Chapter 12

            Troubled by Mahmoud Bakhashaf’s experience, Devereaux pulled our team out of the cave network and, using a satellite phone, summoned U.S. embassy security support. As we awaited the arrival of a Marine fire team from Najran, I took Mubarak Awda aside for a conversation. We sat amid boulders, discussing the connection between us.

            “Mubarak,” I said. “What are you doing here? Look at you – you haven’t changed in all these years!”

            He smiled and looked down, as if embarrassed.

            “It’s a coincidence,” he said. “I didn’t know you would be part of this team. I am here because I need to be…. As I was that day in the desert….”

            “Who exactly are you?” I asked rather bluntly.

            “I’m just a guy who’s been asked to play a role in this expedition. That’s really all I can say. I hope you have been well, Emily, after all these years.”

            “Yes, I’m fine. I just think it’s strange to see you again. Damn, you don’t look much older than when I first saw you, fifteen years ago. And you were young then!”

            Something bizarre occurred to me. I shot him what must have seemed like an odd look.     

            “What exactly do you know about the purpose of this expedition?” I asked.

            “Well, I’ve seen the photo,” he said.

            “What do you think of it?”

            “I think it’s a true image. I don’t think it has been doctored.”

            “Then you believe in the jinn?”

            He grinned.

            “This is Arabia, Emily. We all believe in the jinn!”

            “No doubts?”

“No doubts. God created humans and jinn. We are two species, if you like, each with certain abilities, each with free will. We make our own destinies.”

“It’s true, is it not, that a jinni can look like a human?”

“Of course! That is one of the jinni’s abilities: to resemble.”

“So, theoretically, you could be a jinni, right?”

He looked at her carefully, smiling slightly.

“Right?” I persisted.

“Anything is possible, Emily.”

At that point, a hulking military truck, in desert camouflage, rounded a hillside bend and rumbled into view.

Awda said: “It looks like our guardians are here.” He clearly wanted to change the subject.

The fire team consisted of four locked-and-loaded Marines – one of them female – and a grim-faced staff sergeant. After a briefing, one Marine took point, a few steps ahead of our two pro covers, and the others spread throughout the expedition team, with the sergeant protecting from the rear.  We headed back into the cave, this time feeling a little safer. Beside me loomed this huge Latino-looking soldier named Mike Lorenzo. I had a feeling he was assigned to me specifically, because he clung like Velcro. I would have preferred the protection of the woman, a wiry, no-nonsense African American named Private Willis, but for some reason she was kept as far from me as possible.

We continued downhill, moving gradually toward the east. We took the necessary right forks, as we had done before. We passed the bend where Bakhashaf had his vortex experience, and nothing unusual happened this time. Deeper we went. From time to time I felt cool gusts, as if there were some kind of ventilation or outlet to fresh air. We passed through occasional chambers, with lofty ceilings studded with limestone stalactites. No sign of any living presence, jinn, human or otherwise. The tunnel went on and on. Then, suddenly, it came to an end.

Before us loomed a large door, about eight feet in height and four wide, apparently cast from bronze, ornately etched with strange designs and an undecipherable script. The door was shut and seemingly sealed. There was no knob or handle, no obvious way to open it.

“What the fuck?” said the Marine on point, as he eyed the door, up and down. He rapped on the door with his rifle. It clanged, like a huge bell.

Lasser studied the door and its stone frame carefully, running his hands along the edges. He hit the door with the heel of his hand.

“This is bizarre,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s no handle or niche to grip, to pull this thing open. I have a feeling it’s locked, maybe from the other side.”

“It looks incredibly old,” said Devereaux.

“Thousands of years, maybe?” wondered Semple as he gently touched the engraved portions.

“It could be,” I said. I was totally nonplussed. You just don’t find huge bronze doors in the middle of natural caves.

“Well, it looks like this is the end of the road, at least for now,” said Devereaux.

“Let’s think about this,” I said. “Maybe there’s a mechanism to open it – the ancient equivalent of a keypad – somewhere in this cave.”

