Under Siege (17 page)

The First Lady was pushed into the room and stood to
one side. She wasn’t tied, but she might as well have been. Six or seven times Badri had told her he would never give her up with no gain for himself. He said he’d kill her first. She looked into his brown eyes and believed him. It still didn’t keep her from arguing with him about everything she could think of. But for now she would play it safe and not try to get away. She could trade a few more days of captivity for the rest of her life.

She watched the Arab man Badri had found on the Internet. It had to be al Qaeda. The network. It must still be working. The three men spoke in Arabic. Twice the resident looked up at her and smiled. She wasn’t sure how to read him.

Badri still had the SATCOM over his shoulder on the strap. He was seldom without it. He was careful never to let her near it.

Mrs. Hardesty knew when the topic switched to money. The tones hardened between the Arabs in the foreign tongue, and the sentences became shorter. The exchange was sharp for a moment, then the South African Arab moderated and at last nodded. Bills exchanged hands. She could see only that they were $100 U.S. banknotes.

The living room looked comfortable and lived-in to the First Lady. She was no stranger to plain living. She had grown up in Iowa on a farm and often there wasn’t enough money for the usual trip to town on Saturday night. Her mother canned lots of the food that they raised in the garden. They ate what they needed, and froze and canned the rest. Her roots were planted deep in the good black Iowa soil.

Badri motioned to her. “Sit here. My friend is fixing a secure room for you. He said his wife will have food for us in a half-hour.”

“You mean I get to eat at an Arab table like a real person? Not like a veiled woman, slave, baby maker, washer of clothes, and receptacle for the famous two-inch Arab penis?”

Badri stiffened. She watched him fighting to control his temper. At last he took a deep breath and scowled at her. “No wonder American men are so two-faced. They have to learn to deal with women like you who think they are intelligent, who believe that they are something more than chattel, yet who are so stupid in the ways of the world that they are laughable.”

“Mr. Badri, you must know that in Iraq there are women lawyers, women doctors, women who own stores and businesses. One thing that Saddam Hussein did right was not let the fundamentalist Muslims run the country. He allowed women almost as much freedom as women have in the Western world. And it worked. Women brought a great deal to the Iraqi culture and economy. Iran isn’t like that. You enslave your women, you keep them pregnant, veiled, barefoot, and in the kitchen. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

“Women have their place in Islamic society. I have a wife and two daughters and a son.”

“And your two daughters will not go to school, will barely learn to read and write, and will be married to men not of their choosing by the time they are sixteen. I know the ritual. Again, you should be ashamed of yourself.”

Badri stood and scowled at her. “You are a sassy-talking female who should be disciplined. You should be stripped naked and left that way for two months with only bread and water-to eat. You should be made to do all of the most menial tasks. You should not be allowed to speak. You should be shut up in a windowless room for every daylight hour, and then staked out in the backyard during the night so you could howl at the moon.”

“You, sir, are no gentleman. You should be stripped naked, castrated, made to eat your own balls, and then a sack put over your head and paraded through a national convention of the NOW organization. That’s the National Organization for Women. They are devoted feminists who
believe women are just as good as men. You should be made to sit and listen to the work of the group and how they are striving to get equal pay for equal work for women. How they are fighting the glass ceiling in business firms. How they are making women’s rights the law of the land. No, on second thought, you should be placed on the stage without the sack over your head but still naked so the women could associate a face with your pathetic naked form.”

She watched Badri. He sat there seething. He could no longer contain himself and rushed from the room. She laughed as he left, her voice clanging in his ears, then she slumped in the chair. She did not like verbal fights. She would rather use logic and reason, but sometimes the nasty, insulting, and castrating words were all that could get through the armor of the listener. This man was such a dastardly, black character. She had no idea what his long-range reaction would be. They had argued repeatedly over the past two days. Had it only been two days since she landed in New Namibia? It had. This was the second day and it was about over. It was nearly dark when they had come inside.

