Manhunt Is My Mission Read online

  My motorcycle was already parked at the far end of the street. A dozen kids had clustered around it and were touching the chrome and the black leather saddle gingerly. Beyond them, where the street unexpectedly became a paved road at the southern edge of Al Saydr, stood a battered Land Rover. Its khaki paint was scabbed and rusted; its motor idled noisily. Nearby, a group of soldiers lounged. The door on the driver’s side of the Land Rover opened, and a man got out. The soldiers snapped rigidly to attention.

  “Dad!” Samia cried.

  Mahmoud reached up for my hand. He gazed at me solemnly. Samia was running.

  “Come on, Mahmoud,” I said. “Let’s go meet her old man.”

  John Baylis Falcon, the legendary Falcon Pasha of the Motamar Legion, was a small man in neatly pressed khaki drill shorts and khaki shirt. He had kinky, ginger-colored hair, porcelain-blue eyes and the largest, thickest mustache I had ever seen. He looked at me over Samia’s shoulder. He stuck his hand out.

  “I’d like to shake your hand, young man. My daughter told me what you did for her.”

  “Don’t change the subject, Dad,” Samia said.

  He gave her a smile of paternal amusement. “Oh, I’m going. I’ve got to go. I’m delighted you arrived in time to say good-bye, but do you seriously think you can change my mind? They need me in Shughur City.”

  “Stubborn mule,” Samia said.

  “You have your colonel,” Falcon Pasha said, still smiling. “I dare say he’ll keep you busy enough until my return.”

  “I saw them, Dad. A column of tanks—heading for Shughur City.”

  “I know: El Thamad and his Scourge of Allah. They never gave the Legion any tanks,” Falcon Pasha said wistfully. “But we have the people on our side.”

  “The people,” Samia said, her tone of voice indicting them. “Did the people do any good against El Thamad and the King’s tanks in Qasr Tabuk? Is that why you had to flee to the mountains? You’re lucky to be alive. Haven’t you done enough for them already?”

  “Try to understand,” Falcon Pasha said. “There are rumors King Khalil himself is flying to Shughur City to—well, inspire his troops. I’ve got to be there in person to lead the Legion, or Galib does. And Galib is wounded.”

  “How convenient for Galib,” Samia said.

  Falcon Pasha looked shocked. “He’s the man you’re going to marry.”

  “I didn’t mean that. It’s just that … I wish you didn’t have to go. And Galib always seemed so … indestructible.”

  “You haven’t seen him in four years. He’s changed. And four years ago you were a teen-ager with a mash on a handsome officer. Why, damn it all,” Falcon Pasha said, “they thought they’d have to amputate his leg in Qasr Tabuk. Dr. Capehart saved it. Galib is not indestructible.”

  “Neither are you.”

  “No one is. Please try to understand. I really must go. But will you and Galib delay your wedding until I return?”

  Samia hugged him. “Until the two of you march back into Qasr Tabuk as heroes.”

  “That’s my girl,” Falcon Pasha said, and turned to me “Samia told me what happened on the Shughur Road, but not why you’ve come to Al Saydr. If there’s anything I can do—”

  “Three things,” I said promptly. “Your soldiers took my gun away. I want it back.” He frowned, but nodded. “I also need a safe-conduct through your lines to the Jordanian border.”

  “For you and the boy?”

  “For me and Turner Capehart.”

  “Dr. Capehart? He’ll never leave Motamar now.”

  “I’m a private detective in Washington, General Falcon,” I explained. “His brother hired me to find Dr. Capehart and bring him home.”

  Falcon Pasha shook his head. “If he had wanted to go home, don’t you think he would have? Don’t you think he knew your State Department was looking for him? His life work is in Motamar. He understands that now. Ask him.”

  “I will.”

  “You’ll get your gun. You’ll get your safe-conduct pass, with a blank space for the names. But you shan’t convince Dr. Capehart to leave, you know.”

  I said I’d still like to try. Falcon Pasha spoke to one of his soldiers, and a few minutes later the .44 Magnum was back in its shoulder holster where it belonged and I had a safe-conduct pass, signed by General John Baylis Falcon himself, in my pocket. I followed a soldier to Dr. Capehart’s house. It was halfway up the steep hill on which most of the buildings of Al Saydr perched. Once I looked back. It was almost dark. Gears grinding, the ancient Land Rover had started down the paved road to Shughur City.

