The Desert Run Read online

  “Here!” The boss man drew a knife from nowhere. At first, I thought he meant to slit my throat, but he spun it around and caught the blade, then held out the handle to me and beckoned me to follow him to the car. I took the knife and followed him. On his grunted instructions, I selected a package of drugs and cut through the packaging. The drugs were the purest white powder I’d ever seen; like the finest flour, it spilled out onto my hand and the desert sand. I put my finger to my mouth and tasted some. It tasted of strawberries. I had no idea if that was right. But I nodded to Ben, and the boss man gave me the biggest smile yet. This time every single one of his teeth was solid yellow gold.

  His men moved into position to start transferring the load, and the tension that held us all released its grip. The men lowered their guns and began to laugh. I looked at Ben and smiled in amazement. But then all hell broke loose.

  There was a shout, then a commotion from the guy who now had the money. I didn’t understand what it was about, but then I saw him pull out a black plastic box from the briefcase with a red LED light blinking on the side—a tracking device. I knew what it was at once. I froze, not understanding, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ben react. Like an animal—or an action hero in a film—he threw himself at the nearest of the guards and stole his gun, using the butt to smash against the side of the man’s head. Then they both went down, rolling in the dirt, but it looked like Ben had the upper hand. The gun went off, and everyone dived for cover—except the boss man. He pulled his gun from his waistband, a giant silver pistol, and he pointed it at the two men fighting on the floor. And then, before I could do anything to stop him, before I could even scream out, he fired, once, twice, three times. And then his gun turned into a machine gun, and he hammered the pair with a minute, then two minutes of non-stop deafening gunfire, flushing metal through their riddled bodies long after they were both dead. They jerked and danced, and the desert floor was red with their blood. He stopped, and there was silence. Silence except for the settling of their corpses. Then the man looked at me.

  “So, you would cross me?” he said, and before I could say anything, he pistol-whipped me, and I felt my jaw snap out of place.

  “You would dare to cross me?” He turned and fired a single shot into Ben, who had somehow now survived the previous assault and was gasping for mercy on the ground beside me.

  “Me who controls this land? Then you will face retribution. Your family will die. Your girl, the one you call Julia—I will take her for myself. And you. You will die now. Knowing all this.” He pointed his gun at my face, at point-blank range. He showed me his golden smile one final time, and then I heard the gun fire, and I saw the bullet in slow motion coming right towards my eyes. As it pierced the soft tissue of my lens I woke up.

  22

  “Mate it’s time to get up. I want to get there early and check the place out.”

  Ben was in my room, wearing just his shorts, shaking me by the shoulder.

  After my nightmare, I’d got up and gone to the kitchen to drink water. I’d run through everything in my mind. I’d nearly panicked and woken Ben up, but eventually, up on the roof terrace under a canopy of stars, I’d calmed down. At five in the morning, I’d gone back to my bed, still wet from sweat. Now, I glanced at my watch. It was seven.

  “Mate, you look like shit,” Ben told me.

  I didn’t answer. I just climbed out of bed and went to the shower.

  When I got out, Ben was counting the money on the kitchen table. He’d made coffee, and I poured myself a cup.

  “You all set?” Ben asked, but he didn’t take his eyes off the money. Again, I didn’t answer, but looked at the small piles of euros. Twenty-five thousand euros in cash takes up a surprisingly small amount of space. There were still small balls of polystyrene from where it had been packed inside one of the boards, before they were locked to the roof. If I’d convinced myself up to this point that this wasn’t real, it was time to face reality. And if I wanted to tell Ben I wanted out, now was the time. I opened my mouth to speak.

  “Yeah,” I croaked. Bottling out again.

  Ben didn’t respond. He began to load the piles of cash into a sports bag, packing the money carefully as if it were a bagful of loose eggs. Only when he was finished and he’d zipped it up did he look my way again.

  “You’re good on the plan for today, right? There’s nothing going to go wrong, but we’ve gotta be careful, just in case. You’re going to be driving, and you stay in the van. You’ll keep the engine running while I get out and make the exchange.”

