Chapter 10
"You must not approach Faisal's pasha as an American dressed as you are," insisted Abdullah dictatorially. "He will have you beheaded by his guards. The man is ruthless, powerful and to be feared."
Anger surged through Chet's veins. "But he's got my woman! I don't give a shit if I have to go as a beggar, but I'll drag Karen out of his ugly hands!"
"I regret I can be of no greater help to you, but to interfere would cause dissent in a country already torn by war."
"And just who the hell is this Faisal, anyway?" Chet winced, holding the ice bag to his swollen forehead and felt nothing but hate.
"Faisal owns the largest oil fields in Iraq. Because of his power, he is frightened of peasant uprisings. He is paying your Jibsen to get him the formula for the H-bomb."
Chet's head flew around. "Are you shitting me? Jibsen with a bomb? Huh?"
"Do not laugh," warned Abdullah, strolling up to the hotel window and glancing down into the clogged streets below. "This is a country of many changes."
"I can never thank you enough," said Bentley, offering a warm hand to the pro-American Iraqi. "I would have been a dead man had you not come to my aid." He adjusted the brown, dirty rags of his beggar's costume and felt the weight of the holster riding his hip.
"More reports of Faisal's treachery and possible treason have filtered through the embassy... and with your concern for your assistant, I felt it my duty to seek you out. Fortunately, Mohammed graced us with good timing." He bowed to the East reverently, accepted Chet's warm grip, and disappeared through the door.
On foot, his ankle length tattered robe marking him a beggar, Chet pulled up his hood to hide waves of blonde hair, and a bruised face. Below, his white Addidas whispered over the sidewalk as he made his way towards the heart of town, outside of the tourist district to where the heart of Karbala pulsed. Chet's pulse quickened at the thought of seeing his redheaded Karen again.
He neared the marketplace bustling with Iraqis who'd come to sell their wares, charm snakes, tell fortunes, juggle and do anything to earn a living in this land of extreme wealth and dire poverty. A parade of soldiers guarded the archway leading to the open market. Guns slung over their kaki shirted shoulders, they kept a wary eye out for suspicious foreigners during these days of strife.
Keeping his eyes peeled to the ground and looking the humble beggar, Chet quickly surveyed the hub of activity. Abdullah had given him vague directions to Faisal's palace, but he needed more concrete information to avoid looking the lost foreigner he was. He was swinging about, peering under the hood of his beggar garb, when a soldier on horseback whipped his horse into a gallop chasing a ragged youth who'd been seen stealing a pomegranate from a vendor. With disregard for filthy beggars, the horse charged into Chet's path.
To avoid being trampled under the dusty hooves, Chet nosedived to the ground. The protection of his hood flew backwards, revealing a tanned American. The sudden movement, following Jibsen's hideous attack on his genitals, left him temporarily stunned. Laying in the dirt, he shook his head and started rising to his feet when an Iraqi soldier caught the incongruity
"Halt!" he barked in Iraqi.
Chet took one wide-eyed glimpse over his shoulder, muttered a desperate "Shit..." under his breath, and scrambled to his feet. He was a foreigner in a country at war, an enemy at that, and his Arabic wasn't strong enough to withstand the rigors of long cross- examinations. Besides, the battered condition of his Nordic face and his new Addidas tennis shoes would lend no credence to any story, no matter how wildly convincing. They would probably throw him into a hay-floored dungeon and feed him gruel until every last hair fell out of his head. No, there was no other way around it.
The soldier, on horseback, had halted his horse, swung around and raised the barrel of his rifle. Had it not been for Chet's impeccable sense of timing, he might have been trampled under the heavy camel hooves being led by a Bedouin bringing earthenware vessels to market. The agile American yanked up his beggar's robe, the legs of his denim Levi's scissoring frantically in a mad dash for the twisting alleyway. Behind him, shots rent the air. The din of screaming women and thundering horse hooves screamed in Chet's ears. The marketplace became a bedlam of rearing donkeys, frightened camels and maddened soldiers hot in pursuit.
He followed the alleyway lined with mud-walled buildings. Behind him, the shouts of Arabic soldiers winging bullets in the air hastened his speed. His Addidas tennis shoes slapped along the dusty street as he headed for the adjoining alley and plunged into an arched doorway whose steps lead up to a courtyard above. But beggars weren't welcome in Iraq... he'd better keep running.
