The Scorpion’s Bite Read online

  Jalil nodded. “They’re after sabotage. If they blow up the pipeline…”

  It was beginning to make sense to Lily now, this wandering through the desert from site to site, even the accidental meeting with Suleimon’s encampment.

  Jalil paused, wary, watching a man on a camel ride toward them, waving, his cloak flapping as he came over the ridge.

  When the man drew closer, Jalil relaxed. “It’s Hamud. Hamdulillah. May Allah be praised.”

  Lily gave Hamud a broad smile. “Welcome back. We missed you.”

  “I thought that whoever the scorpion bites will reach the grave,” Klaus said.

  “And so I shall,” Hamud said, dismounting and couching his camel. “Someday. But not yet.”

  “Even if it takes forty years?” Lily asked.

  “Or more. Inshallah. If Allah is willing.”

  “To what do you owe your good fortune?” Jalil asked, “Ma’ah hadas?”

  “My people have a cure for the bite.” Hamud spread out his hand and extended his fingers.

  “First.” He pressed down his index finger. “To break the spell of the scorpion, a friend slaughters a neighbor’s goat.

  “Second.” He pressed down his middle finger. “The friend puts the goat innards into the water to wash the bite.

  “Then,” he turned down the next finger. “The friend digs a grave.”

  Taking in his breath somberly for a dramatic pause, he looked at each of them in turn. “He carried me to the grave. In a few minutes, he carried me out, and quickly, quickly, put the innards of the goat in my place.

  “And the poison was passed to the goat.” He opened his hand and flung out his arm, as if to toss away an evil spell. “The spell of the scorpion was broken.” He clapped his hands together. “I lived.”

  “Hamdulillah,” said Lily.

  Jalil nodded in agreement. “Hamdulillah,” he said, and moved toward his horse. “But for now, we must get back to Azraq, check on H5 and make preparations to attack T3.”

  “What’s T3?” Lily asked.

  “A pumping station on the pipeline through Syria from Mosel. Feeds oil to the Vichy French and the Germans.”

  “That means,” Gideon said, “that we have to extend our archaeological survey as far north as Palmyra. It’s never been adequately excavated.”

  “Palmyra?” Lily said. “It’s in Syria.”

  “In an oasis in the Great Syrian Desert, on a flat plain covered with desert pavement.” He smiled, shrugged and said to Lily, “It’s just north of T3.”

  “The Syrians call it Tadmor,” Jalil added. “There’s nothing there now, except for a small fort for the French Foreign Legion and the Syrian Camel Corp. That, and a few ugly houses.”

  Palmyra, Bride of the Desert, an oasis on the road to the riches of the Far East. Zenobia defeated the Romans as queen of Palmyra, one of a long line of fabulous warrior queens that intrigued Lily. Zenobia rode into battle fearless and passionate, hair flowing, breast exposed. Lily sometimes associated the ancient Greek myths of the Amazons with this tradition of warrior queens.

  Palmyra was near the T3 pumping station of the pipeline that led through Syria. It made sense. They were here because of the pipelines, one that led through Trans-Jordan to Haifa that supplied the British with oil, the other that ran through Nazi controlled Syria and supplied the Axis.

  But there was more to it than that. They kept moving toward Iraq, the Iraq governed by a child who had inherited the throne through the machinations of the romantic, manipulative British heiress, al Khatun.

  Iraq oil held the balance that fed the campaigns of the British and the Axis. And the linchpin was a sad-eyed child.

  Rashid Ali was in exile in Berlin, Glubb had said. But suppose he was in Syria?

  Lily put her hand on Gideon’s arm. “I’ll go with you, of course.”

  “It could be dangerous.”

  “I’ll watch your back.”

  “I don’t know.” Gideon smiled and shook his head. “You don’t have a very good track record watching people’s backs. Eastbourne in Tel el Kurnub, Drury in Tangier, both killed. If it happens a third time, you’ve established a trend.”

  “We’d better get going,” Jalil helped them pack up, mounted his horse, and led the motley procession as it turned back to Azraq, with Jalil and Awadh on horseback, Hamud on his camel, and the others in the Jeep.

