Bet Your Own Man, page 10
“Bomber, see any of ’em?”
“Some.” Brannigan wasn’t much for conversation when there was trouble. It didn’t matter—I knew what he meant. Spotting one Arab on the desert means at least twenty or thirty hidden from your sight. I’d spotted four or five myself, which probably meant that between every weapon in camp we didn’t have a third as many bullets as we did enemies. Sweat beaded on my forehead—despite the chill night wind, the whipping cry of the slashing air around me—the soak dripped off my head freely, muddying the sands below briefly only to then dry and disappear, as if it had never been.
Swatting at the sand gnats buzzing around, nipping my ears and neck, I realized that our hiding in the ancient oasis was just a stall—sooner or later we were all going to have to pay the piper.
I didn’t mind that, actually. I just wished I’d been there to hear his tune.
Things had all happened too fast. I didn’t belong in the picture. My name’s Jack Hagee. I’m a private detective, the kind of guy who usually makes his rent by tailing people who can’t find their way to their own beds at night, or by reporting on people who don’t know how to accurately fill out an insurance claim. A friend had come to my office with a news clipping about his son’s death and a tale of killers with thick accents. Darnell Lowe had died merely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His father wanted it proved. I was the only person he knew who might be able to help him.
Never do business with friends.
The trail of clues led me from back alleys in the Bronx to poppy fields in Turkey. The men who had punched Darnell’s ticket disappeared in an explosion, one the local police in Diyarbakir were willing to ignore as part of the constant drug wars that tear apart their city. The killer’s employers were not so open-minded, however. I’d posed as a federal narcotics agent to find the pair I wanted. Unfortunately, my act must have been good enough for Broadway because my targets weren’t the only ones I fooled. Instead of a Tony, however, my performance netted me a beating that felt like it was administered with baseball bats.
I woke in the desert. The horizon was a flat line of heat and sand in every direction. I lay where I’d been dropped until I passed out again. Once it got dark, I managed to stagger off in who knows what direction until I fell over again, this time for good. I lay on a dune wall, blistering in the next day’s sun when I was spotted by members of a British archaeological expedition. They dragged me around with them, taking care of me until I was actually able to help out a little.
When they took me in I became bottom man in a party of forty-two men and women, ten camels, three horses, two trucks and one jeep. Now I was somehow second-in-command of eight men, four camels and two horses. When the British had departed Diyarbakir, they’d had nearly four tons of supplies; looking around through the faintly cracking dawn, I figured we had maybe two hundred and fifty pounds of that left. Twelve pounds of that was ammunition. Maybe seven was food.
“They’re movin’!”
I looked up, searching the desert for the Arabs Brannigan had spotted. I saw three of them crawling forward, bellying their way across the sand.
“Kulkai—get over here.”
The half-caste boy ran low to get to me. Eyeing the circle of stones and trees behind me, I told him, “Tell ‘em to get back or we’ll poison the well!”
Nodding, Kulkai screeched out toward the advancing Bedouins. Barely in his teens, the boy’s voice cracked several times as he stammered out my warning. While he did, I yelled to Brannigan.
“Bomber, drag a body over here—quick!”
While he sprang to the far end of the wall where we’d first dragged the dead, I ran to the well. Loosening a length of rope, I rigged a lasso as quickly as I could, then threw it up and over the ancient bucket brace. Brannigan was next to me a moment later, a corpse dangling from his powerful left hand.
“Get his feet in the noose,” I told him. “I’ll tie off the end.”
Others of the survivors swarmed around us while we worked.
“Here, Hagee,” snapped Palmer, the expedition’s leader. “What’s this all?”
“Shut up,” I snapped. Turning back to Kulkai, I shouted, “Are they listening to you?”
“Yes, sir; this they are good for, sir.”