  Samia stood in silhouette against the sky. The night wind that had begun to blow sculpted the linen skirt against her long legs. She raised one hand in a farewell wave, then let it drop to her side. Standing there in the wind and the gathering darkness until the truck was out of sight, she looked small and lonely and vulnerable.

  Then a tiny silhouette joined her. It was Mahmoud. She took his hand, and all at once she-looked bigger and needed and strong. We are never anything but what we are to other people. To Mahmoud, Samia was a goddess who had appeared miraculously to take him away from terror.

  3

  DR. TURNER CAPEHART said, “Not a chance.”

  “Your brother’s a pretty stubborn guy. He won’t take no for an answer.”

  Dr. Capehart smiled wryly. He was a big shaggy man of about fifty, with matted, unkempt hair, fifteen or twenty pounds of extra beef and a faded and soiled khaki shirt, its sleeves rolled up to show muscular forearms thickly covered with graying hair. He would have looked at home with a good Georgetown address in an oak-paneled consulting room behind a leather-topped desk and under a collection of impressive sheepskins, but he also managed to look at home in his small, sparsely furnished kitchen with its whitewashed mud brick walls, wearing khakis, needing a shave, a bath and a good night’s sleep.

  “He’s going to have to take no for an answer. Didn’t he warn you I’d be as stubborn as he was?”

  “He warned me, all right.”

  Dr. Capehart was still smiling. “I think I could even tell you how he put it. He must have said, ‘My brother Turner’s an Ugly American type, festering in some stinking hovel giving penicillin shots to syphilitic Arabs and convincing himself he has to live as poorly as they do in order to gain their respect.’ No, he wouldn’t say respect. He’d say trust, wouldn’t he?”

  I gaped. Turner Capehart had almost hit his brother’s words right on the head.

  We were eating a stew of mutton and yoghurt on mounds of white rice. I had cooled my heels a couple of hours while Dr. Capehart treated the last of his patients. Then we started talking, and had been talking ever since. I’d liked him on sight and he’d said nothing to make me change my mind.

  “What my brother Benson doesn’t understand,” he told me as he finished his stew, “is that until I came to Motamar, he had found his place in life and I hadn’t. It’s as simple as that.”

  “You have a damn good rep in Washington as a doctor.”

  “Do I?”

  “I don’t have to tell you you were the top plastic surgeon in D.C.”

  “Benson is a rich man, Mr. Drum. He is also Under-Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. He is—how can I put it?—in the thick of things. I wasn’t. I earned fifty thousand dollars a year, Mr. Drum, as a plastic surgeon. But I just couldn’t see myself spending the rest of my life chipping off the bumps on not quite Mayflower-American noses or sand-papering acne-scars off the cheeks of debutantes with inferiority complexes. That’s why I came here. If they’ll have me, I’ll stay the rest of my life.”

  I couldn’t argue with his logic. After serving a hitch with the FBI, I’d hung out my shingle as a private investigator. I could have been a discreet divorce detective and wound up earning twice what I earned now. I could have been a reputation-peeper with more work than I could handle at a hundred bucks a day, digging into the dirt that had paved the way to Washington for budding bigshots. I was neither. I d
id the work I liked to do, too much of it dangerous, some of it cockeyed foolish, like flying four thousand miles to Motamar for Benson Capehart to hear his brother say why he wasn’t going home—but this way it was easy shaving once a day and staring at the reflection of the only face I’d ever have.

  “They need me here,” Dr. Capehart said. “They need engineers and they need irrigation experts and they need doctors. I can do more good in a week in Motamar than I could in ten years doing the kind of work I was doing at home. And there’s more to it than that.” He got up and returned with a bottle and two glasses. “Do you drink arak? That’s the local brandy.”

