The Old Man(101)
“You have a lot of money and a new car. Why don’t you have papers?”
“It’s an emergency. I’m supposed to drive to Tobruk and bring back one of the doctors.”
“For whom?”
“For Faris Hamzah.”
“Is that who owns this vehicle?”
“Yes, sir.”
The soldier smiled as he turned to face his companions. “He works for Faris Hamzah.”
The others grinned and shook their heads in disdain. The man sitting on the rock by the road stood up, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and approached. “You work for Faris Hamzah?” he said. “Faris the Great?”
It was clear that these men were not fans of Faris Hamzah. He couldn’t decide how far the enmity went. Would they harm him just because they had contempt for Hamzah?
The second man walked to the side of the SUV and looked in at the empty seats, and then walked to the rear door. He pounded on it with his fist.
Spencer leaned into the open door, grasped the fob of the keys, and pressed the button that opened the door locks. The man lifted the back hatch and said, “Ah. Take a look.”
The first man walked back and joined his comrade at the rear of the vehicle. The men began taking things out. There were three M4 rifles. Spencer glanced at the roadblock ahead, where there was only one man left in front of him. The men in the back leaned the rifles against the bumper and lifted a couple of olive drab ammo cans. He could see they were heavy, which meant they were full.
Spencer scrambled into his vehicle, started it, and threw it into reverse. The two men behind the SUV dived to the side to avoid being hit, and then scrambled to rise as Spencer threw the SUV into drive and roared away from them. He hit the wooden barrier so it swung into the front of the right Humvee and bounced on the ground.
Spencer never let the vehicle slow. As he sped off, there was some yelling and then a burst of automatic weapon fire. He heard the staccato reports, the bang of bullets hitting the steel of the SUV’s interior, its bumpers, its roof. The unsecured hatch flapped up and down as he drove. It absorbed one burst, some of the bullets punching holes in the sheet metal and others pinging up into the sky. Then another short burst came just as the hatch flew open again. Bullets hit the windshield, leaving big blooms of pulverized glass in front of Spencer’s face and to his right.
As Spencer reached the first curve in the highway the hits were fewer, and then there were none. He drove as fast as he dared along the dark highway, trying to put some miles between him and the roadblock.
In his rearview mirror, far behind him, a pair of headlights appeared, and then another. He switched off his headlights and turned the SUV off the road. He drove between low, dark hills that looked like piles of rocks strewn across the hard, dry surface of the Jabal Akhdar plateau. He bumped over slopes, always taking them head-on to keep from tipping the SUV over on its side. He got into ruts so deep that he had to stay in them until he could wrench the wheel to the side and bump out of them.
After a short time, he swung between two low hills and his SUV tilted to the side. The wheels spun and began to dig him in deeper. He rocked the vehicle forward and back, but couldn’t get it out of the holes the wheels were digging. He looked around, and realized the SUV was hemmed in and surrounded by rocky hills that hid it from the road. He reached down to find his pistol, silencer, and magazines still jammed under his seat. He took them and ran around to the rear of the vehicle to see what was left of the weapons and ammunition the soldiers had found. There was nothing.
He stepped on the rocks near the foot of a pile, then hurried along the side into some thick brush. He began to run. Spencer ran hard, asking his body to forget its fatigue for just this hundred yards, and then for the next hundred. When he was a mile from the spot where he had left the SUV, he could see headlights on the road he had left. As he watched, he saw them drift along, and then stop. Slowly, the first Humvee, and then the second, turned off the road and began to bounce across the open land. They were following his SUV’s tracks.
He ran on below the endless glittering specks of stars. He found the Big Dipper, and then followed the line from its cup to the North Star. For a long time he trotted and then he walked, using the last hours of darkness to make his way northeast toward Tobruk.
When the sun came up he slept in the shade of a rocky shelf. When he woke it was afternoon. He stood and walked to the east, stepping toward his own shadow, the western sun falling on his shoulders and his head scarf.
Spencer knew he had not traveled far since he had declared himself to be halfway to Tobruk. He was at least two hundred kilometers from Faris Hamzah’s compound, but he was still that far from the airport at Tobruk, where the Canadian People’s Relief Corps would be waiting for their resupply flight. He had used up half of his seventy-two hours.
His night had left him dehydrated, and he could not go on much longer without water. He was on a stretch of land where he could see no buildings, no sign that human beings had ever been there. There was nothing in sight that suggested he was near water—no trees, no green brush of the sort that grew near wells and streams. His only possessions were a pistol with a suppressor and two full magazines, a good pair of shoes, and his white Libyan clothes. The soldier at the roadblock may not have intended to rob him, but he had never given back the two thousand dinars that Spencer had been carrying. He had only eleven dinars in his pocket, left over from tipping Abdullah.