  I felt sick at the base of my stomach. I could still feel the bullet from earlier when I’d dreamed about it piercing my eye. I put my hand over my face to try and shake the feeling.

  “Jake mate, you need to relax. They’re farmers. They’re just a bunch of farmers selling their crop. It’s gonna be fine. It’s all gonna be fine.”

  The coffee still tasted like dirt in my mouth.

  We took the same road we had the day before, slowing at the car wreck Ahmed had marked on his map and indicating before turning off into the desert, even though there were no other moving vehicles in sight. Close up the smashed car made my stomach turn, the whole front end was caved in, past the front seats, like a truck had ploughed into it and not even slowed down. Whoever had been sitting in it when it happened wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  We pressed on, there wasn’t much of a road, just a track that wove through the bumps in the desert. Ahmed’s map told us to go a couple of miles until we came to another abandoned vehicle, this time a pickup truck, picked bare of anything salvageable like an animal carcass stripped by vultures. We parked up nearby and sat there, not getting out. Not turning the engine off. In the distance we could still see the main road, a few trucks and cars trundling along the horizon. I looked at the pick up. I wondered how it got to be here, and hoped it didn’t belong to the last people that had tried to buy drugs around here. I half expected to see a couple of skeletons sitting in the front, or scattered around in the dirt, but there was nothing. No sign of any life anywhere. Or death, for that matter.

  We drove around a bit to see if there was anything else and eventually parked back up by the truck, the engine still on. The slight vibration it gave to the van was making me more nervous. I was about to turn it off when suddenly, Ben pointed.

  “Shit,” he said, and opened the glove box and pulled out his mini binoculars.

  I looked where he pointed them. I saw something but I couldn’t see what it was. It was black or brown—hard to see in the weird desert light where faraway things wobbled and danced in a silvery mirage. But even so, the way this was moving was weird. It wasn’t the Range Rovers of my dream, at least. There wasn’t any plume of sand thrown up behind it, but it looked kind of alien. Or like a giant crab slowly scuttling toward us.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  Ben was silent for a minute, watching through his glasses. Then he swore again.

  “What is it?” I said again, getting irritated that he wasn’t answering.

  “Camel train,” Ben replied. “Here.” He passed me the glasses, and I quickly put them to my eyes.

  I saw at once he was right. There were three camels ambling slowly toward us on long, ungainly limbs. Alongside them were three men walking. They were too far away for me to see their faces, but they were dressed in long brown robes, with turban-things wrapped around their heads.

  “Shit, what do we do?” I said, watching them approach, then added: “Do you think that might be them? They’re not on the road, and it looks like they’re coming straight toward us.”

  Ben didn’t reply. He just held out his hand for the glasses back, and watched as the three camels slowly came closer and closer.

  It seemed to take an eternity for them to get to us, but eventually they were close enough to see them well without the binoculars. And from that point it was clear they were coming toward us. Either we’d accidentally stopped on their route, or more likely, the
y were our guys.

  Eventually they reached us. The men stopped the camels maybe twenty metres away. No one moved for a minute. We watched them, and they watched us. The camels had bags strapped to their sides. Up close, we could see the men better. One was quite old. It was hard to guess how old; he could have been anywhere from fifty to a hundred, his face was chocolate brown and deeply lined. The other two were younger. They looked mean, untrusting. But there was one thing that gave me hope we were going to survive the next few minutes. I didn’t see any guns.

  “OK, let’s do this,” Ben said, more to himself than me, as he pushed open the door. I was about to tell him not to, but he was already out, and I watched him walk slowly toward the men. As he did so, the older man also walked forward until they met halfway between the van and the camels. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I saw as the man took Ben’s hand and shook it, using both his hands to encircle Ben’s. And I saw he was smiling, and even from inside the van, it looked genuine, even if the teeth were the same colour as the desert floor.

  Then the old man called the younger men forward, and Ben ended up shaking their hands as well, and then Ben turned around and pointed to me, and I knew what he was going to do before he did it. He beckoned me to come out and join them.

