Final Flight (29 page)

“Sentries out,” Qazi told the people in
the back of the van. He heard the rear door open and
saw, in the rearview mirror, a man black
clothing with a submachine gun post himself against the large
metal trash box on the edge of the alley. Another
man dressed similarly trotted past the front
of the van and disappeared around the corner; his post was
opposite the gate. “Anything on the scanner?”
Qazi asked over his shoulder.

“No.” It was Noora. She was monitoring the
police and Carabinieri frequencies.

Through his binoculars Qazi could see Ali working
on the doorknob to the office of the helicopter
company. The hangar windows were all dark.

Then Ali opened the door and disappeared inside.
In a moment the lights in the office shone through the
windows. Since this was normal when the company was
waiting for a late-night passenger, it should arouse no
comment. One of the two hangar doors slowly slid
open. Qazi raised a hand-held radio to his
lips. “Van two, go.” In a few seconds he
heard the engine of the other van. It came down the
street past the alley and turned in at the gate.
Qazi had instructed the driver to pause at the
guard shack, and he did so. When he drove past
two parked helicopters and through the open
hangar door. “Van three, go.”

Almost a minute lapsed before this van passed the
alley where Qazi sat.

It also came to a brief halt at the gate, then
threaded between the helicopters and entered the hangar.
Now the door slid shut.

They waited.

“Nothing on the scanner,” Noora told him.
At last the door to the office opened and a man
appeared. Qazi could see that he wore the same
uniform as the gate guard. This man walked the
hundred feet across the tarmac to the guard shack.

Qazi turned in his seat. “Noora, it’s time.”
She took off the earphones and gathered her shoulder
bag.

“Don’t kill any Italians unless
absolutely necessary. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Shoot any Palestinian the instant he
disobeys. And watch Ali’s back for him.

She nodded.

She stepped between the feet of the men sitting in the
back of the vehicle and exited out the rear door.
Qazi watched her. The man behind the wheel of the sedan
parked behind the van got out and Noora took
his place. The engine of the sedan came to life and the
car eased past the van, stopping at the sidewalk as
Noora looked both ways. Qazi could see the
black outline ofJarvis’s head above the top of the
backseat. Then Noora accelerated into the street and
turned left toward the gate.

Behind him Qazi could hear the rear door of the van
being closed.

In a few minutes five men emerged from the
hangar and walked to the helicopter furthest from the
guard shack. They began to preflight it with
flashlights.

A small two-door sedan came down the
street. As it went by Qazi could see a man and
woman in the front seat. It passed the entrance to the
airfield without slackening its pace and disappeared
around the far corner.

Sound carried and echoed through the alleys. He could
faintly hear a man and woman shouting at each
other, and through some fluke of acoustics, snatches of
television audio.

The gentle breeze felt good after the sticky heat
of the day. Qazi sat and watched the flashlights
move around the helicopter, erratically and
haphazardly.

The five men on the other side of the fence spent
five minutes examining the first helicopter. When
they left it and moved to the next one, a voice
came over Qazi’s radio. “It’s okay.
Fuel sample satisfactory.”

“Roger.”

A small pickup truck came down the street
from comthe north, its headlights almost lost in the black
evening. It shot down the street at full
throttle, slowing slightly as it passed Qazi so
it could make the next corner, which it tore around.
He could hear the sound of its engine fading for half a
minute after it had passed. A moment later he
heard the engine of a large truck. Thirty
seconds after it came into view, engine laboring, and
drove up the street with its diesel engine
snorting. “This one’s okay.”

“Roger.”

What had he forgotten? What was left undone?
As he sat there behind the wheel of the van Colonel
Qazi reviewed the operation yet again. He glanced
at his watch from time to time, and turned to check on the
men sitting patiently behind him. They looked
scruffy in their worn, dirty jeans and
short-sleeve knit and pullover shirts.
Most of the shirts were filthy. Some of them were torn.
Most of the men wore dirty tennis shoes.
Satisfied, Qazi esumed scanning the warehouses
with his binoculars.

