’m telling you, they don’t know shit. So you tell them: no cooking.”
“I will.”
“Good.”
Unbuckling his seat belt, Wilson got to his feet. Through the window, he could see the Black Sea stretching toward the horizon. “How long to Sharjah?” he asked.
“Five hours,” Belov told him. “Maybe six.”
The pilot turned to him. “Sometimes, we have problems in Iraqi airspace.”
“What kind of problems?” Wilson asked.
“F-16s.”
Leaving the cockpit, Wilson walked back to where Zero and Khalid were seated on folding metal chairs, bolted into the side of the fuselage. They were smoking cigarettes, and each of them had a Diadora bag in his lap. On the floor in front of them was a dull black scar where someone had tried to cook dinner.
Wilson glanced around.
“Everything okay?”
Khalid chuckled. “He’s scared shitless,” he said, nodding at Zero.
“Well…” Wilson paused. “Lemme ask you something.”
Khalid’s eyebrows shot up, as if to say, Shoot.
“You make any calls last night?”
Khalid frowned. “No,” he said. “I call no one. Him, too! No calls.”
“What about the Internet?” Wilson asked.
The plane hit an air pocket, and Zero turned white.
Khalid’s frown deepened, then softened into embarrassment. He was thinking that Wilson was upset about the hotel bill. So he blamed his friend. “Yeah,” he said, confessing on Zero’s behalf. “He goes on pussy dot com, when I’m in the shower, y’know? Five minutes, maybe ten, I’m in the shower. When I get out, I see what he does, I make him get off.”
“No problem.”
“Maybe fifteen minutes-”
“Don’t worry about it,” Wilson told him. “What I wanted to know was, you hear from Hakim? You get any e-mail from him?”
Khalid shook his head, looking relieved. “No,” he said. “We don’t get nothing from Hakim.”
They touched down in Sharjah a little after three.
Exiting the plane was like leaving a theater in midafternoon. A wall of heat fell on them, and the sky went off like a flare. Wilson fumbled for his sunglasses, squinting so tightly he might as well have been blind. Pools of oil, real or imagined, glittered on the tarmac. In the distance, a cluster of bone-white buildings shimmered in the molten air.
“Dubai,” Belov said, raising his chin toward the horizon. Behind them, a small truck began to tow the plane, heading for a hangar at the end of the runway.
“How long are we here?” Wilson asked.
“We leave tonight. You hungry?”
“I could eat,” Wilson said.
“Good. Come. I get you dinner jacket.”
“Where we going?”
“Dubai. Couple miles.”
“What for?”
“Tea,” Belov replied.
“Tea?”
“With sandwiches!” Sensing Wilson’s skepticism, the Russian gave an apologetic shrug and said, “In Moscow, I am taking you to whorehouse. Have ashes hauled, no problem. Here? In Arab country? Is tea.”
Wilson had never ridden in a Bentley before. It was nice.
As was Burj Al Arab. Built to resemble the sail of the world’s biggest dhow, it stood about a thousand feet offshore at the end of a concrete causeway that linked it to Jumeirah Beach. Belov bragged that it had the tallest atrium in the world, the highest tennis court, the most expensive rooms-
“And…! Underwater restaurant! What you think?”
“Sounds uncomfortable,” Wilson told him. “Sounds like a fuckup.”