The radio? No, he had taken it with him. She thought about the Arab that Badri had found. He had to be part of an al Qaeda cell. How much of the network was left? She’d throw that at him next. There was nothing else that she could do. The three men came back into the room. The other two Arabs who traveled with Badri had never spoken to her. She didn’t think they knew any English. One of them motioned and they all went into another room where a table had been set. A short, fat, long-haired Arab woman wearing a veil had just put food on the table, family style. She left quickly. The man they had seen first, who evidently owned the house, came in and told them all to sit down. He used both English and Arabic.

They sat down, and, before anything was passed. Mrs. Hardesty cleared her throat. “Gentlemen, just before I left Washington, I saw a top-secret message that proved that
Osama bin Laden is dead. DNA on record of him matches with those samples taken from a body discovered in one of the bombed-out caves in the mountains of Afghanistan. This is absolute proof that he is dead. That must really have torn apart the whole al Qaeda network.”

She watched as the host translated for the other two Arabs. One leaped to his feet and ripped off a dozen words in Arabic.

Badri caught the man’s hand and pulled him down to his chair. Badri turned to the First Lady.

“My friend here is emotional. He had been trained in Afghanistan and knew Osama while he was there. But I’m not as gullible as my friend. You are playing another of your disruptive cards hoping to somehow get free. But it won’t work. Osama bin Laden is alive and well and guiding his worldwide network of cells and action platoons.”

“Then why is this cell of his so strapped for money? Why isn’t he supplying them with men and cash? You obviously got this address from some secret word game on the Internet. Just how isn’t important. The state of this house and a one-man cell is more important. This man must be simply trying to stay alive. He must have a job and a family and is leaving the terrorism until the time the cell is healthy again with men and money.”

Badri laughed. “You are a comedian, Mrs. First Lady. You should be in show business. There is no cell here. This is a friend of long standing I knew in Tehran. He moved here years ago and we are friends. That’s all.”

“So he keeps his address coded on the Internet just for the convenience of a visitor every ten years? Not even a good try at lying, Mr. Badri. Make another stab at it.”

“I don’t need to explain anything to you. You are but a woman, chattel, a slave as you say. I should cut off your ear and send it to your husband. Then he would send me the money.”

“I thought you had twenty-five million dollars in a bank in Switzerland.” Didn’t the government send it?

Badri grew angrier as he passed up the food. He pushed his chair back. “We did, it was deposited. But at once the Swiss government seized the money and froze the account until I can prove that I are not an international kidnapper and terrorist.”

“So, you’re broke again. I remember how that was in my early years in Iowa.”

The talk trailed off then as they ate. The food was good, but she was not sure what it was. Some kind of meat, and a bread and mixed fruit. After the meal the two of them went back into the living room. She could hear a hammer pounding at the back of the house.

“Mr. Badri, you talk about the United States as the Great Evil. Interesting choice of words. Remember when your country was fighting against Iraq and the United States sent you money and weapons and aircraft and rockets? The United States gave your country more than twelve billion dollars in assistance and asked for nothing in return. Remember when Kuwait was invaded by Iraq and again the United States led the coalition of forces that battered back the Iraqi in a short war, but one that cost my country two hundred and ninety-eight lives and more than twenty billion dollars in spent hard cash. Again we asked Kuwait for nothing. Did not ask her to repay us what it had cost us.

“Then ten years later we again went into the Gulf with a coalition of forces to overthrow Saddam Hussein and his murderous regime that kept the Iraqi people flat on their backs. On that one we spent more than sixty billion dollars, and we liberated Iraq, let her chose her own form of government in free elections, ripped off the sanctions, and got her oil production going again. Sounds like the Great Evil is the Great Good Guy who has bailed out Arab nations lately to the tune of more than a hundred billion dollars. What has the
Arab world done for the United States lately? Or ever?”

Badri began pacing as she talked. At last he threw up his hands and rushed around the room, his face a mask of fury, his hands doubling up into fists and then opening and doubling up again. At the door, he sent her a horrendous look and stormed out. She was alone.