The camel thieves were two young boys, about
eleven and twelve years of age. Orphans. His
uncle had forced them to dig the water holes and fill
bags for the camels, which were let out on hobbles
to graze. When the work was done, the boys were fed. They
had no food of their own. Then the men had lain in the
shade as the sun scorched the earth. The two thieves
huddled together against a stone below where Qazi and his cousin
sat with their rifles across their knees. The old man
found a place further away, where he could keep an
eye on the camels. Qazi wandered over in late
afternoon and found him reading the Koran.

They tied up the thieves for the night. At dawn
the next day the animals were watered again and the last of the
dried dates and bread were shared. “Who is the
eldest?” the old man asked. One of the thieves
acknowledged that he was.

The old man looked at his son and Qazi.
“Seize him. Put his right hand against that rock. was
He pointed at a large stone.

“No! Allah be praised have mercy. No.”
Kill me instead.” Qazi had helped drag the
sobbing boy to the indicated stone. The old man took
his sword from the saddle of his camel. “You have
violated Allahs law. And you know the law”

The sword made a sickening sound as it bit into the
boy’s wrist. It took theman three
chops to sever the hand. He bound the wrist with a
tourniquet and his own undershirt.

They set the two on their own camel, a beast
sullering so badly with the ange that it had only
habits hair. The old man jammed their rifle
into its cabbard and slapped the beast into motion. The
young boy held his brother in the saddle as the animal
climbed slowly out of the wadi and disappeared over the
rim.

“Uncle.”

The old man face was like chiseled stone. He
gathered the camels that had been taken and roped them
together.

The three had ridden for several miles when they
heard the faint echo of a shot.

The old man reined his camel in and looked about
wildly. He turned in the saddle and looked toward
the west, where the shot must have been fired.
Then he dropped the lead rope and beat his mount into a
gallop. Qazi and the cousin followed. They found the
lone camel standing amid a patch of lava stones and
thorn bushes in a shallow depression. The boy with the
missing hand lay on the ground the barrel of the rifle
in his mouth, his toe on the trigger. His brains lay
in the sand above the body.

His younger brother sat at his feet.

The old man prostrated himself toward the rising
sun. The sun rose higher and higher into the cloudless
sky. “Allah, I have believed in the words of
your Prophet all my days. I have read the book
and followed the book. I have kept the faith of my
fathers. I have obeyed the law. I have raised my
sons to obey the law. But it is not enough.”

“Uncle,” Qazi said. “Do not blaspheme.
He hears everything.” The old man rose from the
ground. His face was lined and his beard was gray.

“The book is not enough for a simple man like me.
Allah knows. “He had looked about him at the
stones and sand and the merciless sky and the twisted body.
“Not enough.”

They buried the dead boy. They took the other
boy home with them and he was taken in by the old man’s
eldest son.

Three years later the old man sent Qazi
north to the city to join the army. The small radio
crackled to life. “This one is okay.”

“Roger.”

Qazi started the engine and put the van in gear.
As he drove away he looked in the driver’s
mirror at the hangar lights and the ungainly
machines. The rotors were spread now, and they
flapped gently in the rising breeze. The wind was
gusting.

The book is not enough. His uncle had been right
about that. But perhaps, Qazi thought, the Prophet was right
and paradise will be better than this life. Perhaps not.
Wherever the old man was, that was where Qazi wished
to be. If tonight’s scheme went awry, he well
knew, he would join the old man very soon. Ah
well, perhaps it was time.

“You’re really serious about adopting?”

Jake and Callie were walking past the Royal
Palace, under the hite marble statues of the medieval
kings of Naples. They joked, Jake thought,
appropriately hairy and fierce, clad in their
armor with swords in hand. Across the street, around the
fountain the Piazza del Plebiscito,
clusters of teenage girls were flirting with the swarms
of boys cruising on their Vespas and motocross
bikes. Every now and then a girl hiked her skirt
up, swung onto the back of the seat, and the boy
blasted off into traffic. Apparently this was the place
if you were young and growing up in apoli.

