Killer Elite (previously published as the Feather Men) Read Free Page A

gone away.” Baaqi looked into the eyes of his cousin. “Is that so? Do you wish to give in? Do you wish Hamoudto plant one of his murdering atheist friends as our leader?” He shook his head and grasped Amr by the elbows. “Remember, there are many of us who will suffer if you go. Your family and your friends. We, who risked much to speak out in harder times to have you as
tamimah
[head of the local tribal grouping] and to keep out Hamoud’s faction.”
    Amr nodded wearily at Baaqi and looked down at his son. Bakhait, a handsome fifteen-year-old, was clever beyond his years. He said little and missed even less. He loved his father as corn loves the sun. “We will go, Father,” Bakhait said with an intonation neither interrogative nor decisive, but merely encouraging.
    Amr’s Land Rover, laden with sacks of rice, Korean combs and boxes of German knives, followed Baaqi’s vehicle just beyond the reach of his dust cloud.
    In two hours they came to Midway camp for fuel. An isolated oil-company base of six wooden huts erected in the 1960s, the place now sprawled over a square mile of military installations and a modern airstrip used by the sultan’s fighters. A thousand tracks, of camels and vehicles, radiate out through the moon country that surrounds Midway. Muscat, capital of all Oman, lies six hundred miles to the northeast, the South Yemen border a hundred miles to the west, and the Qara Mountains a mere hour by vehicle to the south.
    They passed no sign of life but camels, grazing the dry scrub of the wadi beds. Only ghaf, acacia and gnarled
mughir
trees can tolerate this arid region. As the outline of the mountains skittered about in the heat shimmer ahead, they sped by the ruins of Hanun. Potsherds and the detritus of neolithic flint factories lay scattered over the gypsum wastes. Here, 2,000 years ago, was a frankincense storage center and, at Andhur to the east, a main entrepot for the
laqat
incense gum that sold throughout the Roman empire at a price often higher than gold.
    When the Queen of Sheba, from neighboring Yemen, ruled this land, the tribes were animist, worshipping the moon god, Sin, and were slaves to myriad fearful superstitions. Their lives were also ruled by the
ghazu
, the intertribal raid, and the interminable blood feuds that could last for a hundred years. Wahhabi Islam and its religious reforms swept the old beliefs from much of Arabia but never reached the dark recesses of the Qara hills, where the old ways continued alive and well into the latter half of the twentieth century.
    As early as the 1960s the old sultan, from his Dhofar palace at coastal Salalah, had attempted to outlaw the blood feud. He might as well have spat at the devil, for the
thaa’r
was not merely a custom; it was the law and a deeply ingrained way of life. In 1975 Sultan Qaboos, alarmed by a fresh surge of feud killings resulting from the war, appeared on Omani television and threatened the death sentence to any perpetrator of the
thaa’r
.
    Baaqi’s Land Cruiser slowed at the approach to the steep ramp of Aqbat al Hatab and began the climb from the barren
nejd
to the mountaintop grasslands of the Qara.
    For three months of the year monsoon clouds from the Indian Ocean cover the mountains in a cloud of mist several hundred yards thick. The drizzle falls without ceasing on to the
jebel
, turning it into a magical paradise as green as South Virginia and bursting with life. Hummingbirds, venomous cobras, hyenas and every creepy-crawly on God’s earth are to be found here. Along with some 30,000
jebalis
.
    The two vehicles snaked up the Aqbat al Hatab and accelerated as the cliffs and the desert fell away behind and the dry mountain zone, the
gatn
, stretched moonlike on either side. After a mile or so the slopes showed a threadbare covering of grass, tinder-dry from the long postmonsoon drought. Outcrops of bush and thornyscrub increased until the road ran over the top of the world and there were rolling prairies,