Chapter 7
Some hours had passed since we took off from Firuzkoh. The engine’s constant drone became a lullaby we couldn’t resist. Our bodies, battered from days of chaos, finally gave in. I don’t even remember falling asleep—just the warmth of Asma’s hand resting in mine, the dry burn of my eyelids, and the weightlessness that only comes when your body shuts down before your mind gives permission.
Abbas had said little since we lifted off. He was focused, occasionally muttering coordinates to himself or marking points on a crumpled aviation chart taped to the dashboard. The plan was to cross the Iranian border over the southeastern mountain belt, skim across the desert plains west of Bam, and then head north to refuel at Jiroft. It was a thin strip of tarmac etched into the highlands—barely a dot on the map—but it was isolated and rarely manned. That made it perfect. Or desperate. Or both.
The Cessna bucked slightly in the air. Maybe turbulence. Maybe wind bouncing off jagged rock. I stirred but didn’t wake fully. Just a deeper shift into an uneasy sleep where dreams blurred into recent memory—bombs, Bilal, burning cities, Mariam’s shaking frame in the garden.
And then—screeeeeech.
Rubber on tarmac.
The Cessna jolted violently as it made contact with the airstrip. I shot upright, heart already pounding in my chest. Asma jolted too, grabbing my arm. We looked out the small side window, but dust and mountains blurred everything.
Abbas wrestled the yoke, voice strained but calm. “Welcome to Jiroft,” he said with dry humour. “Now keep your heads down. I don’t know who might be watching.”
He taxied the plane slowly to the edge of the airstrip, past a line of crumbling buildings and one rusting military jeep half-buried in sand. There was no tower, no lights, no fuel truck waiting. Just open space, red rock, and dry silence.
As the engine cut out, the quiet was almost eerie. Not peaceful—just empty.
I looked at Asma. Her face said it all. We weren’t safe. We weren’t free. But we weren’t dead.
I leaned forward between the seats, my voice low, trying to keep the panic buried beneath practicality.
“Abbas,” I said, “do we really need to refuel here? I mean, can’t we just push on a little further? Isn’t there somewhere safer?”
He burst out laughing—a deep, bellowing sound that seemed to rattle the interior of the plane more than the landing had. It was too loud for the cramped cabin, too loud for our nerves. But it wasn’t mocking. Just amused. A man comfortable with danger.
“You think this bird is a Gulfstream?” he grinned, turning his head just enough to catch my eye. “This is a Cessna 172, bhai. She’s a workhorse, yes, but she’s got limits. Eight hundred kilometres cruising with a tailwind and a prayer—maybe a thousand if I cut everything down to fumes and glide the last hundred. We were halfway out of gas before we left Afghan airspace.”
He patted the console like it was a trusty old camel and gave me a quick wink. “You don’t have to worry. This isn’t the first time I’ve done a quiet trip between warzones and the Gulf. Jiroft’s a regular watering hole for planes like mine. We fill up and move on. No questions asked.”
I sighed, letting the tension ease slightly from my shoulders. There was no use arguing with physics—or with Abbas.
He unbuckled himself and cracked open the door, letting in the thin, crisp air of the plateau. The scent of dust and diesel drifted in. He turned back to us.
“Just wait here,” he said. “Keep the doors locked. I’ll get the fuel. Won’t be long.”
And with that, he dropped down from the plane with the grace of a man who had done this a hundred times. He moved off across the cracked tarmac, his silhouette framed against the backdrop of the Jiroft highlands. Small. Alone. Capable.
Inside the cabin, Asma leaned her head against the window, lips pressed together, eyes scanning the emptiness beyond.
Abbas disappeared into a crumbling concrete building that looked like it had once been painted beige, perhaps forty years ago. A crooked sign above the entrance, its letters faded and peeling, hinted that this had once been the administrative heart of Jiroft Airport. Now, it barely looked functional.
A few minutes later, he emerged, trailed by a wiry local man in a mud-brown shawl and a cap pushed back high on his forehead. The man was animated, clearly agitated, gesturing wildly with his arms. Abbas, for his part, was calm and collected, letting the man have his say before responding in his typical warm, disarming tone. He’d only been in our lives a matter of hours, but in that short time, I had come to recognize that Abbas had a knack for easing tension the way a seasoned captain settles a mutinous crew—with charm and gravity in equal measure.
Eventually, the man nodded with reluctant acceptance, threw his hand up in that universal ‘fine, whatever’ gesture, and turned away, disappearing behind a large corrugated hangar on the far side of the lot. Moments later, we heard the rumble of an old engine sputtering to life, and a stubby fuel truck rolled into view, its sides mottled with rust and oil stains. It wheezed its way over to the plane and came to a halt beside the left wing.