“I went to see the agency about four months ago.
We would have to wait years for a baby. And these older
children who need special love and care, they spend their
lives bouncing from foster home to foster home.”

“So if we ask for a baby, we really won’t be
helping.”

“Oh, Jake.” She squeezed his hand. “That’s
precisely it. I’ve met Amy Carol about
five times, and she needs a family. And we can be
that family for her.”

“Tell me about her.”

Callie began with a physical description.
They rounded the corner of the castle and picked their way
through the parking lot, past the entrance to the Galleria
Umberto, and around the scafolding on the front of the
opera house. Jake noticed several prostitutes
standing on the steps to the Galleria, but Callie was
describing the little girl’s emotional problems and paid
no attention.

A hundred feet further on he saw a tall,
willowy woman in spike eels and a black dress
standing under the light on the corner cross the street.

Her low-cut, strapless dress clung to her
figure ike cellophane and only came down
to midthigh. She was busy djusting her bosom.
Callie was reciting Amy Carol’s family
history.

Callie stopped dead on the sidewalk, in
mid-sentence, and Jake jerked his head from the far
corner. Directly in front of them on the
sidewalk a woman with exposed breasts stood
talking to a man leaning from a car.

She wore high heels and some type of black
lngerie, but her breasts were completely bare. A
transparent robe was draped around her shoulders.

keep walking, Jake urged. Callie looked
the woman up and down and gave the man in the car a
piercing glance, which he ignored.

Ten paces further on three motor scooters
drew to the curb The young male drivers each had a
teenage girl behind him. They chatted excitedly,
looking back at the working hooker. Jake and
Callie kept walking. The boys eased the
scooters into motion and made a U-turn.

Jake looked back over his shoulder. The
scooter made another U-turn and swung into the
curb where the car had been. The woman surveyed the
teenagers with disdain and the Italian came loud and
fast, audible even above the traffic.

“Stop gawking, Grafton,” Callie ordered.
“She’s a 36 C-cup and needs dental work.”

She’s lying about the teeth, Jake told himself.
Not even Callie had been looking at her mouth.
“I wonder where we could get you an outfit like that?”

“Oooh, you men! You like that, huh?” She began
to sasha along, rolling her shoulders and hips.

“Just admiring the local color.” Callie was still
doing it. Pedestrians were staring. “Stop that!”

“Twenty thousand lire.”

“What?” If she kept on, she was going to need
a chiropractor “Twenty thousand lire, sailor,
and I no givva da kisses.”

“How much for kisses too?”

“More than you gotta, sailor boy. Only da
real men get kisses.”

A loafer on the grass whistled at her and she
dropped the charade, grasping Jake’s arm tightly
and laughing.

“Amy Carol’s gonna have a real
fireball for a mom,” Jake said and led her toward
the promenade around the Castel Nuovo.

They stood against the rail of the moat and watched the
vendors roasting food in makeshift barbecues
on the sidewalk. Working-class families out
for the evening sat on the grass and a roasted ears of
corn and pieces of chicken. Dogs with noses to the
ground charged through the crowd searching for abandoned
delicacies.

Jake counted five young couples, three on the
promenade, and two on the grass, locked in
passionate embraces.

The tinny beep cacophony of motor scooter
and car horns was the perfect accompaniment.
Napkins and food wrappers were swept away
by rising wind.

“Saturday night in Naples.”

“You enjoy Naples, don’t you?” Callie
asked, and brushed back blowing hair from her face.

Jake grinned broadly and led her on. They
crossed the bouled that led down to fleet landing and
strolled down the Via pretis, which paralleled the
Via Medina, a block to the west. zlor bars and
pizza shops lined the east side of the street.
Jake and Callie dropped into an empty
table at a sidewalk bar and had wine as pairs,
threesomes, and foursomes of American whores in
civilian clothes wandered by, noisy tourists in
search of action.”

The Graftons were walking hand in hand when a young
man out of an alley, collided with Jake, and went
sprawling. Jake ost fell, but Callie steadied
him. ‘Sorry.” The man scrambled to his feet.
‘What’s the rush?” Jake demanded.