Umarov and Liaquat, who were still by the fire, looked over at him lethargically. The disease was now in its sixth hour. They were probably starting to feel the initial effects, their eyes glowing eerily in the twilight.
A wind was rising out of the northwest.
Parker looked up in the sky and could see bright twinkling stars, despite his sense that there was a coming change of weather.
This could change everything.
The cave was well above ten thousand feet and, being closer to the heavens, the stars seemed more pronounced, much brighter than home. But Parker had seen it happen before, a sky full of stars and then a sandstorm. You could go from unlimited visibility, spotting mountaintops a hundred miles away, to being blinded, unable to see even one’s hand.
“We must pray.”
Umarov grunted, stood.
Parker rose on his knees and then pushed up with his hands. His head swam as he tried to stand erect.
Yousef had left the cave some time ago. Parker could hear his voice, seemingly on a cell phone, at the edge of the encampment. He sounded excited.
Parker took a prayer rug to an opening on the far side of the huts and the first of three trucks parked between the remaining walls. The trucks were covered with dry, brown tarps that started to flap in the rising breeze. He faced west, toward Mecca, and removed his shoes.
“Do you have water?”
Liaquat had laid his prayer rug down, behind Parker’s, as if to keep an eye on the stranger. Liaquat looked somewhat unsteady himself.
“Yes, of course.” Liaquat yelled to one of the women in the cave. “Bring us some water for Al-Wudu.” The ritual of the prayer required a cleansing.
The old woman from the cave brought a pitcher.
“I noticed on the flight you made your fist.” Liaquat, the physician, was talking. His suspicions seemed to be building. “Did you hurt your arm?”
“Yes, years ago.” Parker knew that attempting to evade the question would cause more curiosity. “It is nothing.”
The woman handed Parker a small metal cup. Odd. Parker looked at the woman in detail as she held the brandished pitcher up to pour. She had short, stump-like fingers, fat and rounded at their tips. The woman would die soon. Parker had seen it before. She was sick. Her lung disease was cutting off the oxygen to her body, causing her fingers to club. When hit by the meningitis she would be one of the first to die.
Liaquat washed his hands, three times, and then his face, and then the back of his neck. As the woman came to Parker, he looked into her eyes. Her head was covered, but her eyes in the glow of the fire seemed to be large and tired. She and her people lived in the worst of a stark, barren, cold, hopeless world. Parker washed his hands three times, and then his face and neck. The water was bitterly cold. For Parker and his rising temperature, it felt good.
“So, Umarov is from Grozny?”
“Yes.” Liaquat laid his prayer rug down next to Parker’s.
Parker noticed Umarov’s accent, when he spoke, had the hint of something other than Arabic. Chechen had similar consonants and sounds to Arabic but sounded quite different.
“He has the mark of the Crni Labudovi?”
“Yeah.”
Parker decided to play journalist.
“So Umarov was originally from Grozny, raised a Muslim.”
“Yes.”
“But the Black Swans are Bosnian?”
Liaquat looked around. No one else was within range of listening.
“All you need to know is that he’s a killer.” Liaquat said the words in a near whisper. “His family was killed in the first Russian purge of Grozny. He joined the Committee of Revolutionary Justice with Nidal. He blew up a Russian train back in the late eighties. It killed a lot of Russian children on a holiday.”
“And that’s how he got to know Yousef?”
“Yes. They were with Nidal together, but the Russians were giving Nidal help with explosives against the Americans.”
Flight 103.
“So Nidal cut him loose. He disappeared for a while and then showed up in Bosnia. He did such a good job that they made him a brother of the Crni Labudovi.”
Meaning, he killed more children.
“And then back in Grozny against the Russians in 1996. And finally he came here to Yousef.”
The Maghrib prayer began at sunset. And Parker followed the Salah, or prayer, through its separate steps. But Yousef was nowhere in sight.
At the end, he turned to the right and spoke to evil and then to the left and spoke to good. And then Parker thought the last of the Longfellow poem.
Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all.
They all stood at the completion of the prayer and hugged each other, kissing each other on the cheek.
Yousef came across to them, looking like a child at Christmas. “My friend, get your pencil and paper. I have news. Very special news.”
“What is it?”
“We have our weapons. They are being moved as we speak!”
Umarov gave Yousef a look. Parker noticed the look as well. It said, You’re talking too much.
Thank God Umarov never heard from Knez, Parker thought. It was clear that Parker would be lying in a pool of blood by now if Knez had ever communicated to anyone any suspicions.
“Weapons?”
“Yes, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Zulfiqar did well. They will be here by midnight. Praise Allah!”
“Praise Allah!” Parker managed to beam a smile. “But they must be used in the right way, yes?”
The trap had been baited.
“One will go to our cell on the lake—”
“We speak too much.” Umarov interrupted Yousef.
“Perhaps, perhaps.” Yousef hesitated. “My friend, you will be the first to know, but let’s wait a little more.”
“I understand.” Near Canada, Parker recalled, and believed he had what he needed.
Umarov continued to frown.
“No, brother,” Yousef told Umarov. “It’s okay. This is why we wanted Sadik here now. When the time is right he will tell the world! With this, the world will listen to my fatwa!”
“This will make you formidable, formidable indeed!” Parker came over and hugged Yousef again, placing a kiss on first his left cheek and then his right. “You must tell me everything.”
“Soon, indeed.” Yousef continued to smile like a child. “Please. Let us go in by the fire. The women will bring us some food.”
Parker followed, looking briefly up into the mountains. Somewhere up there the team was probably learning of the change in the game. If they thought the weapons were here, the team would be on top of us by now.
Inside, everyone huddled by the fire, in all, more than a dozen men, sharing a common plate of chapli kabab and chai. Again, Parker sipped the tea, savoring the moisture. And again, he passed the cup to Yousef. Again, Yousef sipped the tea from the same cup. The comment about the headache passed his ears.
Her last drink would probably have been tea.
He imagined his mother, sitting in her airplane seat, the flight attendant bringing her a cup of tea with cream and sugar.
Parker looked at the AK-47s stacked next to the entrance to the cave.
Parker thought of his grabbing one of the machine guns and spraying the huddle next to the fire. He wouldn’t survive the attack, but that didn’t matter.
But we wouldn’t know where the nukes were. The highly enriched uranium cores would disappear into a place like Danish Abad.
Yousef was obviously intoxicated by his achievement. He continued to smile and babble on. “You see this, my friend.” He held up a cell phone to Parker. This one, unlike the others, had a short stub of a cigar-shaped antenna. “This is a Mobal.”