The pilot, Captain Fahad Kani, drove the aircraft swiftly into the takeoff area, scanned the deserted runway in front of him, and shoved open the throttles without even waiting for clearance. The Orion rumbled forward, gained speed, and climbed into the early evening skies, out over the Atlantic.
He banked right, to the north towards Mauritania, then banked again to a course a few degrees north of due west, aiming the aircraft at the southern Sahara. It was a course that would take them across the hot, poverty-stricken, landlocked African countries of Mali, Niger, and Chad, and then the northern Sudan. An hour later, they would drop down into the green and fertile Nile Valley, way upstream from Cairo at Aswan, home of the High Dam.
Ravi was unable to make up his mind whether to deposit the body of Captain Camara in the burning sands of the Sahara, hoping it would either be devoured by the buzzards or be covered forever by the first sandstorm; or to go for the ocean, where the blood from the Captain’s shattered nose would ensure the sharks would do his dirty work on a rather more reliable basis.
Trouble was, he was not sure if there were sharks in the Red Sea, and the body might wash up on the shore. Also, he knew that timing was critical in a high-speed aircraft, and that heaving a dead body out of the door would not be easy. He did not relish the prospect of a foul-up, in which the carcass of the former head of the Senegalese Navy landed in the middle of Jeddah. Ravi opted for the buzzards.
He and Shakira were almost too tired to eat anything. But the coffee was good and they each ate a small chicken sandwich with tomato on pita bread, before falling asleep.
Two hours later, Ravi, who never slept longer than that, awoke and checked their whereabouts with the pilot. Right now they had crossed the Mauritania border and were flying over Mali. Ravi had consulted his treasured Traveler’s Atlas, a small leather-bound pocket edition with pages edged in gold, a gift from Shakira. And he had selected his spot for the Camara heave-ho.
It would take another three and a half hours to get there, and he instructed the first officer to wake him and then prepare to slow the aircraft down, losing height to around 5,000 feet for the ejection.
He went back to the sleeping Shakira and held her hand, but he dozed off only fitfully himself, as they flew above the mountains of northern Chad. A few minutes later, they entered the airspace over the Libyan Desert, one of the loneliest parts of the Sahara, 750,000 square miles, stretching through northwestern Sudan, western Egypt, and eastern Libya.
Ravi had chosen a 100-mile-wide area of unmapped sand dunes between the oases of Ma’tan Bishrah and Ma’tan Sarah. There was not a town for 100 miles in any direction. Down below, in this burning, arid, uninhabitable Al Kufrah district, the temperature hovered around 105 degrees.
Only the GPS could tell the pilot precisely where they were, and Captain Kani was watching it carefully. Ravi, with the first officer, dragged the body to the rear door, as they came down through 10,000 feet and slowed to a just-sustainable 190 knots.
Ravi and the airman were both standing, strapped in harnesses attached to the fuselage. And as they approached the drop zone, they both heard the Captain call out…“ONE MINUTE!”
The first officer unclipped the door and pulled it sideways to swing it open. The noise was deafening, as the wind rushed into the gap. Both men held on and shoved the body into the doorway with their boots.
“NOW!” yelled the Captain, and with two more good shoves, they rolled the former Oxford University golf captain out into the stratosphere, watched the body fall towards the desert floor, and then hauled the big aircraft door shut, fast.
“Okay, Captain…as you were!” called Ravi. And they both felt the surge, as the Orion angled slightly upward, and accelerated towards its cruising height. As a measure of her desperate exhaustion, Shakira never stirred.
As a measure of his profound relief at having eliminated the talkative Senegalese sailor from all contact with the Harrovian Golf Society, Ravi poured himself another cup of coffee.
Captain Kani pressed on across Africa’s fourth largest country all the way to the border with Egypt, about 550 miles shy of the Nile Valley. “Little more than an hour to Aswan,” called the Captain. “And that’ll be the first 3,000 miles behind us.”
“How far’s that from home?” asked Ravi.
“It’s around 1,500 miles from the Nile to Bandar Abbas. ’Bout another three and a half hours. We’ll be on the ground in Aswan for about an hour.”
Ravi slept while the Orion inched its way across the desert, awakening only when they could see Lake Nasser, the 350-mile-long stretch of water that started backing up against the southside wall of the High Dam when they halted the natural flow of the Nile.
They came in over the 1,600-square-mile artificial lake, dropping down into the flat, barren brown terrain west of the river, and landing at the little airport, which stands 16 miles from Egypt’s southernmost city. It was 0100 back in Senegal, but three time zones later, it was 0400 here in the land of the Pharaohs.
Captain Kani had organized food for his distinguished passengers, the Egyptian dish of kushari, which a local Air Force orderly brought out to the aircraft on a golf cart. It was still dark, and Ravi and the still-tired Shakira gazed in some alarm at the large plates containing that fabled desert combination of noodles, rice, black lentils, fried onions, and tomato sauce.
It was, after all, still pitch dark, but they had lost all track of time, and the kushari turned out to be delicious. They devoured it with hot pita bread and ice-cold orange juice, and the orderly waited to take everything away, the Iranian Air Force being light on catering in its Lockheed prowlers.
Refueled and refreshed, they set off again shortly after 0500 (local), flying out towards the Red Sea and the Arabian Peninsula. Their halfway point was the western end of the dreaded Rub Al Khali, the “Empty Quarter” in the most inhospitable desert on earth. From there they headed up to Dubai, and crossed the Gulf just west of the Strait of Hormuz, landing at Bandar Abbas at ten o’clock on Tuesday morning, September 22.
A Navy staff car collected General and Mrs. Rashood direct from the runway the moment Captain Kani switched off the Orion’s engines. They were driven immediately into the base and delivered to the Iranian Navy’s suite for visiting dignitaries. It represented the final word in air-conditioned hotel luxury, from its vast green marble-floored bathroom, redolent with soaps, shampoo, aftershave, and eau de cologne, to its wide four-poster king-size bed.
There were two Naval orderlies dressed immaculately in white uniforms, shirts with epaulettes, and shorts with long white socks. They had already filled the bathtub with scented, oiled water and laid out two soft dark green bathrobes. Black silk pajamas were on the bed.
There was an assortment of clothing in the wardrobe — newly pressed shorts, slacks, navy blue skirts, shirts, socks, underwear, and shoes, for both male and female personnel. Shakira thought she might look like a freshly bathed deckhand when finally she emerged, and Ravi reminded her it was she who had requested permission to join the Navy.
The orderlies had placed a bowl of local fruit salad on the table in the outer room overlooking the harbor. There was fresh coffee, tea, and sweet pastries. The television was tuned to the American news station CNN. Two newspapers — one Arabic, one English — were on a table set between two big comfortable chairs.
One way or the other, it compared very favorably with the General’s living quarters in the Barracuda.
To Shakira Rashood it looked like paradise, and she languished in the bathtub for almost an hour, washing her hair three times “to stop smelling like a submarine.”