path to conquest (23 page)

Lavi guided the visitors over to sit on the hard ground with Gamel and Abdul, the two Arabs they’d met upon arrival. Scattered lanterns cast enough light to make the dining area cozy.

“There’s coffee, too, if you want it,” Abdul said helpfully. Lauren dug into her plate of stew first, chewing the initial forkful somewhat warily. Then she licked her lips in approval. “Hey, this is good stuff. What’s in it?”

Lavi waved off the question. “Ah, you don’t want to know that. . . .’’He held the serious expression for several beats, then grinned.

Holding the plate at arm’s length, Lauren gave him a withering stare. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Of course, Lauren. We’ve been eating this for months and we’re still alive.” He suddenly made a wretching noise and fell back against the ancient mud-brick wall.

Gamel rolled his eyes. “Same stew for months, and same Israeli jokes, too. Stay dead, Lavi—spare us another show!” “So, tell me, did you enjoy the tour?” asked Abdul. Pete, Lauren, and Neville chorused their enthusiasm. “Well, Lavi,” Abdul said, “you’ve got a much better future in the tour business than the joke business.”

Pete wolfed down another mouthful of steaming stew. “How do Arabs feel living in a Jewish monument?”

“Hey, we didn’t like the Romans either,” Gamel said cheerfully, “no matter what everyone wrote about Cleopatra and Mark Antony.”

“I don’t mean to puncture your unity,” Lauren said, “but back at the UN, I never saw much harmony between your three countries.”

“That was B.V.—before Visitors,” said Abdul. “I don’t know if Lavi told you, but ever since the archeologists dug Masada out of its own rubble, the armored units of the Israeli Defense Forces take their oath up here. When they do, they swear that ‘Masada shall not fall again.’ That’s a sentiment we can all go along with when you apply it to the whole world.” “Besides,” Gamel said, brow furrowed seriously, “Arabs and Jews weren’t always enemies. For a couple of centuries after Mohammed founded Islam and Arab armies swept across the Middle East and North Africa, we were the major power in the world.”

“That’s right,” Abdul concurred. “Europe was entering the Dark Ages, and we Arabs kept the light of civilization burning. Our scholars not only preserved the knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome, they also formed the basis for modem mathematics. The Arab world was the center of art and trade. My homeland was the great crossroads, the place where traders from India and Asia came to sell their treasures and spices.” “They may sound like they’re blowing their own horn,” Lavi said in a stage whisper, “but every word of it is true. The Jews who used to live in Palestine got scattered through the whole region by the Romans. There were Jews all over the Arab world, as well as the squalid little villages in Europe. Since we were always moving around anyway, we became merchants. We linked the Arab and Christian worlds.”

“For two hundred years or so, under Arab rule, the Jews were allowed to practice their religion, which they
weren’t
allowed under Christian mle at the same time. And they even prospered,” Abdul said.

“Uh, mates, if things were so bloody wonderful,” Neville interrupted, “what happened?”

The Israeli traded sheepish glances with his Arab partners. “Things change,” he said ruefully. “Tides of history get pulled in different directions.”

“Hey, anybody want to play chess after dinner?” Gamel asked, changing the subject completely.

Abdul and Lavi uttered disgusted protests, leading Lauren to exclaim, “
Ah-ha!
Discord!”

“They won’t play with me anymore. How about you, Peter?”

“Sorry—never learned how.”

“I’ll teach you!”

“Don’t do it,” said Abdul.

“You’ll regret it,” Lavi warned.

“He cheats,” said Abdul.

Gamel’s irrepressible good cheer clouded for an instant. “1 do not,” he protested. Then, turning his back to Pete: “Lavi doesn’t like to play because he loses all the time.”

Lavi sneered. “Yes, and you keep referring to our so-called matches as replays of the Six Day War.”

Gamel ignored that comment. “And I don’t know why Abdul refuses to play, except that members of the Saudi royal family are sore losers.”

“Royal family?"
Pete said in surprise.

“Of
course,”
Lauren said, feeling incredibly thick skulled.
“Prince
Abdul ibn Aziz. Economics degree from Princeton. You were oil minister when we met briefly at a UN cocktail party four years ago.”

Abdul smiled. “I’m flattered you remember.”

Pete grunted, still astonished. “Then how did you wind up here?”

The Saudi prince’s smile faded. “I’m also an air force pilot and a commando by training—the Royal Air Force College in England, then further training in your country, in Georgia, Yank.”