Without any ceremony, the man climbed down from the truck and set to work, dragging the long hose up and plugging it into the fuel tank. A faint click and a low hum followed as the kerosene began to flow.
The man pulled a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and tapped two loose. He offered one to Abbas, who took it without hesitation. A lighter sparked in the shade of cupped hands, and then both men stood side by side, exhaling blue trails of smoke into the high, dry air of the Iranian plateau.
They talked. Quietly. Casually. As if fueling clandestine aircraft during regional wars was just another Tuesday.
I watched from inside the plane, unable to make out the words. Even Asma, whose remarkable gift for languages had smoothed our way through many corners of the world, was stumped.
“They’re speaking Farsi,” she said quietly, as if reading my thoughts. “I can pick out a few words, but their dialect is too local. Too fast.”
I nodded, resting my head back against the seat, watching Abbas as he chuckled at something the fuel man had said. Despite everything—despite war, betrayal, fear, and loss—there was something oddly comforting in the image: two men, two strangers, sharing a cigarette next to a decades-old aircraft in the shadow of mountains that had seen more history than the men who traversed them.
And for a moment, I let that be enough.
Then, out of the corner of his eye, the fuel man caught sight of something that made him pause—the silhouette of two passengers in Abbas’s Cessna, one unmistakably a white man, the other an Asian woman. It wasn’t the usual cargo he was used to seeing climb into these sorts of aircraft. He squinted through the dusty light, looked back at Abbas, then back at us, his brow knitting into suspicion.
His body language changed instantly. Alarm crept into his stance as he raised his voice sharply, stepping away from the fuel line and waving his hands in agitation. He pointed at us, then at Abbas, then back at the plane, all while speaking faster, more forcefully. The fuel pump fell silent with a mechanical click as he reached over and shut it off, the line going limp.
Abbas, to his credit, didn’t flinch. He stepped forward, palms open, his voice calm but firm as he launched into a fluent volley of Farsi. There was a tension between the two men, unmistakable, electric—but Abbas worked it. Like a man smoothing the feathers of a nervous bird, he reassured the fuel man with slow nods and half-shrugs. We would be out of his way shortly, he said. We were no danger to anyone. No one needed to get involved. No one needed trouble.
The fuel man hesitated for a moment, looking between Abbas and the plane, and finally relented. He turned back to the truck, muttering something under his breath, and resumed the flow. The pump clicked back to life and the kerosene flowed once again. Moments later, it clicked again—finished.
Abbas reached into his pocket, pulled out a wad of American dollars, and handed it to the man without counting. The gesture was generous, maybe even excessive. "I’ll see you soon, my friend," he said, with a warm smile and the charm of a man who could talk his way out of anything.
We climbed back into the plane. Abbas was already flicking switches, coaxing the motor back to life. The propeller spun into a steady blur. The fuel truck hadn’t even backed away yet when he leaned over and said under his breath, “We need to get out of here. Now.”
I looked at him. “What’s going on?”
He didn’t look back. His hands were focused on the controls. “I think he recognized you,” he said. “I don’t know how—maybe from the news, maybe from a photo. But something clicked for him. You’re not exactly invisible.”
I cursed under my breath and looked out the window. The man with the fuel truck was still standing there, staring after us.
“Incredible,” I muttered. “How could anyone out here in the middle of Iran care about some bombing in Kabul?”
Abbas glanced at me briefly, then turned his eyes skyward as the plane began to taxi. “It’s not about Kabul. It’s about who’s hunting you. And trust me, they’ve got long arms.”
And with that, we were back in the air.
Abbas was no fool. By now, he clearly understood who we were—and more importantly, why we were trying to get out of the country. And yet, despite everything, despite the danger, the man was still committed to helping us. It wasn’t just bravery. It was something more. A mix of honour, instinct, maybe even empathy. I could see it in the way he handled himself—there was a calmness, a seasoned steadiness, as if he’d long ago accepted that life in this region demanded choices between lesser evils, and that doing the right thing rarely came without a cost.
And I was growing fond of him. Not in the way you warm to a host or a guide, but in the way you come to respect someone you’d never otherwise meet, someone from a completely different walk of life, who rises to a moment that wasn’t meant to be theirs but became theirs nonetheless. He was risking his freedom—perhaps even his family’s safety—for us. And yes, I knew there would be compensation at the end of this. Favors from people with long arms, some envelopes thick with currency. But life isn’t a ledger of payments. You can’t measure the value of risking everything for someone else in dollars or promises. You just can’t.
