Chapter 19

  

Bamahfuz finished filling the Indonesian servant girl with his seed. He pulled slowly away from her trembling body and lay back on the bed. He was still breathing heavily. Her exotic, Far Eastern looks and her blossoming youth were enough to arouse him every time. He did not speak to her, he never did. He would not know what to say. As he lay there, contemplating his good fortune in life, the girl slipped quietly from the bed, donned a plain gray robe and left the room. Bamahfuz drifted off to sleep.

About thirty minutes later, his eyes snapped open, and he sat up in bed. His cell phone’s odd ringtone sounded again. He picked up the phone.

“Na’am…” There was a long silence, as he listened. Then:

“I am disappointed, Abu Sameer,” Bamahfuz said, “extremely disappointed.”

He listened for a moment, and said: “What is your next move?”

After another silent interval, he ended the call and set the cell phone on the nightstand. Then he threw off the covers, stood up and began dressing.

Within minutes, he was downstairs on the first floor of his villa – there were no servants or family in sight – and unlocking the door to a special room he would visit when he needed strength and comfort. No one else in the house – in fact no one in Saudi Arabia – knew what he kept in this room.

He entered, locking the door behind him, and turned up the lights. Against the far wall, beneath a glass dome on a polished wooden pedestal, was a large, dark chunk of meteorite, about a half meter across. It glistened in the special lighting, presenting a sheen of utter blackness sprinkled with colored dots of brilliance, like tiny diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds. This was the Black Stone of Mecca, taken from the wall of the Kaaba, or old house, in the middle of the Holy Haram and carried off to al-Hasa by the Qarmatians in the year 930 AD.

According to historians, the sacred stone was returned to Mecca 23 years later. The Abbasids had been forced to pay a huge ransom for its return. The meteorite was wrapped in a sack and tossed into the central mosque of Kufa, Iraq. There was a note attached that read: “By command we took it, and by command we have brought it back.” The returned stone had been broken – accidentally or deliberately, it was not known – into seven pieces. It was put back together in a silver frame that encircles the Black Stone to this day.

Bamahfuz smiled as he relished the thought that the stone set into the corner of the Kaaba in Mecca was a fake, and that the real Black Stone lay before him, shining in its iridescent glory. His ancestors, the Qarmatians, had secretly carried the real stone to Najran, where it lay hidden for a thousand years.

Bamahfuz knew that the stone had been originally stolen from the mosque in Mecca at the behest of certain jinn, renegades he had been told, who had cooperated with the Qarmatians.  He did not know why they wanted the stone. The jinn had only taken custody of it for a few hours, returning it to the Qarmatians after their inspection. No one every learned why the jinn had requested the theft. When they turned the meteorite back to the Qarmatians, his ancestors spent the next 23 years negotiating a ransom price with the Abbasid rulers in Baghdad. Someone – he knew not who – had suggested substituting a fake. Bamahfuz thought this had been a splendid idea, simply because it allowed him the pleasure of being the only person in the world to enjoy the wondrous sight of the true Black Stone.

So Frank Devereaux spilled the beans, telling all the cave expedition team members about our madcap enterprise. The newbies – specifically Lasser and his assistant Bakhashaf, plus the military contingent – were skeptical but agreed to continue, given that the President of the United States was supporting our endeavor. Private Willis, the woman in the fire team, kept shaking her head and cursing under her breath, as if for some strange reason this was not her ideal assignment.

The rest of us, who had had more time to assimilate this craziness, acted as if it were no big deal. Of course, the concepts challenged our thought processes, and were difficult to accept. But we really had no choice. Events were in motion, and we had to respond to them. We were in a futuristic blue tube, on a ramp leading down to a lost city. One of our number had turned out to be a jinni and had spontaneously exploded – a paranormal version of a suicide-bomber. What could top that? What would be the next challenge? Were any more of us under suspicion?

Speaking of which – my jinni “guardian angel,” Mubarak Awda, was still not ready to share his true identity with the group. I was sure he had a good reason for this. I was dying to talk with him about the exploding soldier – had Lorenzo been intended for me specifically? Was this a desperate act by the opponents of contact, as Mubarak had suggested? Would there be other attempts? Mubarak’s expression was grim and aloof. He avoided my eye, and spoke frequently, in low tones, to Dan Keller and his assistant Muhammad. Obviously Mubarak’s concerns now focused on security. We continued to head down the ramp, into the maw of the earth, as it were, blissfully marching toward an encounter with a species of beings I had always assumed were metaphorical at best and definitely not real. (Here I am, bracing myself for an encounter with a race I had already personally encountered, and in fact had had sex with!)