  “What about the fucking plan, Ben?” I said, even though he couldn’t hear me. “What about me staying in the van while you do the deal?” But I turned off the engine and pushed open the door.

  Outside, I could smell the camels right away. A warm, milk-and-urine smell, like you get at the zoo. Or it might have been the old man; it was hard to tell. I walked over to him, getting that same floating, not-my-own-legs feeling that I’d had the night before, only this was happening for real. And then I was locked in the older man’s bony-fingered handshake and the brown-toothed grin just as Ben had been, and he was saying “Welcome” to me over and over again, the odour from his mouth washing over me in the desert air. Then one of the young guys spoke.

  “My name is Youssef. This is my father, Agafay, and there, my brother Omar.”

  There was a slight pause, but then Ben replied.

  “I’m Ben, and this is Jake.”

  The old man turned to Ben and repeated his name as if it was a great honour to meet him, then did the same to me, grinning and nodding his head. Then he opened his arms wide, and I thought for a moment he was going to hug me. But instead, he said something in Arabic, then waited for Youssef to translate.

  “My father invites you to drink tea with him,” he said with a slight bow of the head. I looked at Ben, then glanced around, not just surprised at this turn of events but wondering how the hell we were going to drink any tea. We were a long way out of town, especially at the speed these camels walked. But Omar was already fetching things from one of the saddle bags, and he quickly set up a small stove and set a pan to boil. While he did that, the old man, Agafay, asked us questions, translated by Youssef.

  “You have come a long way, yes?”

  “Yes.” Ben nodded.

  “You are from England, yes?”

  “Yes.” Another nod.

  “You are young men, yes?”

  “Yes.” A slight nod, this time accompanied by a raise of Ben’s eyebrows.

  “But you are brave men also. Yes?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Yes.” Agafay nodded as if the question was now settled.

  The four of us, Ben, me, Agafay, and Youssef, were all sitting down by now on tiny folding stools that Omar had unpacked from a camel. Now he came back, carrying a battered tin teapot, which he placed in the middle of us, and the old man did the honours, pouring a little glass of tea first for Ben, and then for me. Only when we’d both drunk and said how good the bitter, oily liquid was, did he pour more for himself and his sons. When we’d all drunk, in a kind of awkward silence, Agafay clapped his hands and gave another command to Omar, who disappeared back to his camel.

  When he returned this time, I saw at once what he had. He was carrying a stack of brown slabs of hashish. I’d never seen that much before in my life, but I knew from all the calculations we’d done that it was a kilo. Omar handed it reverentially to his father, who inspected it quickly, then handed it to Ben with another bow of the head.

  “Here, for you to inspect,” Youssef said, and they both watched Ben’s face as he examined the block. He handed one of the slabs to me too. It was wrapped in cling film, pulled tight against its oily surface. I didn’t want to open it, so I just weighed it in my hand—it had a nice heft—and put it to my nose and sniffed in the deep, pungent smell. It looked OK to me. What am I saying, it looked amazing. I had a momentary out of body experience, just seeing myself there inspecting dope in the middle of the Moroccan desert. I felt so light headed I wondered if I might pass out.

  Ben told me to go and get the money, and I did so, grateful to have a moment away. I carried the sports bag back to the little group and gave it to Ben, unsure what the etiquette was now. Ben unzipped it, pulled the sides of the bag open as much as he could, and handed it to Agafay. But it was Youssef who took it, and who began to count the money, placing small piles of notes on the ground in front of him, weighted down with rocks from the desert floor. We all watched as he worked. It was hypnotic. And when he’d finished, he nodded to his father, who turned to us with a satisfied smile. I had a moment’s panic that we’d just spent the full twenty-five thousand euros on just one kilo of dope, but with another flurry of Arabic, Agafay ordered Omar to bring the rest of the dope, and Ben—clearly getting into the spirit of things—told me to help him, like he was the boss of our side the way Agafay was of theirs.

