The Protocols of Carstairs
Copyright© 2021 by Ron Dudderie
Chapter 22: Of Bikes and Men
The sun was almost at its zenith. My own shadow was less than an inch. Apparently it’s not JUST Englishmen and mad dogs that go out into the midday sun.
“I’ll lure him in,” said Amina, and got into the car. She immediately rolled down the windows. It was like an oven in that thing.
“How?” we asked in unison.
“I’m a woman. That should be enough. You two just stand ready to knock him out, or at least point a gun at him. Not when he can just ride off, obviously. Wait for it.”
“But what if he calls his base?” said Gerard.
I shook my head.
“Don’t think he can. Nobody has a signal here. No way is he carrying a bulky satellite phone on him. He hasn’t even got a backpack. Go, Amina. But lure him HERE.”
“Hide,” she said, closed the door and drove our Nissan off the ledge a lot quicker than I would have done. At the base of the slope, about one hundred metres away from us, she parked the car.
“Stay up here and provide cover,” ordered Gerard. “I’ll go down and hide behind those rocks.”
“Provide cover with WHAT? My weapon is in that car!”
“Well, have one of mine then. Go!”
“Trust an American to bring a bag full of guns but no tea,” I muttered, as I went back inside and had a rummage in Gerard’s kit. I couldn’t easily find a black pistol in a black canvas bag, as my eyes hadn’t adjusted to the darkness and I was nervous. In the end I figured a rock would have to do.
When I finally came back outside, I was treated to quite a spectacle: Amina had popped the hood of our Nissan and was standing on top of it, fully topless, waving her shirt over her head! I ducked behind a rock and managed to get a line of sight to Gerard, who was hiding more or less in front of the car, in a natural recess of another grouping of rocks. If the biker came up to Amina, Gerard would be behind him. I only saw Amina from the back, but I’d seen breasts before so that was fine. Not hers, but enough of them to get the general idea.
“HELP! SAEIDNI! HEEEELP! PLEASE! SAEIDUNI MIN FADLIK!” cried Amina, waving the shirt as if she were starting a race.
It worked a treat! The biker stopped for a moment, during which he was surrounded by his own dust. That seemed to worry Amina, but I understood it completely: if you’re speeding along on this kind of terrain, you just shake too much to get a good look at a pair of knockers. In fact, you might not even be sure that’s what they are. And you sure as hell can’t hear someone yelling, either.
Now that he was sure, the biker made a beeline for us. This seemed to encourage Amina, although she did put her shirt back on when he was about fifty metres away. It was a surprisingly bulky guy. His face was obscured by a yellow, reflective visor. Who the hell wears a closed helmet in this heat?!
He yelled something at Amina, but she pretended not to hear and got off the roof of my rental.
“There goes my deposit,” I remember thinking at the time. The biker slowly came closer. Gerard couldn’t see him yet, but he could see me and so he mimed making a call by extending his thumb and pinky. I understood this to mean: ‘Tell me if he starts making calls.’ I nodded, hoping the glare from the sun wouldn’t give my position away. It sucks to be bald, it really does. To make matters worse, the sweat had started to run into my eyes, taking some sun cream with it. That stings!
Eventually the biker dismounted and came up to Amina while he removed his helmet. They had both settled on Arabic, but even I could tell his wasn’t very strong. When he was close enough, Gerard came up to him and so effortlessly grabbed his arm to immobilise him that the guy didn’t even appear startled. He just seemed resigned, in a: ‘Ah yes, of COURSE a half-naked chick in the desert is a trap ... Silly me!’-sort of way.
Before long the biker was tied up and sitting on the floor of our cave, while I made sure his bike was parked out of sight. Amina had returned our car to where I had left it last night, the difference being that she had backed it in all the way, including an upward turn. Quite impressive, even for someone who hasn’t been banned from driving for months on end!
“He’s Chinese, right?” asked Amina, last to enter the cave.
“No, he’s Korean,” I said, and drank some water in full view of our prisoner. Best to get the psychological torture in early, I say. Besides, I was parched.
“How can you tell?”
“Because he speaks Korean. That’s how you can tell.”
“Do YOU speak Korean?!” she marvelled.
“No. But I’ve been to Korea a few times on business. I recognize the tone. And they all speak English if they’re under forty, so start kicking him in the nuts until he does. I need to get on that bike.”
“Why?!” asked Gerard.
“Because most of the area where he was driving around is in view of that watch tower. I’m sure the guard believes he’s gone behind this hill for a piss or something, but if he doesn’t return they may come looking for him. I’m going to drive away in a different direction and circle back, so at least they won’t search for him here.”
Gerard shook his head.
“That’s clever, Martin, but I need to get into that base later on. They’re not looking for him NOW, so we have some time.”
“You? Why you?”
“I just received orders from John. We are to use your breach charges to blow up the fuel truck they’re emptying now. Hopefully there’s enough petrol fumes left in there to cause a bit of a dent and alert the Saudi authorities to the site. Units from the Tabuk air base should then be here soon enough.”
“Who is here to hear that explosion, though? And do those orders take into account we just saw two missile silos?”
“No. No, fuck! No, John doesn’t know about those yet. Okay, you get on that bike. Do some wheelies, I don’t care. Just make sure you’re wired up, so we can reach you. When I have my orders, come back and I’ll head to the base. So see if the tank is full, else we have to siphon some from our car.”
