The Identity Thief (18 page)

"This must be where they store their building supplies," X said.

"For what?" asked Harry.

"They're turning the old commanding officer's quarters into a chapel," X explained. "Some of our comrades have had to carry concrete blocks and they told me."

The door had a little latch. Harry unlocked it, cracked the door and looked out. A Marine guard, a rifle slung over his shoulder, was pacing about 25 feet away. He hurriedly shut the door.

"It's patrolled," he said.

"We could ... " Asar suggested, drawing his finger across his throat and contorting his face into a death mask, in a manner that might have been comical under other circumstances.

"And if he screams or squeezes off a round?" said X.

Asar shrugged sheepishly.

Harry went to the window and looked out.

"My friends, come here!" he exclaimed.

They drew up beside him.

"The fence is just over five meters away," he said. "And we have all the tools we need here to dig a tunnel."

X smiled broadly. "Yes, we will use their own tools to defeat the dogs."

Asar stroked his jaw dubiously. "Even five meters will take time. We can't do it in one night or even two."

"We will work every night, while the infidels are sleeping," X explained, waving his hands enthusiastically. "Until we complete the tunnel we must continue to play sick so they keep us in the infirmary."

Harry nodded. "We must be careful to put our tools exactly where we find them."

"What about the dirt?" Asar asked.

A good question. From what X remembered from
The Great Escape
, the POWs brought the dirt out in the cuffs of their trousers and surreptitiously dumped it in the prison garden. But they had no garden, and for that matter, no trousers.

"Here," said Harry, excitedly. He thumped his hand against a huge barrel. He lifted the lid and showed them that it was half filled with cans of wood stain. "There are four of them and none are full," he said.

"Excellent my friend. They won't be using those on the floor until the building is finished and by then we'll be long gone."

The prisoners slid away an empty fuel tank that didn't look as if it had been used in years, and began to chip away at the floor. They worked for five hours that night, agreeing that they couldn't risk staying close to dawn. In that time, they only managed to break through the floor of the store room and dig perhaps two feet into the earth below.

The slow progress perturbed the usually ebullient Asar.

"I do not know if when I see The Chief again I will be in as lofty a position," he said morosely. "He must have another driver by now. I will be back to carrying messages, as I did when I was a boy."

X tousled the teen's corvine hair again. It was a fatherly gesture he remembered seeing on TV. "It is said that it is better to be a free dog than a caged lion," he observed. "First we must get out of this wretched place, then we can worry about our future in the great cause."

An hour later, they stopped work and dragged the empty fuel tank back to its place on top of the hole. Each tool was returned to its proper place.

Then, like vampires retreating before the dawn, they returned the way they came, standing on each others' shoulders to reach the airshaft and squirming through it back to the hospital ward.

* * *

Every night they worked on the tunnel. During the day, when the doctor and nurse checked in on them, always in hazmat suits, they faked weakness and pain. The antibiotics they received daily would take some time to cure them, but they would survive, the doctor assured them.

They took turns burrowing in the tunnel, men transformed into moles. The digger passed the dirt back to the others, who placed it in the old barrels.

To allay the monotony they chatted about their personal lives. For some reason, X did not feel comfortable talking about Ali Nazeer's mythical youth in Kuwait with Harry present. Sharing the fantasy with that naive teen, who listened so avidly in the dark, had been moments which, although he'd be loathe to admit it, he'd found somehow magical.

Instead, they talked mostly about women.

Harry bragged about his wife in Riyadh, a strong, devoutly religious woman quite naturally, who maintained strict order in the house. When one of their daughters once brought home a Barbie doll as a gift from a schoolmate, she was severely beaten for accepting the morality-corrupting blond symbol of the West.

"Here, here," X said.

Asar nodded in approval.

Asar told them about the girl to whom he was engaged in an Afghan village near the Khyber Pass. He had never seen her face, or been alone with her, but she had a sweet singing voice and wrote beautiful poetry. They had exchanged many letters before his capture. He was still a virgin, it soon became apparent to X, and was unashamed of it - proud of his purity in the eyes of Allah.

An American his age would be suicidal
, the identity thief thought.

"On our wedding night, there will be rose petals on the bed and I will play on the sitar for her before we make love for the first time," Asar said.

The look in his eyes when he spoke of her was priceless.
He looks like the kid who played Romeo in the old Zepherelli movie from the '60s,
X thought.
Or maybe Gidget getting misty-eyed over Moondoggie.

His idealism was just incredible, X thought as the boy took Harry's place in the tunnel.
Admirable in a way if you could get past the terrorism and suicide-bombing bit.

"What about you?" Harry said. "How are those wives of yours, Jasmine and the short one."

X chuckled. "Still fussing at each other like cats and addicted to shopping. Took a trip to Paris and came home with a suitcase full of mink coats. Furs, to wear in Kuwait City!"

The other men laughed.

At that moment, the tunnel collapsed entombing Asar, and dust shot out of the opening. X and Harry dug frantically with their spades. X was surprised to find himself genuinely frightened, his pulse accelerating. He was not used to worrying about other people. It took several moments to reach the boy and they dragged him out by his heels. He was coughing and covered in dust, but uninjured.

The collapse cost them two nights work, but they forged ahead.

It took some doing to keep Asar's spirits up. He had the impatience of most teens and again and again they had to quote from the Koran to keep him going. X was glad that he'd downloaded that collection of Arab proverbs and memorized choice adages on the plane to Las Vegas.

