'The woman was right,' whispered the dark-skinned Arab in Western clothes peering out through a loose slat in a boarded-up store that only twenty-two days ago had been an attractive cafe devoted to cardamom coffee, cakes and fruit. 'The older pig was so close I could have touched him as he passed by! I tell you, I did not breathe.'
'Shhh!' warned the man at his side in full Arab dress. 'Here he comes. The American. His height betrays him.'
'Others will betray him also. He will not survive.'
'Who is he?' asked the robed man, his whispered voice barely audible.
'It's not for us to know. That he risks his life for us is all that matters. We listen to the woman, those are our orders.' Outside, the stooped figure in the street passed the store, pausing to scratch his groin while spitting into the gutter. Beyond, diagonally across the square, another figure, blurred in the dim light, approached the embassy gates. 'It was the woman,' continued the Arab in Western clothes, still squinting between the loose boards, 'who told us to watch for them on the waterfront, checking the small boats, and on the roads north and south, even here where they were least expected. Well, contact her and tell her the unexpected has happened. Then call the others on the Kalbah and Bustafi Wadis and let them know they needn't watch any longer.'
'Of course,' said the robed man starting towards the back of the deserted dark cafe with its profusion of chairs eerily perched on top of tables as if the management expected unearthly customers who disdained the floor. Then the Arab stopped, quickly returning to his colleague. 'Then what do we do?'
'The woman will tell you. Hurry! The pig by the gates is gesturing for someone inside. That's where they're going. Inside!'
Azra gripped the iron bars, his eyes darting up at the sky; the sprays of light were growing brighter by the minute in the east. Soon the dull dark grey of the square would be replaced by the harsh, blinding sun of Masqat; it would happen at any moment, as it did every dawn, an explosion of light that was suddenly total, all-encompassing. Quickly! Pay attention to me, you idiots, you mongrels! The enemy is everywhere, watching, scanning, waiting for the instant to pounce, and I am now a prize of extraordinary value. One of us must reach Bahrain, reach the Mahdi! For the love of your goddamned Allah, will somebody come over here? I cannot raise my voice!
Someone did! A youngster in soiled fatigues broke hesitantly away from his five-man squad, squinting in the still dim but growing light, drawn by the sight of the odd-looking person at the left side of the huge chained double gate. As he drew nearer he walked faster, his expression slowly changing from the quizzical to the astonished.
'Azra?' he cried. 'Is it you?
'Be quiet!' whispered Blue, pressing both palms repeatedly through the bars. The teenager was one of the dozens of recruits he had instructed in the basic use of repeating weapons and, if he remembered correctly, not a prize pupil among so many just like him.
'They said you had gone on a secret mission, an assignment so holy we should thank almighty Allah for your strength!'
'I was captured—'
'Allah be praised!'
'For what?'
'For your having slain the infidels! If you had not you would be in the blessed arms of Allah.'
'I escaped—’
'Without slaying the infidels?' asked the youngster, sadness in his voice.
'They're all dead,' replied Blue with exasperated finality. 'Now, listen to—'
'Allah be praised!'
'Allah be quiet—you be quiet and listen to me! I must get inside, quickly. Go to Yateem or Ahbyahd—run as if your life depended on it—’
'My life is nothing!'
'Mine is, damn it! Have someone come back here with instructions. Run!'
The waiting produced a pounding in Blue's chest and temples as he watched the sky, watched the light in the east about to inflame this infinitesimal part of the earth, knowing that when it did he would be finished, dead, no longer able to fight the bastards who had stolen his life, erased his childhood with blood, taken his and Zaya's parents away in a burst of gunfire sanctioned by the killers of Israel.
He remembered it all so clearly, so painfully. His father, a gentle, brilliant man who had been a medical student in Tel Aviv until, in his third year, the authorities deemed him better suited to the life of a pharmacist to make room for an immigrating Jew in the medical college. It was common practice. Remove the Arabs from the esteemed professions was the Israeli credo. As the years went on, however, the father became the only 'doctor' in their village on the West Bank; the government's visiting physicians from Be'er Sheva were incompetents who were forced to make their shekels in the small towns and the camps. One such physician complained, and it was as if the writing were stamped on the Wailing Wall. The pharmacy was shut down.
'We have our unspectacular lives to live; when will they let us live them?' the father and husband had screamed.
The answer came for a daughter named Zaya and a son who became Azra the Terrorist. The Israeli Commission of Arab Affairs on the West Bank again made a pronouncement. Their father was a troublemaker. The family was ordered out of the village.
They went north, towards Lebanon, towards anywhere that would accept them, and along the journey of their exodus, they stopped at a refugee camp called Shatila.
While brother and sister watched from behind the low stone wall of a garden, they saw their mother and father slaughtered, as were so many others, their bodies broken by staccato fusillades of bullets, snapping them into the ground, blood spewing from their eyes and their mouths. And up above, in the hills, the sudden thunder of Israeli artillery was to the ears of children the sound of unholy triumph. Someone had very much approved of the operation.
Thus was born Zaya Yateem, from gentle child to ice-cold strategist, and her brother, known to the world as Azra, the newest crown prince of terrorists.
The memories stopped with the sight of a man running inside the gates of the embassy.
'Blue!' cried Ahbyahd, the streaks of white in his hair apparent in the growing light, his voice a harsh, astonished whisper as he raced across the courtyard. 'In Allah's name what happened? Your sister is beside herself but she cannot come outside, not as a woman, not at this hour, and especially not with you here. Eyes are everywhere—what happened to you?'
'I'll tell you once we're inside. There's no time now. Hurry!'
'We?'
'Myself, Yosef, and a man named Bahrudi—he comes from the Mahdi! Quickly! The light's nearly up. Where do we go?'
'Almighty God… the Mahdi!'
'Please, Ahbyahd!'
'The east wall, about forty metres from the south corner, there's an old sewer line—’
'I know it! We've been working on it. It's clear now?'
'One must crouch low and climb slowly, but yes, it's clear. There is an opening—’
'Beneath the three large rocks on the water,' said Azra nodding rapidly. 'Have someone there. We race against the light!'
The terrorist called Blue slipped away from the chained gates and with gathering speed, slowly, subtly discarding his previous posture, quickly rounded the south edge of the wall. He stopped, pressing his back into the stone, his eyes roaming up the line of barricaded shops. Yosef stepped partially out of a boarded-up recessed doorway; he had been watching Azra and wanted the young leader to know it. The older man hissed and in seconds 'Amal Bahrudi' emerged from a narrow alleyway between the buildings; staying in the shadows, he raced up the pavement, joining Yosef in the doorway. Azra gestured to his left, indicating a barely-paved road in front of him that ran parallel to the embassy wall; it was beyond the stretch of shops on the square; across the way there was only a wasteland of rubble and sand grass. In the distance, towards the fiery horizon, was the rock-laden coastline of the Oman Gulf. One after the other the fugitives raced down the road in their torn prison clothes and hard leather sandals, past the walls of the embassy into the sudden, startling glare of the bursting sun. Azra leading, they reached a small promontory above the crashing waves. With sure-footed agility, the world's new crown prince of killers started down over the huge boulders, stopping every now and then to gesture behind him, pointing out the areas of green sea moss where a man could lose his life by slipping and plunging down into the jagged rocks below. In less than a minute they reached an oddly-shaped indentation at the bottom of the short cliff where the huge stones met the water. It was marked by three boulders forming a strange triangle at the base of which was a cavelike opening no more than three feet wide and continuously assaulted by the pounding surf.