I let Brenner and Zamo know, “Good thinking and good job. But let’s hope we never have to get to the roof.” On a related subject, I said, “You may have noticed that the squatter hole on each floor is big enough for any of us—even Zamo—to squeeze through.”
Brenner, the expert on tower houses, said, “They’re made big so it’s easier to dump kitchen garbage and chamber pots down the hole to the excrement level.” He also informed us, “The excrement shaft is a primitive fire escape in the tower houses.”
You learn something new every day. Anyway, I pointed out, “If we need to go down the shaft instead of up, we can also manage that.”
We all agreed that the excrement shaft had multiple uses, but before we adjourned the meeting, I brought up a perhaps moot subject and said to Brenner and Zamo, as I had said to Kate, “After the Al Qaeda guys came here and saw the bait, all of us, except for Chet, could have gotten out of here.”
Brenner nodded and said, “I thought about that back in Aden.”
And that would have been an excellent time to bring it up, Paul.
Brenner continued, “But”—he looked at me, Kate, and Zamo—“I don’t think any of us ever intended to leave.”
“No,” I agreed, “we never did, but for the record, and for later, no matter what happens in the next few hours, we should acknowledge that we stayed beyond the time we were needed. We stayed to see how it ended.”
No one had anything to add to that, except maybe the words, “Brave but dumb.”
So the mafraj meeting was adjourned for probably the last time, and Kate, Brenner, and I went down to the diwan, leaving Zamo to contemplate the abstract thought that excrement shafts go up and down and either way could get you out of deep shit.
This was all coming to a head, and we had lots to think about, but the bottom line was the mission: Kill The Panther. Then worry about how to get out of here alive.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
It was time to join Chet and Buck in Moses’ Red Sea Fish van so Kate, Brenner, and I went down into the courtyard.
The sinking sun cast a shadow along the west wall, and the thirteen Bedouin sat or squatted in the shade, drinking herbal tea and chatting. Little piles of green leaves sat on the ground between them. It was the happy hour.
Kate, Brenner, and I went into the van where Chet was sitting in the left-hand chair, staring intently at the video monitor. Buck was in the right-hand chair doing the same.
Chet’s screen showed the aerial view of the sheik’s goat herder’s hut, with a very close resolution of maybe a few hundred feet.
Buck’s screen had a higher and wider image of the area around the hut, showing a two- or three-kilometer radius. I saw five white Land Cruisers heading for the hut from the east. The Bedouin? Or Al Qaeda? Probably the sheik and his men, who as hosts needed to get there early to make tea.
As we all knew, each of the two Predator drones over the hut had, in addition to video cameras, two laser-guided Hellfire missiles, each with a high-explosive warhead, ready to launch, then seek and destroy whatever was in the crosshairs of the monitors. Awesome.
Chet came out of his electronic trance and said to us, “Look. The sheik is arriving.”
We looked closely at his screen and saw the five Land Cruisers pulling up about thirty yards from the hut, which was farther away than they had been when we’d arrived from the Otter to meet the sheik. In fact, the vehicles were far enough away from the kill zone to avoid winding up in an auto body shop.
As we all watched, the Bedouin began piling out of the five Land Cruisers, and I counted a total of fifteen, all carrying AK-47s, except one—the sheik.
Sheik Musa was distinguishable in his clean white robes and his regal shiwal. I couldn’t see his face, but from this computer-enhanced height of a few hundred feet, I could actually see his awesome proboscis. I mean, that thing cast a two-foot shadow, and probably had its own zip code.
The Bedouin were unloading the SUVs—three carpets, and what were probably crates of bottled water, plus burlap bags of what was maybe bread and tea. They were carrying other things that could have been camp stoves and pots to boil water—but no khat for their Al