They were hot on his trail, no doubt about that! Panting wildly, he sprinted around the first bend in the narrow lane. He dashed into an entry smelling heavily of urine and littered garbage and ran up a flight of stone stairs, crossed a wider street and headed for an archway that led into a maze of alleyways behind. Footsteps and shouting voices sang behind him; bullets whizzed over his shoulder to chip plaster from the wall.
The length of the beggars robe was prohibiting his speed and he ripped it off, tossed it down the steps behind him and tripped up another set of steps leading to an alcove. He was making a split-second decision when he felt something warm grasp his arm.
Ready to swing, he pivoted around ready to land a punch in the face of an Iraqi soldier. His hand fell to his side as he stared into the blue-eyed loveliness of a white-skinned belly dancer returning from the marketplace.
A tight layer of diaphanous fabric sheathed her belly and hips, and a silver cupped brassiere with strands of silver dripping about her neck, shimmered over a deep cleavage. She might have been naked. Chet gulped.
"You American?" she whispered, her cloying perfume stinging his nostrils. She nudged him by the elbow and pointed to a winding staircase leading to a modest mud-walled house above. "Come with me..." she said in perfect English, tinted with a distinct Southern-American accent.
Chet did, gratefully. The sounds of pursuit were one stairway away, but the bullets had stopped singing in his ears. Hopefully they'd found the discarded beggars' robe and assumed he'd run the opposite direction.
At the top of the stairs, the seductive dancer opened a hinged door and nudged the American inside. She bolted it and leaning against it, stared longingly at the handsome blonde American.
The room was tiny, furnished sparsely with cushions and rugs on the floor. Chet had the distinct impression the American girl made her living by moving more than her hips.
And she was lovely. Voluptuously curved, her milky breasts heavy on her chest, her soft belly rippling under the green transparent shift. Her blue eyes were wide and her lips full and ripe. When she removed her veil, a cascade of blonde hair came into view.
"I saw you in the marketplace," she said in a voice which Chet thought was filled with a profound sadness. She cocked her head in the direction of the steps. "The military is after you, that I know."
She came toward him in a cloud of perfume. "I used to belong to Sheik Faisal's harem, I was his favorite, and he named me Pasha. That's my name now. I lived in his harem for about a year, but he grew bored with me, and put me to work in the marketplace. Now I earn my living by dancing and... well... as long as I give my master my earnings, he lets me keep enough to live on, not a lot, but it pays the rent, keeps me fed. You can stay with Pasha and I'll take care of you, I'm so lonely, I never see Americans any more." Whisking up the diaphanous skirt, revealing a shapely pair of lovely white legs, she thrust her pale pelvis outward and smiled seductively. Beneath the skirt, the delicate pink lips of her cunt pouted out invitingly.
Chet backed away. "I cannot stay, I must leave," he croaked in a tight voice.
"Don't you want to fuck me?" she whined. "I'm very good, my master trained me to please a man in every way. Please stay with me! I'll take good care of you and fuck you and care for you!"
Chet gulped. Suddenly she was pressing her pale lushness against him, her hands groping for his genitals, her fingers caressing, crawling over his flesh, groping for his testicles. Chet had no doubt the girl could back up her boasts about being able to pleasure a man in any way. This Faisal had to be crazy to cast a girl as pretty as this one out into the streets to be a common whore. Could he possibly have so much pussy, he could afford to be that choosy? In spite of himself, Chet felt his cock stiffen and lurch under his denim Levi's.
"See, you do want me, I can tell you do, you're all hard and ready for Pasha."
Chet groped in his pocket, hauled out a handful of change and clasped it into her warm palm as he pried it off his crotch. "I just don't have time for that right now, but you can help me with one thing honey. Tell me where I can find Faisal's palace."
Her tiny white hand flew to her mouth. "Oh, you can't go there," she sucked in her breath. "That is a forbidden place, for an American especially, unless you are a girl, that is, one of his harem. Better you stay with me! Let me take care of you, please? I'll be your little whore, I can please you, Pasha is a good slut," the girl said, her voice whining and pleading.
Chet grinned, leaning over to kiss her on the lips. The brief encounter relit the girl's desires and she was devouring him with kisses, her lush white body pressed against his, her round arm snaking around his neck to bend his head towards hers.
The sound of footsteps scrambling up the stone steps made both of them panic. She quickly unlaced her arms from around his neck. Her eyes shot toward the arched window.