We continued our journey, the Cessna humming steadily beneath us, Abbas quiet in the front, focused on the horizon. As we climbed to our cruising altitude again, the sea revealed itself—a glinting curve of sapphire stretching to the edge of sight. The Arabian Gulf. A sliver of hope shimmering beneath the early sun.
I felt something stir in my chest. On the other side of that sea was Qatar—its red-and-white flag, its warmth, its security. It was a land I had come to love. A land that, in its own way, had loved me back—with dignity, with purpose, with protection.
The warmth on my face wasn’t just from the sunlight streaming through the scratched plexiglass of the cockpit. It was something deeper. I could see the sea now—a vast shimmer of blue stretching to the horizon, and beyond that, the coast of Qatar. Safety. Sanity. The place this whole odyssey had begun. And perhaps, if God willed, the place it might end.
I turned to my left. Asma was asleep again, her head resting on my shoulder, her breath gentle and calm, like waves in a tide pool. Her hair, slightly tousled from the flight, framed her face in a way that reminded me just how strong and beautiful she was. Not because of how she looked—but because of who she was.
And I thought to myself—what kind of woman does this? What kind of woman hears the madness in my voice over a 6 a.m. phone call and still gets on a plane to meet me halfway across the world? What kind of woman walks through checkpoints and power cuts and bomb craters, watches cities crumble, prays in broken mosques, and still wakes up to kiss me on the cheek and smile like it’s all going to be okay?
She had left the soft edges of our life in the UK, the structure, the safety net, the school runs, the same supermarket aisles. She had come for what was supposed to be a detour, a brief trip to see a dying friend. But this had become a descent into chaos—war, conspiracy, death. And she never flinched.
I thought about all the things I’d taken for granted over the years—her patience, her sacrifice, the way she protected our children from the harshness of the world, the way she protected me from myself. And here she was again, asleep on my shoulder in a rickety Cessna, somewhere over the Gulf, holding together the last thread of humanity I had left.
She was more than a companion. She was my refuge. My miracle.
And in that moment, I didn’t care what waited for us when we landed. I just knew that I would fight for her—for us—with everything I had left.
—
As we reached about an hour into our flight over the shimmering waters of the Arabian Gulf, for the first time in days, I felt a surge of cautious optimism. The morning light was now fully risen, gilding the waves below in streaks of gold. From our altitude, the sea looked almost tranquil—like the storm we had fled might be far behind us now.
I leaned slightly forward and looked out of the small window on my side. There was no sign of land yet, but we were definitely over open water. Abbas gave a thumbs-up from the cockpit, and I couldn’t help but allow myself to imagine the next steps—safe steps. We would land somewhere discreet in Qatar, maybe the outskirts of the industrial port zone or an airstrip that didn’t ask too many questions. Then I'd meet Ahmad.
Ahmad had been a reliable contact—more than that, a friend. And he had said he’d introduce me to his colleague at Al Jazeera. A man named Khalid. I didn’t know much about him, only that he was a hardened field reporter, a man who had witnessed atrocities in Yemen, Syria, and beyond, and wasn’t scared of telling the truth when the cameras were off. If there was anyone who could help take Bilal’s documents and make the world listen, it would be someone like him.
I looked at Asma, still asleep beside me, and I whispered in my heart a prayer of thanks. We weren’t there yet, but we had a shot. And right now, a shot was more than I’d dared hope for 48 hours ago.
But just as the future began to unfold in my mind, Abbas reached for the radio and muttered something to himself. The engine tone shifted. And that tiny, irrational thread of anxiety that had never quite left me began to tug again at the base of my spine.
Abbas had grown unusually quiet.
For the last hour, he’d been humming some folk tune under his breath, tapping the edge of the yoke with one hand and gesturing idly to the endless shimmer of the Gulf below. But now, his eyes had narrowed, scanning the instrument panel with more focus than usual. He adjusted a dial, checked it again, then tapped a gauge with his knuckle like he didn’t trust what it was telling him.
“Everything okay?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light.
He didn’t answer at first. Then, almost to himself, he muttered in Farsi. I couldn’t catch the words, but the tone made my stomach tighten.
Asma stirred beside me, still half-asleep. “What did he say?” she asked.
“I think he said... she’s not flying quite right.”
Abbas must have sensed our nerves because he flashed us a forced grin. “It’s okay,” he said in English, patting the dashboard with a kind of rough affection. “She’s an old girl. Needs a little coaxing sometimes. But she’ll get us home.”
We exchanged looks. That wasn’t reassuring—but it was something.
Then, as if to reward our misplaced faith, the vibrations in the plane softened. The shudder that had rattled through the cabin began to ease. The engine tone settled back into its steady drone, and Abbas resumed his humming. He even leaned back slightly in his seat, rolled his neck, and patted the panel again. “Good girl,” he whispered in Farsi.
