Shooting the Sphinx (19 page)

“Would you like to meet George Tenet?” offered Prince Amir.

Ari didn't quite believe his ears. “The former head of the CIA George Tenet?”

“He will be here tomorrow night,” said Prince Amir. “He is a personal friend and I could introduce you.”

Ari tried to comprehend exactly what was happening. On a gut level, he found the prospect unappetizing. “I don't know if he would approve of the movie I'm making. You might want to check with him to see. He might not even want me to shoot in Jordan. Is this a problem?”

“Why would it be?” asked Prince Amir.

“In Egypt, you have to give your script, translated into Arabic, to the Ministry of Defense to approve,” explained Ari.

“There is no censorship in Jordan.” The prince said it quite firmly.

“And film permits take an enormous amount of…” Ari raised his fingers and rubbed them together.

“Permits here are instantaneous and free of charge. There is no bribery here. It is not tolerated.”

“Excellent.” Ari was pleased. “If an actor from Israel wanted to…” Again Ari tried to read the answer before he finished the question.

“Any artist may work in Jordan,” said the prince.

“With an Israeli passport?” Ari pressed the point.

“Anyone,” said Prince Amir.

Princess Jala asked, “How do you find the Egyptians to work with?”

“Very strong willed,” admitted Ari. “They can be a little bit…”

“As if their way is the only way?” suggested the prince.

Ari agreed. “Exactly … stubborn. But I suppose Americans are worse.”

“Not at all.”

“The Iraq War?”

Prince Amir leaned back in his armchair to parse his own words. “We were constantly asked for advice. We gave it freely. We predicted everything that would happen. We could have prevented all of the tragedy, almost all. Americans are perfectly rational people, but they don't listen. They listen but they hear only what they want.”

“And George Tenet?” asked Ari.

“His job was to hear only what he was supposed to hear.” The prince seemed both sad and amused. “But that is the story of your movie, is it not?”

The next day Ari visited every flat street in Amman. He took many pictures. On the way to the airport, he was brought to a military base. Duad, the location scout, showed Ari a line of Humvees that could each be used in the movie for three hundred dollars a day, including driver. M1 tanks were a thousand dollars a day, delivered. In a hangar was a brand-new Black Hawk helicopter.

“I'm going to find a way to use this.” Ari walked up to the chopper and ran his hand along the cargo bay door. “We'll think up a shot for it. What will the military charge us?”

“The same as the Egyptians.”

“How low can we fly?” asked Ari.

“There is no limit.”

Of course, thought Ari, why would there be a limit for a prince?

 

Chapter 40

A day later, Ari was back in Cairo scouting places that were supposed to double for Iraq. He saw several houses that would play well, but he couldn't stop his mind from circling back to the rows of the Jordanian tanks and Humvees and, of course, the Black Hawk helicopter. Wistfully, Ari imagined it swooping overhead, a shot impossible to get in Cairo, but easy in Amman. In the afternoon, he scouted several mosques, and Samir came to join him in the courtyard of the last one.

“Doesn't it look like an Iraqi mosque to you?” Samir asked.

“In Hollywood, a mosque is a mosque is a mosque,” said Ari, snapping a single photo of the intricate floor of ancient tile mosaic where the men would soon come to pray.

“And all Arabs look alike?”

Ari shrugged. “Maybe late at night.”

“
Alahu Akbar. Alahu Akbar.”
The call to prayer sounded from the minaret above.

“And night approaches,” Samir said. “Tomorrow we will pick you up at six in the morning.”

“Why so early?” asked Ari.

“In order to drive out to Wadi al Jadid.” Samir pulled out a cigarette.

“Wadi al what?”

“The Western Desert.” Samir took a drag and let the smoke drift out of his mouth.

“Sand dunes?” asked Ari. A whole day lost driving out into the desert with no phone, no Internet, no chance to do any work. He mused over the idea of asking for the location scout to take pictures and bring them back, but Samir didn't give him the chance to back out.

“Sand of such a quantity that you will not find in Jordan.” A fierce pride curled the corners of Samir's mouth, the journey now a matter of honor.