We began searching the walls carefully for some hidden switch or button, beginning at the doorframe and working outward.

“Here’s something,” said my Marine, Lorenzo. He had found what appeared to be a rectangular block of stone, set into the wall at ground level a few feet to the right of the door. Clearly the stone had been set in an opening. Lasser and Bakhashaf brought out picks and blades and worked the stone loose. Jim shone a flashlight into the hole. It was too small an opening to get us past the bronze door, but it might help us figure a way, I thought.

“I can’t see anything in there,” Lasser said. “It’s dark as all get-out.” He started to insert his hand into the opening.

“Don’t!” Awda cried. Leaning forward, he hooked his foot under Lasser’s wrist and deftly raised the caver’s arm out of reach of the hole.

“Hey, what’s your problem?” Lasser asked.

“You don’t know what’s in there!” Mubarak said. “Maybe snakes or scorpions! Let’s think about this for a second.”

Mubarak approached the door and stared at the engravings intently, as if studying them. Then he touched the door gingerly on an inscribed, cartouche-like oval about two-thirds of the way up, on the right side.

We heard a resounding click. Then suddenly the door slid aside, disappearing into a vertical slot in the right side of the frame. It seemed to me it had to be some kind of gravity system, involving hidden weights.

Mubarak smiled as he looked at us. “Now that wasn’t so difficult, was it?”

“How the hell? –” Lasser started.

“Early South Arabian script,” Mubarak said. “It said: Press here.”

We peered through the door. Bakhashaf shined a torch through the frame, and illuminated a large chamber beyond, maybe 100 meters across. It appeared to be empty, apart from some stalactites and stalagmites, and a smooth – perhaps paved? – walkway down the middle. The Marines entered the chamber first, weapons at the ready. As they did so, the expansive space began to illuminate even more, as if from hidden lights. But we could see no source for the lighting.

Awda and I were the last two to pass through the doorframe and into the chamber. As we did so, I whispered to Mubarak: “That wasn’t South Arabian script.”

He smiled and said: “Humor me.”
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Chapter 11

            Annette Braverman met him at the Aramco dining hall. Since it was mid-afternoon, the place was far from crowded, and they took a table in the far corner of a nearly empty room. Mugs of coffee steamed before them. Annette sat straight in her chair. She was a fifties-something professional, wearing a smart blue business suit with her graying hair pinned back. She was a frequent visitor at Aramco. The U.S. consulate was just next-door, and its diplomats enjoyed Aramco camp privileges. Many liked to spend time in the expansive community, using the recreational facilities, shopping at the Commissary or simply taking advantage of the open, western-style environment.

            “So, here’s the thing,” Annette said. “This stuff is so classified I almost couldn’t find out anything. You’re lucky people owe me.”

            “What the hell’s going on, Annette?” Keller stared at her intently.

            She hesitated before continuing. “Fortunately, we’re going to need your help, so I can discuss some of it with you. In fact, I’ve been asked to approach you. I’m not sure I understand it all myself. But bottom line is: our Government knows about the anomaly, and they believe they know what it is. There’s a team in-Kingdom now working on this.”

            “So what is it we’re dealing with here, Annette?”

            “They tell me the anomaly is a city. A city beneath the sands.”

            “Like the Lost City of Ubar?”

            “Even stranger than that.”

            “How so?”

            “It’s not some archaeological ruin. They say this city is inhabited.”

            Keller sat back and tried to absorb what she was saying. It didn’t make sense. For a second, he was sure he was dreaming, and this was some unreal fantasy he was playing out. But the feeling passed as quickly as it came. As he leaned forward, he could smell the slightly bitter, institutional aroma of his coffee. He gripped the wooden edge of the table. He accepted that this was reality.

            “I don’t want to get into who might be down there in that subterranean city,” Annette said. “I’ll let official briefers explain that to you. But I do want you to know this has become a national security issue for the United States. We have intelligence showing that Iran is aware of the anomaly, and that they have operatives in Saudi Arabia who we think are trying to get to it before we do.”

