Tom Foran Clark

In Laghouat, ten or a dozen scowling boys in military greens were bobbing and lunging amid scouring winds, using the sudden, random gusts for punching bags. No laughing, happy urchins, these -- oblivious to Pike and Emery as the two rolled by, heading for the hilltop mosque and minaret.

Going up and down the steps between the back side of the hill that the mosque rose from and the oasis below were the girls, the wives, the women -- in the open, in view, out from under their heavy veiling garb. Still, it was their unnerving liquid eyes that stunned. Pike and Emery turned into arcaded aisles of village shops, where a suave hustler approached them, babbling French. He shook their hands. He was wearing a suit and tie under a smooth tan robe -- a burnous.

"Are we looking for a place to stay, he wants to know," Pike translated. "I’ve agreed to go with him to have a look."

The Hotel Bekhallah was right around the corner from a bakery. A narrow door led to stairs rising to second floor rooms along balcony ledges around an open inner courtyard. The room was painted a pasty powder blue. It was large and empty but for two beds, a sink, and a simple wooden chair. A single narrow window offered a view to the mosque, the minaret, and the steps on which the women had ascended and descended.

"Oui?" Ahmed asked impatiently after revealing the ridiculous price. Pike and Emery could not refuse him. As darkness fell, he generously helped them haul up their bikes and gear and got them settled in. Pike excused himself to use the toilet in the hall, using the opportunity to stash his precious treasure map somewhere -- down his pants or in his socks. When he came back, Ahmed treated Pike and Emery to his personal tour of the town.

Ahmed took the two up a narrow slope by the Grand Market, leading into alleyways with steps winding to a high ridge crest where the old city wall had met an abandoned stone fortress, once a cornerstone of the village. It was now a gutted, burnt-out ruin, three stories high, with windows and doorways framing beautiful views to the vast, encroaching desert. Overhead, mad clouds scurried in several directions, pushed and pulled by icy, frenzied winds.

Out of the corner of his eye, Emery saw Ahmed leap suddenly at Pike, knocking him hard against a wall. Ahmed and Pike both fell to the cold stone floor. Pike’s eyes were wide with fear. Ahmed had a knife.

The blade went down. Emery's foot went out. He kicked the weapon through an open doorway and, despite the adrenaline coursing through his system, though knowing the danger he and Pike were in, still he paused to hope the knife would not split open the head of a passerby below. That brief moment of inaction nearly cost Emery his life. Ahmed sprang like a leopard from Pike, grabbed Emery's left leg tight and, standing suddenly, nearly flung him right out the doorway along the knife’s trajectory or line of flight. Emery put a foot up and hit the right door jamb and fell back into the room, bruised and bleeding. Ahmed, screaming in Arabic, jumped on Emery. Pike lunged at him. Their heads collided. They flew apart.

"What are you, dog-gone crazy?" Pike demanded to know, and then added something in French -- perhaps translating what he’d asked. Ahmed, turning crimson in the face, thrust his hands around Pike’s neck. Pike brought up his hands as if to pray, but instead leveraged apart Ahmed’s clutching fingers. He then delivered a powerful right hook that sent Ahmed across the room. Blood now flowed from Ahmed’s nose.

"Balok! Balok!" men were shouting, approaching on the crest of the city wall -- "Make way! Make way! "Let’s go!" Pike squealed. He was gasping for air. He offered Eryme a hand and pulled him up. "Too late," Pike said. He acted quickly. Three fierce young men in matching burnous robes charged in, aiming rifles. Pike had already gone to where Ahmed lay. Kneeling, he’d pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and begun to wipe blood from Ahmed’s face. The gunmen came upon this tender scene and did not open fire.

The six of them returned together to the Hotel Bekhallah. Along the way, Pike said something to them that went straight to Ahmed’s heart. He put an arm around Pike, as if they were old friends. Pike had quoted André Malraux -- "What a relief to fight enemies who are awake!" Pike, Emery, Ahmed, the three guys with the AK-47 rifles -- all were suddenly like brothers, making their way to the hotel. Pike had thoroughly endeared himself to them.

