Welcome to Dubai (The Traveler)
Read Welcome to Dubai (The Traveler) Online
Authors: Omar Tyree
Praise for Omar Tyree and
Welcome to Dubai
“With this second installment of
The Traveler
series, Omar Tyree’s transition from urban to mainstream fiction is complete. In
The Traveler: Welcome to Dubai,
Tyree moves the setting from the back streets of big-city America to Dubai, where, like the ancient Egyptians, poor laborers work on massive construction projects for men of unimaginable wealth. It is there his protagonist, Gary Stevens—the Traveler—is caught in the middle of an immigrant insurgency that places the lives of hundreds of hostages at risk.
Welcome to Dubai
is a well-plotted, riveting tale of Stevens reaching his potential as a highly trained operative. Tyree uses his unique voice to bring his characters to life, from the incomparable beauty and innocence of Ramia to the effervescent personality of the taxi driver Johnny, the characters are real and captivating. The next installment of
The Traveler
series can’t come soon enough. Wherever Tyree decides to take his readers, I want to be along for the ride.”
—
RON MCMANUS
, award-winning author of
Libido’s Twist
and
The Drone Enigma
“Omar Tyree’s characters pull you in and the action-packed plot does the rest. It’s a nonstop thriller. Tyree keeps us up reading way too late.”
—
WILLIAM ELLIOTT HAZELGROVE
, best-selling author of
The Pitcher
and
Tobacco Sticks
Welcome to Dubai
by Omar Tyree
© Copyright 2013 by Omar Tyree
ISBN 978-9-38467-49-3
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other – except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The names, incidents, dialogue, and opinions expressed are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
Published by
210 60th Street
Virginia Beach, VA 23451
212-574-7939
Publisher
John Köehler
Executive Editor
Joe Coccaro
THE TRAVELER
WELCOME TO DUBAI
Omar Tyree
Contents
October 2012
Chapter 1
A delta jumbo jet from the United States passed over Saudi Arabia, heading east for the United Arab Emirates. The descending flight, full of passengers, made its way into the airspace of the city of Dubai in the early afternoon, passing over an inspiring landscape of new and still developing properties. The opulent construction of Dubai included five-, six- and seven-star hotels and resorts, the largest shopping malls on the planet, and the tallest building in the world, along with an advanced transportation system of high-speed rails. There were state-of-the-art sporting complexes, international gold, diamond and clothing markets, an inside ski resort and hundreds of tourist attractions. Scores of new apartment buildings and villas housed the hundreds of thousands of immigrant citizens of the world who had traveled there to help design and build this paradise in the sand and live in its splendor.
Abdul Khalif Hassan breathed heavily with anxiety as he stared out of his large office window at the steady stream of flights arriving and departing from Dubai’s international airport. He stood at the corner window in his office on the twenty-seventh floor of an elaborate downtown building near the waterfront of the Persian Gulf and Dubai’s famous man-made Palm Islands. An Arabian businessman of royal lineage in his late thirties, Abdul wore a fine designer suit with a striking white shirt and a colorful silk tie. He was a wealthy and confident member of the
Emirati,
the ruling class of local families of the Middle East, who had benefited from their ownership of abundant oil property. The Hassan family and many other Arabian businessmen had now moved into the tourism, hotel and retail industries, where Abdul’s recent plans were not proceeding as scheduled. Construction of his new hotel had fallen nearly a year behind completion.
Abdul’s smooth, light-brown forehead tightened with concern as he ran his hand through his dark mane of thick, wavy hair. He sighed in frustration.
“When will we have the next genius design robots to do the work of construction on time?” he asked rhetorically.
In the advertisements, brochures and worldwide promotions of Dubai, every building was complete, where in reality, many of their grand-scale projects remained in feverish construction, with cranes atop buildings and unfinished streets below.
Hamda Sharifa Hassan, Abdul’s regal wife, stood in his office not far from him. Hearing her husband’s impatience, she walked over to comfort him, placing her hand in the small of his back.
“You cannot rush time, Abdul. Everything will happen when it is supposed to, Allah willing,” she told him calmly. In her mid-twenties, Hamda wore a knee-length white dress with tiny, vertical red stripes. Around her neck was a thick gold necklace and seashell amulet that held a large ruby. With it, she wore matching gold-and-seashell earrings. She was a stunning young queen with dark, straight hair past her shoulders, and she was college educated and mature beyond her years.
