The guy on the far right, however, was smiling and looking at me, which seemed strange. And then I recognized him.
Nabeel al-Samad said to me, “Hello. You remember me?”
My teammates all turned their heads toward me, and the four Bedouin, who spoke no English, seemed confused that the Al Qaeda guy was smiling and speaking to the American captive. Hey, we had bagels together.
I was supposed to just nod, but I said, so my teammates understood who this guy was, “Nabeel and I had a breakfast meeting in New York.” I added, “He had some important information for me.”
Nabeel thought that was funny and he translated for his compatriots, who also thought that was funny.
What wasn’t so funny was Nabeel saying to me, “Jewish deli for me not funny. You not funny. You not go home ever.”
Nabeel needed help with his verbs, but I got that I was supposed to appreciate the moment and the message, which in better English was, “So, Detective Corey, we meet again, and this time the situation is reversed, is it not, Detective Corey?” Hee-hee-hee. Fuck you.
Anyway, I played the game and looked down at the floor.
Bottom line here, soon after the State Department applied for my and Kate’s visas, that information had gotten to Al Qaeda in Yemen. Happens all the time and it’s not usually a problem for American tourists, businesspeople, or diplomats heading to Sana’a-unless their names happen to be on the Al Qaeda kill list.
Anyway, the fun part was over and it was time for business.
Nabeel said something to Yasir, who handed Nabeel our five non-diplomatic passports.
Nabeel had sheets of paper in his hand, which I was certain were the photostats of these passports gotten from the Bilqis Hotel. Nabeel passed the five passports and photostats around to his four buddies, who studied the passport photos and looked at us.
Nabeel, who had seemed to me like a pleasant putz in New York, had another side to him, and he said to the Amriki sharply, “Look up! Look to me!”
We all looked at Nabeel as the other A.Q. assholes glanced between us, the photostats, and the passports.
Nabeel, of course, made a positive ID on Detective John Corey, and the other Al Qaeda geniuses seemed to agree that Buck, Brenner, and Zamo were the Amriki in the passport pictures. The problem was Kate, wrapped in her scarf, and Nabeel said to her, “Take off hijab.”
So Kate pulled her scarf away from her face, and the five Al Qaeda assholes stared at her a long time. I mean, how many women’s faces had they seen in their lives?
They all seemed to agree that Kate’s photo matched her face, and Yasir collected the passports.
Nabeel said to Kate, “Put on hijab!”
Nabeel then produced two more sheets of paper, which he showed to Yasir. Yasir nodded, then said something to Buck in Arabic. Buck replied in Arabic, and said to us, “They also have copies of John and Kate’s diplomatic passports-probably from the Yemeni consulate in New York. And they want to know where-”
“Shut up!” shouted Nabeel. Then to all of us he asked, “Where diplomatic passports?”
Buck replied in English, “At the embassy.”
“You lie.”
But Yasir jumped in and said something, maybe assuring Nabeel that the Bedouin had searched us and not found any diplomatic passports in the possession of the Americans.
So Yasir, Nabeel, and the other four Al Qaeda assholes got into an argument, and Buck, sotto voce, was translating snippets, saying, “They want to search us… and search the bedding… and search the diwan.”
Right. These things never go the way you want or expect. I asked Buck, “Who the hell is in charge here?”
Buck said to us, “Yasir seems to be losing control.”
Great.
Nabeel interrupted his argument long enough to tell me and Buck to shut up.
But Buck, understanding these people, said something to Yasir in Arabic, and his voice was firm. I heard the word “Musa.”
Yasir seemed to find his balls and backbone, and he shouted at Nabeel and at the other Al Qaeda shitheads, who shut up.
I mean, what’s the pecking order here? You tell ’em, Yasir. Meanwhile, I glanced at my compatriots, and I could see they were a bit uneasy. While Nabeel and Yasir were talking, I said in a low voice to Brenner, Zamo, and Kate, “If I say pull, on the count of three, you know what to do.”
They nodded.
As Kate likes to point out, I sometimes change the plan. But only when Plan A is not going well. I mean, bottom line here, The Panther’s prize was right in front of his jihadists, and I wouldn’t put it past them to get the drop on the Bedouin and re-kidnap us. Or just blow us away.
So if we had to, we would draw on these five bastards and waste them all before they even got their AK-47s unslung. And that would be the end of the negotiations and the end of Operation Clean Sweep, and unfortunately the end of any chance we had of vaporizing The Panther with a Hellfire. But sometimes you gotta think of yourself first, and you have to take what you can get-like five jihadists who were getting a little too aggressive.
Nabeel and Yasir seemed to have settled down a bit, and they were still jabbering away.
Meanwhile, I noticed that the other four Al Qaeda guys were eyeballing us as if trying to determine if we looked like real guests instead of kidnapped guests.
The Al Qaeda delegation was also eyeballing the big tower room, and they all glanced out the windows to try to figure out where they were. Crow Fortress? Or some other tower in the hills?
The tip-off would have been the window behind them that overlooked the courtyard, and more importantly overlooked the fish van. Hey, Abdul, what’s that doing here?
The other three Bedouin were standing directly behind the Al Qaeda guys, to keep them literally in line, head and eyes straight ahead. But then one of the Al Qaeda assholes tried to sneak a look over his shoulder, and I was surprised and pleased to see one of the Bedouin smack his head with the barrel of his AK-47. Like, “I said no peeking, asshole. Try that again and your brains will be on the floor.” Good. It’s your show, boys, and your fort.
More importantly, I could see there was no love lost between these two groups. The Bedouin ruled and have ruled for two thousand years; Al Qaeda was tolerated, as long as they understood whose land this was. Nabeel, however, had spent a little time in Amrika and he’d forgotten his manners. Interestingly, it was Buck who had to remind Yasir that Al Qaeda was not top dog here. Not yet.
But back to business.
Nabeel shouted at me, “What you do here? Why you here?”
It was Buck who replied-Buck does the talking, I do the shooting-“We are embassy personnel on a visit to see the ruins.”
Nabeel, of course, said, “You lie! Why you go to Aden?”
“Embassy business.”
“You lie! How you come to Marib?”
“By car.”
“You say to hotel you come from Sana’a.”
“You know we came from Aden.”
Nabeel, perhaps realizing his English was too limited to get at the essential truth, took advantage of Buck’s Arabic and continued his questions in that language. I heard the words al-Numair, Al Qaeda, Amrika, Sana’a, Aden, and Marib, and even the word Ghumdan.
Obviously Nabeel strongly suspected that we were here to find al-Numair. And the answer was, Why else would we be here, stupid? But Buck wasn’t going to give them anything. I couldn’t understand what Buck was saying, of course, but I trusted the old Cold Warrior to just stick to the story, no matter how implausible it sounded.
Also, I was certain that Nabeel and his compatriots, as well as their boss, al-Numair, were very pissed off about the Hellfire attack that killed their buddies. Not to mention getting their asses kicked at the Hunt Oil installation. So obviously the Al Qaeda guys were not in a good mood. In fact, they’d like to kill us. But first they had to buy us.
Nabeel, on the instructions of his boss, I’m sure, was trying to determine if the Amriki knew or suspected that The Panther was in Marib-and maybe Nabeel was trying to figure out if this was a trap set by the Amriki with the help of Sheik Musa. And that was the real issue. But Nabeel was not going to get that information from the Amriki, unless we were prisoners of Al Qaeda, which we were not-yet.