"It is written that men learn little from success, but much from failure," X told Asar after a second collapse two nights later. Harry seconded that, reminding the despondent boy that "Sunshine without rain makes a desert."

The spy had, apparently, spent time on the same Internet site.

When they were, in Harry's estimation, about six feet from the fence - perhaps three night's works - the doctor surprised them with some good news. After carefully examining each of them, he beamed as if he'd just been handed the Nobel Prize for curing cancer and was about to thank the little people.

"You are making remarkable progress," said the doctor, "given that you were at death's door. The latest blood tests show your white count is back to normal. Today's Wednesday. I would say that by tomorrow morning, I will be able to discharge you."

The moment the nurse turned off the light and the door closed behind her, the men sprang into action. They dug furiously until their hands ached. They didn't care what happened to the dirt now; they cast it in a heap on the floor.

"Don't give up, my comrades," X urged, when Asar began to show signs of weariness. "We will prevail, with Allah's help."

In the wee hours of Thursday morning, about 4 a.m. as Harry calculated it, X's fingers breeched the surface. His fingers wiggled in the cold night air.

"We've done it," he exclaimed, turning back to the others. "Three night's work in one!"

In another 15 minutes, the tunnel was wide enough for him to wriggle out, like a zombie rising from a grave. X crawled on all fours on the rocky soil. He could kiss the ground, the feeling of freedom was so exhilarating. He reached back and grabbed Asar's arm and helped the teen out. Together they pried Harry out of the hole.

"We are free men," Harry declared. "We have defeated Satan's minions."

The three men embraced.

"Together, the three of us are unstoppable," X said.

"We're like The Three Musketeers," declared the teen, though perhaps Dumas might roll in his grave. Upbeat as a prisoner, Asar would be insufferably buoyant now, X realized.

Harry pointed the sky. "We will have the cover of darkness for only a short time, my friends," he said. "We must go."

They darted into the night.

"Moammar" had told the others of a safe house less than four miles from the prison. They jogged at a solid clip for a half hour, resting for a few moments every mile. They stopped, panting, at the bombed-out ruins of a barn that was painted a grim tarlike black.

"We should keep going," Asar said, panting.

"No, this is it, the secret place," Harry informed him. Asar surveyed the termite-eaten, broken-down structure, which looked as if it would collapse on anyone foolish enough to enter it. Which, X realized, was doubtless the intention: to ward off nosy intruders.

"It's not the Taj Mahal, my young brother, but it will provide us with a good hiding place," Harry said with a smile. "The Americans must have discovered we're gone by now. Help me with the door, Asar."

They slid across a wooden bar and pulled the huge doors open.

"It's stocked with food and weapons," Harry explained.

"How did you arrange this from the hospital?" Asar asked.

Harry shook his head. "I had my associates put this in place months ago, well before I was captured," he told the teen. "We learned that Abd Al-Rahman Prison was the most likely place we'd be taken."

X tapped his temple. "Moammar is as crafty as a tarantula. He is always two steps ahead of the infidels."

Were tarantulas really crafty? X wasn't sure. He often found himself drawing upon hazily remembered dialog from old movies like
Gunga Din
.

Harry went to a large stack of empty crates and started pulling them off. The other men helped him. Behind the heap of junk, a rusty old Russian-built Tara 138 six by six diesel truck was waiting.

Asar laughed and smacked the side.

"She's no beauty but I can drive her," he said. "She can go up the side of a mountain like a young goat."

Click!
From behind them came the unmistakable sound of a gun cocking.

"Do not move," a female voice commanded.

They turned, and a woman stepped out of a dark corner. She was decked out in a
chadaree
, a traditional Afghani garment that covered her from head to toe, along with an embroidered face piece. Not a burqa, but by no means a micro mini either. The lady was pointing the business end of a Kalashnikov rifle at them.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"I am Ali Nazeer of the Jihadist Brotherhood," X proclaimed, thumping his chest boastfully. "These are my companions Asar and Moammar. We have just escaped from the American prison, Abd Al-Rahman."

She lowered the weapon and gave a gasp of admiration.

"Everyone has heard of the great Ali Nazeer," she said.

"Who are you?" Harry demanded.

"I am Fatima bint Kuttab," she said. "I am from the Islamic Freedom Party of Liberia. Once a month I am to stock this place with fresh food and water. I have been sleeping here for the past two days. I was told by an aide to The Chief that if I encounter any brothers in the Cause who have escaped I am to safeguard them and offer them assistance."

"It is I who made those arrangements," Harry said. "You have done well."

"Do you have civilian clothes for us?" X asked. The backside-baring hospital gowns would hardly make it easy for them to blend in.

The woman nodded and retrieved a wicker basket full of clothes from its hiding place behind a stack of hay.

"There is a set for each of you," she said. To each man she distributed standard Afghan wear: a
tombaan
, a type of pants, a
payraan
, an oversize shirt, boots and a
pakol
, a hat. Then she stepped back and waited. The garments were identical except for color. Harry wore a red shirt, X blue, Asar purple.

"We cannot dress in the presence of a woman," Harry scolded her. "Go to the other side of the truck. The woman nodded meekly and turned to go. Asar suddenly clutched her arm.

"Wait," he said. "How do we know this woman is who she claims she is?"

X stepped in. "My friend, we do not have time for this. The sun is up. The Americans will be coming this way any minute."