"You must go quickly! I didn't think they would come tonight. The soldiers come here sometimes to have sex with Pasha. Master lets them have me for free when they are off-duty. They will find you, and its very forbidden for me to pleasure anyone but an Arab... if they find you here..." She ran a finger under her throat symbolically.
"Faisal's palace?" he whispered, hearing the footsteps and loud Arabic voices getting closer
She quickly gave him directions, begging him to return to her later. They banged on Pasha's door just as Chet made the ten foot leap onto a pile of rubble in the alleyway.
Pressing his panting body to the mud-walled building, he looked right and left, listening for Iraqi soldiers. Satisfied by the silence, he took off for Faisal's palace.
The outside of Faisal's palace was nothing stupendous, but once Chet had stolen his way through the arched courtyard, strewn with costly rugs and cushions, the meaning of Arabic petrodollars struck home.
Hugging a mosaic column, he peeked through the archways, hearing servants on the far side of the courtyard muttering in Arabic. Chet scurried through a deserted anteroom decorated in rich carpets and perfumed with clove-smelling incense, and followed a twisting corridor which led onto a second courtyard where a large fountain spurted prismatic crystals into the air.
Sucking in his breath and patting the holster boring into his hip bone, Chet tiptoed toward the back of the house. It would only make sense that the harem would be at the back. Rather like Blacks in the back of the bus, thought Chet miserably. Being a new member of Faisal's private society, no doubt they'd locked Karen in a separate room, considering her stubbornness, he was sure she had resisted valiantly up to this point, and kept Faisal at bay.
Or at least he prayed she had.
After seeing the little blonde American girl, no doubt a formerly sweet southern girl, reduced to the lowest form of common Arab street-whore by that bastard Faisal, Chet's blood boiled, he had to get to Karen quickly before they turned her into the same kind of trained whore...
A narrow stone stairway twisted upwards beyond the anteroom. Heavy wooden doors locked with heavy iron bolts lead off the corridor. Chet stopped, put his ear to the first door and listened. The sounds of sobbing filtered through the wooden plank. No, that wouldn't be Karen... she was too strong, the weeping was far too hysterical.
Cautiously, on tiptoes now, he unbolted the second door and peeked inside. A fleshy bodied naked white woman was asleep on her back. Another blonde! Where did Faisal find these girls? The third room he found empty. Biting his lip and losing hope, he unbolted the fourth. A naked woman with flaming red hair and enormous white breasts crowned with luscious raspberry nipples stared druggedly at him, a small smile coming to her lips when she saw him, her lush thighs opening in lewd invitation from a divan piled high with cushions.
Chet drew in his breath, shocked... for a moment, he had thought it was Karen, and now he was beginning to wonder just how much Karen had been able to resist Faisal's advances. Shaking the thoughts from his head, he squared his shoulders and dashed out of the room, rabbit-like around the corner... and stood still in his tracks.
A dozing guard sat outside a bolted door, a sword hooked in his belt. Cautiously, silent as a cat, gun drawn from his holster, Chet slunk towards the door. Hurling himself at the guard, he clubbed him viciously over the head with the revolver butt as his other arm squeezed around his throat.
The guard was well trained in combat and the thundering blows only stymied him for a moment. They crashed to the floor together and the sword fell from the guard's belt. As the strong body writhed and threshed beneath him, Chet levered his knees between the man's shoulder blades, put his arm around the guard's throat and pulled up with all his strength against the pressure of his knees.
The muscles of the guard's neck corded, the veins in his swarthy forehead popped as he fought against the well-trained ex-Marine's strength to break the neck cracking lock around his throat.
Sweat poured from Chet's brow and rivered down his cheeks; the muscles of his arms spasmed... until the gasping breaths of a choking man bubbled and died. The head flopped lifelessly on the marble floor. Chet stiffened. The screech of air-raid sirens sang in the air.
"Holy shit!" muttered the American, hearing the screams of terror echo down the hallways from the trapped women. Shuffling of feet scuffed up the stairs and down the hallway.
Knowing the dead guard wasn't the only servant stationed to maintain the harem, Chet shot back the bolt on the door and flung it open.
Karen, naked, lay sprawled on the bed, her red hair tumbling about her naked shoulders, she stared at him lewdly from a pile of cushions. There was a tall hookah pipe beside the bed and Karen was drawing in a deep breath on the long pipe end she had placed to her lips.
Karen's lush white thighs were splayed wide apart, and Chet could see her red-furred muff was wet with her sex-oil.