  At the fort, Gideon parked and started toward the gate, then bent down to pick up something from the ground.

  “What is it?” Lily asked.

  “Looks like Qasim’s knife.” He held out a knife with a tooled black leather handle and sheath. “How did it get here? He had it with him in Wadi Rum.”

  Lily shuddered. “Whoever killed Qasim and took his knife is with us, here in Azraq.”

  The others arrived one by one and busied themselves watering and hobbling the animals, hitching the horses, couching the camel.

  Ibrahim watched them trudge inside. “Lies beget lies,” he said. “Betrayal begets betrayal.”

  In the morning, he was gone. The rusted shotgun with the broken barrel from World War I and the training rifle Jalil had brought for Lily were gone with him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Today it was just the three of them on their way to check on the pumping station at H5. They were prepared for the day like Boy Scouts, with canteens filled, canvas water bags hanging from the sides of the Jeep, sandwiches in a cooler in the back.

  Gideon drove east between the black lava hills along the Haifa-Baghdad road, with Lily in the passenger seat. Great lava boulders lined the road, hulking sentinels of an ancient volcanic eruption.

  Jalil sprawled in the back of the Jeep, gripping a large pair of field glasses like a new toy, taking them from the case, raising them to scan the flint-strewn plain and putting them back.

  “Seven times magnification.” Jalil patted the binocular case affectionately. “Bausch and Lomb, best make.”

  He handed Lily the field glasses. “Take a look.”

  She held them up to adjust the focus. The heavy binoculars banged against her cheek when the Jeep hit a bump, and she focused again.

  She held the rubber cups of the field glasses tight against her face, scanning the horizon, watching the dust swirling in their wake, and following the base of the low hills rising on either side.

  She spotted the slight dip in the hillside, covered with a slab of basalt.

  “Over there.” She pointed. “Looks like a cave.”

  Gideon left the track to turn the Jeep in the direction she was pointing. “Over where?”

  She lowered the binoculars. “Keep going straight.” The road was rougher now. “You’re going in the right direction.”

  She bounced off the seat, and down again. “For God sake, slow down.”

  “I see it now,” Gideon said.

  “What do you see?” Jalil said.

  Gideon pointed. “See that piece of basalt against the hill?”

  “Yes. So?”

  “Could be the entrance to a cave. Could be used to store arms.”

  Lily got out as soon as they reached the cave. “Smells more like garbage.” She pulled the basalt rock away from the small cave entrance.

  Inside, the stench was overwhelming.

  “Good God! It’s Ibrahim’s dog.” Two steps led down from the entrance. The dog, covered with bugs and slithering maggots, lay half on the edge of the bottom step.

  “The training rifle and old shotgun he stole are on the floor of the cave. I better go in.”

  She lowered herself to shimmy inside the entrance.

  “You sure you can so this?” Gideon asked.

  She sensed he meant her panic when she was trapped in the cave before they got to Azraq, and was mortified.

  “It won’t happen again. Not this time, anyway.”

  “What won’t?”

  Lily looked over her shoulder at him, smiled, and
slid warily into the cave, avoiding the dog, keeping her eyes on the rifle and shotgun. For a moment, she glanced toward the dog, gagged, and turned away. It won’t happen again, she told herself.

  She reached the floor and carefully lifted the shotgun through the entrance to Gideon outside, then reached for the rifle, ready to crawl up the steps. Holding the gun in both hands, she stretched up toward the entrance, pushed the butt of the rifle through, and lost her balance.

  She landed on the soft, half putrefied flesh of the dog.

  Creatures moved along her arm, crawled along her neck, crept inside her shirt. She leaped up the steps, scrambled through the opening, and came out screaming.

  She ripped off her shirt and stomped on it, slapping insects and maggots off her arms. Still screaming, she wriggled out of her slacks and stomped on them with her feet, hearing the crunch of the insects, stamping, shouting, “Go away, go away, go away.”

  Brushing her arms and legs again, she paused to lift the stone with both hands and heave it onto the clothes and quivering vermin on the ground. She jumped on it and collapsed, cross-legged, on the ground, weeping.

