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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