He gasped as he saw a seepage of thick bubbling sperm slip from the delicate pink lips of her honeyed hole. Someone had fucked Karen, and very recently.
And that is when Chet noticed the ring in Karen's pert little freckled nose, the gold chains running from the ring down to the rings through Karen's nipples, and as he stared between her full, fleshy white thighs, he noticed another ring had pierced her pink puffy pussy, right at the top, through the hood of her clitoris! He'd kill Faisal with his bare hands for this!
It was lucky for Chet, that he did not know how many men Faisal had offered Karen to over the past few days. Or that the sperm he had seen sliding form her well-used pussy lips had come from the very guard he had just killed a moment ago. One of the many guards who now enjoyed Karen's services each day, for Karen had been given to the guards as a plaything.
After offering her to the Arab Sheiks at the orgy, and seeing her respond so quickly as a whore, he had been disappointed that she had not been more shamed and humiliated.
He'd kept her over the next few days, but after getting his fill of her ripe shapely white body, he found he was still disgusted with the American redhead, and so he had given her over to his palace guards.
The fifty palace guardsmen shared five cast-off American females from Faisal's harem, and Karen was now the new favorite. Over the past five days, she had received all of the guards many times over. Only the strong smoke from the hashish pipe kept her from dying with shame at the daily defilement of her lush white body by the unwashed Arab palace guards. She had resisted only once in her first day of service to the men, and a stern session with a cane on her fleshy white bottom had quickly changed her mind, and brought her to submissive obedience.
She saw Chet in the doorway through her slitted emerald eyes, and thinking it was another palace guard come to ravish her, she obediently raised her knees and brought them up under her chin, spreading her full white thighs invitingly, wriggling her bottom which still bore the raised red welts from her punishment five days before.
Chet saw the invitation and his jaw dropped in shocked surprise. He felt a mixture of both revulsion and desire. He doubted she even knew it was him, but the invitation was clear. He felt his cock lengthening and hardening in his Levis.
It was tempting, but first things first. Jamming his gun back into the holster, he darted to the hallway and dragged the guard by the feet and dumped him in Karen's chamber. Outside the sirens wailed. Seconds later the hellish thunder of Iranian aircraft sang in the air.
The world exploded into a deafening blast of dropping bombs exploding over the skies of Karbala. The walls of Karen's chamber trembled, the plaster chipping from the walls.
"I never thought I'd love the sound of bombs, but by God, I'd rather take my chances in war than getting caught in Faisal's palace!" He grunted, grabbing Karen by the arm. "Come on, let's get you out of here."
She didn't budge, she stared up at him and smiled lewdly.
"You okay?"
She stared at him for a moment more and then a frown seemed to come to her pretty face. Her lips lost the smile and she pouted with annoyance. She had never expected to see him again... and here he was in flesh and blood. Why hadn't he come for her sooner she pouted. And then gradually, she began to clear her mind a little. He really was standing there! He really had come to rescue her. She flung herself hysterically into his arms sobbing wildly while the bombs sang and exploded, while plaster shivered off the walls and a detonated missile crackled blocks away. "Oh, Chet, I thought I'd never see you... Chet I've done awful things... they made me into a whore, Chet! Can you forgive me?"
"Later for that," he said urgently. "Cry later, explain later. Right now we've got to get ourselves out of this place alive. I have a feeling it ain't gonna be easy."
"But, I'm naked!" she protested, as if suddenly realizing her immodest state.
"Better to be naked than dead." He ripped off his shirt and held it out for her slender arms to slip through. "Come on, we've got to get out of here."
Outside in the corridor all hell broke loose. Women, trapped behind bolted doors, screamed as rockets shook the walls of their prisons. Karen balked. "We've got to let them out, please, Chet!"
"We'll take care of them later... maybe... right now we have to save our own necks!"
The courtyard below was swarming with guards and servants hovering in confusion as pillars cracked and crumbled around them, explosions biting into the mud-walled building of Karbala.
They picked their way down the steps and dashed for the alleyway. Stones bit into Karen's bare feet; the flaps of Chet's shirt winged up to show off the lush nudity beneath. Shards of rock and bits of stucco whistled through the air. Donkeys and camels, torn from their master's reins, thundered down the alleys braying wild-eyed.
The Americans plastered themselves to the alley wall as a wounded donkey screamed in the last throes of death before collapsing in the clogged narrow street.
Minutes later they dashed up the confusion of stairways and pounded on little Pasha's doorway.