  Gideon brought a canteen and spilled water over her hands. “Here.” He handed her the canteen.

  She poured the water over her head and down her shoulders, rubbing at her arms and legs, brushing more insects into the dust. They crawled out of the sun. “What are those things?”

  “Maggots?”

  “The other things, those dark, hairy bugs.”

  “Dermestids. They’re beetles. Some people call them cemetery beetles.” He went back to the jeep and fished for a towel. “They clean up putrefying flesh.”

  “They were eating the dog?”

  “They eat carrion. Keep our cemeteries tidy and hygienic.”

  “If cemeteries are such healthy places,” Lily mumbled, “why aren’t the dead out playing tennis?”

  She rubbed herself vigorously with the towel, shook it out, rubbed and shook again. “They could eat me.” She stood up. “I could go to sleep tonight and in the morning I could wake up dead, nothing but a skeleton.”

  “They only eat decaying flesh.”

  She flicked off the last insect that she could find, then jumped up and down, shaking, to make strays fall away. “For all I know, I might be decaying.”

  Gideon looked her figure up and down with a sly smile. “I don’t think so.” He handed her a fresh shirt and slacks that he had retrieved from the Jeep. “And neither do the Bedouin watching from beyond the ridge.”

  Jalil stood discreetly with his back turned to her. But beyond him, Lily made out a pair of faint shadows with billowing cloaks at the top of the hill.

  Chapter Nineteen

  They drove on toward H5, bumping along the track that followed the pipeline, veering occasionally to avoid one of the black boulders scattered across the open plain.

  As they approached the pumping station, they heard the noise, like distant thunder, echoing among the hills long before they realized what was happening. Jalil lifted his field glasses, turned his head to sweep the horizon.

  Closer to the pumping station, the sound was more distinct, a steady series of blasts muffled, in part, by a wind that blew toward Iraq.

  A mile from H5, they pulled to the side of the road, and stood next to the Jeep openmouthed, watching dust and smoke erupt from the ground near the pumping station.

  Jalil peered through the field glasses again. “Vichy French fighter.” He lowered the binoculars. “He doesn’t see us yet.”

  Squinting, Lily could barely make out the outline of an airplane in the distance, saw it bank and turn, spew red tracer bullets, and leisurely bank again.

  “How do you know who it is?” she asked.

  “Body painted yellow, with the tricolor roundel near the tail. Glubb gave us photos, silhouettes of planes to identify.”

  This time, the fighter banked and flew directly at them in a flurry of noise, firing, churning fountains of dirt and dust as it came.

  “He spotted us,” Lily said.

  “Quick,” Jalil shouted over the roar of the engine, “under the Jeep.”

  “Shouldn’t we make a diversion?” Lily turned her back on the oncoming plane. “Draw him away from H5?”

  “He’s coming at us. We’re the diversion. Get under the Jeep.” Gideon grabbed her sleeve. “Now. It’s our only cover.”

  “We could drive in the other direction,” Lily still ignored the looming plane. “Slalom around the boulders.”

  “There’s no cover here,” Jalil said. “It would be suicide. After he kills us, he’ll go back to H5. We’d be dead for no reason.”

  She looked around at the open field, bare and gray and dusty. “But….”

  Gideon grasped her arm. “This is no time to gawk. He’s shooting at us. Come on, come on,” he shouted.

  “We have no anti-aircraft weapons,” Jalil said.

  “You have rifles.”

  “Are you crazy?” Jalil asked her. “You can’t shoot down a plane with a rifle.”

  The airplane bore down on them, firing, kicking up columns of dust.

  “He’s strafing.” Jalil turned away. “Under the Jeep. It’s our only chance.” He disappeared beneath the vehicle.

  Finally, she ducked under the running board, and crawled into the oily underbelly of the Jeep.

  She heard the fighter climb, bank, come in lower, the shriek of the engine receding, banking, returning again, lower.

  The Jeep vibrated, swayed under the strident attack of the plane.

  Dust clotted the air. The plane’s engines screamed. Its machine-gun chattered.

  It banked again, roared lower still, gripping the Jeep under its shadow, shooting a blast of sound, shattering a nearby boulder.