Once they got back to the room, Ahmed’s armed pals took control of Pike and Emery's passports, their money, and all. He ordered his men to keep their things safe, then dismissed them. He took a seat on the room’s sole chair, motioning for Pike and Emery to sit on the beds. There were things he wanted to tell them. For the next three days, Pike and Emery were Ahmed’s captive audience.

"You are very smart," Ahmed began that first night, in English, afterwards rambling in his own mixed Arabic-French-English jargon. From time to time Pike would cautiously raise his right index finger, politely to request toilet privileges for himself or Emery. Ahmed’s lieutenants, who appeared at regular intervals with loaves of bread, Camembert cheese, and mint tea for us, stood guard by the toilet door. Every now and then, Emery would ask pike a question or get a clarification on a point. By and by, over the course of four days, Ahmed unfolded his story to them.

As a boy, Ahmed Bougaiba had dreamed of joining the Algerian army, to get out of his street urchin’s rags and into a clean, sharp soldier’s uniform. He’d envied the respect accorded military officers -- the presidential guard and the state police. He knew the alternative: permanent unemployment. In time, he’d in fact receive the intensive training reserved for special units -- the government’s elite right guard.

No sooner had he got this job than Islamic demonstrations had flared in Algiers. The Democratic government had cracked down, imposing martial law, and Ahmed’s own neighbors were suddenly "the enemy" -- family friends, near and distant cousins, and so on. Some had been imprisoned and some murdered, which had caused a backlash -- a new uprising. Local officials had been stripped of their authority. The New Islamic Front had ordered women to cease studying in schools, working in offices, and showing their faces. Men had been ordered to stop drinking and smoking. That had been more than Ahmed could bear.

Ahmed had vowed the country would not fall into the hands of the Islamists. He’d hunted down government traitors. He’d turned in officers and soldiers who secretly prayed. He’d been present at random massacres in remote hamlets, killing old people, women, children, infants. Rumors of the massacres had spread like wildfire. Bloodlust filled the hearts of the New Islamic Front, anti-government rebels who believed their own deaths would carry them to paradise. Hiding and training in the mountains, they emerged only to eradicate whole villages, in some cases surreptitiously settling ancient tribal feuds through these blood baths. The guerrillas blamed the killings on the government and the government vowed it would seek and bring to justice the real killers.

One day Ahmed’s commanding officer ordered him to assist these Islamic rebels seeking paradise: "Get them there at once. We don’t want any prisoners." He drove a truck filled with knives, rifles, grenades, rockets, rocket-launchers, and commando fighters trained to use them to the village of Dazatarya Aiwar. While Ahmed waited in the truck (he said) the government commandos, wearing false beards, disguised as rebel guerrillas, slaughtered the population. In turn, Islamic militants shaved, put on police uniforms, and set up roadblocks, gunning down whole busloads of women and children. Some of the girls and women in the villages and on the buses and so forth were not immediately murdered, but rather carried off for the soldiers’ or guerrillas’ amusement, only to have their necks slit at a later date. Some of these kidnapped women were kept alive and raped, tortured, sold, and transported to Libyan and Italian villages to work as prostitutes and slaves.

Ad hoc groups of civilian vigilantes had armed themselves with guns, swords, and knives, patrolling their villages day and night. In one of these villages late one evening, a band of vigilantes had in fact faced off with a dozen terrorists and the guerrillas had been driven off. "We won’t kill you today!" they’d called behind them, retreating. "But we’ll be back! We’ll come back and do it!" These warrior berserks began to lose their popular appeal among the common people, who’d previously thought of them as romantic adventurers and liberators -- the new Mujahideen.

