Shaikh-Down

By David Gee

On the Persian Gulf island of Belaj, British air-hostesses and Egyptian belly-dancers are working overtime to relieve oversexed citizens of their frustrations and petrodollars. One of the punters is murdered: whisky-soaked publisher Farouk whose randy wife Nayla is a niece of the local despot, His Highness Shaikh Khaled bin Khalifa al-Khazi.

Newcomer Cass, an East London housewife, becomes a $500 hooker. Sammy-Jo, an American stewardess with page-3-girl boobs, and bisexual British banker Eddy are drawn into a plot by BARF (Belaj Armed Revolutionary Front) to assassinate Shaikh Khaled in a bizarre bedroom romp.

What happens after the coup? Will it be the Dawn of Democracy - or "Whoops Apocalypse"? (And what unnerving fate does the author predict for Muammar Gaddafi and other tyrannical Arab rulers?)
* * * * * * *
“Witty, entertaining, raunchy and very well written.” Peter O’Donnell, creator of Modesty Blaise

“Ribald and politically incorrect. Set in a fictitious but absolutely believable Arab state where sheikhs and their minions are locked in a life-and-death struggle to survive the relentless move towards democracy. Entertaining.” Gay Times
“Probably a Zionist plot masterminded by the CIA to undermine the good image of morally irreproachable Gulf Arabs.” Gulf Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Hurst
• Release date: May 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458028419

David Gee

I've worked in telecomms and journalism in London and the Persian Gulf, but have now settled back onto my native Sussex South Downs to a life of writing and rustic pursuits (pub-lunches and dog-walking!) You can read Extracts from some of my yet-to-be-published novels at www.abctales.com, including my 'romantic thriller' LILLIAN AND THE ITALIANS - written to show my mother that there would be life after 50. Paradise Press in LOndon will publish THE BEXHILL MISSILE CRISIS in 2014 as a paperback and ebook.

Book preview

SHAIKH-DOWN

Witty, entertaining, raunchy and very well written

Peter O’Donnell, creator of Modesty Blaise

Copyright © David Gee

Smashwords Edition

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please go to https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/58399 and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

David Gee

Originally earmarked for the Methodist Mission Field, David Gee discovered that ‘the missionary position’ didn’t suit him. He has worked in London and the Middle East as a teacher and journalist. He now lives on the south coast of England with Sadie and Sophie (who appear in the novel), two mongrels salvaged from a date plantation in Bahrain.

www.shaikh-down.co.uk

www.shaikh-down.blogspot.com

Lines from The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam translated by Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs (Allen Lane, 1979, translation copyright © Peter Avery and John Heath-Stubbs, 1979), reproduced by kind permission of Penguin Books Ltd.

Cover illustration by Earl Hyde

To Sheila, Susan and Mary

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is a novel. Only the dogs are real.

Oh, and the cat.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Death of a Newspaper-Owner

PART ONE: MARHABA

Chapter 1: In-flight

Chapter 2: Well Come

Chapter 3: Party Night

Chapter 4: Shallow Waters

Chapter 5: Wazda

Chapter 6: Lulu Road

Chapter 7: Sodom and Gomorrah

PART TWO: NEHARKUM SA’ID

Chapter 8: Shaikh-up

Chapter 9: Habibi

Chapter 10: Hole in the Wall

Chapter 11: Missionary Position

Chapter 12: Rain

Chapter 13: Banquo’s Ghost

PART THREE: MAS-SALAAMA

Chapter 14: Sandstorm

Chapter 15: Shaikh-down

Chapter 16: BARF

Chapter 17: Wind of Change

Epilogue: The Road to Damascus

The extreme unimportance of the events

in the interior of the Emirates

cannot be exaggerated.

John G. Lorimer

Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf

(1908)

‘Oh Shaikh, I am what you say,

Are you what you seem?’

Omar Khayyam (c.1100)

PROLOGUE

Death of a Newspaper-Owner

Seek for wine, girls and music.

Omar Khayyam

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-Khabar, the national daily newspaper of the island of Belaj; he also owned the weekly English-language Belaj Gazette. His neglected wife was a niece of the emirate’s ruler.

The belly-dancer’s name was Leila. A dusky twenty-year-old from Cairo, 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 and mostly local) competed for her favours by tucking bank notes of increasing value into the waistband of her golden G-string. Tonight Farouk made what his rivals conceded as 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 brief but intensive exertion 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 from Mrs Fadilah’s box-like villa behind the British Club to the eclectically designed house his dowry had purchased in Medina Khaled, 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 Khaled boasted kerbs and pavements.