“We should go out to eat at the Promenade,” she suggested. “It will take your mind off your worries about construction.”
Abdul nodded in response to her proposition, but he could not take his mind off of his projects.
“Anything you want,” he grumbled. He leaned forward and kissed his wife on the cheek.
Hamda frowned and eyed her husband, knowingly. “Your stress will not make anything better. Relax, and leave it all up to Allah. The Magnificent will see all of your plans through. Has Allah ever failed you before?” she challenged him.
“Of course not,” Abdul objected fiercely. Such a charge was considered dishonorable and blasphemous.
His wife reached forward to hold his hands in hers and to face him, taking his attention away from the landscape outside the window.
She told her husband with conviction, “Abdul, you will be successful at everything you do, and so will our children. So stop wasting my visit with you, and let’s go do lunch.” She continued to stare into his dark-brown eyes to settle him.
Finally, he grinned and loosened up. “Hamda, don’t you know we cannot rush time?” he mocked his wife.
She tapped his arm gently and chuckled at his sarcasm.
“Come on, let’s go,” she demanded. “Call for the car.”
She moved to cover herself in a white
abaya,
the traditional Muslim garb for public viewing, and added a royal, red-trimmed
khimar
to cover her head and shoulders.
Abdul stepped quickly away from his wife and toward his desk.
“First, let me call my management.”
Hamda eyed him again in irritation.
Men will be men,
she thought.
My husband has the heart of a bull.
Abdul picked up the phone from his desk and made a call to the management office of his various developing properties. His young wife watched him and took a seat with patience.
*****
At one of the hundreds of construction sites owned and financed by the
Emirati
of Dubai, a project manager, wearing a red turban over his traditional white
throbe,
nodded with a cell phone to his ear.
“Yes, praise be to Allah.”
He hung up his phone with urgent new orders to speed up his crew, moving immediately to inspect a group of workers who had taken their lunch break on the dusty ground floor of a rising skyscraper.
“How many minutes have you been on break?”
The sandy-brown men with thick, dark hair, dressed in identical light-blue uniforms, were startled. The imposing man in the long white garb seemed to have appeared out of nowhere.
“We, we just took our break,” a well-respected worker responded for all of them. He was a soft-spoken native of India.
“Are you sure?” the manager questioned.
The Indian man nodded respectfully. “Yes.”
Some of his co-workers were not as cordial. They looked at the Emirates overseer with disdain, tired of the disrespect they received as immigrant workers. The large population of multicultural immigrants did the majority of the building in Dubai—immigrants from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, Taiwan, Egypt and Ethiopia, with architects and engineers from Germany, France, America and Australia. They had come from all around the world to work and live there. These hardworking men with wives and families felt they should be allowed to eat at work in peace, especially on a job where many of them had been bused in to give their all from sunup to sundown.
“What are you looking at?” the manager asked a particularly stern-faced worker. He was a tall and rugged Pakistani, who leaned against an iron pole with his bowl of rice and bread. The Pakistani could care less about respecting a man who did not respect him. Nevertheless, he needed the job, so he looked away to avoid a confrontation.
The manager attempted to bully him anyway. “You heard me. What are you looking at?”
The Indian co-worker spoke up to support his crewman. “He is okay. He is just tired and hungry. A man gets cranky when he cannot eat,” he joked with a chuckle.
The manager continued to stare down the rugged Pakistani, unafraid of his superior size. He even walked in closer, crowding his space.
“You tell him not to look at me like that again,” he informed the Indian to translate. The manager assumed the Pakistani worker could not speak English.
When the Pakistani looked into his Indian co-worker’s eyes, the Indian man became hesitant to relay the message. Instead, he turned back to the Muslim overseer.
“Yes, I, I will,” he stammered.
“You tell him what I said
now
,” the manager demanded.
Suddenly, the tension between them all became apparent. The Pakistani man met the overseer’s ire and refused to back down. He stepped forward against the restraints of his co-workers, who frantically jumped in between the two men to hold him back.