Ahmed said it got so you couldn’t tell the new Mujahideen from the Algerian military and police. There was no side to root for. Algerians had come to hate Islamic militants as much as government soldiers. In the villages, policemen’s uniforms hung next to guerrilla rags and gear. It was something like a standoff, so new ground had then been broken -- new blood spilled. In the Berber region of Kabylia, government security forces had accompanied village paramilitary police, slaying Berbers and Arabs at random. Berber Resistance Fighters rose up to hunt down soldiers and guerrillas alike.

Here in Laghouat, during a Government "mopping up" operation, soldiers had arrested a fifteen-year-old boy suspected of passing information to Islamic activists. He’d been ordered to kneel, and gasoline had been poured over him. A colleague of Ahmed’s had lackadaisically pulled out a cigarette lighter and had set the boy on fire. "That was that," Ahmed said, in English. He’d spoken against this offense to officials ranking higher than his commanding officer. Not a week went by but Ahmed was charged with collusion with terrorists. No, that wasn’t it exactly. Ahmed was arrested for allegedly stealing spare parts from an army store and for colluding with terrorists. He’d been sentenced to four years in prison. He and his three colleagues had escaped, altered their identities (trimming their beards and donning the lightweight burnous robes), and returned to Laghouat.

At this juncture – it was now the third evening -- Ahmed paused, wringing his hands. He moved Pike and Emery forward to recent events. He told them he had intended to kill them, in fact -- "no one would notice" -- but he had changed his mind. He and his three fellow former members of the government’s elite guard had intended to bury their bicycles with their bodies, or to keep the bicycles for spare parts. They’d planned to use their passports and their money to carry two of them -- or two other non-Islamic non-ruling-party fellow Freedom Fighting comrades -- to America to plead their cause. When, in the fortress ruins, Pike had tenderly begun wiping blood from Ahmed’s face, Ahmed had begun devising a new plan. Even as Pike and Emery walked from the fortress to the hotel -- Pike apologizing to Ahmed for calling him dog-gone crazy, commending him now for his fine fighting spirit -- Ahmed had plotted a new course. He would let Pike and Emery go, he said, and they would agree to return to their country as Ambassadors for Ahmed’s cause. He said he knew Pike and Emery had this in them. Pike turned to Emery and translated what Ahmed offered, laying the proposal down.

Emery could see Pike was ripe for enlisting. For a moment Emery had thought Pike was just being tricky, acting like Ahmed was the cat’s pajamas and he’d follow him anywhere and so on, in order to win some time -- eventually to get the two of them out of their predicament. But, on studying Pike’s eyes closely, Emery could see how wrong this was. Pike was really, actually, authentically ready to sign on to what Ahmed proposed.

The long and arduous journey here, Emery knew, had taken a huge toll on Pike. Emery could see his friend was on very shaky ground. An empty space had opened up in him, just waiting to be filled. Now here was Ahmed Bougaiba, Freedom Fighter, himself some sort of berserk or Mujahideen, offering Pike an opportunity, a plan, a course of action -- a challenge not without merit of enchantment and excitement, for which Pike yearned -- providing him with fresh images. As for Emery, he heard nothing there he felt they should rush into, and he said so.

Pike must have mistranslated something, because the next thing Emery knew, Ahmed had called in his armed cohorts, who entered the room not with food but with their rifles and a long rope. Ahmed now took out his knife and slashed this rope roughly in the middle, using the two lengths of cord to bind together first Emery's wrists and ankles, then Pike’s. The two did not resist, though Pike swore profusely at Ahmed, who seemed to cherish it. Ahmed tied their own bandannas around their lips and chins. He left them there like that, face down on their beds. Weird music from the restaurant below drifted up, then dispersed into the night.

Pike and Emery heard buses pulling out -- night buses carrying women and children? Government soldiers? Islamic terrorists? Berber Vigilantes? Ahmed and his pals? Their money and their passports? Through the room’s window they could see the pointed arches of the hilltop mosque, lighted brightly within, putting out a diffused, pulsing emerald glow or sheen. The light inside their room was ashen, gray.

