Racing With the Devil

By Habu

Espionage and Murder, Terrorists and Betrayal in the Middle East.

Two hunky blonds play dangerous games in a U.S. embassy in this gay male novella of Middle East espionage and terrorism.

Two very similar-looking young, blond men, the first-assignment CIA technical support officer, Christ Carter, and the ambassador’s son, Sean Caldwell, have both arrived in an oil-rich Persian Gulf emirate. Both have been steeped in Muslim studies in their U.S. university studies and both are determined to take dangerous measures—and to prostitute themselves, as needed—to fulfill political objectives.

The emirate embassy seems isolated and insular, but looks prove deceiving as, in narratives by various characters, both of the young blonds and those around them—Arab royals, terrorist masterminds, American diplomats, spies, oil company executives, and even servants—become embroiled in a terrorist plot. A plot that has potentially explosive regional ramifications and more twists and turns than a corkscrew.

Characters become pitted against each other in a race with the devil, in both strategy and threat to life, that challenges the reader on just who is the devil.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BarbarianSpy
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9780987609311

Habu

Habu is one of the pen names of a former supersonic spy jet pilot, intelligence agent, male model, movie actor, and diplomat. A wild youth in South East Asia was spent enjoying whatever sexual opportunities came his way, and much of his gay male writing is about recalling incidents from those days and inventing ones he’d perhaps have liked to experience. He now leads a very quiet and ordinary life.Check out our blog and get free stories. Feedback and reviews are always appreciated.

Book preview

Chapter One: Welcome to the Gulf

The combination of knock-out pills, which didn’t completely work, and liquor, on the run from Frankfurt to the Arabian Peninsula would have had me staggering off the plane onto the tarmac even if the oppressive desert heat hadn’t done the trick. I had to lift my arm to cover my eyes against the glare off the steel and glass monolith of a terminal building that rose like an iceberg in front of me. Westerners like me were being piled into one of two airport buses at the bottom of the jet stairs. The buses had already taken all of the Arabic men to the terminal—those having been permitted off the plane first—and then had returned for the rest of us. These Arabs, dressed in the white robes the country book the Agency had doled out to me shortly before I left Washington called thawbs or dishdashas, evidently were local potentates. The handbook told me not to bother to try to distinguish a thawb from a dishdasha.

I wasn’t in much condition to tell much of anything from the other—although it was obvious that, no matter what order we deplaned in, the men in the robes were going to get to the terminal before the rest of us.

The heat of the Gulf emirate we’d landed in was still building when we finally reached the terminal and were hit with a blast of cold air conditioning inside what I’d already named The Iceberg. Then, as we slowly cleared immigration control—me clearing last, because third-world satrapies just loved to hassle Americans with diplomatic passports—everyone seemed to disappear. When I stumbled out into the main terminal, it was like I was the only one in a gigantic air hanger that just soared up and up. It took a while to focus in on the direction I was to go to get to baggage claim. The terminal seemed empty—so deserted that the sound of my shoes clipping along as I walked across the terminal floor echoed off the glass walls and steel frame of the terminal. All of the signage was in Arabic. That alone didn’t defeat me, as I spoke and read Arabic fairly fluently. But none of it seemed to relate to airport functions. Pithy blurbs from the Koran are all very nice—in fact I found them inspiring and helping to steel my resolve in what I had agreed to do—but they don’t tell me where to find my suitcase.

Stumbling onto the baggage claim area at last, I could see my bags circling the metal carousel as I approached and disappear through strips of black rubber back into the bowels of the building before I could reach them. Of course it took them an age to come out the other side again—and of course my bags were the last to be picked up and I was the last to clear customs.

In one last moment of frustration and confusion, the customs agents linked arms to deny me access to the exit everyone else had used and to direct me over to a door at the side. They were smiling now, their job of putting the American in his place finished. Who would have known that at this late stage of the process, there would be a diplomatic lounge and separate entrance to depart the terminal—to a covered waiting area for limousines rather than right out onto the teeming masses street. In the lounge, tapping her toes impatiently, a look of irritated impatience on her face, was the last person in the world I wanted to either see or to be made to feel delinquent by.

I had met Penny Haskell in Langley a couple of times during my abbreviated training for this post, where I was to engage in covert tech support while pretending to be a State Department logistics officer and where even that had an element of pretense. Haskell was the chief of station in this emirate—the top American spy in the country. Each time we had briefly met and spoken at CIA Headquarters across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., Haskell had been abrupt and cold. She always seemingly needed to be somewhere else in the next ten minutes and was dealing with me only on sufferance—although it had always been a case of me sitting and cooling my heels waiting for an appointment with her that I hadn’t been the one to schedule.

Today was no different—other than that she’d been waiting for me, and wasn’t at all pleased by that fact. At my obvious confusion that I had been met at the nearly deserted airport in this postage-stamp sized emirate on the Persian Gulf by the COS herself rather than by some embassy foreign national, she told me, in clipped tones, that the COS always met her incoming staff members. But she went on to say that my plane had been late and I’d come out of customs late—and she managed to say it in a way that suggested I personally was responsible for the delays—and that she was expected at an event. There wasn’t time to take me to my hotel or the embassy; I’d have to go to the event with her.

Wonderful, I thought. Just what I wanted to do, having traveled a quarter of the distance around the globe without sleep—although I could fall down in a stupor now—with the makings of a hangover and nearly drooping with heat exhaustion.

Where? I started to say.

We’re going to the horse races, Haskell said.

God, yes, I thought. Just the thing for the condition I’m in—outside at the rails in the heat of the desert day with horses kicking dust into my face. Lovely.

The horse races turned out to be at a fancy track across the city, the emirate’s capital being a compact collection of impossibly tall and wildly shaped skyscrapers set on obviously manmade islands poking out into a harbor on the shores of the Gulf. Haskell told me that, from the air, the whole complex fanned out in the shape of a palm tree. I believed her. She also told me that the city was only for the wealthy rulers—that the lower classes lived in slums hidden on the other side of manmade hills surrounding the central city and only came into the modern city to serve the upper class. I believed that too. I was so tired and hung over I was willing to believe anything she said.

I balked a bit when she told me that the horse race we were going to would feature this year’s winners of the Kentucky Derby and Belmont racing each other—the horses having been shipped here just for a race that would last less than eight minutes. But it turns out she was right about that too. Mercifully, though,