A Devil Is Waiting - Jack Higgins [67]
Miller came in wearing combat fatigues, his head and face wrapped in black-and-white checkered cotton, and Holley moved in after him. The costume was perfect, and as Sara had suggested, he had wound a cotton headcloth about his head, its folds falling to his shoulders.
“They’d love you in the bazaar,” Miller told him.
Wali Hussein came down the stairs with a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, a blue cotton scarf wound around his neck. He wore a black flying jacket and a khaki shirt and trousers. Dillon was wearing identical khaki.
“I’ll fly like this and steal his flying jacket and the baseball cap when we get there.”
“My spare shirt and trousers,” Wali said.
“You should he honored,” Dillon told him.
All conversation died at that moment, as Sara drifted in, moving out of the gloomy shadows like some dark ghost in her black robes.
“Will I do?” she asked.
“Most certainly,” Colonel Hamza told her. “You fit the part perfectly.”
“Then let’s get going.” She went to the Raptor and reached for the helping hand that Gregory Slay offered her.
ELEVEN
Wali Hussein had discussed the flight with Greg Slay before they left. Short flights to towns and villages by his three Raptors were commonly accepted by air traffic control at Peshawar. The one he had filed for a twenty-mile run to Dimla aroused no comment; nor did the fact that at five hundred feet and ten miles south, it swung west across the border with Afghanistan. Greg Slay at the controls, they set course for Amira.
The weather was atrocious, heavy rain mixed with those large wet snowflakes, the mountains in the distance shrouded in mist. The landscape below, in the heat of summer arid and barren, stretched to a gray and miserable infinity, patchy with snow. Here and there, what had once been fissures in the ground were now swollen with water.
They passed the occasional mud house, sometimes four or five such dwellings huddled together. Occasionally two or three people would appear and stand together, staring up, although, muffled as they were in winter garments, it was impossible to tell if they were male or female.
Harry Miller, who was wearing an old sheepskin robe over his uniform, stood by the machine gun, peering out. “What a bloody awful place. The backside of the world.”
“That’s why they call it the Wilderness,” Hamza shouted. “Tribal laws alone apply here. They can do what they want.”
Miller crouched beside him. “I’m trying to imagine Ali Selim fitting in here. In London a couple of days ago, now here in some mud hut, living a primitive life.”
“But with a mobile phone, don’t forget—that’s all he really needs,” Hamza reminded him.
“Why is it so important for him to be here, of all places?” Miller asked.
“Al Qaeda reigns supreme in areas like this. The tribesmen from these mountains are warlike by tradition and easily recruited for the training camps in Waziristan. To them, Osama bin Laden was the next best thing to the Prophet himself. A great man who made them proud to be Muslim, proud to see Americans and British humiliated by what the West calls terrorism, but they regard as a holy struggle.”
“So when Ali Selim appears in their midst, it’s like the Second Coming?” Miller asked.
“A Christian concept, that, and quite different,” Hamza said. “But he has enormous power and respect.”
Miller shook his head. “I still think religious differences are a poor reason to kill someone. I’m sure most people would agree if pressed, whatever their religion.”
Wali Hussein turned and scrambled down, leaving Greg Slay on his own, and said to Miller, “Not long now. You and the colonel will stay well back out of sight, and Slay must join you. They will expect to see only me at the controls, and my cousin and the woman.”
Hamza said, “All right, we’re not fools. Raise your arms.”
“Not again,” Wali Hussein said, but did as he was told.
Hamza searched him, running his hands everywhere, and found nothing. Wali Hussein said, “Can I go now?”
“Just get on with it.” Hamza turned to Miller. “He’s such a devious little bastard,