When he awoke, Uhud was lying on the ground a dozen meters from the truck. Soldiers were streaming over the tipped MB-814, like ants around an anthill. He started to rise but someone held him down. He could taste blood in his mouth. Somehow, this reassured him. If he could taste blood, it meant he was still alive. He looked about the plain. His comrades were heaped together in a nearby ditch. Their faces were gone but he recognized them from their clothes. A great shout rose up above the ringing in his ears. The soldiers on the truck began to jump about. And then a solitary figure stood atop the cab, waving an object in his hand. It was the cylinder. Uhud could see it glinting in the sun. Suddenly a wave of nausea overcame him and Uhud threw up across his legs and thighs. Somebody laughed. He looked up. A Colonel stood above him. He was smiling. He reached down and pulled him to his feet. It was only then that Uhud realized he was bound. His hands were lashed together, behind his back. The Colonel said something. Uhud felt himself pushed roughly from behind. He started forward, stumbling. But he didn’t fall. They had not bound his feet, he realized. He looked down. He could see himself walking. He could see the way each foot moved, one before the other.
The Colonel herded him along the road. When they had reached the boulders, the Colonel kicked him and Uhud went down, onto his knees. He could not see the truck anymore. It was behind the boulders. He could not see the soldiers either. He looked up and the sun stared down at him. His face felt warm and wet. The Colonel was talking. Uhud could see that now. He was talking into some kind of field phone with a long antenna. He was saying something but the words were indistinct. Uhud couldn’t make them out above the ringing in his ears. The ringing in his ears. It would not go away. And then he saw the Colonel reach down for the handgun on his hip. He pulled it out. He aimed it at Uhud’s face. He smiled. He had a black mustache and coal black eyes. He was a handsome man. He held the phone out in his other hand.
“What?” said Uhud.
The Colonel kept on smiling. He pressed the gun to Uhud’s face. He brought the field phone closer. The ringing was unbearably loud. The Colonel mumbled something.
“What? I cannot hear you. What do you want me to say?”
And then the Colonel laughed and mouthed the word, “Goodbye.”
Gulzhan hung up his satellite phone. He looked out through the windshield at the deserted stretch of road. It seemed to unroll indefinitely across the open plain. “Uhud is dead,” he said.
The two men beside him in the cab did not respond. He could feel their bodies tense up for a second but the truck didn’t veer a centimeter from its path, didn’t slow or pick up speed. The old Mercedes-Benz moved on relentlessly.
Gulzhan closed his eyes. With Uhud’s team captured, they only had eight kilograms of Highly Enriched Uranium left — just shy of the “significant quantity” threshold as defined by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Yet enough to make a nuclear device with a one-plus kiloton yield. A very respectable bomb. El Aqrab was wise.
Chapter 12
It had been a long, frustrating day. Decker had gone out with Williams, Kazinski and Warhaftig just after sunrise to interview drivers at the Imperial Taxi Company in Queens. Although generally thankless duty, Decker had had to almost beg Kazinski to let him tag along. Another pair of watchers had been assigned to the squat in Long Island City. He was available, Decker had told them. And his language skills might prove useful.
Truth was, it was meant to be a day off for Decker; he had a number of vacation days stacked up. In fact, he should have taken some time off during his transfer from Chicago to New York, but the days had somehow been misplaced, along with his favorite Nikes and that T-shirt from Key West, like so many other things in the move from Illinois. Johnson insisted Decker take his vacation time immediately — standard practice whenever a partner died. On the other hand, the SAC had shuttled down to Washington, D.C. that morning. He wouldn’t be back until the following day. Decker just wanted to help out, he told Kazinski. He just wanted to be part of the team, to be of service. He could take his vacation any time.
In the end, Williams and Warhaftig had felt sorry for him and — over Kazinski’s protests and better judgment — let Decker come along. And it was a good thing too. The drivers were already suspicious. Many of them had been interviewed by the authorities before and they knew what to expect. They sat in the back office, looking churlish, drinking cold coffee, trying hard not to understand English.
After about twenty minutes of watching Kazinski stumble through one interrogation after another, Decker got up and left the room. What was the point? He didn’t know how Williams and Warhaftig could put up with it. Each time he tried to interject, to translate some tidbit he thought might prove important, Kazinski shut him down. He might as well not have come.
Decker moved out into the main garage, sat down on a bench, and began to examine the pool. About a dozen or so men were sitting or standing about, smoking cigarettes, checking their cars, punching out. There appeared to be a new shift coming in. It didn’t matter where you were — from corporate boardroom to high school cafeteria — the same set of characters always seemed to map out each new territory, in exactly the same way. There was always a dominant male, the Alpha wolf, usually a tough but not altogether large man, in some corner, flanked by a large enforcer. Around him stood intelligence, a few omega wolves, and on the outside, the snitch, the connection to the other groups and individuals who spun about the social solar system. In this case, the snitch wore blue jeans and a cowboy shirt. He had a swarthy round face, friendly eyes and a soft rather petulant mouth.
Decker got up, strolled across the garage, and sat down right beside him. As it turned out, the snitch was also the local bookie and odds-maker, and the kind of man you went to when you wanted something organized, a union meeting or retirement party handled without incident. His name was Akbar. He was a Yemeni who spoke machine-gun Arabic with the cutting accent of the Horn of Africa. Within five minutes, Decker and he had made their way to the far corner of the garage, behind a beat-up gold Impala, where they began to talk in earnest.
How long had he been working there? asked Decker. Where did he live? How long had he been in America? Where was he from originally? This was followed by a fair amount of banter about his hometown in North Yemen, about the difficulty of making a living in America, about American movies and American women, about American food, about what he missed most about his homeland. After a few more minutes, as they sat together on a nearby bench, Decker finally brought up Ali Singh and Salim Moussa. The man stiffened. His eyes narrowed into slits and he turned away. But Decker was insistent. “You were friends with Ali Singh and Moussa when they worked here. I know you were,” he said. “Perhaps you still are. It is common knowledge. Why do you deny it? Are you ashamed of them?”
The Yemeni folded his arms. Then, as if he had rehearsed this movement, he leaned against the wall of the garage and simply sat there without speaking, staring off into space.
After a full minute or two, he finally said, “We talked together, that much is true. But I didn’t know them very well. Only enough to learn that they are pious men, good men, unlike so many others here who claim that they are Muslims. Yet they eat pork, and drink and copulate with whores.”