‘It begins,’ he murmured to himself. ‘There will be more. Insh’Allah.’ If God wills.

His night’s work completed, Death - Hassan - roared off into the humid darkness.

PART ONE

Marhaba

(Hello: welcome)

Here we are with . . . this broken-down corner.

Omar Khayyam

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 blood-soaked driveway), a Belaj Air 737, flight number BJ027, 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 stewardess named Monica, a thirty-something brunette. (Monica, soon to run off to Canada with a divorced oil-rig diver, will play no further part in our story but this is not the last we shall see of Captain Richards.)

Erect in both senses, the captain stood between Monica’s cellulite thighs in the cramped toilet. His uniform trousers and BHS boxer shorts were concertinaed at his ankles. Monica’s Calvin Klein 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. Borne 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, turned 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 and an untended galley 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 reopen often in the hours and days ahead. Doug Richards’s belated induction into the Mile-High Club would become part of the legend of Belaj Air.

The only other passenger in First Class, seated three rows behind Shaikh Ibrahim, vaguely registered the commotion at the front of the aircraft, but Tariq Bahzoomi, nephew of the newly deceased newspaper-owner, had other things on his mind. Dressed in a grey Armani business suit, Tariq, already running to the family flab at thirty-three, was trying to get his rocks off at 35,000 feet. This idea had obsessed him since he first saw the movie Rich and Famous on TCM.

‘Come on, darling,’ he urged the shapely brunette in the next seat. ‘Just some head will do.’ Tariq prided himself on his command of English.

‘I can’t,’ the girl said. ‘If we’re caught, I’ll lose my job.’

‘Job, schmob. I’ll get you a job with one of my dad’s outfits.’

‘I’ve got my future to think of.’

‘Future, schmuture.’ Tariq was beginning to overdo the showbiz Yiddish. ‘Don’t you want to join the Mile-High Club, Bettina?’

Bettina shrugged inside her green-and-orange Belaj Air uniform blouse. ‘Not here, not now,’ she admitted.

‘If not here, where, for Christ’s sake?’

Bettina wondered if this was the time to tell him that she’d been initiated into the Mile-High Club last year in a Business Class toilet by an Italian structural engineer. Probably not, she decided. The Italian, married of course, had been a hunk but the experience was a shade less glamorous than in Rich and Famous. Jacqueline Bisset isn’t seen to have bruised her hip on the tap fitting or to have lost a pair of Janet Reger panties down the loo; nor, at least not on the sound track, does her bottom come out of the sink with a plop like breaking jelly.

Bettina had been Tariq Bahzoomi’s girlfriend for the past four months. Half an hour ago he’d bought her a $2,000 Piaget watch from the duty-free selection, an investment on which he now seemed to expect a quick return.

Receiving no answer to his question, Tariq sighed and said, ‘OK, make it a quick hand-job.’ And he pulled her diamond-watch-wristed hand towards the bulge disfiguring the pelvis of his Armani suit. Bettina tweaked the top of the protrusion firmly between her thumb and forefinger, a stratagem her sister had picked up at self-defence classes. The bulge subsided dramatically.

‘Jesus H. Christ,’ bellowed Tariq, his Harvard Business School English not letting him down under pressure.

In the front row Shaikh Ibrahim’s head swivelled through almost 180 degrees at this third summons to the Prophet Issa which was neither entirely appropriate nor entirely inappropriate in an aircraft whose flight path included the sand-swept lava plateau between the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. He glared across the empty seats at his brother-in-law’s nephew, a useless playboy whose presence on the flight he had acknowledged with no more than a brief nod when they boarded.

Among several posts in which Ibrahim bin Sayed served his uncle the Amir of Belaj he was the island’s Commandant of Traffic Police. His sister Nayla was, though she didn’t know it yet, the widow of Farouk Bahzoomi.

These persistent blasphemous exclamations were interrupting a near-sacrilegious train of thought in the mind of Shaikh Ibrahim bin Sayed al-Khazi. He had been fantasising about the houris, the ‘chastely amorous’ wenches with which the Muslim Paradise promises to be liberally staffed. Ibrahim wanted them all to be built like another of BJ027’s stewardesses, a platinum blonde whose breasts were simply mega (Arabic is untypically deficient in this connoisseur area, and Tariq wasn’t the only Belaji with a command of English idiom); her breasts were ‘yummy’ and ‘scrummy’ and totally edible.