  I said it would be fine, and he poured two stiff shots and went on talking. “There’s Motamar,” he said. “Qasr Tabuk is at the head of the pipeline from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait—almost a third of the world’s petroleum flows through this country, Mr. Drum. And Shughur City is the biggest port in the Middle East. If Motamar stumbles onto real democracy—and if Falcon Pasha is given a chance, they may—I want to be around to see what happens. Because the rest of the Arab world is watching Motamar. I don’t give feudalism ten years in the Middle East if Motamar goes democratic, and every American who’s doing what he can to help here is going to be one more reason why these countries may turn to the West when they discover the twentieth century.”

  “You mean Falcon Pasha led his Legion against the king in the name of democracy? That’s what throws me, because King Khalil’s got a reputation in the outside world as a pretty benevolent ruler. But he sent El Thamad’s Scourge of Allah to mop up Falcon’s Legion, didn’t he? Somebody’s wrong. They can’t both be on the side of the angels.”

  “Well, put it this way. King Khalil is the best they have in this part of the world. Call him an enlightened despot, but—”

  “What I saw on the road today didn’t look like enlightenment.”

  Dr. Capehart drank his arak. “Sure, I’ll go along with that. Khalil’s been out, of touch with his country; he’s been playboying around the fleshpots of Europe. He comes back to learn he’s in trouble, and to clamp the lid on that trouble he turns to extremists like El Thamad for help. I’d pity Motamar if there was no Khalil and El Thamad called the tricks for the conservatives, just as I’d pity her if there was no Falcon Pasha and Colonel Azam called the tricks for the rebels.”

  “The way I heard it, you operated on Colonel Azam when he was wounded.”

  “Of course I did. I’m a doctor. Besides, Azam is a first-rate military man. Falcon needs him. The colonel also happens to be ambitious and an opportunist and—”

  Dr. Capehart’s voice trailed off. I heard footsteps outside the kitchen door. Capehart called out something in Arabic. The sound of footsteps stopped. I got up quickly and took two strides to the door and yanked it open.

  Samia Falcon stood there.

  “Thank God I’ve found you,” she said. She moved past me into the room. There was a sheen of sweat on her face. She’d been running. I shut the door. “You’ve got to hide me, Chet. Or you’ve got to take me into Shughur City—or both.” She went to the window and parted the net curtain and looked out. “I’ve got to reach my father before it’s too late.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Everything,” Samia said breathlessly, but not revealingly. “Everything.”

  Dr. Capehart was looking back and forth at her and at me like a spectator at a tennis match. I realized then that they didn’t know each other; Samia hadn’t been in Motamar for four years. After I made the introductions, Samia said:

  “Baki Osman’s in Al Saydr.”

  “Who in heck,” I asked her, “is Baki Osman?”

  Capehart explained impatiently: “A slimy type who used to do most of Khali’ls dirty work before El Thamad came along. Then El Thamad shouldered him aside and, instead of being resentful, Osman was content to play second fiddle to him and his Scourge of Allah. It’s typical of the man.” He turned to Samia. “What the devil’s he doing here in Al Saydr?”

  Instead of answering him, Samia said: “I hadn’t seen Galib Azam in four years. You heard what my father said, Chet. I had a crush on him four years ago. A mash, as Dad put it. He wrote the most wonderful letters,” she continued ingenuously. “In four years I got to thinking he was about nine feet tall. I didn’t think he could do any wrong. And Dad didn’t discourage me.”

  “Your father is a brilliant man, Miss Falcon,” Dr. Capehart said. “Like so many professional military men, he is a humanitarian. But also like so many professional military men, he—”

  “Don’t you dare talk like that about Dad, as if he’s a uniform and a general’s star and nothing else,” Samia snapped. “He detests war.”

  “I know he does. That’s the point I’m trying to make. It’s a fairly common trait in high military circles—but so is an almost pathetic naïveté when it comes to understanding people. Your father has had to deal with uniforms and rank insignia all his life. Stay with it long enough, and they come to stand for people. Your father didn’t discourage your romance with Galib Azam because he never understood what Azam was really like.”

  “Sure,” Samia said angrily, “and most doctors are … are horribly rude because their contacts are with people flat on their back and grateful for any smidgen of help they get.”

  “Okay, okay both of you,” I said. “And most dentists yammer all the time because their patients have their jaws locked open and can’t answer back, and most private detectives haul all their beautiful women clients to bed because that’s the way it happens in detective stories. Will you stop bickering and get to the point, Samia?”

