"Deixe~me so!" she begged. "Leave me alone!"
The sheikh approached her, putting his face close to hers. "Where is Hildegard?"
"I do not know," Teresa sobbed. "I am not a friend to her. I never talk to her. If she goes someplace, how am I to know?"
Alif slapped her hard, then looked over at the sheikh. Jambarah nodded his head, and the bodyguard pushed her roughly back to the sofa where she had been sitting. Taa reached down and hauled the Italian Lucia off the settee. He shook her hard, slapped her face, then shoved her toward the sheikh.
"Per favore!" she cried. "I know nothing."
"I think you are lying," the sheikh said. "I have noticed you being chummy with both Hildegard and her friend Franziska in the past. Where did she go?"
"I am not a friend to them," Lucia protested. "Nobody like those Germans. They are stuck up, both of them!"
Jambarah believed her and he nodded to Taa to let her go. The Italian ran to a spot behind the settee for safety. Blanche stood up, hoping to put off getting a hard slap. "I do not know where she go, but I see her in her cabin putting things in a bag. I say what are you doing? She say she go away with her amant americain Mike."
"Now we are getting somewhere," the sheikh said, smiling. "Where did she say she and Mike were going?"
Blanche cringed, her voice tinged with fear. "She did not tell me nothing except they go out on a picnic and come back when it is dark."
The sheikh suddenly laughed loudly. It seemed Mikael had developed a very special sexual attraction for the German, and wanted to be alone with her in some intimate place outside the yacht and fortress. He looked over at Sabah and motioned for the al-Mimkhalif agent to follow him to the stem deck. When they were out under the canvas awning, Jambarah asked, "What do you think?"
"Mikael is not yet a complete Muslim, Sheikh Omar," Sabah said. "His morals have long been corrupted by exposure to Western culture in America. I fear he has sinful passions for the German whore." He started to say something about fornication, but stopped short as he remembered that the sheikh had regular sex with the foreign women.
"How much do you know of Mikael Assad?" the sheikh asked.
Sabah shrugged. "Not much," he admitted. "I met him after he had returned to Camp Talata after escaping from the Americans."
"We have been informed that a whaler boat is missing," the sheikh said. "I was wondering if Mikael would have been able to operate it. It would take some skill to handle such a vessel."
"As far as I know, there is nothing that indicates Mikael has any experience with boats."
"We must also consider the attack on Baa," the sheikh said. "Would Mikael be capable of such a thing? Baa is a very large and skillful fighter."
"I have learned nothing that indicates Mikael is an expert in hand-to-hand combat," Sabah said. "Perhaps he sneaked up behind your bodyguard."
"Baa was hit from the front in a most devastating way," the sheikh said. 'The doctor in the dispensary has reported that the fellow remembers nothing of being attacked." He fell into a few moments of silence before speaking again. "How did Mikael enter al-Mimkhalif?"
"What I learned from Kumandan was that Mikael was sent to al-Mimkhalif from a mosque in America. The cleric who recruited him has been involved in obtaining mujahideen for a long time."
"All right" the sheikh said, "but I am beginning to feel that there is more to Mikael Assad than we figured ."
.
WHALER BOAT
VICINITY IF 5deg NORTH AND 57deg EAST
1800 HOURS LOCAL
MIKE Assad throttled the motor of the whaler back to slow ahead. He had picked up a rapid current, and the GPS indicated he was making extremely fast progress; hence there was no reason to use up fuel unnecessarily. The afternoon had been an unrelenting hell of baking heat as the sun flared down on the boat, making all the metal parts too hot to touch. Mike had taken a rag from the toolbox and put it on the wheel so that he could handle it with a minimum of pain. A flicker of movement behind him was reflected in the windshield, and he whipped around to see Hildegard chugalugging a bottle of the precious water.
"What the fuck are you doing?" he bellowed.
"I am thirsty!" she said defiantly. "And something else I tell you. I eat a sandwich too."
"Do you really want to die out here?" he asked. "Some controlled, temporary discomfort is a hell of a lot better than dying of thirst. Because that's what will kill you. You'll dry out like a mummy before you manage to starve to death."
'Too much you worry," Hildegard said. "Ships will we soon see and plenty too."
He reached back and grabbed her arm, jerking her up beside him at the wheel. 'Take a look at the fucking horizon! What the fuck do you see?"
Hildegard obediently looked around, noting nothing within sight. 'Talk to somebody on your radio again."
"I haven't talked to anybody yet," Mike said, "because I haven't been able to raise anybody." He reached over and clicked the set on, then grabbed the microphone and pressed the transmit button. "Any ship at sea. Any ship at sea. Mayday.
Mayday. Position five degrees, six minutes north and fifty-four degrees, twelve minutes east. Mayday. Over." He repeated the transmission twice more and waited a few minutes for a reply. None came.
"Ach, Himmel!" she said, jerking her arm free. "You did not tell me it would be hot."
"You've been sailing around in these waters for weeks," Mike said. "Didn't you notice it was hot?"
'The deck we did not come out on when it was hot," she said. "I think better it is if back to the yacht we go where the air conditioner runs."
"What about your friend Franciska? Don't you want to avenge her murder?"
"Maybe not," Hildegard said, shrugging. "Franciska was a torichist--silly and always getting into trouble."
"Silly or not," Mike said, "we're not going back to that fucking yacht."
"But, Mike, out here we will die!"
He grinned without humor, speaking to himself under his breath. "That's one thing you're probably right about."
Chapter 17.
CAMP TALATA, PAKISTAN
28 OCTOBER
0500 HOURS LOCAL
KUMANDAN, the field commander of al-Mimkhalif, stood in the empty field of what had once been a thriving terrorist camp. Orders had come to destroy any equipment, ammunition, weapons, and other material that could not be carried away. The task had kept the entire group busy for a full two days of round-the-clock labor. When the job was finally finished, the mujahideen were divided up into three groups and sent by separate routes to the coast for pickup by the dhow Nijm Zarik. This was to happen at the exact location where the arms shipments arrived in the past. The reason behind splitting them was supposedly to assure that most would be able to reach the destination on the beach after sneaking through Pakistani police and military areas. From there, the lucky ones would be going to Mikhbayi to join the supreme leader, Husan.
The last column sent out was now wending its way down the mountain to the lowlands before turning west toward the Arabian Sea. In spite of their optimism and trust in their leader, the mujahideen stood no chance of making it safely to the objective. Kumandan had carefully mapped out the routes of the withdrawal so that the men were certain to run into military and police posts where death or capture would result. In actuality, he was using the operation as a way to rid of himself of the less desirable elements of his command. The only people left with him were the dozen members of his immediate staff. The unfortunates now heading out would be the decoys to draw the Pakistani authorities away from the trails he and his entourage would be following while making their own escape. The twelve men who accompanied him were his best and brightest. They had to be saved if al-Mimkhalif s field campaign was going to reestablish its jihad.