He waved flies off his face, frowning. Unfortunately, he still had to settle with Salim. Where the Sheikh gave with open hand, his querulous advisor doubted and misered. No better than a Jew. But surely such an action as he was about to carry out would close his career with honor. Surely after it a tired, no-longer-young man with only one eye could retire to his boats, his company, his private devotions. To a quiet life in the Sudan.
When he called out, several men emerged into the sunlight, wiping their hands on cotton waste. He acknowledged their greetings with a smile. Went down a rickety gangplank, clutching the bag to his chest, feeling the cool sweating roundnesses within with anticipation.
The boat smelled of years at sea. Its deck was patched with the paint the villagers had compounded of the oily fish from time out of mind. It was a hundred feet long, with a midships deckhouse and a stumpy pole mast to which the outrigger nets were hinged. Moored by a line to the stern, a smaller craft lay on the sluggish river: a beaten-up fiberglass-hulled sport fisherman with a tilted-up Yamaha outboard.
The first team, in this same boat, had sailed from Domiat the month before, made the round trip to their target area, and returned. They’d been boarded and searched a few miles from their destination, but of course there’d been nothing in the hold but sardines.
The second group had been here a week. They’d overhauled the engines and installed steel plates shielding the wheel and the fuel tanks. They’d installed another bank of batteries, a second generator, and two more bilge pumps, and had scrubbed down, decked in, and run lighting to the hold. They’d bought bottled water, new mattresses, a butane stove, rice, couscous, dates, tea, coffee, chocolate, and canned meat.
Then, the night before, they’d driven the truck in from the warehouse in Port Said. Under cover of darkness, they’d swayed the heavy crated package down into the hold. Where it rested now beneath closed hatches, snuggled into its cocoon of the other material.
He spoke briefly with them, saying all would be as God willed, but he had hopes of success and victory. Then stood watching as they filed up the gangplank. From the pier, one of them — the Sheikh was very media-savvy — held up a video camera. Shielding his face with his sleeve, he bowed deeply to all those who would see and thus be moved to follow in the path. The cameraman panned over the boat, then out toward where the river met the sea. Then the red light went out, and they waved, and he waved back to them.
Then he was alone.
The third crew, the final crew, would not board for a few hours yet. He went below and checked the hold again. Running his hands over the sacks stacked close against the bomb, their contents slowly warming in the dim heat of the hold.
The bomb itself was not so much. A small charge, as such things went. It was the heavy plastic-covered sacks stacked around it that made him smile. They were covered with writing in many languages. Most also bore colorful pictures of healthy robust sheep and goats, for the benefit of purchasers who couldn’t read. Products of India, for the most part, though some came from China and other countries as well. The Sheikh’s men had purchased the material in small lots here and there throughout the Middle East, from various agricultural suppliers and commercial growers.
Sheep grazed on pastures without trace amounts of certain rare elements lost their appetite. Their skin grew scaly. They became anemic, and the lambs did not thrive or grow. Most of the sacks contained cobalt sulphate, a heavy sand the color of dried blood. Others contained cobalt chloride. A few contained cobalt carbonate, which potters used in blue glazes, but as this was the most expensive form of the element, they numbered only a few.
He snapped a padlock behind him, then looked into the engine room. Humming quietly, he checked the battery charge, fuel level, oil level, through-hull fittings. All secure. He went topside again and looked across at the dusty streets.
Almost against his will, he went slowly up the gangplank. Checked the lines.
He hesitated there for a moment, a white-clad figure alone in the burning sun, on the hot stone of the quay. Then began walking, with firm, steady steps, on into town.
She was heavier than he remembered; shorter than he recalled. She stared at his shoes from the barely opened door with no sign of recognition, a fold of cloth drawn across all but her eyes.
“Haleemah?” he asked, not even sure it was her.
“Who … You are not him. Who are you? Who sent you here?”
Did she know him? Had he, too, changed so much? Or did her dull tired gaze no longer see? He remembered her beside a fountain, the day they were married. The radiance of her smile, her slender body in the night… “It’s me. Your husband.”
Her eyes came up, flickered on his face. Recognition came. And with it, something that looked like shame. “Ahmed. You didn’t write me you were coming.”
