The Caliphate, André Gallo [best books to read ever .TXT] 📗

front gate of the fort was open. He took a wide turn to his right in order to approach it from the side, where there were no entrances. There were three or four camels near the corner of the side and front walls. Camels were valued property and their owner, probably close by, would not take kindly to having his means of transportation, his source of milk, and his investment threatened or even disturbed. Further, he had learned that camels were as ornery as they were aloof and might complain loudly if they thought he was invading their territory.

     He walked toward the front gate staying close to the wall. Voices came from inside the gates as he approached. He moved forward slowly and silently, extremely conscious of the sound his sandals made in the sand. The voices became louder; two men stepped out of the fort through the front gate and continued talking. He was close enough to recognize Karim and waited until he was looking in his direction to loosen his tagoulmoust. Hoping for recognition, he then pointed to his right.

     Karim apparently understood; he and the other guard started walking slowly along the wall, away from Steve.

     He’d had no particular plan when he headed to the fort, except to find Karim somehow and hand him the satellite phone. He now understood Karim could not leave the other guard without a very good reason, and that he would have to return the phone himself.

     He looked inside the gate to see if anyone else was in the courtyard and walked in with an air of bravado that he did not actually feel. From Karim’s information, he remembered that al Khalil normally kept the phone on a desk inside his room at night. With the layout of the fort in his mind, he headed toward the tower in the middle of the courtyard.

     It was still dark. There was no movement in the courtyard. When he made his way into the corridor leading to al Khalil’s room, he saw the door was closed.

     He placed his hand on the door handle but hesitated and instead went back outside and looked for the window he hoped would be open, substituting for air conditioning. The window was where he thought, and while the bars were close enough together to keep a body from entering they were wide enough for the phone and his arm.

     When he got close enough, he used a pencil flashlight to look inside. The bed was near the wall to the right of the window. In the bed, he could see a body turned toward the wall—he assumed al Khalil. Under the window was the desk. He reached inside and put the phone carefully on the desk.

     As he withdrew his hand, he heard shoes crunching in sand from the direction of the front gate. He quickly walked around the tower and went into the corridor in order to stay out of sight of anyone in the front part of the courtyard. With pounding heart, he stayed there for about a minute, noting that the sky was getting lighter. It couldn’t be long before the morning prayers began, when these corridors would fill with bodies and he would be seen.

     The sound of voices growing louder told him people were approaching his location. He felt trapped but retreated farther inside. He guessed someone was supposed to wake up al Khalil.

     He went up the stairs to stay out of sight as a man in a jellaba entered the corridor. Instead of stopping at al Khalil’s door, he kept going toward the stairs. Steve retreated farther up.

     At a steady pace, sweating with anxiety, he ascended more stairs until he saw the door to the room that he had earlier noticed on the plans. With his small flashlight he scanned the room for a hiding place seeing only empty ammunition boxes, coils of rope in one corner, and a large piece of black cloth on a table crowded with old candles and booklets yellowed with age.

     The black cloth, he realized, was a flag. It occurred to Steve that perhaps that flag was raised every morning. He grabbed a coil of rope and kept going up the stairs, still hoping for a place to hide.

     The platform at the top was larger than it looked from outside and could accommodate fifty men firing on attackers below. Steve looped and tied one end of the rope through an iron ring just below the top of the five-foot high wall around the platform then threw the rest of the rope over the wall. It was too dark to see if it reached the ground.

     Steve briefly considered waiting in ambush for the guy who would raise the flag; surprise would be on his side and he was confident he could overcome the flagman. But would he have to kill him to keep him quiet?

     Instead, he went over the side and held himself steady about ten feet down by wrapping his legs around the rope. He thought he might be able to come back up and escape down the stairs after the flag was up. On the other hand, he might run into someone else in the tower, maybe al Khalil.

     He started descending and finally could soon see the ground. His rope was about twenty feet short of the sandy courtyard. Without any other options, he continued downward, hand over hand.

     With just two feet of rope left, he noticed a shooting port below him. He was able to wedge first one leg, then the other into the opening. He let the rope go and was able to grip a ledge immediately above the port. Then he lowered his grip to the opening, got his legs out and dropped his grip to the bottom. From there he swung himself away from