            “Does Iran have anything to do with the deaths we’ve had recently?”

            “We doubt it.”

            “Then who do you think could be responsible?”

            “Well….  Clearly the anomaly has been a secret until now. There are those who want to keep it hidden.”

            “Come on, Annette! Let’s stop dancing around this. Level with me! What are we dealing with here?”

            Annette had always been honest with him. She was straightforward and a longtime friend. She sighed, as she thought about how far she should go in discussing this.

            She looked around, making sure no one was within earshot. Then she began to tell him about the anomaly.

            Keller, alone again, drove his Nissan Patrol around the perimeter of the Aramco camp, to give himself time to think. “So this is where those damned UFO’s come from,” he said aloud, as if that would make it sound more reasonable. “A city, a base, beneath the Empty Quarter. And the space aliens are really a species that has been living on earth since time immemorial. And that explains the Arab legends about the jinn, the genies….”

            It didn’t sound any more sensible than when Annette had set it out for him. It was a load of sci-fi crap, if you wanted to know the truth. He had told Annette he needed time to process this new information. He had left her at the dining hall table, cradling her white coffee mug.

            Keller was basically a cop, when you came right down to it – a security consultant in title, but a cop in essence. He had worked on police forces all his life – in Port Arthur, in Houston, in Phoenix – until Aramco came along and asked him to take a job in Saudi Arabia, doing industrial security. He was a practical person, who used logic to put together cases, and nab the bad guy. This UFO business was a bit out of his area.

            But he knew Annette was not yanking his chain. She was one of the most serious persons he had ever met. And if she said there was a city beneath the sands filled with UFO jockeys, then so be it. Now he had to chew on this information and figure out his next steps.

            He thought about Jennie and felt a desperate emptiness inside him. If only she were here, they could talk about this, and figure things out. He had always used her as a sounding board for the difficult conundrums in his life. She had had wisdom beyond her years, as if she had lived many lives and dealt with the gamut of human experiences. Jennie had dealt with her own downhill slide into death much more calmly and sensibly than he had. Keller really needed her now.

            He pulled over in a parking area, picked up his iPad from the seat beside him and began a quick Google search. He came up with an “Alien Abductions” website with a bizarre reference to the jinn:

Islam has considerable material that helps identify these “energy-people” and give an idea just what they are. They provide a term that we can use: Jinns; call them Jinns. Most Jinns are good and live mostly in the wilderness. In fact, they appear to “run” nature. Jinns have free will. They can be good or bad. Jinns can shape change and use this ability to trick humans.

Those few Jinns that turn bad enough to take up harassing have found out the new “in” way to harass humans is: Alien abductions! Apparently designing their harassment after the “new” human obsession, aliens, and especially those few original accounts of truly physical abductions, the bad Jinns decided to drop the old fairy appearance and begin shape changing to grey aliens. With their minds, the bad Jinns can rustle up “mother-ships” and their interiors, examination rooms, weapons, instruments, anything. (You can create things too when out of body! But they are good at it for they have lived “there” (higher vibration level) for untold centuries.)

Unwittingly, your own thoughts help these harassers form the surroundings. You expect a ship, an examination room and its instruments, so your thoughts, energized by fear, construct the surroundings. The Jinns themselves mostly only have to “look like” greys then your mind does the rest!

My God, he thought, people have apparently been talking about this on the Net for years, on the same dubious level of seriousness as Bigfoot and the Face on Mars. Now our Government is saying it’s not just a loony fringe topic, it’s national security….

Another web search, and he found a blog that discussed alien abductions:

           

Most cultures acknowledge the abduction of humans by otherworldly beings of some kind. Patrick Harpur, author of Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld, says these abductors look different to each society, but they have some constant characteristics: “they are elusive shape-shifters, always ambiguous, notably part-material, part-immaterial, as well as being sometimes benign and, at other times, dangerous and malevolent. Following the ancient Greeks, I call them daimons.”

