“Don’t kill any Italians unless absolutely necessary. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Shoot any Palestinian the instant he disobeys. And watch Ali’s back for him.”
She nodded.
“Go.”
She stepped between the feet of the men sitting in the back of the vehicle and exited out the rear door. Qazi watched her. The man behind the wheel of the sedan parked behind the van got out and Noora took his place. The engine of the sedan came to life and the car eased past the van, stopping at the sidewalk as Noora looked both ways. Qazi could see the black outline of Jarvis’s head above the top of the backseat. Then Noora accelerated into the street and turned left toward the gate. Behind him Qazi could hear the rear door of the van being closed.
In a few minutes five men emerged from the hangar and walked to the helicopter furthest from the guard shack. They began to preflight it with flashlights.
A small two-door sedan came down the street. As it went by Qazi could see a man and woman in the front seat. It passed the entrance to the airfield without slackening its pace and disappeared around the far corner.
Sound carried and echoed through the alleys. He could faintly hear a man and woman shouting at each other, and through some fluke of acoustics, snatches of television audio.
The gentle breeze felt good after the sticky heat of the day. Qazi sat and watched the flashlights move around the helicopter, erratically and haphazardly.
The five men on the other side of the fence spent five minutes examining the first helicopter. When they left it and moved to the next one, a voice came over Qazi’s radio. “It’s okay. Fuel sample satisfactory.”
“Roger.”
A small pickup truck came down the street from the north, its headlights almost lost in the black evening. It shot down the street at full throttle, slowing slightly as it passed Qazi so it could make the next corner, which it tore around. He could hear the sound of its engine fading for half a minute after it had passed. A moment later he heard the engine of a large truck. Thirty seconds later it came into view, engine laboring, and drove up the street with its diesel engine snorting.
“This one’s okay.”
“Roger.”
What had he forgotten? What was left undone? As he sat there behind the wheel of the van Colonel Qazi reviewed the operation yet again. He glanced at his watch from time to time, and turned once to check on the men sitting patiently behind him. They looked scruffy in their worn, dirty jeans and short-sleeve knit and pullover shirts. Most of the shirts were filthy. Some of them were torn. Most of the men wore dirty tennis shoes. Satisfied, Qazi resumed scanning the warehouses with his binoculars.
The camel thieves were two young boys, about eleven and twelve years of age. Orphans. His uncle had forced them to deepen the water holes and fill the bags for the camels, which were let out on hobbles to graze. When the work was done, the boys were fed. They had no food of their own. Then the men had lain in the shade as the sun scorched the earth. The two thieves huddled together against a stone below where Qazi and his cousin sat with their rifles across their knees. The old man found a place further away, where he could keep an eye on the camels. Qazi wandered over in late afternoon and found him reading the Koran.
They tied up the thieves for the night. At dawn the next day the animals were watered again and the last of the dried dates and bread were shared.
“Who is the eldest?” the old man asked.
One of the thieves acknowledged that he was.
The old man looked at his son and Qazi. “Seize him. Put his right hand against that rock.” He pointed at a large stone.
“No! Allah be praised, have mercy. No! Kill me instead.” Qazi had helped drag the sobbing boy to the indicated stone.
The old man took his sword from the saddle of his camel. “You have violated Allah’s law. And you know the law.”
The sword made a sickening sound as it bit into the boy’s wrist. It took the old man three chops to sever the hand. He bound the wrist with a tourniquet and his own undershirt.
They set the two on their own camel a beast suffering so badly with the mange that it had only half its hair. The old man jammed their rifle into its scabbard and slapped the beast into motion. The young boy held his brother in the saddle as the animal climbed slowly out of the wadi and disappeared over the rim.
“Uncle …”
The old man’s face was like chiseled stone. He gathered the camels that had been taken and roped them together.
The three had ridden for several miles when they heard the faint echo of a shot.
The old man reined his camel in and looked about wildly. He turned in the saddle and looked toward the west, where the shot must have been fired. Then he dropped the lead rope and beat his mount into a gallop.
Qazi and the cousin followed. They found the lone camel standing amid a patch of lava stones and thorn bushes in a shallow depression. The boy with the missing hand lay on the ground, the barrel of the rifle in his mouth, his toe on the trigger. His brains lay in the sand above the body.
His younger brother sat at his feet.
The old man prostrated himself toward the rising sun.
The sun rose higher and higher into the cloudless sky.
“Allah, I have believed in the words of your Prophet all my days. I have read the book and followed the book. I have kept the faith of my fathers. I have obeyed the law. I have raised my sons to obey the law. But it is not enough.”
“Uncle,” Qazi said. “Do not blaspheme. He hears everything.”
The old man rose from the ground. His face was lined and his beard was gray. “The book is not enough for a simple man like me. Allah knows.” He had looked about him at the stones and sand and the merciless sky and the twisted body. “Not enough.”
They buried the dead boy. They took the other boy home with them and he was taken in by the old man’s eldest son.
Three years later the old man sent Qazi north to the city to join the army.
The small radio crackled to life. “This one is okay.”
“Roger.”
Qazi started the engine and put the van in gear. As he drove away he looked in the driver’s mirror at the hangar lights and the ungainly machines. The rotors were spread now, and they flapped gently in the rising breeze. The wind was gusting.
The book is not enough. His uncle had been right about that. But perhaps, Qazi thought, the Prophet was right and paradise will be better than this life. Perhaps not. Wherever the old man was, that was where Qazi wished to be. If tonight’s scheme went awry, he well knew, he would join the old man very soon. Ah well, perhaps it was time.
“You’re really serious about adopting?”
Jake and Callie were walking past the Royal Palace, under the white marble statues of the medieval kings of Naples. They looked, Jake thought, appropriately hairy and fierce, clad in their armor with swords in hand. Across the street, around the fountain in the Piazza del Plebiscito, clusters of teenage girls were flirting with the swarms of boys cruising on their Vespas and motocross bikes. Every now and then a girl hiked her skirt up, swung onto the back of the seat, and the boy blasted off into traffic. Apparently this was the place if you were young and growing up in Napoli.