Some men are leg men, some are arse men. Ibrahim was a major-league boob man. His very personal video collection (he was also Head of Customs: all sorts of goodies came his way) included the complete works of Russ Meyer and Dolly Parton. He liked breasts that were prominent – let’s face it, he liked them big – but he preferred them to look natural, unaugmented. On his last night in the Hyde Park Hilton he had discovered a bizarre reality TV show, set on a much lusher island than Belaj; a girl with the enticing name of Abi Titmuss had displaced Marilyn Monroe at the top of Ibrahim’s tit-parade.

‘Is there anything I can get you, Shaikh Ibrahim?’ Bettina enquired as she made a detour past his seat en route from her wounded lover to the Business Class section. Ibrahim briefly pondered several replies he could make to this query.

‘No, thank you very much.’ His voice was guttural.

‘You’re welcome.’ Bettina’s mouth, lipsticked by Estée Lauder, parted in a polite but not perfunctory smile, and she moved on. The Commandant of Traffic Police and Head of Customs, who had chain-smoked throughout the flight, lit another cigarette and returned to his reverie of the Gardens of Paradise.

The object of Ibrahim’s mental dalliance was called Sammy-Jo-Ann and known, conveniently, as Sam. She was 28 (the same age as her new admirer) and she hailed from Pittsburgh: almost Dolly Parton territory.

While the Economy passengers were sleeping or watching the movie and the First Class passengers were variously tumescing or detumescing, Sam was sitting with her feet up in the rear of the untenanted Business Section. Next to her was Janice, another Economy stewardess whom airline grooming had not rescued from plainness.

Bettina joined them, plumping herself down in the seat across the starboard aisle from Sam.

‘Men are vile,’ she announced. Sam was quick to agree:

‘Honey, if I got all the men in my life into a herd, I’d have me a hog farm bigger than any in Kentucky!’

‘My Colin isn’t vile,’ protested Janice, who never missed a chance to sing the praises of this paragon.

‘We all know your Colin is the Prince Charmin’ of Twat-ford.’

‘Watford.’

‘Whatever. Who’s gotten you mad, honey?’ Sam asked Bettina. ‘Did that Shaikh person get fresh? When I took him a hot towel after dinner he had a hard-on inside that shirt thing they wear like a log goin’ over Niagara Falls.’ As she laughed, the buttons of her green-and-orange blouse strained against the thrust of their cantilevered contents in a way that the ‘Shaikh person’ would particularly have savoured.

‘It’s not him. It’s that foul Tariq. He was trying to get me to - you know - do things in First Class.’

Janice looked shocked. Sam did not. ‘The Mile High Club! Go for it, Bettina.’

Bettina smirked. ‘I already did. A year ago.’

‘In the john?’ Bettina nodded. Sam’s breasts went into overdrive as she shuddered with laughter. ‘Did your ass come outta the sink with a noise like a wet fart?’ The way she said the last word was onomatopoeic. Janice shuddered, but not with laughter. Bettina shook her head.

‘Nothing like that. It was pure magic. Just like in the movie.’

‘The one with Jackie Bisset? Well, the guy I screwed on a flight out of Houston -’ Janice winced - ‘I had bruises right up my spine and my snatch was sore for a week!’ Sam laughed some more. If Ibrahim knew what he was missing.

Janice’s pursed lips now resembled a clenched anus. Bettina put a hand over her own mouth to hide another smirk and Sam noticed the glittering watch on her wrist. ‘Is that new?’

‘Tariq bought it for me tonight.’

‘No wonder he wanted you to do some stuff! Well, who’s a lucky girl? Nobody ever gave me a diamond watch.’

‘I’ve got three of them,’ said Bettina, looking smug.

‘Yes, but look what you have to do to get them,’ Janice contributed. Bettina’s mouth opened, but Sam got in first:

‘Go piss up a rope, Janice. She doesn’t do anythin’ you don’t do with your precious Colin for a Big Mac and a seat at the movies. Grab it while it’s goin’, Bettina. Best I ever got was a pair of earrings off a PanAm captain one time. Oh yes -’ more laughter, more strain on her buttons - ‘and a ground engineer at Houston gave me crabs!’

A female passenger lay stretched across the four centre seats in the front row of Economy behind the partition separating it from Business Class. Headphoneless, not watching the flickering screen above her, she seemed to be asleep. In fact she was awake and listening to the conversation on the other side of the partition.