For a few long, suspended minutes, the sky was calm, and the sea below sparkled with early morning light. I even allowed myself the sin of hope.
And then the sky ripped open. A sudden burst of flame and smoke erupted off our left wing, sending the entire aircraft into a shuddering spin. The force of the blast knocked me sideways in my seat and flung Asma bolt upright, her eyes wild with panic and confusion. Pieces of metal—shrapnel—ricocheted off the fuselage like hailstones from hell. I couldn’t tell if we’d been directly hit or if it was a near-miss, but it didn’t matter. The aircraft was failing.
Abbas let out a sharp curse in Farsi, his hands gripping the controls with a desperation that betrayed the calm he had exuded since we’d met. He shouted over the noise, “Hold on! We’re going down! We’re going to end up in the drink!”
Everything inside the plane erupted into chaos. Lights blinked wildly. A warning alarm shrieked. The cabin groaned and popped with the sudden change in pressure. I instinctively reached across and grabbed Asma’s hand, pulling her close and shielding her as best I could with my shoulder as the nose of the Cessna dipped and the wind roared through a sudden gap in the fuselage.
Abbas fought to level the descent, but there was no pretending this was going to be anything but a crash landing. The sea was approaching rapidly now, churning up to meet us, its dark surface no longer a calming presence but a looming wall of uncertainty.
I turned to Asma—her knuckles white as she gripped the seat. “We’re going to be okay,” I lied. “He’s done this before.”
Abbas was yelling something again—something about the life raft—shouting over his shoulder while flipping switches on the panel like a man possessed. I couldn’t hear all the words, but one stuck out: dinghy.
And that was when I remembered what he’d said back in the hangar: “Don’t worry. I’ve got a dinghy.”
God help us. We were about to put that plan to the test.
By the grace of all that’s holy, Abbas managed to put us down on the water with the finesse of a seasoned pilot landing a seaplane. It defied belief. The plane, battered and smoking, descended with a trembling shudder — and then, almost like a feather drifting to rest, skimmed the surface of the Gulf and settled with a sigh onto the waves.
I held my breath the entire time. There was no time for prayer, no time for a goodbye — only disbelief. I had expected an impact that would tear the wings off and leave us clawing for the surface, but instead, the old Cessna whispered into the sea, cradled by water that was surprisingly calm. Not glass-like, but smooth enough to offer us a final mercy.
Abbas had his hands on the controls right up to the moment the plane slowed to a halt, one last squeal of protest from the engine before it died for good.
“Move!” he shouted.
We didn’t need telling twice.
The door groaned as we shoved it open against the weight of the wind and the faint slosh of rising water. The dinghy — a dull grey bundle stowed behind our seats — was dragged out and inflated in seconds. Abbas had packed it tight, but had clearly practiced this moment in his mind. Within moments, it was bouncing beside the plane, tied by a short rope to the wing strut.
Asma climbed out first, her legs shaky, eyes wide but alert. I followed, reaching back for the small waterproof satchel that held everything that mattered now — Bilal’s envelope, the USB, our passports, and a few bills of hard cash that were still somehow dry.
The plane was beginning to sink, the tail first, a slow gurgle bubbling from its seams.
But we were out.
We were afloat.
And somehow, by a miracle of God and grit and Abbas’s madman instincts, we were still alive.
Within a few minutes, the plane was gone — completely swallowed by the calm, indifferent waters of the Gulf. It slipped beneath the surface with barely a burp, like it had never existed at all. No more bubbles, no drifting seat cushions, no oil slick. Just water and sky and the soft creak of our inflatable dinghy bobbing like a cork.
The silence that followed was deafening — not oppressive, but profound. We sat there, all three of us, not speaking, each of us clutching some corner of the boat as if the memory of the last few minutes might yank us back into the sea. The sudden contrast between the screeching terror of falling from the sky and the gentle rhythm of the waves was almost surreal. My ears still rang. My heart still thundered.
Asma leaned her head on my shoulder without a word, her breath shallow but steady. Abbas sat opposite us, hunched forward, his wet sleeves clinging to his arms, his eyes locked on the horizon like it might offer us answers.
After a while — a minute, maybe two, maybe five — I turned to Abbas and asked quietly, “Do you know which way we need to start rowing?”
He looked up, the corners of his mouth twitching into the first smile I’d seen on him since before the explosion. Wordlessly, he reached into his jacket, pulled out a battered compass — the kind you'd find screwed to the dash of an old scout vehicle — and held it up.
I gently lifted Asma’s head from my shoulder and laid her down against the inflated edge of the dinghy. She murmured something incoherent in her sleep but didn’t wake. The exhaustion had finally caught up with her — and who could blame her? In the last few days, she had lived a thousand lives.