About an hour later, we broke for a rest and some lunch. We simply sat down on the path through the blue tunnel and fished out some edibles – granola, nuts, apples, bottled water, etc. I wondered if the path would ever end, if we would ever find the alleged city. I knew we were still hundreds of miles from the Hima oil field. If the city was beneath that field, it would take us forever to reach it. And our food and water wouldn’t last much longer. Devereaux was apparently thinking the same thing. As he munched his roasted almonds, he leaned over and said: “We can’t keep this up much longer.”           

“I know,” I said. “This is ridiculous. You folks need to get some vehicles in here, so we can move faster.”

Awda, who overheard us, said: “That won’t be necessary.”

Devereaux looked at him oddly. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“We’re about to reach a – transition zone,” Mubarak said.

“What the hell is that?”

“We all know that the Hima field is very far away – at least 150 kilos. The builders of this tunnel added a ‘short cut,’ you might say, that eliminates the distance.”

“And you know this how?”

Mubarak sighed. He seemed to recognize that he would have to explain things at least to Frank Devereaux.

He stood up.

“Come on, Frank,” he said, “let’s take a walk.”

The two of them wandered back up the tunnel, speaking under their breath, for about a hundred yards or so. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, even though my hearing is very sharp. The tunnel didn’t allow for echoes. I’ve already mentioned what it did to our footsteps. To hear someone speak, you needed to be fairly close.

As they spoke, Dan Keller, who was sitting off to the side, watched them with interest. He casually reached into his backpack, which lay beside him, and extracted a reddish disk with a silver rim. It looked very old. Dan studied the artifact for a moment, then held it up and peered through the disk – it was transparent, perhaps made of glass or some other see-through substance. Keller swiveled around, looking at the team members seated around him – including me. He then raised the disk in the direction of Devereaux and Awda. He froze, and his jaw dropped a bit. He had obviously seen something unexpected. I looked back toward Frank and Mubarak: Nothing seemed to have changed.

Every so often, Frank would stare at Mubarak with widened eyes, then ask him another question. Mubarak would reply, and Frank would shake his head – with a strange combination of incredulity and weariness – and then the two of them would walk on. When they were done, they strode back to us in silence.

Keller, meanwhile, had stuffed the disk back into his backpack, and looked as if nothing had happened. He then began speaking with Al-Shaikh, his assistant, who said nearby; I could only hear a few words, but the two men seemed to be focusing on our security.

Devereaux sat down beside me. His face looked taut and grim.

“So you know everything?” he asked.

“A hell of a lot more than I knew yesterday,” I said.

Frank shook his head again. Mubarak sat silently, and avoided my eyes. The others just stared at us and wondered what in the world was going on.

Frank stood up again.

“Okay, folks,” he said, “let’s move out.”

Soon we were back on the road again.

It wasn’t long before I had my first conversation with the only other woman in the expedition, Marine Pvt. Willis. Till now, she had avoided me. Now she was walking beside me, like “Pvt. Lorenzo” had done before he exploded. This made me a bit nervous. I wondered briefly if she could be another plant, but, on reflection, I realized this was a crazy notion. She seemed totally out of her element, though – as I may have seemed to her!

Pvt. Willis looked at the team members around us, and said: “This whole thing creeps me out.”

“Me too,” I said, with a half smile. I thought: Why not a little sisterly bonding? It wasn’t your usual military operation. No clear enemies, no easy targets. And the whole scenario resided on the borderlands of fantasy. I suspected Willis was a very pragmatic soldier and not a big fan of ambiguity. “It should become clearer soon,” I added. “You’ll see.”

            “What’s your role in all this?” she asked, then checked herself: “I hope you don’t mind me asking. You’re a professor, right?”

            “Right,” I said. “I teach courses on Middle East myths and legends. Like the jinn.”

            “The jinn,” she said, as if she had never used the word before. “That’s the same thing as genies, right? But these guys are saying the jinn are real, that they’re not legends. What’s with that?”

            “Well, just imagine if we’d discovered that Bigfoot is real. Or the Loch Ness Monster.”

            “But this isn’t just a creature of some kind,” she responded. “It’s a whole race of people, more or less!”