Cass McBride had been to Belaj before, for holidays. Her brother was the editor of the Belaj Gazette. But this time Cass wasn’t coming on holiday. She was running away. She didn’t know what the future held in store for her (and wouldn’t have believed it if she did). So far - it was only (she kept looking at her watch) six hours since she’d left Walthamstow - she didn’t feel unduly bothered. What she mainly felt was free.

The loose-fitting tracksuit she wore for in-flight comfort (and modesty in strait-laced Belaj) gave little hint of the figure it contained. Her hair was light brown with ash highlights, and at forty-four she still had the clear complexion of her Highland childhood. She could have claimed to be thirty-eight (not that she did) and got away with it.

She envied the stewardesses. Not the mousy one with the boyfriend in wherever Twatford was and a voice that was inaudible over the engine noise. But she envied the pretty brunette who seemed to have met a lot of generous rich men and she even envied the platinum blonde with the overlarge bust who sounded as if she’d enjoyed, in her earthy way, putting herself about quite a bit.

Cass hadn’t put herself about much. Cass hadn’t put herself about at all. Her husband had never given her a diamond watch, and she doubted that he’d ever given one to any of his girlfriends. He’d also managed not to give her crabs, for which, she thought with a grim smile, she ought perhaps to be grateful.

Never mind all that, she told herself: you’re free now. Things are going to change.

No, they’re not, another part of her mind whispered. It’s too late for change. This whisper was, almost, her mother’s voice. Your goose was cooked a long time ago, my girl.

Go and piss on a rope, she told this voice, blushing as she permitted herself to think in the same crude terms as the foul-mouthed blonde stewardess.

‘Back to the galley, slaves,’ urged the chief steward, cracking an imaginary whip down the Business Class aisle at the chattering trio in the back row.

‘It’s too soon to start breakfasts,’ protested Bettina. ‘The movie won’t finish for another half an hour.’

‘Hardly anyone’s watching it anyway,’ Janice put in.

‘Why do they cut so much out of them?’ asked Sam. ‘Myself, I like to see plenty of bedroom action.’

‘I could give you all the bedroom action you can handle,’ the chief steward told her. ‘Make you a very rich girl, too. The bigger the boobs, the bigger the bucks.’ A short tubby man in his mid-forties with cropped grey hair, his name was Felix ffrench; he always stammered the double consonant - ‘f-french’ - and got very cross if his surname was spelt with a single capital ‘F’. He operated a lucrative sideline that made him a rival of Belaj’s Mrs Fadilah, although the girls who worked for Felix were rarely called on for any belly-dancing. Sam had so far resisted conscription.

‘Sorry, honey,’ she told him now. ‘There’s no way I could turn tricks for money. I don’t mind screwin’ creeps but I have to believe in the creeps I’m screwin’.’ Janice winced again. Bettina smiled (as, on the other side of the partition, did Cass McBride).

‘Well,’ Felix riposted, ‘that’s one hell of a creep you’re screwing these days.’

‘Blow it out your ass, Felix.’

Felix cracked his invisible whip again. ‘Back to work, you idle scrubbers.’

‘Who you calling a scrubber, you bloody poofter?’ Janice revealed a rarely seen streak of belligerence. It was unwise to take on Felix ffrench at verbal abuse.

‘Who are you calling a poofter, you scrawny ugly cow?’

‘Now-now, ladies,’ Bettina intervened. ‘Remember we like to run a happy ship.’ In his pre-flight cabin crew briefing Felix always made reference to ‘a happy ship’. Now he screwed his mouth into a moue.

‘Send Dawn and Melissa up here,’ he told Bettina. ‘They can put their feet up for ten minutes before breakfast.’

‘I heard it was their legs they like to get up!’ Sam cackled at her own joke, then pretended to cower as Felix raised his whip arm.

Now 1,450 kilometres to the south-east of Belaj Air flight 027, the body of Farouk Bahzoomi had been discovered. The Pakistani gardener, who lived in a shed in the grounds, went to investigate the unremitting glare of headlights through the gates and saw his master crumpled in a puddle of blood beside his imperial, not to say imperialist, Rolls Royce.

‘Aiyee!’ screamed the gardener and ran to hammer on the door of one of the cubicle-sized rooms which housed the domestic staff above the garage. A bleary-eyed Indian houseboy emerged clad only in a sarong; he could make no sense of the gardener’s babbling in the Pashto language of the North-West Frontier. Seizing the houseboy by one arm, the gardener dragged him downstairs and over to the gates.

‘Aiyee!’ screamed the houseboy and ran into the main house via the kitchen door. Upstairs a Filipina maid slept on a mattress on