Brannigan gave me a high sign, indicating he had the body tied off over the well. Running back to the wall, I scanned the early morning for myself, checking to see if the Arabs had really stopped coming at us, even if just for the moment. Brannigan hurried back to his own end of the oasis, doing the same. We didn’t see anything. Palmer came up to me while we continued watching.
“See here—I want a word with you.”
I turned, waiting for him to close the distance between us. Sir Jeffrey Fenton Palmer was the archaeologist who had put together the expedition that had found me. It was his belief that a year earlier he’d located the undisturbed burial grounds of some previously unknown pharaoh. At the time he’d made the discovery, though, he’d been short on men, money and supplies, let alone any kind of government sanctions for digging up the local real estate. It’d taken him a long time to get the whole thing together, tensions being what they always are in the Middle East. My guess was he was about to blame me for whatever the hell was going on around us now. Fine, I thought. Let him try.
He rooted himself behind me as I continued to watch the desert, staring at me back. “This, I suppose, is your idea of a rational ploy?” He sputtered for a moment, then added, “You—you’ve trapped us here.”
“I’ve trapped us here?” For a moment I thought the heat might’ve softened his brain. “What’s your problem, Palmer?”
“We should have continued to run for it. Surely we could have reached some better sanctuary than this.”
“Surely we could’ve been cut down one by one like every other body that’s out there on the sand starting to blister.” I mopped at my head and brow. The rising sun was making short work of both my chill and my patience. “We stopped running here because here is all there is. We’re fifty miles from anywhere else. Anything! The only chance we have is to swap our freedom for their water.”
“Our only chance vanished in gray smoke when your nerve ran out and you raced us into this hell-bound way station. If I hadn’t set the alarm and gotten us all moving,” the older man snapped, “as many of us as did survive would already be dead.”
“What I don’t seem to be able to puzzle up at all,” said Nash, another of the Brits, “is what set all this madness to whirl in the first place.”
“Good question,” added Brannigan as he joined the rest of us. “You think these bedsheets have some legit reason for bustin’ our chops, Jack?”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d asked myself the same question a hundred times since the first of us had been cut down. I’d studied the whole thing a dozen times, but I couldn’t find any sense in it. When we’d first come across Acbai Mulask’tar’s tribe, they’d seemed genuinely pleased to see us. They weren’t part of any oil-fat herd; these were simple tribesmen who spat on the rest of the world with a set of emotions ranging from hatred to indifference. To them, the only things that mattered were those found in the desert.
We traded with them, bargaining under the sharp eye of Allah’s laws of hospitality. When the Bedouins discovered what we were there for, they were eager to become a part of things. A number of the younger men volunteered to hire on as diggers, interested only in securing a part in history. The older men saw it as an opportunity for a celebration. What their women saw the chance meeting as was unknown. They remained out of sight during the trading, their voices unheard, nothing seen of them but their completely draped and bundled forms. Maybe not wanting to lose their hold over their women had turned these Arabs away from the wealth the area offered. I knew a lot of guys who’d give up something as simple as unimaginable wealth for the mastery of their homes.
That was besides the point, though. The Arabs hosted a wild party for us, setting what sure seemed as all their best forward. We “Europeans,” as they insisted on calling all of us, were given the finest of everything in sight. Tents were filled with fiery dishes of mutton and goat, desert puddings and curries. Mulask’tar provided wrestling matches, jugglers, a magician, and even a sort of Passion Play that brought tears to the eyes of the faithful and keenly captured the interest of the archaeologists, while not boring we of the grunt caste too much.
We responded with howled choruses of popular songs and a drunken dance around the central campfire. One of the students along on the dig told a tale of vampires and maniacs, hamming things up worse than a made-for-TV movie. The necessity of translating things didn’t seem to overly bother either the teller or his audience, however.
Not to be outdone, Mulask’tar set about winning our unspoken contest by calling for his daughter. She came without a word, wrapped in long thin shreds of black fabric, laced and stitched in patterns too delicate to read in the firelight. She was young, a child really, barely in her teens. Probably the only reason she was permitted to dance in front of us was the fact that she was too young to be considered a woman in the first place. I wasn’t so sure, though. She moved across the sand around the central fire, gliding in the footprints of our drunken dancers the way grass fills in the scars of a bombed-out field.