Mrs. Hardesty had seen him lay down the SATCOM when they entered the room after the dinner. Now she rushed to it, folded out the antenna the way she had seen him do and angled it through a window at the sky. Then she moved it until she caught a satellite. She turned on the set and, using the same channel he had it set for, began talking.

“This is Mrs. Eleanor Hardesty, wife of the president of the United States. I’ve been kidnapped and am at a house in Cape Town, South Africa, on Wander Street. The house number is one four, three, six. That’s fourteen thirty-six. If anyone can hear me, please notify the president at once. I’ve got to go.” She turned off the set, moved the antenna back and folded it and left the SATCOM exactly the way it had been. She went across the room and sat on the sofa, waiting to see what happened. Her fondest hope was that someone in Washington had heard and could act quickly.

Less than two minutes later, Badri rushed back in the room, looked for the SATCOM, saw it, and grabbed it and hurried out of the room with only a look of pure hatred directed at the president’s wife.

The taxi cab company’s branch office north of Cape Town was a one-room affair with one cab waiting outside and a telephone answering machine inside. The cabby told Murdock and Stroh what they wanted to know. They called the cab company’s main office, explained that they were working with the police and needed the drop-off point on the cab driven by Charles Majors when he took four persons from the AirField airport north of town, back into Cape Town.

It took several minutes of persuasion and working through two pencil pushers before they got the address. Moments later their cab raced into town and to the spot designated. It was a partly business, partly residential street. They had no building number, just a street. They worried about it for ten minutes, then Murdock called it off.

“Badri knew we would track him, so he came out of the cab here and then walked or took another cab to his destination. This is a dry hole.”

Stroh reluctantly agreed. “Back to the airport where the rest of the platoon waited in the aircraft. The Army liaison I contacted has arranged for us to use a pair of vans and has set up a temporary barracks for us in one of the vacant hangars. He didn’t want us traipsing into one of the hotels with our cammies on and packing our weapons. I can understand that.”

The taxi took them back to the airport and to the hangar.

“Sure you don’t want to go somewhere else?” the cabby
asked. He was young, a student at the university, he had told them. “You the best customers I’ve had all day.”

Murdock gave him a five-rand tip and he grinned and drove away.

In the big hangar, they had set up twenty cots and two tables with chairs. Stroh contacted a catering service that would bring in meals twice a day, the first one at five that afternoon. Murdock, Gardner, and Stroh sat at one of the tables with pads of papers and pens trying to figure their next move.

“We’ve alerted the airports to let us know if three Arabs and a white woman try to buy commercial air tickets,” Stroh said. “We’ve talked to half a dozen of the best aircraft rental firms about not renting a plane to the same group. We don’t even know how many such outfits are in the area. There are over three million people in this little town, and lots of private planes.”

“Maybe he’s contacted Washington again,” DeWitt said.

Murdock set up Stroh’s SATCOM and handed him the mike. Stroh had immediate response to his call.

“What’s happening down there?” Wally Covington, the CIA director himself, asked on the first transmission.

Stroh filled him in on the lack of progress.

“We transferred the twenty-five million to his account in Switzerland. The director said the government there froze all assets of that account the moment the transfer was complete. We’re waiting to hear from the kidnapper again. Sounds like you’re stymied there with no leads.”

“About the size of it, Mr. Director. Any suggestions?”

“You might listen in on the set on this channel. He’s due to contact us in about two hours. We don’t have a clue what he’s going to say.”

“Best idea yet, sir. We’ll keep the channel open. Maybe something will turn up to help us. This town is so crowded it’s like Hong Kong. Well almost. Good luck with your next call.”

The evening meal came. Sixteen-ounce slabs of roast beef that melted between the molars. Stroh winced at the price, but he paid it in cash. After all, they were saving on the hotel bill.

Murdock called his brain trust in after the meal and put them down at the table.