It was five minutes before Abdullah spoke. ‘Maybe they are protecting the halikubtars.’
At first Girling didn’t register the bedouin’s words.
‘They say the halikubtars are very valuable,’ Abdullah added nonchalantly.
Girling pulled up his camel. ‘Halikubtars?’
Abdullah nodded. ‘Yes.’ He made a whirling motion in the air with his finger. ‘But you are not interested in halikubtars, only ta’iraat. You said so in Qena.’
‘What is the difference?’
Abdullah held his hands out, arms level with his shoulders. He grinned self-consciously. ‘These are ta’iraat.’
This time, it was Girling who laughed.
‘Do not insult me, ‘agnabi.’
‘I’m not laughing at you, my friend, only my own stupidity.’ Girling shook his head. Halikubtars. It was so simple. It had not occurred to him that the word ta’iraat would not include the species, halikubtar. Helicopter. He should have been more precise.
‘Tell me about these halikubtars.’
Abdullah pointed to a spot on the horizon. ‘Every day they fly into the mountains.’ His arm described an arc from the air base to the jagged heights in the distance. ‘They say that one of them crashed.’
‘Recently?’
‘Two days ago.’
‘Where?’
Abdullah pointed to two barely discernible peaks, their summits arching slightly inwards towards each other. ‘In the valley that lies between the Horns of Shaytan.’
‘Take me there and you will receive the rest of your money.’
‘Never, ya majnoon. It is an evil place. They say djinn, evil spirits, dwell there.’
Girling studied the bedouin’s face. There was fear there, certainly, but…
‘Would another fifty pounds lessen your fear?’
Abdullah smiled. ‘A hundred, maybe.’
They agreed on seventy.
Abdullah nudged the nose of his beast. He looked to Girling, riding beside him, and smiled. ‘Truly, you are mad, ‘agnabi,’ he said.
CHAPTER 18
The sun was low in the sky when Girling and Abdullah rode up the dried river bed that lay in the long shadows of the Horns of Shaytan.
The wadi had known death. It was not just the physical evidence — a camel’s rotting carcass lay a dozen yards away — there was a malevolence there too. Girling felt its imprint deep within the rocks. He almost found himself believing Abdullah’s talk of genies and spirits.
They urged the camels on, following the course of the wadi deep into the mountain range.
After many miles and with the light diminishing, Abdullah pulled up his camel and the beast sank to the ground.
‘What are you doing?’ Girling asked.
‘We camp here for the night.’
‘No, my friend. We do not rest until we have found the halikubtar.’
Abdullah raised his hands to the sky. ‘We have searched for hours with no sign of it. Perhaps those who gossiped in the market were mistaken.’
‘I don’t think so,’ Girling said. But inside, he was beginning to have his doubts.
‘And it is almost dark,’ Abdullah said.
‘But not quite.’
‘I should never have told you about the halikubtar, ya majnoon.’
‘Think of the money, Abdullah.’
The bedouin groaned. ‘What good is money in this devilish place?’
They rode for another half-hour, until the light was so poor Girling could see scarcely a few yards ahead. Then, without warning, Abdullah stopped.
Girling no longer had the stomach to argue. ‘Khalas,’ he said.
In the gathering gloom, the bedouin scurried down the side of a sandy depression in the wadi bed and was lost from sight. A moment later, Girling heard a muffled shout.
‘Come quickly, ya majnoon.’
Girling slid off his saddle and stumbled after him. He tripped over the edge of the hole, the sharp drop taking him by surprise. He tumbled down its side to land at Abdullah’s feet.
Abdullah threw his arms out expansively, gesturing to the dimensions of the hole. ‘Is not this great trough the work of the djinn, ‘agnabi?’
Girling said nothing.
‘Tell me, ‘agnabi. How was it made?’
Girling looked around him. It seemed an unnatural hole in the otherwise flat river bed. ‘A flash-flood perhaps.’ Then his bare foot touched something hard but smooth beneath the surface of the sand. ‘This was made by man, not spirits.’
He pulled a lighter from his robes and flicked the flint, the sparks like tracer in the darkness. The flame danced in the light, warm breeze that blew in from the far-off shores of the Red Sea.
The hole was big, probably thirty feet across. And deep.
He reached down and pulled the object from the sand and held it up to the light. Its geometry was almost perfect; a block of aluminium, two feet long and rectangular, with over thirty holes drilled into one face. He ran the light up and down the sides free of the perforations and saw the burnished identification plate, its Cyrillic indecipherable but for the serial number and the machine for which it was intended, a Mil Mi-24J.
The hole was big, because a helicopter had crashed here and then been removed. The flare dispenser he held in his hands, its thirty-two cartridges devised to seduce heat-seeking missiles away from their intended target, had been missed by the salvagers.
His thrill turned to disappointment. Girling had been positive he would find an American helicopter. But instead it was Soviet. And the Egyptians had Soviet-built helicopters coming out of their ears.
He let the flare rack fall to the ground and mounted the slope towards the place where they had left the camels.
Abdullah had been watching him expectantly. ‘There was a halikubtar here, ya majnoon?’
Girling turned to him. ‘Yes, my friend. You did well.’
‘Then why are you not pleased?’
‘I was hoping we would find a different machine. But ma’lesh.’ No matter. ‘My search is over.’
When Abdullah came over the lip of the depression, he found Girling standing perfectly still, as if something had turned him to stone.
Girling swung round. There was a look of awe on his face. ‘My God,’ he whispered in English. ‘The Russians are here too.’ He let out a whoop of glee that echoed off the valley walls. ‘The Russians and the Americans are here. They’re working this thing together.’
Everything came together in a whirl. The Ilyushin at Machrihanish, Stamen’s visit to the Soviet Embassy the day he was taken, the fact that he had interviewed the Sword over a decade before in that distant corner of the once mighty Soviet Empire, Afghanistan. And now this Mi-24J, a helicopter so new that it wasn’t even listed in the reference books. ‘The Egyptians don’t have any Mi-24s — they never did.’
Abdullah rushed round to confront Girling, but the journalist was so absorbed he could not see him.
Girling laughed out loud. ‘This rescue mission’s a joint operation. They’re both going in together to get the Angels of Judgement. Because the Soviets know who the Angels of Judgement are, they have done all along. This is the New World Order at work.’ He did a little jig in the sand. ‘The Russians know where the Angels of Judgement are, but the Americans don’t. That’s why Ulm came looking for me. He wants to know for himself, because the Russians won’t tell him.’
Abdullah stared at him, horrified. ‘Are you possessed?’
Girling stopped dancing. ‘We found the right hali-kubtar after all,’ he said, reverting to Arabic. And not just the right helicopter. His mind was spinning so fast he didn’t know how to stop it. One piece of metal, a flare dispenser, had unlocked an Aladdin’s cave of information. Not least, it pinpointed Stansell’s source for the story. It hadn’t been the Israelis, the Americans, or the Brits. Lazan had been right. It was the goddamned Russians who’d told him about the Angels of Judgement.