35

Ibn Aqnaar

Tilaal Mumeet was a small village that clung to the side of a steep hill by the same name. The leader of the clan in that area was a hulk of a man, apparently middle-aged, who towered over everyone else and had a voice incongruously mild and soft. The rest of the party waited outside while Sohkoor and Woodgerd entered a wattled hut in the center of the village. A frigid wind had sprung up that day from the High Atlas in the distance, now blowing across the hillside and reaching inside their burnouses to freeze exposed skin.

Rough-looking young men watched them from the neighboring huts as the occasional woman glided by covered from head to foot in a black burkha, carrying a load of bread or spring fruit. The village was gray and brown, like the clothing and the countryside and the day. Wake and Rork stood staring at the locals as Faber sat under the lee of a wall and morosely kicked sand against a bush.

“Aye, a day like this makes me miss the West Indies. An’ that one’s feelin’ helpless, for sure, sir,” said Rork, eyeing the Frenchman.

Wake walked over to Faber and sat down. “We’ll find her, Mr. Ambassador. We’ll find her.”

Faber looked up, tears filling his eyes. “I will die if we do not. I’ve lost everything I thought was important to me—my good name, respect from the leadership of France. But all that is nothing. Catherine is my life, my reason to exist. She is all that I have.

He sighed. “It all has gone by, Wake, and now here I am, in the middle of nowhere, melancholy in a God-forsaken place I was sent to because my own stupid pride made me arrogant. I dragged her here, you know. She wanted us to stay in Europe, or maybe go to America, but I dragged her here.”

“You were promoted, though. Promoted to an ambassadorship in Morocco from being a consul general in Genoa. That’s an honor, sir.”

Faber shook his head. “Hah . . . They promoted me up—and out of sight, Wake. I was too unsteady for Paris to keep in Europe, especially after that scene with Moltke, so they sent me to Africa, where the worst I could do is alienate some primitive Arabs.”

Against his better judgment, Wake felt sorry for the man. “Morocco is important to France, from what I’ve been told, sir. I think they needed someone they could trust to be ambassador.”

“Paris already had someone they could trust in Morocco, Wake. The commercial attaché is the one with the real power, not me. He does the agreements, socializes with the sultan, lives in a lavish estate. I periodically show the flag from my pathetic office and am expected to know my place. And ignore the whispered insults. No, Morocco was the perfect spot for their purposes—far enough away from the important work and close enough to recall quickly.”

“Well, whatever happens politically, you need to be strong now, Mr. Ambassador. For Catherine, if nothing else.”

Faber nodded. “Yes, on that you are correct, Lieutenant. All else is minor now to me—she is everything.”

***

They climbed the hill silently, Sohkoor and Woodgerd somber, the guardsmen sullen, Faber still depressed, and the two American sailors confused. Wake hadn’t seen a map, and other than the direction of the sun, had no idea where he was and where they were heading.

Rork gazed toward the sunset, a cold red glow between the layers of gray windy clouds. As if reading Wake’s thoughts he said, “That’s the way home, sir. The ocean is somewhere o’er there. A week o’ riding on one o’ these beasts, or maybe three times that by foot.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, Sean Rork.”

The top of Tilaal Mumeet was flat and an acre in area, reached as the last of the sun disappeared and the temperature plunged even further. They made camp and shortly thereafter sat around a small fire, drinking a cinnamon tea called hunja and eating chunks of dried and salted lamb. Sohkoor sat apart from them, Woodgerd explaining that he was preparing for the evening by eating special a food, called majoun. It looked indigestible to Wake, but Woodgerd said it had herbs that would assist Sohkoor in understanding what would happen later.

When asked for details, he simply said, “You’re not in Pensacola now, squid. You’re beyond the back of the world and there’re some things I can’t explain. Hell, I don’t understand it myself. You’ll just have to see it for yourself.”

***

Two hours later, after the final prayer toward Mecca, the mountaintop to their east began to glow as the sky, blown clean of clouds, lightened along the horizon. The group was huddled together close around the fire, except for two of the Arabs on picket farther out and Sohkoor still sitting forty feet way, alone. The glow transformed into amber, then pink and soon the moon peeked up over the jagged landscape, a half-crescent that seemed like you could reach out and touch it, the air was so clear.

Wake saw the Arabs glance at Sohkoor, waiting apparently for him to do something. But the scholar still sat, quietly facing east. Faber, who had been silent since his emotional outpouring to Wake earlier, turned to him, his voice sad and low.

“You were her friend. I will not inquire further on that. But I will ask you if you think she will want to stay with me after this.”

Uncomfortable with the subject, for Woodgerd and Rork were next to him, Wake tried to be reassuring. “Sir, she is your wife and respects you greatly. You are the hero of Paris and a man whom France has honored repeatedly. I am sure that this ordeal will cement her devotion to you.” Wake steeled himself. It had to be said. “And just so you know, she and I were friends, but not lovers. We talked but never did anything else.”