I shifted toward the middle of the boat and picked up the oars. Without waiting for instruction, I began to row, setting a slow and steady rhythm. Abbas gave me a nod of approval from the front of the dinghy, still clutching the compass, his silhouette lit by the faint predawn haze curling along the edge of the horizon. I figured if I went first and set the example, he’d be less likely to complain when it was his turn. Not that he seemed the complaining type, but it always helped to lead from the front.
Besides, I had questions.
As we glided forward — or what passed for gliding in an inflatable lifeboat — I leaned my weight into the oars and glanced at Abbas. “What do you think hit us?” I asked quietly, careful not to disturb the stillness that had finally settled over the sea.
Abbas let out a long, slow whistle, then shook his head. “Iranian missile, most likely,” he said, voice heavy with reluctant certainty. “Probably a SAM battery… surface-to-air missile. Not military-grade — if it was, we wouldn’t be talking right now. More likely a short-range launcher, portable. Old Soviet tech maybe. Plenty of that still floating around this region.”
I paused, letting the sea catch my breath.
Abbas sighed and rubbed his brow. “It was that fuel guy, back in Jiroft. He saw your face. He knew something was off. I think he decided it wasn’t worth the trouble pretending he hadn’t seen anything. Maybe he told himself we held him at gunpoint — easier to be the victim than an accomplice. So he made the call. Told someone what was coming. And they waited for us over the Gulf.”
“And we played right into it,” I muttered.
He nodded, eyes still scanning the horizon. “They wouldn’t have shot at just anyone. But you? You’re on every list in this hemisphere by now.”
A sliver of anger welled up inside me, but I said nothing. I kept rowing. Abbas leaned back, arms folded behind his head, letting the sea do the rest for now.
“Still,” he said, his voice lightening, “they missed the part where we don’t die so easily.” I almost laughed. Almost. But not quite.
I rowed for what felt like nearly an hour — muscles tightening, breath steady, the sea slipping past in long silver strokes — but when I glanced at my watch, only twenty minutes had passed. Twenty. I almost laughed. Time, it seemed, was stretching itself just to mock me. Still, I had to admit: the rowing wasn’t unbearable. I’d been doing a lot of it lately at the gym, part of that low-impact, joint-friendly fitness regime you get into once your knees start whispering their protests every time you climb stairs. Swimming and rowing — they’d become staples of my routine. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone; it was just part of a quiet work ethic, a discipline that had crept up on me as I got older. And here, out in the middle of nowhere, it was paying off — just not as much as I’d hoped. Not if time insisted on dragging its heels.
Eventually, my shoulders began to give in — the burn turning from virtuous to unbearable — and I had to concede defeat. I passed the oars to Abbas, who accepted them with a grin and an energy that made me wonder if he'd been waiting for this moment. To his credit, he was a natural. Strong, rhythmic, efficient. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought he’d done this more than a few times before. I nearly asked him, with a wry smile, whether this was a regular part of his smuggling package: ditching his plane into the Gulf and rowing the final stretch like some kind of budget James Bond. But I didn’t. He was doing us a kindness, and sometimes the best thank-you is silence — especially when someone’s bailing you out of death by drowning.
Abbas and I settled into a rhythm — each rowing for about an hour at a time, while Asma, ever the quiet hero, took over every so often to give us both longer spells of rest. Her turns were shorter, but no less determined. She didn’t complain once. Just leaned into the oars and pulled as if the future of our family depended on it — which, in truth, it did.
But even with the rotation, the fatigue built up like rust on the joints. The sun climbed higher and the sea turned from a mirror to a furnace. Our mouths dried. Our arms slowed. Eventually, none of us had the strength to keep rowing. First Abbas stopped mid-stroke, his muscles giving up without permission. Then I followed. Asma tried to carry us alone for a while longer, but the sun was relentless. Her breath became shallow. Her strokes lost their shape. And at last, she too gave in.
We each collapsed into our corners of the dinghy, our bodies curled into the shade cast by whatever scrap of cloth or limb we could find. The thirst was overwhelming, the tiredness even more so. And there, under the glare of a merciless sky in the middle of the Gulf, we drifted in silence — too weak to move, too alert to sleep, and too parched to speak.
The problem with ditching into the sea, even with a landing as smooth as Abbas had managed, was that it gave us no time to think, no time to gather anything. We’d escaped the plane with only what truly mattered — Bilal’s envelope, the USB drive, and oddly enough, our passports. Not that those slim documents held much value anymore. They were the remnants of a past life, one we’d long since abandoned in the clouds.