            “Well, a species. But that’s right. It’s a whole new thing for us to deal with. The government’s telling us, in effect, to stop worrying about aliens from outer space and start worrying about – or dealing with – our next-door neighbors. It takes a lot of re-thinking. We’ve been raised to believe that elves, fairies and the like are make-believe. Now it appears they may be another ancient and highly intelligent species on this planet, a species that in this part of the world is called jinn.”

            Willis frowned. “If they’re real, they’re probably way ahead of us. Much smarter, much stronger. They’ll kick our butts!”

            I rested my hand on her arm. “Look, they’ve been around for ages. They haven’t kicked our butts yet, so I don’t think you need to worry about that happening now.”

            “I come from Louisiana,” she said, gritting her teeth. “We got lots of spirit creatures down there. I know what I’m talkin’ about! I know they got power, and it’ll be a hell of a fight to hold ’em off if they take it in their heads to come after us!”

            I smiled at her.

            “What’s your first name, Private?” I asked.

            “Vanessa.”

            “Well, Vanessa, I’m sure we’ll work things out with the jinn. I don’t think you’re going to have to go to war against them.”

“I hope to God not,” she said softly. She hoisted her M-16 semi-automatic rifle on her shoulder and stared straight ahead, down the long blue tunnel.

Barely a quarter of an hour passed before the expedition team reached what Awda had called the “transition zone.” The tunnel ended in a spherical chamber, about twenty feet across, of a different color from the tunnel. As the Marines and then the others slowly entered the chamber, they were enveloped in purple light. When they were all inside the chamber, the tunnel entrance faded away, and the members felt as if they were inside a huge bubble. They gathered at the center, facing out, marveling at the glow around them. The purple light seemed to pulse, slowly growing brighter, then dimmer, then brighter again.

            Devereaux tried to explain what was about to happen, though his uncertainty was obvious. “This is some kind of transportation system,” he said to the group. “I’m not clear on how it works, but it is supposed to take us from here to the City.”

            Suddenly the pulsing stopped, and the smooth walls of the chamber began to rotate, in a clockwise direction, spinning faster and faster. The effect was dizzying, and many in the group covered or closed their eyes. A deep thrumming sound accompanied the movement. Emily reached out for Awda and clutched his arm. The Saudi’s eyes were wide open – he was familiar with the transition. He took Emily’s hand and squeezed it tightly.

            When the spinning stopped, the chamber was silent once more. An open doorway had appeared. The oval opening was pitch black. There appeared to be no light at all in the passageway beyond. It was clearly not the same tunnel they had been traveling on.

            A look of concern passed over Awda’s face. He frowned.

            “This is not the passage,” he said softly.

            “What?” barked Devereaux. “Where are we then?”

            “I’m not sure,” Awda replied. “But it’s not good.”

            Emily stared at him. “What do you mean?” she asked.

            “Our enemies have done something to the system,” he said. “We have arrived somewhere else.” He thought for a moment. “Or somewhen else.”

            “Oh crap,” said Keller with a sigh.

            Lasser looked around: “How many torches do we have?”
            Devereaux looked at him quizzically. “Torches?”

            “Flashlights.”

            “Apart from our headlamps, I say five or six,” said Sgt. O’Dell after a visual survey. “Some extra batteries as well.”

            “That’s not a bad start,” Lasser said. “It looks like we’ve lost our magical illumination. We’re going to have to head out into the darkness. I recommend we keep the headlamps off for now, and use only two of the torches at a time – one to light up the path ahead, and one to keep an eye on our rear. You never know what might be out there.”

            Dr. Goddard turned to Mubarak Awda. “What should we do? Start trekking again, or wait here?”

            Awda thought for a moment. “We need to leave the chamber, at least for a while. But we will come back to it. We have to. It’s our only gateway to the city.” He looked at Devereaux. “Keep everyone close together. I will have to leave you for a short time, to deal with our problem. But I will return.”

            Frank looked at him skeptically. “And just how do you plan to ‘leave’ us?”

            “That is my worry, not yours. But I am concerned there may be trouble when the group leaves the chamber. Please have your soldiers ready. And remember, things are not always what they seem.”

            He headed for the doorway, and turned suddenly to the others. “Wait about five minutes after I have left, and then you may come out. I suggest you listen to Mr. Keller when it comes to your security. He seems to have a good sense for these things.”