In an hour, Ahmed was back. He removed the bandannas from their faces and took his seat again. He spoke to Pike, who in turn spoke to Emery: "He says he wants our cooperation. He wants us to be friends."

"When’s the last time a friend bound you up by your wrists and ankles with a rope?" Emery spat it out. Pike duly translated that. Ahmed grabbed Emery hard by the collar of his shirt -- he was still face down on the bed -- and shook him. "Tell -- him -- to -- stop!" Emery stuttered. "Tell him he’s a -- a filthy, Goddamned, lawless torturer, a savage murderer, a burglar, a bungler, a mugger, a marauder, a bastard, and a bum!"

Without blinking, Pike translated. Ahmed began to laugh heartily, spraying spit, letting go of Emery. Ahmed then went to work, untying Emery. When he finished, he gestured that Emery should now untie Pike. "Untie him yourself," Emery said. "Take a hike. I don’t take orders from you. You’re just a Godforsaken bloodthirsty little Algerian barbarian, so far as I can see."

Ahmed caught the drift of this. "Your friend is smart," Ahmed told Pike in English, undoing the ropes around his wrists and ankles. "I like him." To Emery he said, "Do your friend tell you how I am coming to this miserable life?" He then continued to tell his story, talking well into the night and again resuming in the morning, Pike translating at appropriate occasional intervals.

Ahmed had been first a beggar, then a thief. Prior to his becoming a government soldier, Ahmed and his buddies had hijacked government cars and, after taking joy rides in them, had wrecked, burned, and abandoned them out in the desert plains. That activity had eventually led them to more ceremonial adventures -- "necklacings." Ahmed and his friends would hang tires around the necks of policemen and soldiers, and then set them on fire. That had led to cutting off the ears and fingers of soldiers, the police, and local bureaucrats. When Ahmed appeared in one of the videos that he and his friends had made in the course of taping assorted abductions, necklacings, and slayings, the government used this to coerce him into joining its own secret service, the elite guard, to do its bidding, although Ahmed had long dreamed of enlisting in the army of his own accord. What he found most ironic, he admitted, was his being later tried and imprisoned for being a traitor to his country for protesting the fiery incineration of a single Arab youth so many years after his earlier wild season of incinerating policemen and soldiers. Had the government put it all together – the videotape, the slayings, the necklacings, the car thefts, the armed robberies -- Ahmed would not have been here this day to tell this story, he said.

Now Ahmed began asking Pike and Emery questions, seeing what they knew about Algeria and Morocco beyond what he himself had been telling them. They didn’t have much to say to that, so Ahmed started asking what the two knew about the Western Sahara. Again, Pike and Emery drew a blank. Ahmed was visibly upset. He barked something obviously harsh and threw his hands in the air. Pike translated: "How in the world could you ride a bicycle across Algeria into Morocco and not know anything about either country?"

Ahmed sighed and began -- it was now the fourth day -- to tell Pike and Emery about the landlocked western border of Algeria protruding into the neighboring territory where began the northeast corner of the Western Sahara -- he drew for them the outline of that territory in the air. The eastern border of the Western Sahara lay in an area that could easily be perceived as land rightly belonging to northern Mauritania. The southmost border cut straight west to the sea. The western frontier was the ocean. In the north, the border went from the ocean east to Algeria again.

Ahmed then illuminated the lives and hard times of the Sahawari, the people who actually lived in the Western Sahara -- nomadic Berbers, Arabs, carbon-black Africans from deep in the Sahara desert, and Yemeni Arabs who’d arrived there in the thirteenth century. By the eighteenth century, this collective had taken the name "Ahl Essahel." These diverse people shared the same language, Hassania, and the same religion, a form of Sunni Islam. The Sahawari people, when under Spanish domination, had organized the Movement for the Liberation of the Western Sahara. Then, when Spain signed over its holdings to Morocco, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el Hamra -- the Polisario -- had arisen.

