“But they can’t leap two feet,” he said, and roared at his own joke. Being stung on the dick by a high-jumping scorpion—that was a good one for the boys back home.
“Ray, you are a terrible man,” replied Maybelle, and laughed also. Walker swung the Ram Charger to the edge of the empty road and opened the door. The blast of heat came in as if from the door of a furnace. He climbed out and slammed the door behind him to trap the cool air.
Maybelle stayed in the passenger seat as her husband walked to the nearest dune and unzipped his fly.
Then she stared out through the windshield and muttered:
“Oh, my God, would you just look at that.”
She reached for her Pentax, opened her door, and slithered to the ground.
“Ray, do you think he’d mind if I took his picture?”
Ray was facing the other way, absorbed in one of a middle-aged man’s greater satisfactions.
“Be right with you, honey. Who?”
The Bedouin was standing across the road from her husband, having apparently walked out from between two dunes. One minute he was not there, the next he was. Maybelle Walker stood by the front fender of the off-road, her camera in her hand, irresolute. Her husband turned around and zipped himself up. He stared at the man across the road.
“Dunno,” he said. “Guess not. But don’t get too close. Probably got fleas. I’ll get the engine started.
You take a quick picture, and if he gets nasty, jump right in. Fast.”
He climbed back into the driver’s seat and gunned the engine. That boosted the air conditioner, which was a relief.
Maybelle Walker took several steps forward and held up her camera.
“May I take your picture?” she asked. “Camera? Picture? Click-click? For my album back home?”
The man just stood and stared at her. His once-white djellaba , stained and dusty, dropped from his shoulders to the sand at his feet. The red-and-white flecked keffiyeh was secured on his head by a two-strand black cord, and one of the trailing corners was tucked up under the opposite temple so that the cloth covered his face from the bridge of the nose downward. Above the flecked doth the dark eyes stared back at her. What little skin of forehead and eye sockets she could see was burned brown by the desert. She had many pictures ready for the album she intended to make back home, but none of a tribesman of the Bedouin with the expanse of the Saudi desert behind him.
She raised her camera. The man did not move. She squinted through the aperture, framing the figure in the center of the oblong, wondering if she could make the car in time, should the Arab come running at her. Click .
“Thank you very much,” she said. Still he did not move. She backed toward the car, smiling brightly.
“Always smile,” she recalled the Reader’s Digest once advising Americans confronted by someone who cannot understand English.
“Honey, get in the car!” her husband shouted.
“It’s all right, I think he’s okay,” she said, opening the door.
The audiotape had run out while she was taking the picture. That cut the radio station in. Ray Walker’s hand reached out and hauled her into the car, which screeched away from the roadside.
The Arab watched them go, shrugged, and walked behind the sand dune, where he had parked his own sand-camouflaged Land-Rover. In a few seconds he too drove off in the direction of Abu Dhabi.
“What’s the hurry?” complained Maybelle Walker. “He wasn’t going to attack me.”
“That’s not the point, honey.” Ray Walker was tight-lipped, the man in control, able to cope with any international emergency. “We’re getting into Abu Dhabi and taking the next flight home. It seems this morning Iraq invaded Kuwait, goddammit. They could be here any hour.”
It was ten o’clock, Gulf Time, on the morning of August 2, 1990.
Twelve hours earlier, Colonel Osman Badri waited, tense and excited, by the tracks of a stationary T-72
main battle tank near a small airfield called Safwan. Though he could not know it then, the war for Kuwait would begin there and it would end there, at Safwan.
&nbs
p; Just outside the airfield, which had runways but no buildings on it, the main highway ran north and south.