  A piece of the boulder rocked the Jeep with the impact. It ripped the canvas water bag hanging from the side, spewing water onto the desert-hard ground.

  The plane circled, banked for another strike. Lily held her breath, dug her nails into the dirt, watched the water spurt from the bag into a mud-soaked puddle.

  The fighter dove again, the rancorous roar deafening them.

  A wing dipped, almost scraped the Jeep.

  He’s flying too low. So close I can touch it. If he’s not careful…

  The plane hit the ground, flinging sparks in every direction, skidding on its crumpled belly.

  “My God,” Lily said, watching flashes fly off the ground. “Flint and steel. My God.”

  Gideon gasped. “It’s going to blow up. Got to get him out.”

  He scrambled out from under the Jeep, ran toward the plane.

  “Get back. It’s going to blow,” Jalil called after him, but Gideon still ran toward the plane.

  Jalil started toward him. “Gideon!”

  The plane erupted with a whoosh and a deep rumble, exploding in a blast of fire and smoke. The hulk kept moving, momentum carrying it forward, black smoke and orange flames trailing in its wake. Gideon stood, arms stretched out, silhouetted by the bright raging inferno.

  “Flint and steel.” Lily crawled out, tried to steady her legs to stand.

  “Flint and steel.” She couldn’t stop saying it, a formula for fire, for sparks of molten metal, for death in the bare desert.

  “Fuel was in the wings,” Jalil told her.

  “Flint and steel,” Lily chanted as the smell of gasoline and burning hair and flesh beat against her in waves of unbearable heat.

  She stared at the blaze shimmering behind a haze of heat, the firestorm belching black clouds that billowed skyward, and horror chilled her skin.

  “Ma’a es salaam,” Jalil murmured. “Go in peace.”

  Lily’s legs wobbled; she could hardly stay on her feet. She crept toward the back of the Jeep, leaned her head against the doorpost, climbed inside, shoved the binoculars aside, and huddled against the seat.

  She shook, tremors of shock disturbing the thick dust on the
seat, her hands and fingers moving in circles. Her knees rattled and she clamped her hands between her knees to force them still.

  She shivered as Jalil pulled Gideon back to the Jeep. “Hurry,” he said. “Get in.”

  “We can’t just leave him,” Gideon said.

  “Too late,” Jalil told him. “Get in. Have to check the damage to H5.”

  “Back there,” Jalil said as he drove toward H5 in a cloud of dust, “you were going to rescue the pilot before the plane blew up?”

  Gideon nodded.

  “Even though he tried to kill you minutes before?”

  “He was a human being,” Gideon said.

  In the back seat, Lily, calmer now, unclasped her hands and gripped the side of the Jeep tenuously, bouncing with each jolt.

  The fort guarding the pumping station at H5 was small, with irregular walls, built by the Desert Patrol. When the Jeep drew up, a soldier from the Desert Patrol emerged from a detached shed-like building.

  “You all right?” Jalil called to the soldier.

  “Hamdulillah,” he answered. “I took cover. Nothing I could do. Tried firing at them, but all I had was a rifle.”

  The soldier looked around and grunted. The walls of the fort were pockmarked, otherwise undamaged.

  “No damage to the pipeline, the pumping station?” Jalil asked.

  “No. I checked the gauges. I’ll check again.”

  He turned back to Jalil before he disappeared into the shed. “The fighter pilot was not a good marksman,” the soldier said, then added, “Not a good pilot either.”

  As he waited for the soldier’s report, Jalil slapped his hand against his leg impatiently. “Have to get back to Azraq, have to radio Glubb.”

  The soldier emerged from the shed and told them that everything seemed to be in order.

  “You’ll be all right here?” Jalil asked him.

  “Inshallah,” the soldier said. “I could use reinforcements, anti-aircraft guns. If the planes come back….” His voice trailed off and he shuddered.

  “I’ll check with Glubb.” Jalil climbed into the passenger seat of the Jeep.

  As Gideon started the engine and turned the Jeep, Jalil said, “We’ll wait at Azraq for Glubb. Time we went to Tadmor.”