The meagre bottle of water we’d stashed, the snacks packed as an afterthought — all of it had sunk with the Cessna, vanishing beneath the waves like the normality we once knew. Now, hours under the scorching sun, with salt-dried lips and raw exhaustion gripping every muscle, we were completely and utterly parched. The Gulf was vast and blinding. The sky didn’t waver. The sun, unrelenting.
I worried that we were nearing our edge — not just physically, but mentally. The kind of thirst that doesn’t simply tighten the throat, but makes the mind loosen. Drift. Blur.
Asma was the first to succumb.
During her last spell at the oars, her strokes had begun to falter. At first, I thought she was just tired, but then her hands slackened on the wood and her body tipped sideways like a flower folding into sleep. I dropped my own oar, lurched forward, and caught her before she hit the edge of the boat. Her skin was hot, her breath shallow.
I laid her gently at the stern, wrapping her in the only dry cloth we had. And then she started speaking — softly at first, like she was recounting a dream to someone I couldn’t see. Her eyes flickered open, unfocused, and she spoke again. Not to me, not to herself exactly, but to someone who wasn’t there. The cadence of her voice was light, oddly serene, as if she was seated on a garden bench somewhere in Yorkshire, sipping tea, not adrift in the middle of a saltwater grave.
I crouched beside her, helpless. I couldn’t understand the words, but I understood the meaning well enough.
The heat, the thirst, the sheer weight of everything — it was breaking her.
And I feared I wasn’t far behind.
By the time the sun began its descent, dragging a blanket of orange and crimson across the endless sky, Abbas had gone quiet. He hadn’t spoken in hours, except for one moment that made my stomach knot: he suggested we drink the seawater.
His voice was hoarse, barely more than a dry whisper, but the seriousness in it chilled me.
“I know we’re not supposed to,” he croaked, eyes fixed on the waves. “But maybe... just a sip. Just to feel something wet in my mouth. Even if it’s poison.”
I shook my head with more force than I felt. “No. You know what happens. You drink that and you’ll be worse off in minutes. Your kidneys will shut down, your mind’ll melt.”
He nodded slowly. “I know... I know. But it’s like my brain keeps telling me it must help. That surely something is better than nothing.”
“It’s not,” I said. “Not this time.”
He nodded again, more distantly, and that was the last thing he said before he closed his eyes and drifted into unconsciousness. Whether it was sleep or collapse, I wasn’t sure. I hoped the former, feared the latter.
Now, it was just me.
I sat there, between the faint sound of my wife’s shallow breathing and the quiet stillness of Abbas’ sleep. And I watched the sun disappear.
It was beautiful. Too beautiful. The kind of beautiful that shouldn’t exist in moments like this.
The sea reflected the sky like a shimmering sheet of gold foil — rippling, dancing. The sparkles on the water looked like they were coming toward us, bouncing up from the surface and skipping across the boat, like tiny stars leaping from heaven to remind us we were still alive.
But were we?
The silence was thick now, and something in me — a part I usually kept hidden — began to slip.
My breath slowed. My limbs ached in that bone-deep way that only comes after total exhaustion. The colours around me were too sharp, the patterns in the waves too intentional.
And I remember thinking: if this was the end, at least it was beautiful.
At least it looked like a painting of heaven.
Then the stars above me began to spin.
And the first shadowy shapes started to emerge on the horizon — but I didn’t know yet if they were real, or just the beginning of the visions that were waiting for me beyond the wall of sleep.
—
I didn’t fall asleep so much as I was pulled under — into a place where light didn’t behave properly, and where the sea disappeared and was replaced by scorched soil and booted footsteps on gravel.
Lahore.
Or something like it.
The air was heavy with heat and humiliation, and I could smell the diesel of tanks long gone and the metallic tang of blood that clung to everything. There was dust in the air, red and brown, as though the earth had been burned into fine powder.
They were all standing in a line.
Bilal.
Mariam.
Mohammed.
Kashif.
Samson.
The doctor from the hospital whose name I never remembered, though his hands were red with Bilal’s blood.
They were all standing in front of me. Eyes forward, silent. No emotion, not even fear. As though they already knew what was about to happen.
And standing beside me, shouting in Hindi-accented Urdu, was the Indian general. His uniform immaculate. His moustache curled. His medals catching the sun like they were laughing at me.
“Shoot them!” he barked.
He held out a pistol — sleek, black, absurdly polished — and forced it into my hand. “One by one. Every last one. This is the price of betrayal.”
I dropped the gun.
He smiled, almost kindly, before raising the butt of his rifle and slamming it into the side of my head.
White light. Buzzing ears. My knees buckled.
“Shoot them, or I’ll shoot one for you.”
