On the Persian Gulf island of Belaj, British air-hostesses and Egyptian belly-dancers are busy relieving oversexed citizens of their frustrations and petrodollars.
Newcomer Cass McBride, an East London housewife, becomes a $500 hooker. Sam Devonshire, a stewardess with page-3-girl boobs, and geeky banker Eddy Lawrence are drawn into a plot by BARF (the Belaj Armed Revolutionary Front) to assassinate the Amir in a bizarre bedroom romp.
All over Arabia thrones rock and heads roll. Yes, folks, it’s Armageddon and global petrol rationing as this light-hearted look at sex and politics in the Middle East takes a darker turn.
“Witty, entertaining, raunchy” Peter O’Donnell, creator of Modesty Blaise
PROLOGUE: Death of a Newspaper-Owner
Sodden with whisky and fresh from a belly-dancer’s elastic embrace, Farouk Bahzoomi drove home to his wife in the middle of a mid-September night.
Fifty-two years old, Farouk, was a figure of some minor significance in one of the Arab world’s most insignificant states. He owned and edited Al-Jazira, the national daily newspaper of the island of Belaj. His neglected wife was a niece of the Emirate’s ruler, Shaikh Khalid bin Khalifa al-Khazi..
The belly-dancer’s name was Leila. A dusky twenty-year-old Cairene, she worked for Mrs Fadilah, a fellow Egyptian of
indeterminate age who operated the island’s only house of toleration . To the music of two finger-drummers and one player of the oud (a plangent Arab version of the lyre or balalaika), Leila undulated up and down her mistress’s Kashmiri-carpeted salon, whirling the tassels adhered by sorcery to her pomegranate breasts.
Seated on mattresses against the walls, the punters (all Arabs), competed for her favours by tucking bank notes of increasing value into the waistband of her golden G-string. Tonight Farouk made the winning bid for Leila’s services when he folded three 1,000-dirham notes (each worth a little over £200) into the taut gold cord.
Leila went to sit beside him on the mattress and they polished off a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label before retiring to a more private mattress in another room. Here, after a bare seventeen seconds labour on Leila’s part and for a total outlay roughly equivalent to the monthly wages of his entire Asian printing staff, Farouk precipitately splashed her mahogany loins.
This might not strike you, O Gentile reader, as - you will pardon the pun - a very satisfactory outcome, but it was a sated as well as a thoroughly sozzled Farouk Bahzoomi who weaved his way home in his treasured and much dented Rolls Royce Continental to the eclectically designed house his dowry had purchased in Medina Khalid, Belaj City’s poshest suburb. Parking haphazardly outside the high rendered walls, Farouk left the headlights on full beam as he lurched out into the humid night air and tottered over to the wrought-iron gates.
He didn’t know it but he was about to pay for his manifold sins and, in the process, catalyse a chain of events with repercussions
beyond the shores of this tiny island. More immediately and of only incidental relevance, he would make the front page of both his newspapers.
Death stood waiting in the shadow of Farouk’s mock-Crusader walls. Death stepped into the headlight beam and touched him on the shoulder as he fumbled at his Moorish-Gothic gates. Farouk turned with a gasp and stared into the face of Death, a plump and
buck-toothed face framed in a white headdress. Unlike Farouk’s, Death’s long white robe was spotless and leather-belted at the waist.
“Peace upon you, Farouk bin Abdul Bahzoomi,” Death addressed him formally.
“And upon you also, noble stranger,” Farouk replied in the same vein. Belching, he tasted sour forbidden whisky in his throat. “Praise God,” he beg-pardoned. “But you are not a stranger. I know you. Your name is -”
“Death.”
Farouk gasped again and took two steps backward until his fat bottom came up against the silver-plated grille of his cherished Rolls Royce. “How can this be?” he stammered. “Surely your name is -”
“My name is Death,” the other insisted. “You think you know me because one summer in my ignorant youth I bound the bales of that corrupted wood-pulp wherein you fawn upon the usurpers of this island and their allies in the lands of the Great Satan. Then I was
Hassan, but tonight I am Death to you, Farouk bin Abdul Bahzoomi, you blaspheming whoreson spawn of a buggerer of sheep and camels.”
