Mortimer of the Maghreb

Charles Mortimer watched the rippled brown land wheel back to horizontal. He drained the last drops from the plastic glass of Johnnie Walker the air steward had given him, and decided: that's it, no more booze for a week. Au boulot. His former life, his real life, stitched together by the clackety-clack of the typewriter and the patter-patter of the laptop, and by the roar of jets, was coming back to him now. Once again he was baptised in the odour of jet fuel (which still made him sick), born again in the air, the medium of his real work. They had been flying for two hours, deep into the desert. As the plane finished its turn for final approach, one of the MiGs stationed at the El Zouarte air base sliced through the desert sky like a steel meteor. His heart tightened. The old feeling came back, the feeling you almost smelled in your nose which told you this was the one, this was the right place to be, you would find what you needed herethe feeling that guided you to the front page. Enough of those blustering columns on page twelve. How good that he had returned Mohammed Ahmoud's telephone call and gone to meet him at the Wolf and Whistle, that he had got away from the little office with its blue carpet and oversize computer terminal and private fax machineall the perks just for him, the grand old man come home to grow fat and die. "Welcome, Mortimer of the Maghreb," a man in fatigues addressed him when he reached the bottom of the airplane steps. Mortimer squinted at the man, who was grinning broadly, by which Mortimer understood that he was to take the greeting as a joke. He chuckled back. Like his compatriot Mohammed Ahmoud back in London, the man looked like he would weigh very little. He introduced himself as Ibrahim. Mortimer noted a certain friendly roundness about his face, almost a clownishness. Men like that could be dangerous, Mortimer thought. They didn't care about anything. "Welcome to SAR," the man said, speaking awkwardly, with excessive emphasis, as if it was difficult for him to utter each foreign letter of his spurious nation's name. He hissed on the S. The letters stood for "Saharan Arab Republic." A seriousness came over the clownish face as he pronounced them. Mortimer followed the man towards a waiting Land Rover. As he moved across the tarmac, away from the airplane, the wind caught him unawares. It was an extraordinary wind. He had travelled a great dealin the Pamirs, the Balkans, the Caucasus, in South Africa, the Middle East, in Sri Lanka, all the world's trouble spots over the last thirty yearsbut never, it seemed to him, had he known a wind like this. Strong and steady, and so hot he felt there must be some mistake, someone had left an engine running, or opened a furnace at the wrong time. It scalded his face, burnt his neck. It came from nowhere, from everywhere. Mortimer looked round. Beyond the airstrip with the one jetliner there was nothing but flat, open desert, beginning at the edge of the tarmac and stretching away for hundreds, thousands of miles. What a place to live. It was an unfinished world, not ready for human habitation. What a place for a war. He remembered his wars being in beautiful landscapes, among valleys and mountains and rivers. You would wake up to see the dew glinting on a gun barrel and feel the sun warming your back. You would eat your porridge overlooking a gorge. Or you would hike up a trail among fir trees. Or you might be staying in some dismal concrete city but from the hotel window you could see splendid dusty mountains. This was different. A construction site with no construction, an emptiness without end. Mortimer had been here once before, over twenty years ago, but he remembered the terrain quite differently, as a glinting plain of gravShukman, Henry is the author of 'Mortimer of the Maghreb', published 2006 under ISBN 9781400043255 and ISBN 1400043255.