I looked up — dazed, blood trickling down my temple — and tried to speak, but my tongue was dry, fused to the roof of my mouth.
“I refuse,” I managed. “These are my people.”
He nodded slowly, raised the pistol, and pulled the trigger.
Kashif went down first — a small grunt, and then silence. No one moved. No one flinched.
“Next,” the general said. “Pick it up.”
I didn’t.
Again the butt of the rifle. Again the world exploded in white.
“Shoot them!”
“I won’t.”
Samson. One shot. Fell like a tree cut at the base.
“Next.”
I looked into Bilal’s eyes. They weren’t angry. They weren’t scared. They were disappointed.
Still, I couldn’t do it.
He moved to the end of the line. Mariam sobbed quietly now, her body trembling, her white scarf turning red at the edges.
“Last chance.”
I whispered, “They died for truth.”
Another blow.
Darkness again.
And this time, I fell through the earth.
—
A sharp coolness touched my face — not water, but air. Conditioned air. Artificial and clean. My head throbbed, but it was a dull ache now, not the blinding agony of the hallucination. There was no sun above me, only a white fluorescent light with a slight flicker in the corner. A hum filled the space — mechanical, precise. A whirring fan perhaps, or the low rumble of an engine.
I blinked.
Twice.
The ceiling above me was smooth and off-white, not the endless sky I remembered. I moved my eyes sideways and felt the tug of something in my arm — a cannula, a drip line taped down against my skin. Cool liquid was flowing into me. I was being rehydrated. Saved. Brought back from wherever I had drifted to.
I turned my head slowly to the left. Abbas was lying on a padded medical bench, his hands folded across his chest, snoring softly. A thin stream of drool escaped from the side of his mouth. The man could sleep through the Day of Judgement.
To my right was Asma. Her hair was damp and tied loosely back. She looked better — still pale, still tired — but her breathing was steady. An IV bag hung above her as well, gently rocking with the rhythm of the vessel.
And that’s when it hit me — we were on a boat. A real boat. Not the dinghy. Not the sea. The smooth pitch and sway of the hull told me this was something large, something powerful. This wasn’t survival anymore. This was a rescue.
I tried to sit up, but a firm hand on my shoulder pushed me gently back.
“Easy,” came a voice in Arabic-accented English. “You’re safe now. Just rest. You’ve been through something big.”
Safe.
The word echoed strangely in my mind.
Safe. But how? Who? Had someone found us? Had Fahd received the message? Had a miracle actually happened?
I tried to speak, but my throat was sandpaper. The man beside me brought over a cup of water with a straw. “Small sips only,” he warned, and I obeyed.
It tasted like mercy.
I cleared my throat, still raw. “Where... where am I?” My voice cracked with the dryness. “Who are you?”
The man, still holding the cup of water, gave me a tight-lipped smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes.
“You’re aboard the Qatari Coast Guard cutter Hamad,” he said, his accent crisp, likely educated abroad. “You were picked up approximately twelve nautical miles inside Qatari waters. My name’s not important. I’m a medic.”
I blinked. “Wait. What do you mean—picked up? We… we were adrift. For how long? Where’s my wife?”
“She’s here. She’s fine,” he said quickly. “Resting. Rehydrating.”
I tried to sit up again. “No, you said picked up. Are we being detained?”
The medic hesitated, just for a second. “You’re provisionally under arrest,” he said, more carefully this time. “For illegal entry into the State of Qatar. The cutter captain logged your position as inside national waters without clearance or maritime notice.”
My mouth hung open. “But… I’m a Qatari resident. My wife too. Look—check my ID. I live in Doha. I work in—well, I worked in West Bay. This is insane!”
He gave a soft sigh, the kind you give when you’ve heard too many people protesting too many times. “Sir, I’m not in a position to comment. My job is just to keep you alive until the rest of the authorities can process you. That’s all. So please, stay calm. Keep sipping. You’ve been through… quite a bit.”
I slumped back into the cot, dizzy again from the effort. I closed my eyes. The low hum of the engine seemed louder now, echoing through my ribs. The air was cold and clean, but nothing inside me felt settled. I didn’t know whether we were safe, or whether we were about to step into a whole new kind of danger.
My head fell to one side, and I stared at the IV drip. Drop. Drop. Drop.
The only thing I knew for certain… was that we were still alive.
I heard the sound of boots approaching—measured, firm, confident. A moment later, the door opened, and a Qatari officer stepped into the room, the cool air of authority preceding him. He wore the standard navy-blue of the Coast Guard, epaulettes neatly squared, a pistol holstered at his hip. I didn’t recognize him at first—until he stepped forward and tilted his head just slightly.