“Oh, when he says Yank, he means the American kind, not the baseball kind,” Lavi put in. “Went to British public school as a kid. Every now and then I get the urge to call him Prince Charles instead of Abdul.”

“At any rate,” Abdul continued, “to answer your question as to how I wound up here, when the Visitors overran Riyadh, our capital, much of my family was kidnapped or murdered. Some of us escaped and went underground. We realized we had to protect as much of our oil fields as we could. That’s when we formed the Arabian Defense Force.”

“We need oil, too,” Lavi said. “Even before all this, we did buy Saudi oil, you know. So we contacted them and suggested putting ail our shoulders to the same grindstone.”

Gamel looked up from the chessboard he was busily arranging in a pool of lantern light, obviously hopeful of finding a willing opponent. “That’s right. We all want to survive. Once we get through this, if we really want to, we can always go back to fighting about a Palestinian homeland and who really leads the Arab world and whether we still want to drive the Jews into the sea. But if we let the Visitors beat us, that’s the whole ball of wax.”

Pete sighed wistfully. “Maybe you won’t want to fight about all that anymore.”

Abdul nodded. “Maybe you’re right, Yank. Maybe we won’t. Let’s hope we get a chance to worry about it.”

The group indulged in food and companionship for another hour or so, and Prince Abdul even entertained with some pretty fair blues-harmonica music he’d learned while stationed in America’s South. But Lavi finally pointed out that they would have to rise before the sun and they really should retire for the night. Some of the resistance fighters left the confines of the between-walls dining area to sleep in the tents. Others went down to a cave. Folding army cots were brought in for Pete, Neville, and Lauren and as they were being set up, Gamel took Pete aside. The Egyptian seemed uncharacteristically shy.

“I, uh, I hope this doesn’t offend. . . . Um, when I joined the army, I was also sent to your country to train. I, uh, very much liked baseball. Before I got to America, the Yankees were the only team 1 had ever heard of. So I decided to be a Yankee fan while I lived there.”

Pete chuckled. “Did you get to see any games?”

“I was a tank commander, and we were trained in your deserts out west. But on my way home, we stayed in New York and
then
finally I got to your Yankee Stadium. I saw you play. When I learned to play—our instructors taught me—I played third base, so I watched very closely how you played.” Fearfully, Pete closed his eyes. “Oh, God, I hope I had a good day.”

“Well, you kicked a grounder—”

“Booted.”

“Right—
booted.”

“Wonderful.”

Gamel clapped him on the back. “Ah, but you made three impossible throws. You also hit a home run.”

“Not so bad. then.”

“Not bad? Great! So, what I wanted, uh, to ask you is—for your autograph?”

“I’m just a doctor now, Gamel. Haven’t played for two years.”

“But you were my only real baseball hero. All that matters is that I saw you play that one game before I went home to Egypt,” Gamel said, his eyes full of the same earnest hero worship Pete had seen in so many nine-year-old boys back home.

“Well, I’d be honored to give you my autograph.”

The Egyptian appeared greatly relieved. He stood in place, smiling at Pete. Pete smiled back, waiting. Then he made a writing motion with his hand.

“Pen, Gamel?”

“Ah, do you have one?”

“Uh, yeah, sure.” Pete pulled a ballpoint out of his back pocket. “Paper?”

“Ah, do you have paper, too?”

Pete shook his head and started to laugh. “Yeah, sure, Gamel. Out in the shuttle. C’mon.”

“Me? On a
camel
?
No way!"
Pete shook his head emphatically, looking like a child refusing to take medicine, mouth clamped shut in permanent resistance.

“What’s so terrible about camels?” Gamel asked. “I’ve been riding them since I was a tiny child.”

“Yeah, well, you were bom with camels.”

Gamel flared in mock anger. “I beg your pardon!’

“You know what I mean.”

Gamel shrugged mildly. “Well, that’s part of the plan. You don’t ride, you’ll have to walk.”

Abdul, Lavi, and Neville regarded Pete with bemused interest. Lauren’s look was more of a sharp probe. “What’s with you and camels?” she demanded.

He hunched defensively. “I don’t care to tell you. I’ve got my reasons.”

“This is one very weird phobia you’ve got, and one lousy time to reveal it.”

“Well, we never had to worry about camels in New York, now did we, Lauren?” he said, his voice peevish.

