DUBAI MARINA
DUBAI
UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
"Richard, help me please!"
Aries studied Richard Townsend for a response on the balcony. "Your assistant needs your help. Aren't you going to assist her?'
"If she is the mole, she's yours to do with as you like." He turned to watch a yacht slipping its moorings.
Aries chuckled. "Good. I'm delighted to see you are a pragmatic man. It's your butler who is the mole." He stood back from the balcony door. "Go. Comfort your mistress."
QUETTA
The elder Afghani accepted the tin cup of steaming tea from Christopher. "You know our ways well, but I suspect that you are not one of us."
"I am not. I'm a British soldier, but I have spent time in Kandahar with many shuras. I have tried to learn, but I have much to learn. My friends are from Jordan, a Muslim Kingdom to the west of here. About a hundred days of hard walking." He drew a rough map of the Middle East in the mud.
"Why are you here?" The elder dunked a piece of bread into his tea as he examined the man in front of him. "Why are you travelling with these men?"
"We have heard whispers that someone is planning to attack the celebrations of Milad un Nabi. We are worried because it is said that the attackers will make it look like the foreign soldiers did it."
"And why would it not be so?" The elder adjusted his scarf as the wind gusted through the ramshackle shelters causing several large pieces of debris to drift into their clearing. He carefully added more wood to the makeshift windbreak that sheltered the fire. "They kill our women and children without further thought." He gestured towards the night sky. "No one ever knows when the next bomb will come."
"As you say, our bombs sometimes kill the innocent, but that is the same as bullets. Your bullets kill innocents as well as ours. We do not deliberately target innocents ..."
The elder stared at Christopher as he interrupted. "You call it culled damage!"
"I think you mean collateral damage and I do not cause it—just as my men do not cause it." Christopher angrily responded. "I am a soldier. I fight with my gun and my body. I am a paratrooper. I do not use drones to target innocents and I do not cause collateral damage. I have accidentally killed seven innocents and I regret that, but I do not kill innocents deliberately. Can you say the same for all your brothers?"
"You know I cannot ..."
"Then you can deal with me man-to-man the way your people have always done for centuries before the foreigners joined your ranks." Christopher reached for the pot of tea. "I want to stop innocents being killed..."
"And why should I trust you?" the elder demanded as he withdrew his cup.
"I could have killed you. Why didn't I? Tell me!" Christopher refilled his cup and returned the pot to the fire's wire grill.
The elder spread his hands in an expansive gesture.
"Then talk to me. If you really want to save innocents, I will help you. I will also tell you how we can both save innocents. Then, after we finish saving the women and children, you and I can fight each other again." Christopher gestured for the man to bring forward his cup.
**
A yellow gap tooth grin was the elder's initial response. Finally, he pushed his cup forward. "You will give us back our weapons? And why would you fight with us against your brothers?"
ESTÁ A LER
The Shaddad Conspiracy
Aventura“Your murder victim was not an innocent, naive woman. She was on our terrorist watch list. The fact that she escaped from Basra and lived a normal life in London buggers belief, but she was planted here by a foreign government to wreck the Taliban p...