            Mubarak strode into the darkness, and vanished.

            When Awda mentioned his name, Keller subconsciously moved to a higher state of alert. He feared a repeat of the Lorenzo attack, and he began sizing up the rest of the team members once more. None of them had appeared strange when he had viewed them through the ruby lens – none of course except Awda. But Keller was still not convinced he could trust all of them. 

            While they waited, Devereaux put together a plan, and won Keller’s support for it. The Marines would head out first, with one of the high-beam flashlights, followed by the group. Keller would cover the rear, with the other flashlight. If anyone saw anything unusual, they should alert the group immediately.

            When five minutes had passed, the team, led by the four Marines, filed through the door. At the rear, Keller carefully examined the walls of the new tunnel, playing his flashlight across the surface. It appeared to be a normal limestone tunnel, carved by ancient water action. The sound of their footfalls had returned. The group moved slowly. Sgt. O’Dell carried the flashlight, and his three fighters headed forward, rifles at the ready.

            With the limited light and natural tunnel walls, their passage seemed much creepier than before, thought Keller. Strange shadows danced on the walls, and the sound of their footsteps reverberated, and took on otherworldly echoes. Every so often he would turn his head back toward the team ahead of him, and assess their movements. So far nothing suspicious, he thought. Maybe it’s more likely the threat will come from the darkness, rather than from our team….

            Mubarak Awda, no longer clothed in caver’s garb, was walking in the desert. It was midday, and the naked sun was beating down relentlessly. Mubarak, now in traditional Saudi dress, had wrapped his white ghutra around his face to protect his skin. He was stepping carefully across a salt flat, watching for soft spots, damp depressions. He remembered the dangers of such sabkhas. He had once watched a good-sized herd of sheep and goats, bleating frantically, get sucked down into a hidden bed of quicksand, as their shepherd scrambled on his belly toward solid ground and safety. The shepherd survived. But in minutes the beasts were gone. How quickly they had been silenced….

            Awda had just come from the City. The great metropolis beneath the desert constantly thrilled him with its marvels, its complexity. At the same time, it was a great comfort. The City was home, and he could not imagine his life without it. He thought about the legends the metropolis had spawned. Iram of the Pillars, Ubar, a sprawling city with columns of amethyst and beryl, ruby and emerald. A cursed city, destroyed by God for its arrogance. He smiled. If only the Bedouin who moved their camels above it knew the truth about their legends….

Awda scanned the dune tops for his contact. Suddenly he saw him, and waved. The contact slid slowly but deftly down the dune, waving back to him. In minutes they were face-to-face.

            “We have problems,” said Mubarak, without the usual preliminary greetings.

            “I know,” said the contact. “It’s Bamahfuz and the Rejectionists. They have sabotaged the gateway. We are trying to stop them, to fix the gate. It is difficult. The Iranians are pushing Bamahfuz, who in turn seems to be leading the Rejectionists around by the nose. Their powers are being exploited, in a most dangerous fashion.”

            “How can you stop them?” Awda said. “We need to complete this mission.”

            “You will,” said the other. “You will. Please give us some time. We outnumber the Rejectionists. Greatly. For now, all we need to do is trace their mischief at the gateway, and undo it. Those responsible will be punished.”

            Awda searched the eyes of his contact. “Are you confident?”

            The other smiled. “Of course I am! We are all confident!”

            “Can you stop Bamahfuz?”

            “We must. Everything hinges on stopping him. He is powerful, but he is also deeply flawed. His flaws will enable us to block his scheme.”

            Mubarak sighed, but the sound was lost in the desert wind. “It saddens me that we are so divided on this important matter.”

            “Most support the reconciliation of man and jinn, Mubarak. Remember that. Only a handful oppose it. A powerful handful, but few nonetheless.”

            Awda nodded. There was nothing more for him to say.

            “Return to your charges,” the other said. “We will deal with Bamahfuz. When the gateway is ready, we will inform you.”

            “Thank you, my friend,” said Mubarak.

            He turned and began the trek back across the salt flat. His contact stood silently, watching for a short while, then turned. A gust of wind and sand encircled him, and he vanished.