Faber studied Wake’s eyes for several minutes, the prolonged silence and pleading look on Faber’s face crushing Wake’s heart. “I do think you loved her just a little, though. Do not worry—it is not a problem, Lieutenant. What normal man would not fall under her spell? I believe you when you say it did not go further.”

Faber looked off for a moment. “You have a wife also? And children?”

“Yes, sir. A boy and a girl.”

“And you are happy?”

He thought of Linda’s last letter, received the night before he left on this mission. One paragraph telling him they could make it, that she wouldn’t let him go. He choked with emotion. “It’s not easy to be a naval officer with a family, sir. It’s very hard on the family, especially on the woman. But I hope it will get better and that my wife becomes happier with her marriage. I hope it gets better for you too, sir.”

“I want you to please call me Henri, for after all we have been through it seems that we share something—a common sadness and a common hope.”

Wake held out his hand. “Yes, Henri, I think we do. Please, call me Peter.”

Faber exhaled loudly and shook Wake’s hand. “Peter, we will find her. I have no doubt of that now.”

Woodgerd snored abruptly, which made everyone laugh. Rork said, “Well, if the toughest man amongst us can sleep, then methinks we little people can rest easy.”

“Good point, Rork,” Wake observed. “We should get some shuteye.”

Wake tried to settle into sleep, his mind was whirling. He noticed that Faber was not asleep either. Perhaps here’s an opportunity to loosen Faber’s obnoxious façade, Wake thought. He turned to him and said in a low tone. “Henri, if we can’t sleep, we might as well talk. I’d like to ask you about Paris during the German invasion. Is it true you actually flew balloons out of the city?”

Faber regarded him suspiciously. “Why?”

“Because it’s one of the great accomplishments in military history and I want to hear about from a man who was there.”

The Frenchman shrugged. “Yes, I was on the committee that tried to maintain communication with the outside. I helped to construct balloons and operated one of the last out myself. Actually, we flew many of them out, right over the Germans with their vaunted big guns. It was how we got thousands of pages of national documents—treasures, really—and secret communiqués through the siege. And, of course, we used the birds. Pigeons.”

“Birds and balloons. Amazing,” exclaimed Wake. “But what if they had captured them?”

“We thought of that. The Germans would not have been able to read them—we had them photographed and reduced the images to a tiny size, with many of them on a sheet of paper.” Faber was warming to the subject, the pride of his accomplishment obvious. “They didn’t look like normal photographs, they looked like dots to the average person.”

“I’ve never heard of that. They used balloons a bit in our war, but not to that extent. Very innovative.”

“Oh, the Parisians did far more than that. We sent out many balloons with carrier pigeons who then flew inbound over the Germans with messages from outside. On the ground the siege was tight, but in the air,” he grinned again, “it was not so dominated by Prussian metal.”

Rork asked, “Didn’t they try to shoot you down, sir?”

“Yes, quite aggressively. The balloon I flew out in January of seventy-one had several dozen holes and was deflating slowly when I landed outside the city and beyond German lines. They upended their cannon and fired grape, but by the time it reached our elevation it was robbed of its, how do you say? . . . punch? But it was very frightening, I must say.”

Wake had never seen the man like this, Faber’s eyes were shining as he narrated what he saw during the famous siege. “We had to be innovative, the Germans were closing the ring tighter and tighter. We used magic-lanterns, semaphore stations, small boys who would hide in containers, and of course, those pigeons, who became the heroes of the city. They carried much of the tiny film documents—almost three thousand of them. You know, Peter, they even arranged money transfers that way. Germans like Moltke may boast of their army and the defeat of our country, but they never defeated us in Paris. Never!”

Wake could visualize the man at the scene three years earlier, his élan and strength leading the way for a beleaguered people. No wonder they revered him afterward. Faber and the defense of Paris was one of the few bright memories of the war for the French.

“An incredible story.”

“Not all was successful, though, Peter. We had failures with some of our ideas, which in retrospect seem ridiculous. We tried flying out five special sheep dogs who would then walk back and return to the city with messages from the outside. They got out but never made it back in. We floated zinc metal balls, boules de Moulins, down the river Seine to the outside world, but none made it. We even laid a secret telegraph cable down the river’s bottom—a very good idea—but the damned Germans found it.”

“Yes, but Paris never was captured,” said Wake, “and the German Army never stopped the birds.”

“Yes, my friend. It shows what determined men can do, does it not?”

Just then an animal howl rose from the darkness around them. It was Sohkoor, standing at the edge of the firelight, arms raised to the east. Woodgerd spun over, wide awake, one hand on his rifle. He looked at Sohkoor, then the others.

“It’s about to start. . . .”