“Fahd,” I said, blinking in disbelief. I stood up instinctively.
He gave a quick smile, and we embraced. I greeted him with the three kisses on the cheek, the way I’d seen Qatari men do countless times before. “You’re learning,” he said, grinning. “We might have to get you a passport soon.”
Relief made me giddy for a moment, until the weight of everything came crashing back.
“I sent you the message,” I said quickly. “Did you see what happened to us? Do you know who… who shot us down?”
Fahd’s smile dropped. He looked over at Asma, still lying under a thin blanket with IV lines in her arm. Then he turned back to me and nodded once.
“It was the Iranians,” he said, voice low. “Or at least, a paramilitary group acting under Iranian command. Possibly subcontracted by the Americans. We don’t know which division, but what we do know is that someone wanted that plane gone.”
I swallowed hard. “So they thought they got us?”
“They were counting on it. They didn’t bother tracking you afterwards, which tells us they assumed it was a clean hit. They thought the plane would break apart and scatter in the sea. No survivors. No questions.”
Fahd stepped closer. “But it wasn’t a clean hit. And because your pilot is a damn fine pilot—and you had angels watching over you—you glided her in. That’s the only reason you’re alive.”
I let the words settle.
“We’re not out of the woods, are we?”
“No,” he said simply. “But you’re in Qatar now. And we have a chance to finish what you’ve started. You brought the storm with you, Yaqoob, that's for sure, but let’s make sure it doesn’t drown us - Just Keep Calm - Keep it together, no matter *what* happens”
With that cryptic message I noticed that Fahd was injecting something into my drip that was beginning to make me feel drowsy. Despite my protestations that I had never been one to cause a stir, I lost consciousness and fell back onto the trolley I had been restrained onto.
—
The Hamad cut through the sea like a scalpel—sleek, swift, and sure. Its bow rose and fell with surgical precision, parting the dark blue waters of the Gulf in clean, sharp lines. Beneath us, the hull hummed with restrained power, its twin engines churning confidently through the waves as the cutter skipped across the surface, hopping gently from crest to crest like a predator in no hurry, but completely in control.
Each wave slapped against the underside with a low, padded boom, echoing up through the metal deck beneath my feet and into my spine. The boat didn’t lurch. It didn’t roll. It danced. Not the clumsy slap of a dinghy or the drag of a fishing vessel—this was something closer to choreography. Streamlined, balanced, fast.
Spray feathered out from either side of the vessel in long, silver plumes, catching the early morning sun as it lifted higher behind us. The water glittered gold and white, like the sea itself was waking up. I sat near the back of the main cabin, strapped in loosely, with a blanket across my lap and a drip still taped to my wrist. Across from me, Asma rested quietly. Her breathing was light now, steady. I noticed Abbas was slumped against the bulkhead, his face turned toward the glass, seemingly watching the waves in silence - he didn’t move.
I’d asked where we were headed. Doha? Al Wakrah? Al Udeid? No one answered. Not even Fahd. He stood toward the helm, one hand resting on the shoulder of the officer steering us, the other tucked behind his back in that typical officer’s stance. He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to. His presence was enough.
Whilst the fact that we were effectively under arrest—detained for having, in part quite literally, illegally entered Qatari territory—was concerning enough, what disturbed me more was the absence of the one thing we had risked everything for: the documents.
The envelope, the USB, the physical and digital burden we'd carried across borders, through warzones, into mosques and over oceans—they were missing. I didn’t know when exactly they had left our possession. Somewhere between the crash into the sea and the moment I woke up under soft LED lighting with a drip in my arm, they had vanished. And no one—none of the Coast Guard officers, not the medic, not even Fahd—would give me a straight answer about where they were or if they were even still in our hands.
We didn’t know what port we were heading to. We didn’t know if we were going to be released with apologies and handshakes, or interrogated in a quiet room far from any consulate’s reach. It was deeply unnerving—this creeping sense that everything rested in the hands of people who might not fully understand what they had… or worse, people who did.
And this was Qatar. A land I had learned to love. A land of gleaming skylines and ancient desert wisdom. A land with both soft hearts and sharp edges.
But Qatar also hosts the largest American military base outside of the continental United States. You don’t get into bed with the Americans unless you’re prepared to go all the way. And that’s what troubled me now. These weren’t idealists or rebels we were dealing with. These were sovereigns, stakeholders, realists.
So even though Fahd was my friend—and I trusted him as a man—I couldn't be sure if the institution he represented would protect the truth. Even in a Muslim country. Even for its neighbors. Because in the end, politics is not Islam. And faith is not policy.
And so the question I couldn’t shake, the one that rattled in my skull with every slap of sea against the hull, was this: Will they do the right thing?