'Go!' shouted Kendrick.
The four prisoners crashed into the centre panel of the door as the van lurched over the rocks in the downhill curve. The metal partition gave way, bulging at the seams, moonlight protruding through the wide separations.
'Once more!' roared Yosef, his eyes on fire.
'Remember!' commanded the man now accepted as Amal Bahrudi. 'If we break through, tuck into your knees when you hit the ground. We don't need anyone hurt.'
Again they rushed the half-collapsed panel. The bottom rivets snapped; the metal flew up in the moonlight and the four figures bolted out on the twisting road that led to a desert valley. Inside the van the guard rolled forward with the pitch of the vehicle's descent, his face streaked with perspiration brought about by fear of his own death. He crawled to his knees and hammered repeatedly on the wall of the driver's carriage. A single thud was heard in response. Their assignment for the night was half finished.
The fugitives also rolled, but against the descent, their movements abruptly halted, reversed by gravity, each straining to regain his balance. Azra and Yosef rose first to their feet, swivelling their necks and shaking their heads, instinctively checking their bruises for signs of anything worse. Kendrick followed, his shoulder on fire, his legs in momentary agony and his hands scraped, but all in all, he was grateful for the harsh requirements of backpacking through the mountains and riding the white water; he hurt but he was not hurt. The harelipped Palestinian had fared the worst; he moaned on the stony earth with its pattern of desert grass beneath the road, writhing in fury as he tried to rise but could not. Yosef ran to him, and as Evan and Azra studied the valley below the gruff older man made his pronouncement. 'This child has broken his leg,' he called over to his two superiors.
Then kill me now!' shrieked the youngster. 'I go to Allah and you go on to fight!'
'Oh, shut up,' said Azra, gripping the MAC-10 weapon in his hand and walking with Kendrick to the injured boy. 'Your compulsion to die becomes boring and your grating voice will kill us instead. Tear his shirt in strips, Yosef. Tie his hands and feet and put him in the road. That truck will race back up the minute it reaches the camp below and those fools realize what's happened. They'll find him.'
'You deliver me to my enemies?' screamed the teenager.
'Be quiet!' replied Azra angrily, strapping the machine pistol to his shoulder. 'We're delivering you to a hospital where you'll be taken care of. Children aren't executed except by bombs and missiles—all too frequently, but that's neither here nor there.'
'I will reveal nothing!'
'You don't know anything,' said the man called Blue. 'Tie him up, Yosef. Make the leg as comfortable as possible.' Azra bent over the youngster. 'There are better ways to fight than dying needlessly. Let the enemy heal you so you can fight again. Come back to us, my stubborn freedom fighter. We need you… Yosef, hurry!'
As the older terrorist carried out his orders, Azra and Kendrick walked back to the road hewn from rock. Far below the white sands began, stretching endlessly in the moonlight, a vast alabaster floor, its roof the dark sky above. In the distance, intruding on the blanket of white, was a small, pulsating eruption of yellow. It was a desert fire, the rendezvous that was an intrinsic part of the 'escape'. It was too far away for the figures to be seen clearly but they were there and rightly assumed to be Omani soldiers or police. But they were not the executioners Amal Bahrudi's companions imagined.
'You're much more familiar with the terrain than I am," said Evan in English. 'How far do you judge the camp to be?'
Ten kilometers, perhaps twelve, no more than that. The road straightens out below; they'll be there soon.'
'Then let's go.' Kendrick turned, watching the older Yosef carrying the injured teenager to the road. He started towards them.
Azra, however, did not move. 'Where, Amal Bahrudi?' he called out. 'Where should we go?'
Evan snapped his head back. 'Where?' he repeated contemptuously. 'To begin with, away from here. It'll be light soon, and if I know what I'm talking about, which I do, there'll be a dozen helicopters criss-crossing at low altitude looking for us. We can melt in the city, not here.'
'Then what do we do? Where do we go?'
Kendrick could not see clearly in the dim moonlight, but felt the intense, questioning stare levelled at him. He was being tested. 'We get word to the embassy. To your sister, Yateem, or the one named Ahbyahd. Stop the photographs and kill the ones involved.'
'How do we do that? Get word into the embassy? Did your people tell you that, Amal Bahrudi?'
Evan was prepared; it was the inevitable question. 'Frankly, they weren't sure where the pipeline was and they assumed if any of you had any brains it would change daily. I was to pass a note through the gates directed to your operations council to let me through—through the pipeline wherever it was at the moment.'
'Many such notes could be passed as a trap. Why would yours be accepted?'
Kendrick paused; when he answered his voice was low and calm and laced with meaning. 'Because it was signed by the Mahdi.'
Azra's eyes widened. He nodded, slowly and held up his hand. 'Who?' he asked.
'The envelope was sealed with wax and not to be broken. It was an insult I found hard to accept, but even I follow orders from those who pay the freight, if you know what I mean.'
'Those who give us the money to do what we do—’
'If there was a code signifying authenticity, it was for one or all of you on the council to know, not I.'
'Give me the note,' said Azra.
'Idiot!' yelled the congressman from Colorado's ninth district, exasperated. 'When I saw the police closing in on me, I tore it to shreds and scattered it through the Al Kabir! Would you have done otherwise?'
The Palestinian remained motionless. 'No, obviously not,' he replied. 'At any rate we won't need it. I'll get us into the embassy. The pipeline, as you call it, is well regulated both inside and out.'
'It's so well regulated that films are slipped out under the noses of your well-regulated guards. Send word in to your sister. Change them, every one of them, and start a search immediately for the camera. When it's found, kill the owner and anyone who seems to be a friend. Kill them all.'
'On such surface observation?' protested Azra. 'We risk wasting innocent lives, valuable fighters.'
'Let's not be hypocritical,' laughed Amal Bahrudi. 'We have no such hesitations with the enemy. We're not killing “valuable fighters”, we're killing innocent people quite properly to make the world listen, a world that's blind and deaf to our struggles, our very survival.'
'By your almighty Allah, now you're the one who's blind and deaf!' spat out Azra. 'You believe the Western press; it's not to be questioned! Of the eleven corpses, four were already dead including two of the women—one by her own hand for she was paranoid about rape, Arab rape; the other, a much stronger woman not unlike the marine who attacked Nassir, threw herself on a young imbecile whose only reaction was to fire his weapon. The two men were old and infirm and died of heart failure. It does not absolve us from causing innocent death, but no guns were raised against them. All this was explained by Zaya and no one believed us. They never will!'
'Not that it matters, but what about the others? Seven, I believe.'
'Condemned by our council and rightly so. Intelligence officers building networks against us throughout the Gulf and the Mediterranean; members of the infamous Consular Operations—even two Arabs—who sold their souls to sell us into oblivion, paid by the Zionists and their American puppets. They deserved death, for they would have seen us all die, but not before we were dishonoured, made caricatures of evil when there is no evil in us—only the desire to live in our own lands—’
'That's enough, poet,' broke in Kendrick, looking over at Yosef and the boy terrorist who longed for the arms of Allah. 'There's no time for your sermons; we have to get out of here.'