The three of them turned when they heard the door to the forward compartment being unlocked. Abedsaid came through it. He bent down to peer out a window and then looked at Dunjee.
“We’ll be landing in about twenty minutes,” he said, straightening up. “The Captain wants you to fasten your seat belts.”
“What happens after we land?” Dunjee said, snapping his seat belt together.
Abedsaid frowned, as if weary of answering questions. He apparently had had no sleep in the forward compartment. The lines around his mouth had deepened. His eyes were bloodshot.
“You and I,” he said, still frowning at Dunjee. “You and I will take another small journey.”
“Where to?”
Abedsaid shook his head. “The name would mean nothing. As for your two colleagues, they will be taken to a hotel. The Inter-Continental, I think. It’s quite comfortable.”
“You sure it’s a hotel?” Dunjee said.
“A prison perhaps?” Abedsaid said. “A dungeon even?”
“All right. It’s a hotel.”
“You’re very suspicious, Mr. Dunjee.”
“You’re right,” Dunjee said. “I am.”
From one thousand feet up Dunjee counted six chrome-shiny Airstream trailers. They formed an L. Next to them were parked two flatbed trucks. On the beds of the trucks were diesel generators. Parked near the generators were two tanker trucks containing the oil that ran the generators. Scattered here and there were at least two dozen sedans and heavy-duty pickup trucks. Farther away were two French six-passenger Aérospatiale AS 350 Squirrel helicopters, twins of the one that had flown Dunjee and Abedsaid east and south of Tripoli for a little more than forty-five minutes.
Some one hundred yards away from everything was the black tent. Cables from the generators snaked across the sand to it. Near the tent were some stunted trees of some kind.
“That’s the oasis?” Dunjee said as the helicopter wheeled and started down.
“What did you expect?” Abedsaid asked. “Date palms surrounding a small crystal clear pool with cool deep shade and belly dancers?”
“Yeah,” Dunjee said. “Something like that.”
The helicopter landed on a hundred-foot-square of thick green heavy-duty staked-down plastic, something like that used to make garbage bags, only heavier, thicker. Abedsaid said it was to keep the dust and sand from blowing.
But it wasn’t sand that the plastic covered. It was more like a not-quite-formed thin gravel that was mixed together with a gray grit. Nothing grew in it.
Dunjee kicked at it once after they got out of the helicopter and started for the black tent. The blow of his foot made a small plume of gray dust that settled slowly. There was no wind. The dry heat was not quite unbearable. Dunjee guessed that it was just over ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit.
Uniformed soldiers and civilian technicians stared at Dunjee curiously as he followed Abedsaid toward the black tent. Near the generators they passed two inclined banks of round shiny discs.
“Solar?” Dunjee said.
Abedsaid nodded. “Solar.”
There were two young uniformed guards armed with rather fancy-looking machine pistols at the entrance to the tent. They stood in the shade cast by a liplike square of the heavy black material made out of goat hair that protruded from the entrance.
Dunjee had to duck only slightly to enter the tent behind Abedsaid. Once inside, the tent soared up. The ground, he noticed, was covered with the same thick green plastic. The plastic was overlaid with rugs. The rugs looked expensive.
The man Dunjee had come to see sat cross-legged on a rug near the center of the tent. Next to him was a Carrier air conditioning unit. On a nearby small low table rested a white telephone. Next to the telephone was a silent teletype. Just behind the man who sat cross-legged was an office-size refrigerator. And next to that was another small low table that held two thermos carafes and some tiny porcelain cups. The man watched Dunjee approach. He wore a loose white slipover shirt and white duck pants. He was barefoot. He looked younger than Dunjee had expected.
Abedsaid and the seated man spoke in Arabic for nearly a minute while Dunjee stood and waited. It was surprisingly cool in the tent, at least ten or fifteen degrees cooler than out in the sun and it wasn’t because of the small air conditioning unit, which seemed mostly for show. Dunjee, who was still sweating from his walk from the helicopter, took off his jacket.
Abedsaid turned to him, and made a small gesture. “Colonel Mourabet, Mr. Dunjee,” he said.
The seated man stared up at Dunjee. He had a strikingly handsome face, big-nosed and strong-chinned with deepset biuer-brown eyes that managed to look both sad and lively. His hair was black and thick and slightly disarrayed, as if he unconsciously combed it with his fingers. The only evident touch of vanity was the mustache, carefully clipped and tended, that spread across his wide upper lip. It was, Dunjee decided, a smart man’s face. Very smart.
“Sit, Mr. Dunjee,” Mourabet said with a curiously polite gesture. “Sit and we will talk American. You observe I didn’t say English.”
“I noticed,” Dunjee said as he dropped his jacket to the rug and lowered himself down, imitating Mourabet’s cross-legged position.
Mourabet glanced up at Abedsaid. “You may leave us,” he said. Abedsaid nodded, turned, and left. Mourabet shifted his gaze to Dunjee and smiled. It was a warm smile, very wide, very friendly. Dunjee automatically discounted its sincerity and smiled back.
“Would you like some tea or coffee?” Mourabet said, gesturing toward the two carafes. “Did you know that we Libyans drink more tea per capita than any other country in the world?”
“I read that somewhere,” Dunjee said. “Quite an accomplishment.”
“But then for guests, foreign guests, I also have beer. American beer. Schlitz, I think.”
“A beer would be nice.”
Without getting up, Mourabet turned and opened the small refrigerator. He took out a can of Schlitz, leaned forward, and offered it to Dunjee. “They say it is better drunk from the can. It stays cold longer.”
“The can will be fine.” Dunjee flipped the top open and then waited for Mourabet to pour himself a cup of tea. Mourabet took a sip of the tea; Dunjee took two long swallows of the beer.
“If you were asked, how would you identify yourself?” Mourabet said.
“Chubb Dunjee.”
“And your race?”
“American.”
“That’s not a race.”
“No, but it’s handy.”
Mourabet nodded. “If I were asked the same question, I would say I am Mourabet, a Moslem, one of the Arabs who happens to be a Libyan.”
“A somewhat broader concept,” Dunjee said politely, and waited to see what would come next.
“What were you doing in 1969, Mr. Dunjee?”
Dunjee paused, as though to give it some thought. “I was in Congress.”
“And your age then?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“You are forty-one now?”
“Yes. Almost forty-two.”
“I am a year younger. Qaddafi was the youngest of us all. He was only twenty-seven in ’sixty-nine. I suppose you never met him?”
“No.”
“He and I went through the academy together. And later, they sent us to England for ten months in 1966. To Beaconsfield. We studied communications. He began planning for the revolution when he was twenty-one — back in 1963. Some of us at first were skeptical. But he overcame our doubts. There are some men who God chooses as leaders. He was one of them.”
“He died — rather unexpectedly, I understand.”
“A stroke. The entire country was... desolated. I comfort myself sometimes with remembering his courage and bravery on the first of September.”