In an effort to regain some form of equilibrium she said, ―My father never forgot he was Egyptian.‖
―So much so he changed his family name from Mohammed to Moore,‖ Chalthoum said bitterly.
―He fell in love with America when he fell in love with my mother. The deep appreciation I have of it comes from him.‖
Chalthoum shook his head. ―Why hide it? It was your mother‘s doing.‖
―Like all Americans, my mother took for granted everything her country had to offer. She couldn‘t have cared less about the Fourth of July; it was my father who took me to the fireworks celebrations on the Mall in Washington, DC, where he spoke to me about freedom and liberty.‖
Chalthoum bared his teeth. ―I have to laugh at his naÄ•veté—and yours.
Frankly, I assumed you had a more… shall we say pragmatic outlook on America, the country that exports Mickey Mouse, war, and occupying armed forces with equal abandon.‖
―How convenient of you to forget that we‘re also the country that keeps you safe from extremists, Amun.‖
Chalthoum clenched his teeth and was about to respond when the jouncing vehicle rolled through a cordon of his men, armed with submachine guns, keeping the mass of clamoring international press at a safe remove from the crash site, and ground to a halt. Soraya was the first out, settling her sunglasses more firmly on the bridge of her nose and the lightweight hat on her head. Chalthoum had been right about one thing: The airliner had fallen out of the sky not six hundred yards from the southeastern tip of the wadi, a body of water, complete with waterfalls, all the more spectacular because it was surrounded by desert.
―Dear God,‖ Soraya murmured as she began a tour of the crash site, which had already been cordoned off, presumably by Amun‘s people. The fuselage was in two main chunks, embedded in the sand and rock like grotesque monuments to an unknown god, but other pieces, violently disjointed from the body, were scattered about in a widening circle, along with one wing, bent in half like a green twig.
―Notice the number of fuselage sections,‖ Chalthoum said, as he watched the American task force deploy. He pointed as they moved around the periphery of the site. ―See here, and here. It‘s also clear that the plane broke up in midair, not on impact, which, considering the composition of the ground, caused minimal further damage.‖
―So the plane looks more or less the way it did directly after the explosion.‖
Chalthoum nodded. ―That‘s correct.‖
Say what you wanted about him, when it came to his trade he was a first-rate practitioner. The trouble was that too often his trade included methods of interrogation and torture that would make even those running Abu Ghraib sick to their stomachs.
―The destruction is terrible,‖ he said.
He wasn‘t kidding. Soraya watched as the forensics team put on plastic suits, slipped shoe coverings on. Kylie, the explosives-sniffing golden Lab, went in first with her handler. Then the task force split in two, the first group heading into the burned-out interior of the plane while the second began its examination of the ripped-open edges in an attempt to determine whether the explosion had been internal or external. Among this latter group was Delia Trane, a friend of Soraya‘s and an explosives expert from ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Though Delia was only thirty-four, her abilities were such that she was often on loan to various federal law enforcement agencies desperate for her expertise.
Dogged by Chalthoum, Soraya headed into the circle of death, skirting bits of metal so black and twisted it was impossible to determine what they had once been. Fist-size globs that looked like hail on closer inspection turned out to be plastic parts that had melted down in the fiery conflagration. When she came to a human head, she stopped and crouched down.
Almost all the hair and most of the flesh had been scorched to ash, which pocked the partially revealed skull like gooseflesh.
Just beyond, a blackened forearm rose at an angle from the sand, the hand above it like a beckoning flag signifying a land where death ruled absolutely. Soraya was sweating, and not just from the brutal heat. She took a swig of water from a plastic bottle Chalthoum gave her, then proceeded on.
Just before the yawning mouth of the fuselage, a team member handed her and Chalthoum plastic suits and shoe coverings that, despite the heat, they put on.
After her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she took off her sunglasses, peered around. The seat rows were canted at a ninety-degree angle; the floor was where the left bulkhead would have been when the jetliner was right-side up and everyone inside had been alive, chatting, laughing, holding hands, or foolishly arguing until the final moment before oblivion. Bodies lay everywhere, some still in their seats, others thrown clear on impact. The explosion had completely disintegrated another section of the aircraft and those in it.
She noticed that wherever a member of the American team went, he or she was shadowed by one of Amun‘s people. It would have been comical if it weren‘t so sinister. Her companion was clearly determined that the forensics team would not make a move, including relieving themselves in the dizzying heat and fetid stench of the portable latrines, without him knowing about it immediately.
―The lack of humidity works in your favor, of course,‖ Chalthoum said,
―slowing the decomposition of those bodies not incinerated beyond recognition.‖
―That will be a blessing to their families.‖
―Naturally so. But really, let‘s not mince words, you haven‘t given much thought to either the passengers or their families. You‘re here to find out what happened to the aircraft: mechanical malfunction or an act of extremist terrorism.‖
He still had the utterly un-Egyptian knack of cutting directly to the quick. The country was a bureaucratic nightmare; nothing got done, not a single answer was forthcoming until at least fifteen people in seven different divisions were consulted and agreed on it. Soraya debated only a moment as to how to answer. ―It would be foolish to pretend otherwise.‖
Chalthoum nodded. ―Yes, because the world wants to know, needsto know.
But my question to you is this: What then?‖
A typically astute query, she thought. ―I don‘t know. What happens then is not up to me.‖
She spotted Delia, signaled to her. Her friend nodded, picked her way through the debris and hunched-over workers, with their bright task lamps, to where she and Chalthoum stood just inside the roasting gloom.
―Anything to report?‖ Soraya said.
―We‘re just beginning the prelim stages.‖ Delia‘s pale eyes flicked toward the Egyptian and back to her friend.