            When I was a young teenager in Saudi Arabia, before I finished ninth grade at the Aramco School and went off to boarding school in Switzerland, I heard a lot of talk about jinn possession – people being taken over by demonic spirits. It was a very common topic of conversation among village and nomadic women (whom I encountered more often than you would think, given our frequent camping trips in remote areas), and it seemed to me that most of the people being possessed were female. Since we girls had a richer emotional life than most of the boys we knew, it made sense to us that females would be better targets for demonic possession. We sort of believed it was real, but deep down, I think, we doubted it was anything but a social instrument.

            You see, when a woman was found to be possessed by a jinn demon, the local women would arrange a zar ceremony for her. It was really just an excuse for a party, if you ask me…. A female shaman would preside, and she would assemble a group of musicians – drummers, oud-players and the like – and all the women would gather for an evening of nonstop chanting and dancing, seeking to communicate with the demon. It was a women-only event, apart from the male musicians. The shaman would take the possessed woman by the hands and they would dance round and round, like whirling dervishes, chanting Arabic incantations and the like.

            The point was not to drive the demon out, but simply to establish contact with it. As the drums pounded and the music went on, the shaman would speak to the jinn possessor and tell the gathered women what it was saying (if its host was not repeating the jinn’s words clearly enough). Once the shaman found out what the demon wanted, then she and the others would try to propitiate it. But usually, they just assured the “possessor” that their intentions were good, and they would pray that the demon would be kind and gentle with the woman it had taken over. Sometimes the demon would depart of its own accord. But usually not. The women at the zar ceremony did not try to act like mutawwas – those self-proclaimed holy men who would sometimes play the role of exorcist in Saudi society, and would attempt, with varying degrees of success, to expel demons from possessed individuals using Qur’anic quotes and pious chants…. I went to a couple of zars in my time, and always left the event exhausted and dripping with perspiration. But they were fun, and that was the important thing. As for the more serious jinn encounters that the mutawwas engaged in, well, I didn’t have any involvement in those.

            I did hear about one such incident, however, that happened to the father of one of my Saudi schoolmates. Rania’s dad was an oilfield surveyor, and was quite respected by his colleagues, both Saudi and American. One day he was working in the dunes, setting surveyor’s stakes in the midday sun, when he suddenly collapsed. He went into convulsions, and was totally out of it – delirious. They called a medevac helicopter and flew him to the Aramco hospital, where they ran a battery of tests on him – but nothing seemed amiss. They got his convulsions under control with sedatives, but he still wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t communicate with anyone.

            Rania’s mom suspected his problem wasn’t medical, and she turned to traditional methods. She summoned a respected local mutawwa who was known for his ability to exorcise jinn. The bearded shaikh recited ancient prayers and Qur’anic passages over the catatonic surveyor. Before long, he was talking to a jinni – and then to a second jinni.

            It seems Rania’s father had accidentally speared two jinnis while working in the sands. If only he had said the bismallah before driving the stake into the dune, the jinnis would have been alerted and fled, and he would not have been possessed. That, at any rate, was how Rania told it.

            “The old sheikh apologized on behalf of my dad,” Rania said, her eyes wide with wonder. “That was enough to send the jinn packing. Dad recovered quickly, and was back at work within a few days.”

            When Rania related that story to me as we sat in the Aramco snack bar, our burgers and fries untouched before us, all I knew was that it was a great yarn. I had no idea it would become part of my life.
(Next)
(Beginning)

Chapter 18

            That night, as the team slept in the great cavern, I lay awake, staring at the stone ceiling far above us, and recollected a very strange dream I had had years before – at least I had categorized it then as a dream. I now realized it was a memory. Mubarak’s transformation earlier that day had ignited a spark somewhere in my latent memories.

            I had returned to our home in Dhahran from my second year at UCLA, where I had begun seriously studying anthropology. I was what Aramco called a “Returning Student,” a senior high school- or college-age dependent who studied outside the Kingdom and would spend the summer and holidays in-Kingdom with his or her family. Some of us were lucky enough to snag summer jobs in the Aramco camp, either working for the company itself or for one of its contractors, as an intern or temporary help. I had found work at the Dhahran Recreational Library, which suited me just fine. They had an interesting, eclectic collection of books in English acquired over the past three-quarters of a century. I became familiar with some rare anthropological resource material that would prove useful to me in my studies – for example, old explorers’ accounts, from the 19^th century and earlier, of travels in the Rub’ al-Khali and other parts of Arabia. I was fond of that library, where I had studied and chatted with classmates in my junior high years. The cool quiet and serenity of that place was a great relief from the blazing heat that reigned outside its walls for more than half of the year.