She stamped her foot on the hardened dirt floor of the sleeping area within the ancient battlement walls. “Peter, this is downright ridiculous. Tell me right now—”

He threw his hands up. “Okay, okay. Who cares if I’m embarrassed?”

“We don’t,” said the other five in harmony.

Pete glared. “I once took my daughters to the Bronx Zoo and they wanted to go on the camel ride. Fine. What did I know about camels? Lawrence of Arabia rode ’em, that’s good enough for me. The girls are thrilled. They think the camels are cute. The trainer gets ’em up there, the girls are still thrilled. I go to pet the damned beast and it lets out this horrible roar and tries to
bite
me. I
don’t like camels.”
He noticed everyone attempting—and failing—to stifle sniggers. “Satisfied?” Abdul controlled himself enough to say, “Must have been a New York cab driver reincarnated as a camel.”

“Ho, ho,” Pete sneered. By now Lauren had doubled over in laughter. Pete smiled sweetly at her. “Hey, Laur—how’d you like me to tell everybody about
your
favorite phobia?” She straightened up in a hurry. “Don’t you dare.” “Why? I think these four men would get a real kick out of knowing that you—”

She clapped a hand over his mouth. “Well, almost time to get going. Let’s go over the rest of the plan in the shuttle, en route—what do you say?”

With cooperative and conspiratorially neutral faces, the others concurred, starting to pack up the maps and charts they’d spread out for the strategy session.

With the first highlights of dawn starting to tinge the eastern sky, the Visitor shuttlecraft lifted off the top of Masada, heading toward the sunrise. They rose high over the Dead Sea, its calm surface reflecting the sky’s morning glimmerings. Pete was at the controls, with Abdul ibn Aziz in the co-pilot’s position.

In a few minutes they were over the barren badlands of Jordan. In the dim early light, Pete could see that except for a narrow tear-shaped section along the Jordan River Valley, King Hussein’s country was mostly arid plateau. Prince Abdul told him the land got progressively more dry as it stretched to the east, toward his own country.

“The Jordanian Desert is called
hamada.
Nothing but sand interspersed with gravel and chips of flint.”

“Sounds like we wouldn’t want to crash there,” Pete said. “Definitely not.”

Soon they were over Saudi Arabia, flying quickly above vast expanses of uninhabitable sand, on a course taking them southeast.

“Hard to believe you’ve got people living in your country, Abdul,” said Pete.

“When I’ve toured the desert, I’ve often thought the same thing, Yank. But the whole country isn’t like this.”

“No?”

“Actually, some parts are worse. In the south we have a region called Ar Rab al Khali—the Empty Quarter. It’s two hundred and fifty thousand square miles of sand and dunes. The wind blows the dunes every day of the year—always shifting and changing, almost as if they were alive.” “Abdul, tell me something. Why has the Middle East always been a place that somebody was trying to conquer? It’s not exactly the garden spot of the world.”

The Saudi prince grinned. “Well, now it’s because of oil, obviously. But in ancient times it was mostly because this part of the world was the path to other places. For the Romans it was the fringe of the known world, and they wanted whatever they could reach. If you sailed east on the Mediterranean, what did you hit when you reached the shore? Palestine and Lebanon. That gave you a beachhead to move inland. Later on it was the route to the exotica of India and the Far East. Then there’s also the religious aspect of the place—the cradle of the three Western religions, and God knows we haven’t exactly gotten along through the centuries.”

“One man’s devout next-door neighbor is another man’s infidel,” Pete quipped.

“That’s right,” said Abdul. “Think of all the blood that’s been shed in and around the so-called Holy Land. Every age has had its own reasons for following this particular path to conquest. Now the Visitors do, too.”

Pete glanced out the window and did a double take. “Is that what I think it is?”

“And what do you think it is, Yank?”

“I think it’s Kansas, U.S.A. Are those fields of crops?” Abdul raised an eyebrow. “I told you it wasn’t all sand. We’ve got oases, of course, but a lot of the money you pay us for oil has gone into massive desert reclamation projects— building irrigation canals, planting grass and trees to hold the soil, then cultivating crops. The idea is to create new lands for nomadic tribes to settle on and farm, as well as for overflow from expanding populations in the coastal cities. The Israelis aren’t the only ones making the desert bloom, eh, Lavi?” “Stuff it, Your Highness!” came the good-natured reply from the aft cabin.