She raced everyone’s breath, keeping our eyes like a miser’s purse does pennies, even the usually stiff and proper Palmer’s. Bone flutes and goatskin drums helped weave her magic, but only slightly. The movements, the wild kicks and turns and leaps, were hers, borne from an inner urge to express what was within her before approaching womanhood cut her off from the freedom she could only exhibit as a child.
But then, after laboring every man’s temperature more severely than the desert’s hostile noonday sun, she disappeared into a tent beyond the firelight’s edge, the slightest of giggles the only sound she made the entire time. I had to force myself to remember she wasn’t a child of the New York streets, a product of the fast and ruthless era of greed and shameful knowledge that had its hooks so deeply into the West. She was innocent—totally. The thoughts she gave us were ours alone, and not of her conscious devising. And suddenly, I realized just what the rest of the world means when they call us decadent.
The Bedouins, pleased with their chieftain and themselves, insisted we share their camp that evening. As stuffed and drunk as we were, we didn’t have the slightest urge to offend anyone’s kind gestures. If that was what they’d been.
“Maybe we were set up,” I told Brannigan.
“Yeah,” he answered. “Maybe they didn’t want us diggin’ up their holy dead and just suckered us in.”
“Seems unlikely,” responded Nash.
“I pretty much agree,” I told him. “But what makes you think so?”
Prentiss Nash was one of the directors of the museum sponsoring Palmer’s expedition. He had accompanied more than one British team into the Middle East, and seemed to know what he was talking about.
“It doesn’t have the proper feel.” His hands swept the horizon. “These are not a subtle folk; we are talking about a people unchanged in their ways since before the coming of Moses. You’ve got to forget the outside world when you’re here—Christian ethics are nothing more than a confusing nuisance when trying to understand the nomadic mind. If these people wanted us to stay away from something, they would have simply told us to stay away from it—period.”
“And I think you’re being far too naive,” interrupted Palmer. “Mulask’tar is unfortunately no fool. As much as you do not wish to subscribe to your own theory, Mr. Hagee, I am afraid you are correct. We are not the first to enter this region in search of her treasures. The fact we wish to uncover history to put it on display for the world does not diminish the fact that much of that history is fashioned from hand-beaten silver and gold.
“You know nothing, Nash. I’ve lived most of my adult life amongst these people, dodging their insane Jihads and persecutions—sifting the dunes around us for bits and fragments that make your gloomy, grey-stoned royal sideshow the attraction it is, and I’ve done it with a spade in one hand and a Webley in the other.”
The archaeologist lifted his sun helmet and wiped his forehead. “They meant to kill everyone except those of us who knew where to dig. And, I leave it to your imaginations to decide how long those kept alive would have retained that condition once the tomb had been unearthed.”
Nash tried to calm Palmer down, but the older man wheeled in the sand, pointing his finger at the museum director and myself, cursing, “Damn both you fools. This affair will end in death. Everyone pays for their mistakes eventually, Mr. Hagee. Everyone.”
“We shall all pay dearly for yours.”
Palmer turned then, retreating toward the palms growing around the well. No one else said anything. The day was becoming uncomfortable, both from the heat, and the hostile glare of hundreds of unseen eyes.
* *** *
I LOOKED at the watch I’d borrowed from one of the dead for the thousandth time. It let me know there wasn’t much time left before the last of the sunlight disappeared, leaving us in the weakly lit grey of the desert night. There were no clouds to mask the stars and the moon, but their feeble light only made the shadowy web of dunes around the oasis that much more unreadable. Brannigan crawled across the encampment, joining me near the well. He asked;
“Think they’ll come at us?”
“They might. We probably won’t know it until it’s too late.”