Modern daimons include the little gray aliens who snatch people from their cars or beds. Sometimes, Harpur notes, it seems as if the abductees are taken out of their bodies, as if in a waking dream. These are the same kind of ambiguities found by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in his studies of the Trobriand Islanders, whose practicing witches seemed to be able to leave their bodies in similar fashion.

“All cultures recognise daimons who abduct us – from the kwei-shins in China and the djinn in Arabia, to the Yunw Tsunsdi of the Cherokees,” Harpur contends. In Newfoundland, the daimonic abductors were called the “Good People” – fairies who seem to have come over with the Irish immigrants and who were known for abducting young people while they were out picking berries. The abductees would eventually be found in a state of disarray, bruised and suffering from loss of memory, like many victims of alien abduction. Like the UFO abductees, the berry-pickers would later begin to recall bits and pieces of what happened to them: often they had been lured by exotic music, and were swept up in a bizarre dance. Other berry-pickers returned after a much longer period of time, looking quite different or much older, wracked by fear or rendered simple-minded.

In Ireland, those abducted by the Sidhe – Celtic nature spirits or fairies – were occasionally allowed to return to their homes after seven years, or after multiples of seven. But they were only sent back to the human world when their years on earth had run out – “old spent men and women,” as Lady Augusta Gregory describes them in Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920), “thought to have been dead a long time, given back to die and be buried on the face of the earth.” The reality of these abductions cannot be doubted, Harpur observes, given the many descriptions of “tradition-bearers weeping, sometimes after the passage of many years, as they narrated [remembered events] dealing with the abduction of their children or other relatives.”

The more Keller read, the more he needed to know. Turning off his iPad, he pulled out into traffic. He drove to the Dhahran Recreational Library, where he checked out a book on legends of the jinn.
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Chapter 10

            I thought back to the camping trips in the desert during the years my father worked for Aramco. On long weekends and Eid holidays, we would head out in our old Landrover to far-flung places like Scribner's Canyon, Mammoth Cave and the Umm al-Hadid meteorite field. Usually there would be two or three families, traveling in “caravans.” We would occasionally meet up with shepherds and Bedouin, and once in a while we would be invited to some desert family's bait al-shaar, or “house of hair,” the black, woven goat-hair tent that served as their home during nomadic migrations.

            Invited into the majlis, or sitting room, of the tent, we would settle down on Oriental carpets, bolsters and cushions, and would drink cardamom-scented Arabian coffee and sweet tea prepared over the campfire, and eat dates or other fruit. Usually we would not see the women; we could hear them giggling behind a tent divider. But the desert men would not mind a mixed crowd of Americans in their sitting room. Their kids, both boys and girls, were very curious about us, and would either peek at us from behind the tent wall, or would assist their fathers in serving us fruit and tea. We would sometimes be honored with a meal of sheep or goat, served on a huge platter amid a mountain of seasoned rice. We would sit with our hosts around the platter on the carpet and dig in with our right hands – the hand reserved for eating. The idea was to snare a piece of lamb and work it into a little ball of rice, then pop it into your mouth, all using only your right hand. The host would normally tear out chunks of the tenderest meat for his guests, and set it in the rice before them. A very social form of eating, if a bit messy. (The Bedouins had discovered that washing your hands with a little Tide detergent after the meal was the best way of removing lamb fat. If water was in short supply, there was always sand.)

            I tried not to think about one of our family caravans into the remote Rub' al-Khali. It was the time I first learned about the Sulayb. These were not Bedouins, or even Arabs. They were gypsy-like wanderers of unknown origin who worked as trackers, did repair work and blacksmithing, and kept their distance from the true Bedouins. The Sulayb – whose name has been interpreted as a diminutive of salib, Arabic for “cross” – were thought by some scholars to be the remnants of ancient Christian Crusader forces that had become lost or stranded in the desert. Some Sulayb had fair hair and blue eyes. They were also known as the very best desert trackers. But because of their murky origins, because they did manual labor – which was looked down upon by true Bedouins – and because in the old days they wore animal skins and rode donkeys instead of nobler horses or camels, the Sulayb had the misfortune to be considered the lowest social class in Arabia – virtual untouchables.