  Dr. Capehart gave me a surprised look. Samia bit her lip and said, “After my father left I went to Galib’s place with Mahmoud.” Unexpectedly, she blushed. “We had the kind of reunion … well, the kind I guess I dreamed about. Then, during dinner, Galib—I couldn’t tell what was the matter at first—Galib patronized me. He treated me exactly as he was treating little Mahmoud.”

  Dr. Capehart drummed his fingers on the table like a man forced to listen to a garrulous drunk. He didn’t give a damn about any lovers’ tiff. Baki Osman’s presence in Al Saydr bothered him and he wanted to get back to it.

  “Mahmoud got sleepy,” Samia said. “We put him to bed. Galib was still treating me like a child. He acted so superior and condescending, I—”

  “Osman,” Dr. Capehart urged. “El Thamad’s flunky. What about Osman?”

  “I had to get away from Galib,” Samia told us. “I said I was tired, and went to Dad’s house. I felt like lying down somewhere in the dark and crying my eyes out. I stayed about an hour, but I couldn’t sleep. I kept telling myself it was my fault, I’d expected too much after four years of separation; Galib really was the Galib of his letters, not the … arrogant boor I’d met tonight. So I put on a new face and a bright smile and went back there. Dad’s place is just up the street from Galib’s. They’re both at the bottom of the hill.”

  Samia was seated at the table. She stared down at her clenched hands. “Just as I reached the house, I saw a figure approaching in the darkness. A fat little man. He looked furtive, but the sentry passed him and when he reached the door Galib opened it right away. In the light from inside I recognized him. It was Baki Osman.”

  Samia frowned. “I knew my father would have nothing to do with Osman. I got scared then. What if they were planning something behind my father’s back? What if Galib was selling out to King Khalil? I went to the window and listened.”

  Taking a deep breath, Samia finally got out in a rush of words what Dr. Capehart was waiting to hear: “I was there five minutes. There’s a plot to assassinate King Khalil. Osman is in on it. So is Galib. The King is flying to Shughur City tomorrow. Between the time he arrives and the time he flies back to Qasr Tabuk, they’re going to plant a bomb on his plane. The government will fall. They’re sure of it.”

  Dr. Capehart stared at her bleakly. “I can guess who’ll pick up the pieces—El Thamad and that colonel of yo
urs.”

  “But they’re on opposite sides!” Samia cried.

  “Is that why Osman dropped in on Colonel Azam—after your father drove to Shughur City?”

  “But Dad would never stand for it. He—”

  “Of course,” Capehart said. “Galib Azam must know that. He doesn’t intend to let your father get back from Shughur City alive.”

  “That’s not true,” Samia gasped. “They wouldn’t dare—Galib wouldn’t dare—to kill my father.” Those black eyes of hers widened suddenly. “Would he?”

  Dr. Capehart shrugged. I asked Samia: “Why’d you come here asking us to hide you?”

  “Because I stumbled outside Galib’s place, and they heard me. Someone—a soldier, I guess—chased me. I lost him in the darkness. I came here.”

  “Did they recognize you?”

  “I don’t know. You’ve got to take me to Shughur City. I have to warn Dad. He won’t stand by and let them murder King Khalil. The Legion went to war against El Thamad, not the king. Dad thinks some day King Khalil can be a good ruler for his people—if he stays home and works at it and doesn’t let men like El Thamad rule in his name. But you’re wrong about Galib. God, you’ve got to be. Whatever else he’s planning, he wouldn’t be a party to framing Dad.” She asked again: “Would he?” Her head jerked up. One hand flew to her mouth. “Mahmoud!” she cried suddenly, remembering. “Mahmoud’s still there. What am I going to do?”

  “Whoever Mahmoud is, there’s no time for him now,” Dr. Capehart said. “I have a car. The soldiers know me. I can drive you to Shughur City.”

  “But I’ll never be able to come back. What will happen to Mahmoud?”

  She explained who Mahmoud was. Dr. Capehart said he would care for the boy himself on his return to Al Saydr. That didn’t satisfy Samia. She wouldn’t leave without Mahmoud, she said. “When Galib learns I went to Shughur City, and why, what do you think he’ll do to the boy?”