What could Ari say? So he found himself outside the Mena House at 6:02
A.M.
the next morning, where he met Samir. A red Toyota Land Cruiser waited with two Egyptians in the front seat, the location manager, and a fellow named Wael, who owned the SUV. They were both eager and wired on Egyptian coffee. Ari pet the bomb-sniffing German shepherd and stepped around the security guard holding the proverbial mirror on a stick checking the bottom of the car for explosives. The moment a Westerner entered a vehicle, the search was over.

Ari had taken a pillow from his room. He'd spent enough of his life driving around in vans and four-by-fours to lose any sleep on a scout. Ari could feel Samir's eyes watch him closely, looking for any hint or clue that Ari would send his job to Jordan. Ari had no thoughts one way or the other, so he screwed his head into his pillow and closed his eyes.

At first, Ari feigned sleep. He could hear the chatter of Arabic from the front seat until the silences between phrases began to grow. It wouldn't be long now. Ari knew from many a car journey with film crews all over the world, the small talk always peters out, and then even thoughts, until a vacant meditative stare takes over, but not for the man in charge, no, never for him. No, Ari's eyes stayed closed.

For an hour or two, Ari would doze and wake. If the car jolted or slowed, he would lift an eyelid and catch a glimpse of a water buffalo ploughing a field, or a scrawny dray mule dragging a cart, or an old 1960's truck coughing black smoke, its bed piled up impossibly high with bales of cotton.

On his side of the road, a green swathe of cultivated land followed the bank of the Nile. They drove south, following the river toward its distant glacial Ugandan source. An ancient tractor, its sun-baked red paint faded to a rusty pink, chugged along tilling under plucked beanstalks and bare chickpea plants. Children picked cotton. Men dressed in dishdashas moved among them with sacks to collect the white puffy little balls. Half a mile beyond that, the lush greenery of the crops ended.

The Nile fed a mile-wide oasis, a river of green in an ocean of sand. Every possible hectare at the edge of the desert had been cultivated for thousands of years. An ancient system of irrigation ditches, occasionally watered by an odd diesel pump chugging away, spilled the river up its banks to flood then dribble through those narrow farms.

The red Toyota slowed to a crawl at a military checkpoint that looked like a tollbooth. A soldier wearing sunglasses waved them over to the side of the road with his rifle.

“What's up?” Ari looked at Samir for the first time since getting into the car.

“We are about to enter a restricted zone. There is little reason to come. Very few people live out here. We are almost at the Sahara.”

The soldier asked some questions of Wael and pointed at Ari.

“He wants to see your passport,” said Samir.

Ari pulled out his well-worn little blue book and passed it up front. He was always nervous whenever any soldier took hold of his passport. He couldn't help himself. He'd had to buy it back from underpaid sergeants on roadsides a few times in other countries. He looked at Samir, who seemed to enjoy Ari's discomfort. The soldier found the big tourist visa and started to argue with the location manager.

“Why doesn't he just give him the two bucks?” asked Ari.

Samir didn't answer. Ari finally pulled out a couple of bills and handed them out his own window. The soldier took them, closed the passport, and handed it back.

“Do you think we like paying baksheesh to any soldier or policeman who thinks it's his right?” asked Samir.

This wouldn't happen in Jordan, Ari almost said, but kept quiet.

Again they passed the towering cotton bales on the rickety truck. The Toyota left the highway, veering off onto a road straight out into the desert dust as far as the eye could see. They drove for an hour without passing another car. Strange shapes emerged in the road casting long shadows. Giant sandstone pillars rose up one hundred feet high, some shaped like jagged mushrooms, their shade like beach umbrellas, their bases cut away from beneath them by millennia of shifting sands.

The tan pillars gave way to flat rocks; polished black pebbles polka-dotted the desert floor. A shimmering speck of green materialized down the road, a distant oasis; then it disappeared into heat waves on the horizon. At first, Ari thought it was a mirage, but the green speck returned several times, then grew into date palms rising up slowly above the sand. As the Toyota approached, Ari saw a few very dark-complected men wearing turbans up in the trees pruning dead palm fronds or lowering flat baskets of red dates on long ropes from treetops forty feet up in the air.