            I was about fifteen at the time. Our families were still asleep in their tents, when I went for a dawn trek in the dunes. I was looking for a secluded spot to pee. Behind me the sky was almost inky black, but in front a pinkish splash tinged the horizon, and it was growing steadily. I soon found a gully where I quickly did my business. On my way back to the camp, I climbed a sand hill and off to the right I saw a jerboa scurry into its hole. I loved being alone, in a purely natural environment like this. I breathed deeply. The universe seemed to be this amazing song, and I sang harmony with it. But the song was suddenly cut short, as someone grabbed my shoulders and spun me around.

            I gasped, almost screamed. I was staring into the face of a bearded man, not much taller than me but wiry and extremely powerful. He wore a dingy white robe and a red-and-white checked shemagh or headcloth wrapped around his skull, like a sloppy turban.

            “What do you want?” I said, in English, terrified but trying not to show it.

            He muttered something in Arabic, but I couldn’t understand it.

            He took off his shemagh, rolled it into a long strip and without warning bound my mouth with it. I began screaming, but the sound did not carry far under the cloth, which reeked of wood smoke and old sweat. He smacked my face, shouting “Uskuti!” -- “Shut up!” He reached around me, grabbed my buttocks and hoisted me up, facedown, onto his right shoulder. He then set off across the dunes.

            I knew what was about to happen. I felt helpless, outraged and ashamed. I struggled, but the man smacked me repeatedly to keep me still. Before long, we reached a small canvas tent, alone in a hollow amid the dunes. The tent was empty, apart from a rug and pillow. He threw me inside and followed me in. He made gestures to me, indicating clearly that I should take off my clothes. He knelt down beside me and shook a bony fist. He didn’t seem to have any weapons. But I knew he could overpower me. I began slowly to undress. I pulled my Gap sweatshirt over my head and set it beside me. I was not wearing a bra. The early morning air was still cool, and I shivered as I wrapped my arms around my bare breasts. He leered at my body, and began to hoist his filthy robe. He nodded toward his obscene erection, indicating I should touch him. The stench of his unwashed skin nauseated me.

            Suddenly, I sensed a shadow behind the man. It moved like another person. Then a blur surrounded the man and he fell backwards and seemed to be dragged out of the tent. He began howling, then screaming. The wind roared. Then he was silent.

            Puzzled, I grabbed my sweatshirt and slipped it over my head.

            Another man poked his head into the tent. He was younger, better looking, and much cleaner than my kidnapper. He wore a dark brown robe and his head was bare.

            “Are you okay?” he asked in Arabic. I knew enough of the language to respond.

            “Yes, I am fine,” I said. Relief washed over me.

            “He was from the Sulayb. Usually they do not do that. Do you know how to get back to your family?”

            I shook my head. “No.”

            He beckoned to me, but he would not enter the tent. “Come with me, I will show you.”

            My attacker had disappeared. My rescuer walked me back over the dunes to my camp. As we walked, he explained to me about the Sulayb, how they were outcasts of unknown origin. He told me had never heard of a Sulubi trying to attack a woman.

“What happened to that man?” I asked him. “Where did he go?”

The young man smiled. “He is far from here,” was all he would say.

When they reached the campsite, everyone was still asleep. As I stood beside my tent, I whispered “Shukran” – “Thank you” – and the young man smiled. I glanced away for a moment, and in that second he vanished.

In the cave, as I stared at Mubarak Awda posing like the crucified Christ, I remembered the horrifying abduction in the desert, I remembered so clearly the young man who had saved me. He was now standing before me, unchanged.

Mubarak lowered his arms and looked at me. Noting the change in my expression, he smiled broadly.

“Yes, Dr. Goddard, I am the one,” he said.

“But how – ”

He gestured for silence.

“We will speak of it later,” he said.

The others were caring for Mahmoud Bakhashaf, and didn’t notice our exchange.
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