H.M.S. Unseen Read Free Page B

as he cleaned his razor, I suppose they’d never, ever look for me along the street in which I vanished. My last-known position.
    One Month Later.
    Baghdad had simmered for four days in flaming June temperatures of around 110 degrees. Not even the nights had brought in a cooling breeze off the eastern edges of the Syrian desert. There had been terrible dust storms out in the central plains all week, and the winds were hot, and Baghdad’s population of four million was wilting under the anvil of the sun. Nonetheless, Eilat had to go.
    He waited until ten o’clock on the night of June 26, then gathered up his heavy cloth sack and cleared his room. He collected his bicycle from the downstairs hall, and the heat hit him like a blast from a furnace as he shambled out into the dark alley.
    By the time he reached Al-Jamouri Street he was already sweating heavily. But once on the wide thoroughfare, he mounted the old bike and set off slowly, in a southeasterly direction, heading for the great bend in the Tigris, where it suddenly swings west around the university, and then east again, in a 9-mile loop out on the southern edge of the city.
    Eilat was fit, but he was deliberately overweight. In the past month he had gained 14 pounds on a careful diet of chicken, lamb, rice, and pita bread at least twice a day. Finally, he was leaving, and, as he had remarked to the man whose life he had so carefully spared a month before, he might not be back for some time.
    He pedaled gently, making for the long sweep of the Dora Expressway, right where it crosses the river. The city was darker and quieter down there, along Sadoun Street, and only a few people were walking in Fateh Square. Eilat kept going until he could make out the huge yawning overpass of the expressway, just as it becomes a truly spectacular bridge.
    He dismounted there and turned off the public roads, pushing the bike in the dark until he came into the shadow of the bridge, where he dumped the bike under a clump of bushes and began his long lonely journey on foot, down the banks of the Tigris. It was the great river of his boyhood, and he was aware this might be his last walk beside its quietly flowing brown waters.
    It would be a long journey downstream, 225 miles, the route laid out in detail, but without one name penciled in, on a hand-drawn map he carried in the pocket of his robe. It was a critical drawing to him, but complete gibberish to anyone else. He also carried with him a tiny military compass he had owned for many years. He intended to proceed at the speed of Napoleon’s army on its way to Moscow—four miles every hour with full packs and muskets. If he could find shade, he would sleep by day and walk through the dark, which was a little cooler, but not much. As he proceeded south toward the marsh, the humidity would become stifling, and he guessed he would lose weight every day. If there was no shade, he would keep walking, beneath the glare of the desert sun.
    Eilat was a Bedouin by birth, and he possessed the Bedouin pride that he alone could survive in the pitiless summer climate of his homeland, that he could go without food for days if he had to, and that he was not intimidated by even the worst dust storm. Water he carried with him, but he would not require so much as other men.
    He wished, not for the first time, that he still had access to one of his father’s camels. If he closed his eyes, he could easily imagine the tireless, swaying rhythm of the stride, the endless beat of the wide hooves on the desert floor. But that was all in his long-lost youth, out on the rim of the central plains, a long way north up the river, when life had been simple, and he had been a true son of Iraq.
    Iraq—the country that had used him for years, often under circumstances of unthinkable danger, then betrayed him in the most brutal way possible.
    Eilat inwardly seethed at the injustice of the treatment handed out to him by the President. He had seen the coldness in the