We sat with our backs to the rapidly cooling stones of the well. While I checked my .45 again, making sure no sand had crawled inside since the last time I’d broken it down, I asked Brannigan what had brought him into our little mess. I knew some of his career, but couldn’t figure out what might have brought him to the Middle East.
Bomber Brannigan is a name known to most older sports fans. At 6’6”, weighing over 300 pounds, he isn’t an easy man to forget. He’d been a decent heavyweight in his prime, once going the distance with a pre-champ Sonny Liston. He’d lost the decision, but I knew an old timer who’d seen the fight, and he said it was so close they must’ve tossed a coin to see which guy’s career they were going to toilet. On top of that, Bomber chipped a bone in his knockout right during the ninth with Liston, the piece of bad luck that finally took him out of the boxing ring and landed him in pro-wrestling.
Knowing all of that, however, still didn’t give me a clue as to what had landed him in the Middle East. When I asked him, he told me that eighteen years on the grunt-and-groan circuit had been enough. He’d settled down in Rockford, Illinois, where he now owned and operated a popular bar called The Bomb Shelter. What had stirred him from his comfortable nest was the interesting part.
“Kinda hate to admit it,” he said, twisting his mouth in a way that showed he was uncomfortable, “but I’m here because of a damn woman. Not just any woman, mind you, but the kind of dewey-eyed, bubble-busted blonde that’s been drivin’ guys like me bugfuck since Adam first peeked under Eve’s fig leaf. Well, this one was no good—not for me, not for anyone but herself. I had a lot of people try and tell me that, but I wouldn’t listen. Even took a poke at my best buddy when he tried to set me straight—guy named Hannibal, who, by the way, you sorta remind me of.”
“Hope it’s not enough of a resemblance to start you taking pokes at me, too.”
“Nahhh,” he grinned. “I’m over the tramp now. Once I finally wised up to what a fool she was playing me for, I sent her packing. But then, well, I had to get away for a while, you know? Get it all sorted out in my head. Had to get away from things that reminded me of her and away from people who either felt sorry for me, or were snickering behind my back.
“Anyway, I always had a hankering to see the Pyramids, so I decided that was just about the right distance to do the trick. After I’d been over here a few days—long enough to get bored but not enough to go back—I saw an ad in one of the English papers stating that Palmer and his bunch were looking for some real roughnecks to keep the sandbugs digging. I figured what the hell. I got good people takin’ care of The Bomb Shelter for me—let’s go play archaeologist for a while.”
“Yeah, sure,” I agreed. “But what makes you think we’re gettin’ out of this mess?”
Brannigan looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. “Hell, Jack,” said the older man, “don’t tell me you’re worried about all this?” When I admitted the possibility, he said, “Let me tell you something I learned when Liston and I were pushin’ each other’s mushes in. I was worried before that fight. He wasn’t the champ or nuthin’ yet, but the Bear was undefeated—he was the toughest man in the world—and he knew it. It showed on his face plainer than his nose or eyes. He was a thunderer, a wreckin’ ball, a big black monster that just dared anyone to get into the ring with him. He wasn’t arrogant about it—he was just the best, and he knew it. A lot of guys lost to him just because they couldn’t get past their fear. I knew some of them; I knew they were beat even before they got in the ring with him, just because they thought they couldn’t beat him.
“Well, maybe there are too many bedsheets out there for us to put a dent in ‘em. Maybe Palmer was right and we’re all goin’ to end up payin’ a heavy price for bein’ here at that. If we do, though, I don’t see any reason in over-tippin’ the sons-of-bitches.”
Brannigan smiled. I joined him. Our throats stung too much from swallowing sand all day for us to laugh, but we could still smile. Exposure had started taking its toll. Although we had all the water we wanted, we couldn’t afford the luxury of tents or lean-tos. The first of us to try and hide from the sun died as gunfire leveled at us riddled the canvas sheet he tried to hide beneath with lead.