“Okay. Just one thing: can you, in fact, ride a motorbike?”
“Uhm ... Is it hard?”
“Follow-up question: can you in fact drive MANUAL?”
“Sure I can! I mean, I used to. My uncle had a manual in his ... Come on, how hard can it be?!”
“Allow me to demonstrate,” I said, grinning.
That would have been quite impressive, if in fact I’d managed to drive off then and there. But it took ten minutes to equip the two way radio with the ear piece, put on our victim’s racing outfit over my cooling vest, put on his gloves and boots and find a place to stash my Ruger LCP without risking it falling out of my waist band. Not that I expected to need it, but finding myself without it just then had felt a bit stupid. Sort of a ‘Where is your spare tyre? At home in my shed’ kind of thing.
I’ve driven all kinds of bikes, mostly rentals or whatever my uncle Jan had in his garage during my visits, but my beloved off-road bike was a Yamaha 125 cc. It was fairly small, almost (but not quite) indestructible and very much the yappy dog of motorbikes. I could raise it upright with one hand. This Honda XR650 on the other hand was five times as powerful and felt like riding a bull. A murderous bull at that. Still, being Dutch means having an innate mastery of anything on two wheels and this was no exception. I rode out and within two minutes was doing a wheelie. Wonderful machine, this. The fuel tank was almost full, so no worries there. The more pressing concern was that it was so hot to the touch it nearly scalded me.
“Are you receiving me?” asked Gerard through the earpiece. I had a thin straw-like translucent tube running along my jaw, with a tiny metal microphone at the end. It was all supposed to be voice activated. How the system differentiated between my voice and the engine was a mystery to me. Still is.
“Loud and clear.”
“Did you just do a wheelie!?”
“Sure did. Shouldn’t you be on the blower with the Pentagon?”
“I’m using text based chat. Hey, if you’re feeling lucky why not ride around that base? See what’s on the other side of that plateau.”
“Roger Ebert.”
“Say again?”
“Roger Daltrey? No wait, Roger Moore!”
“Oh God ... Please don’t tell me you also missed the lessons about prowords?”
He was referring to Procedure Words, the most famous of which are ROGER and OUT, which are never supposed to be used together.
“No, I’m aware of procedure, over.”
“Good. Let’s use it. Circle that base and report back, over.”
“Ten-four. Out.”
Gerard made sure I heard his audible sigh. First I claimed I knew the NATO standard, then I switched to ten-codes almost at once.
I didn’t have a compass, but the guard tower was a great landmark. Sure, it was a little too hot to be driving around for fun and it had been a while since I’d done this, but it was a lot better than hanging out in a hot as balls cave and beating some answers out of a Korean. My bet was he was North-Korean, like the fuckers I’d met on Omar’s yacht.
I drove towards the base until I had reached the ramp at the foot of the watch tower. The guard, who turned out to be wearing a black beret, stood up and leaned forward to look at me. I waved, as manly as I could. (Try it, it’s harder than you think. The trick is to rotate your wrist, not waggle your fingers.) He briefly tilted up his chin, which was intended as a question. I pointed at myself and then to my left, into the canyon between the base’s plateau and our ‘mountain’, as if to either ask his permission or keep him informed as to my whereabouts. He gave me a disinterested thumbs up and sat down again. I guessed I looked enough like the Korean to do as I pleased near the base.
And so I sped up and veered left, into the canyon. This was your classic ‘wadi’, or dry river bed. It was filled with boulders so large it was almost impossible to navigate between them, but near the base of the plateau the ground was reasonably flat and clear. They’d be able to hear me, but I assumed everyone would be aware that one of the Koreans (there’s never just one Korean, much like bed bugs) occasionally let off steam on his bike. I kept the wall of the plateau, rising up about 20 metres above me, to my right.
It didn’t take long before I found something interesting: two large, square, concrete tunnels disappeared deep into the mountain. Would these be the ventilation shafts for the missiles? All those exhaust fumes would have to go somewhere, after all.
I considered driving into them, but I was pretty sure all I’d find was a metal gate at one point (only a complete moron would leave these tunnels wide open) and the entire base would be aware I was down there, what with the noise my bike engine made. Turning it off and walking in also didn’t seem like an option: right now I was already causing quite a bit of noise, amplified by the plateau walls. If I cut the engine, people might think I had an accident and look over the edge. And so I continued onward, conspicuous as hell but taking my time. Right now the only thing that could move faster than me in this environment was a bullet.
I came to the section of the wall, if you can call it that, that formed a bridge to the second, slightly higher but also much smaller plateau. I could see a grey, plastic pipe running along the edge, all the way at the top. Underneath it were some cables. It stood to reason this was plumbing of some sort. Maybe the house shared whatever facilities the fort had for water storage or waste processing. Or maybe the house sent some of its solar power to the barrack. Something like that. It was way, way out of my reach, anyway. And so I moved on, driving clockwise along the plateau’s base. Eventually I was on the other side of the ‘bridge’ and could see the back of the fort, or at least the top half of it. An Arab man dressed in olive green fatigues appeared near the edge and for some reason shook his fist at me. Green struck me as an odd wardrobe choice for a man: I’d been here for so long that seeing Arabs in ‘regular’ clothes somehow seemed off. I waved and he turned his back to me. A rifle was slung over his shoulder.
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