            I had spent a busy day at the Rec Library working on the annual inventory, and was home, asleep in my room. Asleep, that is, until something awakened me. The only sound was the steady rush of chilled air from the vents of the central air conditioning system. While it had to be at least two in the morning, the temperature outside our house was doubtless still in the nineties. I was certain my parents and two brothers were still asleep. Something had changed in my room. I sat up in bed and peered around in the dim green light that emanated from the radio alarm clock on my nightstand. I thought I saw a black shadow, of human form, move quickly into my open closet. I blinked, certain my eyes were not working right. Then, strangely, the hair on the back of my neck, and the fine hairs on my forearms, stood up as I felt genuine fear.

            I debated climbing out of bed, turning on the lights, and checking out my closet. But my rational mind told me there could be nothing there. The Aramco camp was very safe, and break-ins were extremely rare. The strict nature of Saudi Arabia’s legal punishments for crimes, including the loss of a hand for theft and the loss of one’s head for murder and rape, was a powerful deterrent.

            I closed my eyes and pulled my covers up around my neck. Then I did a full-body shiver, as I felt someone lying in bed beside me. There was a man’s body beside me, a warm, living body. He rolled toward me and put his arms around me. I tried not to panic. I decided not to scream. I found myself thinking about my boyfriend Max Sellars back at UCLA, and for some reason I thought he was with me in the bed. I recalled our slow and tender explorations of each other’s flesh, our tentative moves to join our bodies together, and then the amazing rush of excitement as we thrust and strained to become a single organism, a merged body and soul.

            Suddenly Max and I were making love again, and I could feel his rigid penis moving deep inside me. I held him tight, and kissed him, and tasted his lips and his probing tongue. It was an incredible experience, being back at UCLA again, and I was certain at that moment that I must be dreaming. Before too long I began to orgasm, and Max, with his sweet patience and impeccable timing, responded by doing the same. It wasn’t long before we were lying in each other’s arms, spent but blissfully relaxed. Then I opened my eyes and saw that it wasn’t Max.

            I was staring into the big brown eyes of the young Arab man who had rescued me several years earlier from that would-be rapist.

            I gasped. He gently put his fingertips on my lips.

            “Be still,” he said. “You wanted Max, and I helped you with that.”

            “How did you – ?”

            “ – know that?” he said, finishing my sentence. “How did I get in here? Who am I? So many questions.”

            I saw a smile begin on his lips. He seemed so reassuring, I was not frightened.

            “I am your qareen,” he said. “Call me your guide. I have been paired with you, and I do what I can to guide you, to help you. In your culture, you might call me your ‘guardian angel,’ but understand, I am not an angel.”

            I knew about qareens from my Middle Eastern studies. They were jinnis who served as spirit guides or hidden companions of humans. Some were said to be good, and others evil.

            “You speak such good English,” I said, somewhat nonplussed and clueless where this conversation was going.

            “We’re not speaking English,” he said with a smile. “You are wondering how I got in here. I attenuated myself, and then passed through the wall. It’s a talent I have, as do all of my people, and it comes in handy sometimes. I didn’t think you would mind. You are a lucky woman. Not many humans are able to interact directly with their qareens. I must say – I am lucky too. I am very fond of you.”

            He brushed a few strands of hair from my eyes and kissed me gently on the lips. I responded. The world took a quick spin. When I finally opened my eyes, he was gone.

            Afterwards, I treated this experience as a dream, filed it, and forgot it. It was only when Mubarak came back into my life, and we began exploring this cave together, than I remembered that he was my qareen.

When morning came, we packed up our belongings and prepared to resume the trek. At about 7 a.m., new team members arrived from outside. Frank Devereaux, who had been expecting the new arrivals, made the introductions.

            I shook hands with Dan Keller of Aramco. He was a big guy with craggy good looks – an ex-cop, apparently, who worked the industrial security beat for the oil company. He was accompanied by a sharp young Saudi aide, Muhammad Al-Shaikh. You had the impression that this aide was focused on the future and knew that some day, when Keller retired, he would take over his boss’s job. So while Keller seemed serious and maybe a bit grim, Al-Shaikh was upbeat and fully charged, ready to take on the world (subterranean though it might be).

            “So tell me, Keller,” I said, “what’s your involvement in all this?”

            “Well,” he said slowly, “I was going to ask you the same question.”

            “Let’s start with you first.”

