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, held 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 just then." He adjusted the brown, dirty rags of his beggar's costume arid 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. Chefs 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 khaki 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 nose-dived to the ground. The protection of his hood flew backwards, revealing a tanned American face. 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 Addida 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 beggars 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 addida 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 sloe-eyed loveliness of a 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 Arabic.
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 blond American.
The room was tiny, furnished sparsely with cushions and rugs on the floor. Chet had the distinct impression the girl made her living by moving more than her hips.
And she was lovely. Voluptuously curved, her breasts heavy on her chest, her soft belly rippling under the green transparent shift. Her sloe eyes were wide and her lips full and ripe.
"I saw you in the marketplace," she said in Arabic, smatterings of which Chet understood from prior assignments in the Middle East. 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. "You stay with Pasha and I take care of you." Whisking up the diaphanous skirt, she thrust her pelvis outward and smiled seductively. Beneath the skirt, the ragged lips of her cunt pouted invitingly.
Chet backed away. "I cannot stay, I must leave," he chirped in a tight voice in broken Arabic.
"Do you not desire me?" she contested.
Chet gulped. Suddenly she was pressing her lushness against him, her hands groping for his genitals, her fingers caressing, crawling over his flesh, groping for his testicles. In spite of himself, Chet felt his cock stiffen and lurch under his denim Levi's. "See, you are 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 don't have time for that right now, but you can help me with one thing . Tell me where I find Faisal's palace."
Her tiny hand flew to her mouth. "Ah," she sucked in her breath. "That is a forbidden place, for an American especially."
"You're telling me," he mumbled in English.
"Better you stay with Pasha," the girl said.
Chet grinned, leaned over to kiss her on the lips. The brief encounter relit the girl's desires and she was devouring him with kisses, her lush body pressed against his, her hand snaking around his neck to bend his head towards hers.
He unlaced her arms from around his neck. Footsteps scrambling up the stone steps made him panic. His eyes shot toward the arched window.
"You must go quickly! They will search for you here and if they find you.. . " She ran a finger under her throat symbolically.
"Faisal's pace?" he whispered, hearing the footsteps and loud Arabic voices making threats against the beggar.
She gave him directions. They banged on Pasha's door just as Chet made the ten foot leap onto 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 obstinence.
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 . . . the weeping was far too hysterical.
Cautiously, on tiptoes now, he unbolted the second door and peeked inside. A fleshy bodied naked woman was asleep on her back. The third room he found empty. Biting his lip and losing hope, he unbolted the fourth. A naked woman with enormous breasts crowned with raspberry nipples glared druggedly at her from a divan piled high with cushions.
Chet drew in his breath, squared his shoulders and dashed 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 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, trembling with alarm, her red hair tumbling about her naked shoulders, stared at him from a pile of cushions.
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 grabbed Karen by the arm. She didn't budge. "You okay?"
She stared at him incredulously while plaster shivered off the walls and a detonated missile crackled blocks away. She had never expected to see him again . . . and here he was in flesh and blood. She flung herself hysterically into his arms sobbing wildly while the bombs sang and exploded. "I thought I'd never see you."
"Later for that," he said urgently. "Cry 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.. . 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 Pasha's door.