Almost lunchtime, they stopped for gas, and bought water and tan beans, which they scooped out of small metal dishes with flat hot bread pulled right out of a roadside oven fed by dried palm ribs. Boys sold them dusty brown dates on the vine, a large cluster for half an Egyptian pound. They were meltingly sweet and so cheap. Ari and Samir bought much more than they wanted. Their hunger sated, they piled back into the red Toyota and drove off away from the shade of the green fronds out into the noonday glare.

Another half hour and Ari saw what they had come for. The horizon undulated. Dunes swelled around the car as it drove among them—first five, then ten, then twenty feet high, some massive as beached whales.

“The Bedou call this The Sea of Sand,” said Samir. “The end of the Sahara desert. There is nothing for two thousand miles to the West, but…”

“Emptiness,” Ari said.

Samir said something in Arabic to Wael, the driver. Wael nodded, took his foot off the gas, came to a stop, and shifted the Land Cruiser into four-wheel drive. With a lurch, they turned off the road onto the sand.

They drove fast along a row of small dunes, a stream of dust kicking up behind them. When they hit a dip in the dune line, Wael swerved over the crest and cut over to the next line of dunes a few feet taller than the ones before. Like surfers, they raced sideways along the static waves until they found a gap that would not flip them and crossed and climbed up the faces of bigger and bigger swells, each crest revealing a more enormous one on an elusive, tantalizing horizon. Sometimes the vehicle would fly over the top of a crest and drop airborne down the face of the next dune.

The effect was as if the car were shrinking down to the size of a tiny toy. The dunes rose up to at least three or four hundred feet tall—almost as tall as the Great Pyramid at Giza. Elated, Ari wanted to go higher. If Samir had pointed Wael straight across the desert, Ari would not have objected.

“Happy?” Samir shouted over the roar of the engine when the wheels left the ground.

“Yes!” Ari shouted back.

Summit fever overcame them. They were now on a quest for the largest, twisting around one towering dune after another. The Land Cruiser surged up on top of a plateau before an abyss.

“STOP!” screamed Ari then Samir in Arabic.

Wael slammed on the brakes, throwing them all forward. They could not see the sand below, the face of the dune was too steep, at least a five-hundred-foot drop.

Wael put the Toyota in reverse and backed down the face of the dune, but too slowly. The sand slid down around them. Wael tried to go forward. The wheels spun. He tried to reverse. They spun again.

“Doesn't he know that he's just digging the car down deeper when he spins the wheels?” asked Ari.

“The car is his,” Samir snapped as he opened his door. Wael jumped out and immediately started digging away the sand in front of the wheels with his bare hands.

Ari watched for a minute, thinking that digging would lead nowhere, but he said nothing. Wael finished scooping out craters in the soft sand in front of his wheels, jumped back into the driver's seat, and gunned the engine. The car rolled down into the holes he had dug and almost up the other side until the wheels spun again. Wael dug new holes and repeated the process, gunning the engine with the same result. Impatiently, Ari took his camera case and a bottle of water out of the car.

“What are you doing?” asked Samir, alarmed.

“I'm going to snap some pictures of dunes.”

“The desert is a dangerous place.” Samir walked over the soft sand to Ari. “I'll come with you.”

“Don't worry. Once you get the car out, follow my footprints and find me.”

Ari turned his back on Samir and started to walk away.

“Wait, take a walkie-talkie.” Samir handed him a radio from the car. “If the wind gets strong, you must come back quickly or you will lose your way. Your footsteps will be covered and we will not be able to locate you.”

“Okay,” said Ari, taking the radio and pushing the key to talk. “Radio check.” He heard his own voice on the other walkies in the car. Then he turned and left them. He walked along the ridge where it dipped. As he descended, he started little sand avalanches with his feet. The fine grit worked its way down around his socks into his sneakers.

This isn't the beach, he thought grimly. The powdery sensation between his toes was annoying but not uncomfortable. He resigned himself to the dry powdered grit and climbed up the next ridge, trying to follow the firmest sand and find the easiest path to walk. When Ari reached the top of the next dune, his radio crackled.