Arabic is a majestic language in which to flatter or to revile.
On Sunset Boulevard and on Piccadilly, driving, as tonight, under the influence, Farouk had been called dickhead and wanker by other motorists and had accepted the epithets as his due. But now he quivered with outrage as well as with fear.
“How dare you address me in this profane calumnious fashion?” he spluttered, clinging to his dignity.
“I address you thus because you are a propagator of cringing putrid falsehoods and a kisser of the fundaments of those who pollute the land of my blessed forebears.”
“On the contrary, I am -”
But Death did not wait on Farouk’s expostulations. “Go now,” said Death, and from a scabbard at his waist he unsheathed a knife with a short curved blade like a scimitar and plunged it into Farouk’s broad chest.
“Allaaaah!” cried Farouk, as if hoping to redeem decades of dissipation by calling on his Maker even as he was dispatched into his Maker’s presence. In a last mindless act of lechery he clutched the semi-nude silver nymph on top of the car’s radiator; then his chubby fingers lost their hold and he slid to the compacted sand that was the topsoil of his driveway.
Death - or Hassan, to call him by his discarded name - bent down and retrieved his khanjar from the chest of Farouk Bahzoomi, wiped it on the dead man’s robe and replaced it in its scabbard. Then taking the flowing corners of his headdress, he knotted it into a washerwoman’s bundle on top of his head before climbing onto his motorcycle which was parked a few yards away, where the kerb would be if Medina Khalid boasted kerbs and pavements.
His night’s work completed, Death - Hassan - roared off into the humid darkness.
[Hassan flees to Egypt, but he will return to Belaj - in Islamic drag! - with the Amir as his next target.]
CHAPTER ONE: In-flight
2,000 kilometres to the northwest, ten and a half kilometres above sea level (and the level of Farouk Bahzoomi’s bloodsoaked
driveway), a Belaj Air 737, flight number BJ002, whispered south-eastward through the indigo night sky. Many of those on board would be engaged to a greater or lesser degree in the events set in motion by Farouk’s Shakespearean demise.
Monitored by a bleary-eyed Belaji first officer, the autopilot was in control of the plane. The captain, Doug Richards, an English
expatriate with twenty years flying experience, was squeezed into one of the First Class toilets behind the flight deck in the company of a senior flight attendant named Monica, a thirty-something brunette.
Erect in both senses, the captain stood between Monica’s cellulite thighs in the cramped toilet. His uniform trousers and British Home Stores boxer shorts were concertinaed at his ankles. Monica’s Dolce & Gabbana bikini pants lay crumpled on the floor. Her feet, in airline-issue low-heeled shoes, rested against the bulkhead just below the ceiling. Her buttocks overflowed the tiny hand-basin; the soap dispenser was digging uncomfortably into her waist. As she lifted herself into a less painful position, unthinkingly hastening the captain’s gasping ejaculation into a Durex Fetherlite, the aircraft hit a pocket of turbulence.
The captain, his latex-sheathed organ providing a fulcrum for most of Monica’s nine stone eleven, lurched backwards and sideways and slammed into the door, whose lock promptly gave way. Born down by the weight of his partner, Doug Richards fell through the opening door and landed on his back in the narrow aisle. His head thumped with concussing force into the door of the vacant opposite toilet.
“Chrrrist!” he yelled, fighting unconsciousness.
Monica, now straddling in a herniating embrace, the one part of him that was still vertical, experienced the most intense orgasm of her closer-to-forty-than-she-cared-to-admit years.
“Jeeesus!” she cried through clenched teeth.
In the front row of First Class a male head, white-shrouded and crowned with a twist of black braiding, swivelled at the sound of a loud thud followed by invocations to the Christian Messiah who is known to Muslims as the Prophet Issa. Aisle curtains obstructed Shaikh Ibrahim bin Sayed al-Khazi’s view of the pagan spectacle.
The engineer, another British expat, opened the flight deck door. His mouth also opened and could be expected to re-open often in the hours and days ahead.
Doug Richards’ belated induction into the Mile-High Club would become part of the legend of Belaj Air.
* * *