Morocco, supplied with a hundred-and-fifty-million U.S. dollars and plenty of arms, stepped in and, claiming sovereignty over the Western Sahara, sent three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand volunteers in, enclosing half of the one-hundred-thousand square miles territory with a seven-hundred-fifty mile long wall of sand and rock. Sponsored by Algeria, bankrolled by Libya, provided with arms by Russia, the Polisario declared the creation of the Sahawari Arab Democratic Republic, the southern portion of which was immediately bombed by Moroccan war planes carrying napalm. Surviving refugees walked to the area inside the westernmost protruding nipple of Algeria, where the Polisario built refugee camps with hospitals.

When Mauritania turned over its portion of the Western Sahara to the Polisario, Morocco quickly annexed its holdings, the other two-thirds. When the Polisario launched Russian rockets against the Moroccan garrison at the Bir Zarran oasis, Moroccan forces dropped five-hundred pound bombs on them from U.S.-built F-5 planes.

It was all still going on, Ahmed said. He would in fact be leaving Algeria soon, he said, again to go to the Western Sahara to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with his Polisario brothers in liberating the territory from the bondage of Morocco. He was inviting Pike and Emery to join him. The two could go see first-hand, for themselves, the tremendous injustice. They would then willingly, without coercion, gladly report to their American countrymen the horrors transpiring both inside Algeria and against Algerian interests elsewhere in the world, Ahmed said.

The chant from the mosque came and went at all hours -- "As hadu illa illaha illa alla." Late in the afternoon of the fourth day, reminding Pike and Emery that he still had control of their money and passports, Ahmed warned them not to try any funny stuff and escorted them, disguised in hooded djellabas, to the public showers, the douche. There, restorative, steaming hot water rained on them, followed by rejuvenating rinses in cool bath waters. After, they went to a café for coffee and bread rolls, then returned to the hilltop fortress where Ahmed had assaulted them. Ahmed showed Pike and Emery an elegant peppermint colored Kouba monument built in honor of a long-dead wise Muslim fakir of exemplary austerity and goodness, Sidi Abdelkader. "Someday I be honored, too," Ahmed said in English, "like Sidi Abdelkader, or Albert Camus."

Now, on that fourth evening of their being Ahmed’s prisoners, while a gorgeous lapis lazuli sky turned iron gray and the stars came out, Ahmed told Pike and Emery all about Albert Camus, who’d "rightly and nobly" written on Algeria’s troubles and its potential for saving itself from itself. He also told them of Algerian devil spirits, the Djinns, and of magic charms, talismans, spells, and incantations. When he was done talking for the day, Ahmed did not stay in the room but gave Pike and Emery gravest warnings about their trying to escape in the night, apparently forgetting that he and his lieutenants still had possession of their passports and their money. It wasn't as if Pike and Emery could go to the authorities -- here where one couldn’t tell Islamic militants from government soldiers or Mujahideen guerrillas from the local police.

In the morning, the usual, familiar village clamor filled the air. The first chant at sunrise emerged from the mosque minaret. Pike and Emery heard the early whir of morning traffic, the opening of shop doors and awls, and the hushed voices of the schoolchildren -- the first stirrings of what everyone knew would be another brutal day.

Ahmed was a no-show. Pike was visibly disappointed. He’d come, perversely, to look forward to these sessions with Ahmed. It was Pike who found, around noon, their restored money and passports -- when he went to get some water from the sink. Ahmed had not only returned these intact, safe inside a plastic bag in six inches of water, he’d even added extra dinar, with a note explaining he felt it was his obligation to pay the hotel bill. Regrettably, he also noted that he expected their paths -- his and Pikes' and Emery's -- would cross again soon.

Pike and Emery checked out of the hotel and rolled through the town, eager to replenish their supplies. Suddenly, Pike put on his brakes. He jerked to a halt. His face was drained of blood. He searched his coat furiously. He ransacked his pants pockets. He reached down and almost ripped apart his socks. He and his bike fell over. Emery got off his bike and went over and knelt by him. “It’s gone,” Pike squeaked, wracked by pain. “Ahmed has… the map.”