            “Muhammad and I work Industrial Security at Aramco. We’re investigating several mysterious employee deaths in Dhahran, as well as the disappearance of a remote area exploration team at the Hima field. When I mentioned these incidents to a friend at the U.S. consulate, suddenly gears started turning, and I ended up here.”

            Devereaux was listening to us, and he gave me a facial signal that it was okay to fill Keller in on our bizarre quest. I did so, veering between vagueness and stark specificity. The interesting thing was, Keller didn’t seem taken aback by the idea that we were “jinn-hunting.” Clearly someone had briefed him. His questions were to-the-point and very productive. As we talked, with Devereaux occasionally chiming in to add some clarity, it became obvious to all of us, without anyone saying it directly, that our little cave expedition had an actual destination. We weren’t just searching for a jinni in a photograph. We were heading out under the desert, en route to the “anomaly,” as Keller called it – a subterranean base, beneath the Rub’ al-Khali, that might prove to be the source of all the world’s UFOs, to put it bluntly.

            I told Keller: “We’ve encountered something strange at the end of this cavern – a ramp, built by human or other hands, leading way down, to God knows where. This morning we plan to follow it and see where it goes.”

            “What direction is it heading?”          

            “Due east.”

            “Toward Hima, eh?” He smiled.

            “Don’t be too optimistic,” I said. “Hima’s about two hundred miles from here.”

            “Look – distance isn’t a problem for the jinn – if that in fact is really what they are.”

            “True,” I agreed. “Let’s see how they solve the problem.”

            We packed up our gear and headed across the cavern, with our two new team members in tow. Al-Shaikh chatted in Arabic with Mubarak Awda. Keller questioned Jim Lasser and Mahmoud Bakhashaf about the cave itself. The Marines silently led the way. My own personal Marine, Mike Lorenzo, resumed his Velcro position at my side. Devereaux seemed lost in thought.

            Two Marines were the first to head down the ramp. After about five minutes, they returned to us.

            Private Belding filled us in: “It looks safe, far as we can tell. It’s just a ramp in a tube, and it goes on for miles. It seems to be pretty well lit, though we can’t see where the light is coming from. We may end up walking all morning and not come to the end of it.”

            With Devereaux’s go-ahead, we all headed into the tunnel. Belding was right: it was a tube. A manufactured tube that went on forever, slicing deeper and deeper into the earth. The light that surrounded us was pale blue, and the ramp itself, as I said before, was dark blue. It was an eerie atmosphere, something out of a sci-fi flick. Oddly, I couldn’t hear the sound of our footsteps as well walked. I thought at first perhaps something was wrong with my ears. But I could hear people talking to each other. It was just the absence of sound when our feet made contact with the tunnel floor – total silence! The contact itself felt normal – there was the normal jarring in my bones – I just couldn’t hear it.

            I asked Devereaux about this. He had noticed the same thing.

            “Jinn technology,” he said, and left it at that. The whole thing blew my mind, but I trudged on.

            After a few minutes, I tried to engage my Marine, Lorenzo, in a little conversation.

            “Where are you from, Private?” I asked.

            “Uh, sorry, ma’am,” he said, keeping his eyes straight ahead. It looked like he was blushing. I don’t think he expected me to talk to him!

            “I just wanted to know where your hometown is,” I explained.

            “Sorry, ma’am,” he said again, and then clammed up and continued walking, his eyes focused on the tunnel ahead.

            Maybe he’s under orders not to talk to me, I thought. Oh well, that’s life. Onward!

            My thoughts returned to Max. I recalled the delicious times we had had in the early days, and thought about how the relationship had turned sour, step by step. I thought about his remarkable mind, and his fine body, and I puzzled over how clueless he was when it came to understanding my needs, emotional and otherwise…. As we trudged through the cave, I shook my head and felt true regret that I could not share this experience with Max – he would have been in his element, and I certainly could have used his insights….

            Dan Keller watched Dr. Goddard’s failed effort to engage the Marine in conversation. The professor was a fascinating woman, quite intelligent and attractive with her short brown hair, large green eyes, and a quirky, informal manner that put you off your guard. Keller wondered what it would be like to be involved with such a woman – he bet an unexpectedly sharp tongue went along with that sharp mind – but then he put the idea out of his head, and tried to focus on the task before him. (He did notice, though, that Goddard was frequently trading glances with the Saudi guide, Mubarak Awda. Something was going on there, he decided.)