  I’d calmed down enough by now to give him a dirty look for that, but I did what he told me anyway. I opened the side door of the van and then went back to where Omar was standing, by the first camel. He pulled open the bag that was draped down the camel’s side and showed me it contained stack after stack of slabs of hashish, each wrapped in the cling film and loosely tied together as four. He grinned at me then handed me two piles of slabs and he pointed to where the van was parked, still twenty metres away. Omar took another pile, but it was going to take all day if it was just the two of us. Instead of the others helping, something else happened.

  Suddenly the old man leapt to his feet and shouted something. He looked angry. Then Ben was on his feet, and Youssef too. I’d known all along something was going to go wrong, and I just froze, expecting them all to whip guns out from under their robes. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Omar bowed his head and went back to the camel. He grabbed the reins by its mouth and led it, and its companions, over to where the van was, meaning we could transfer the load of hashish much more easily. The old man laughed as he did it, and Youssef translated again.

  “My father says young men are brave, but not always wise.” I could see Youssef smiling as he said it.

  It didn’t take us very long now to remove the bricks of hashish from the panniers of the camels—which up close really stank, by the way—and count them into the van. There were four slabs to a kilo, so four hundred in total. I was shocked how much space it all took up; it pretty much filled the whole back of the van. I was wondering how I was going to fit this all inside the boards.

  While we were doing that, Youssef packed away all the tea stuff, and the old man started up with another round of double-handed handshakes, and then a kind of manly hug, which I hoped for a moment might be for Ben only. I’d almost forgotten my fear at this point, but when I saw I was getting a hug as well, I had a fleeting thought that maybe this was the moment he was going to pull out a knife from under the robes and stab me. I didn’t have long to fear, and instead of a blade, all I felt was a firm embrace. It was like I was the guy’s favourite nephew.

  “My father says to say thank you, and you are welcome any time,” Youssef said. “He hopes very much to meet you again.”

  And then, with much nodding and waving, Ben and I retreated to the van. We watched them for a moment while
they finished strapping everything away on their camels and then began to walk onward, continuing the path they’d taken as if stopping to sell us one hundred kilos of hashish had been nothing more than a tea break.

  “Well, that wasn’t too bad,” Ben said when we were both back in the van, and he turned around to look at the load we had packed in the back. Then he laughed.

  23

  Ben was hyper that evening. Screaming with excitement, running up and down the stairs. In and out of the swimming pool, dripping all over the house, and in between everything, just stopping to look at our enormous pile of hashish. We’d backed the van right up to the front door to move the bricks inside. Now, they were stacked up against the wall of the courtyard, opposite the paddleboards they were supposed to fit inside. It looked impossible. Like there would never be enough room. Maybe that was why my mood didn’t match Ben’s. For him, this was a massive release of stress. I still had some work to do.

  I got right on with it. I used chairs, placed back to back, and laid the first board on top; then I got the mini power saw, opened it up, and chiselled out about half of the foam. I took a couple of the slabs of dope and placed them inside, calculating how this was going to work. I chiselled out a bit more foam and tried again. This was going to happen. It was going to take me a good few days. But I was going to make this work.

  Ben helped for a bit when he calmed down, but he wasn’t much use—he always looked for shortcuts. And in the end, he got bored anyway and told me he was going to go and explore the area, and I was happy to let him go. He came back later with the contents of another tagine in a styrofoam box. Moroccan takeout. I was surprised how hungry I was, and when I’d eaten, I decided I was too tired to do anything more that night.

  The next day, Ben went off exploring again after breakfast. I didn’t mind being left with all the work. There was a radio in the house, and I found a station that played a mixture of old American hits and French pop that made a nice accompaniment to my work. The morning flew by and eventually hunger drove me to the kitchen where Ben had been back and left some more food, and that’s how things progressed. By the time the sun went down I’d opened up all four of the boards. By midnight I’d scraped away enough foam from inside that I could pack all the bricks into the boards. I was dead tired by then so I did a length of the pool by starlight then found my bed.