            As they continued down the ramp, Keller made assessments of all the team members. He drifted to the back of the pack, so that he could keep an eye on each participant. His cop instincts told him he would eventually need to know something about everyone in this crowd. But he was having trouble with Lorenzo, the Marine to the left of Dr. Goddard. The man’s body language signaled some kind of distress – as well as a surprising awkwardness for a Marine, who lived by the reaction times of his muscles. It was almost as if Lorenzo, who was a big guy, was uncomfortable in his skin….

            They arrived at a fork in the tunnel. For a moment the group stopped and rested, as Devereaux, Lasser and Bakhashaf consulted on whether to branch left or right. Devereaux chose the right branch of the tunnel, which continued the eastward trend. As the team members shouldered their gear and began heading down the rightward ramp, Keller slipped deftly beside Lorenzo and gently nudged him out of the group and into the leftward corridor. Keller’s assistant, Al-Shaikh, saw his boss was up to something, and he wisely backed away from the action. The big Marine seemed baffled and suddenly showed fear in his eyes. Keller whispered to him in rapid-fire cop-speak, telling the young man he needed to discuss something with him privately and he’d be able to get back to the team in just a moment.

            “Sir –” Lorenzo said hollowly. “Sir, out of my way!” He pawed at Keller, trying to push him aside. But Dan stood his ground.

            Keller realized something strange was happening to the young man. He wasn’t sure what it was, but he wanted this Marine a good distance from the team when it happened. With all the strange things going on around him, Keller would not be surprised if Lorenzo was one of those jinnis. He knew they could change shape. He suspected that was happening right now.

            Lorenzo’s skin had taken on a shimmering quality, and appeared to be glowing. Waves of heat emanated from the soldier and he began to quake. His eyes were like gleaming yellow studs.

            Keller’s instincts told him it was time to leave. He swung a foot behind Lorenzo’s calf and with both hands pushed hard on the Marine’s chest. “Christ!” Keller shouted as the pain of an intense burn seared his hands. Lorenzo went down hard. He was so distracted by the changes occurring in his body that he seemed unaware he had fallen. He lay on his back, his spine arched, trembling – and burning. Keller leaped backwards and ran toward the tunnel fork. As he wheeled around the corner and rejoined the expedition members, who had moved barely twenty meters down the ramp, a loud crack and devastating explosion ripped through the other corridor. The team members froze in their steps and looked back. Clouds of smoke and dust billowed from the other corridor, lanced with beams of white-hot light.

            “What the hell??” Devereaux shouted and started to move tentatively toward the blast.

            Keller took him by the arm. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I took care of it.”

            “What just happened?”

            “I think it was meant be an attack on us. The Marine Lorenzo – just blew up.”

            The Marine sergeant, a wiry, grim-faced African-American named O’Dell, stepped up to Keller and eyeballed him: “What did you say?”

            Keller didn’t back down. “Sorry, Sergeant,” he said, “but your man is gone. If you ask me, that wasn’t your man anyway. I don’t know where the real Private Lorenzo is, but that wasn’t him. That was a damned jinni.”

            O’Dell’s face twisted with anger and confusion. “What the hell are you talking about?”

            Keller turned to Devereaux. He noticed Dr. Goddard was staring at the White House man too, and clearly wanted him to say something. “Mr. Devereaux, I think it’s time you explained to the sergeant here – and in fact to everyone -- just what’s going down. We’re in some pretty dangerous territory, and not knowing what we’re up against is likely to get us killed.”

            The caver Lasser stepped up as well. “I agree. This has gone on long enough. If you don’t level with us, Devereaux, we’re all very likely to end up toast.”

            The psychiatrist Semple nodded in agreement. His face was pale and streaked with fear. “Tell them, Frank.”

            Devereaux looked down for a moment, sighed, then looked up at the team. His eyes sought out Emily Goddard, who was silent, her expression inscrutable. She knew. Semple knew. Keller – clearly – knew. The rest of them were groping in the dark. Devereaux took out his cell phone, as if to call Washington for counsel. He remembered that cell phones did not work far below the Earth’s surface, and he slipped the phone back in his pocket. He was on his own. The White House was far, far away, and the decision-making was up to him.

            “Fair enough,” he said. “You all have a right to this information.”

            The team members gathered around him as he tried to explain the unexplainable.
(Next)
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