The final part of this tripartite story of the 1991 Middle Eastern Gulf war. It helps here to recall Danish Composer Carl Nielsen's memorable quote: “Patriotism has become a spiritual syphilis that devours the brains and grins out through empty eye sockets with moronic hate!”

SADDAM’S TOILET (PART III)


The Middle East, or Southwest Asia, as the milspec savants are fond of referring to it, is a land of extremes. Extremes in temperament, attitude, opinion, religion...especially religion. I recall extracting this particular shred of thought out of my head one afternoon, while pulling some high G at altitude with a student Eagle driver aboard. The son of some prince or another (Saudi Air Force officers are usually all from royal families), my student was practicing some intercept vectoring, operating off the sector’s air defense ground radar complex at Taif. Keeping us company were two F-16s from a TDY American ANG squadron, and as usual, the Falcon jockeys were trying to impress us Eagle driver types with their sharp maneuvering, tight-turning aerial combat capabilities. My student, eagerly trying to keep up with the lighter one-seaters, was clearly enthused over having such fancy company along for the ride.

As we slashed out and up, over the edge of the Western escarpment of the Hijaz, everyone else was caught up in the momentary visual theatrics of seeing the 'ground' appear to fall away beneath the fighters as the Hijazi escarpment below us suddenly dropped some two thousand meters in the span of a heartbeat--even the staid American jocks were stimulated to make laconic fighter-jock type comments as the brown plateau instantly became 7000 feet of blue void...."Oh, Mama....are those ants below us, or camels?" "If they're ants, we're in deep shit, bub...vectoring off on heading one-two-zero." "Rog." Two additional clicks on the headphones indicated that the second Falcon had acknowledged and was taking up echelon formation off the starboard wing. Then one final “Close up, meathead!” and the two Falcons were keeping perfect station off our starboard wing.

"You've got it, Hamed. I'm just along for the ride," I advised my student, and released the stick when I felt him take control.

Extremes. We had been at the villa several weeks ago, returned after a long training flight and happy to pop the few beers we had managed to shag from the Lockheed boys. After a bit of hanger flying, and some reminiscences about the delivery of the first Saudi F-15Cs to Taif's RSAF Fifth Fighter Squadron (the commander had flown the first bird in, nosed up too high on the flare and ground a good 6 feet of the proud bird's expensive titanium engine nozzles into metal hamburger), the other IPs had finally adjusted their shades, prosaically reckoning that it was probably time to 'turn and burn' back to families. Squinting against the intrusion of the mid-day glare into the darkness of the living room, all had trundled off into the Mitsubishi 4-wheeler, and driven back to their own quarters. Overhead, the solar furnace of a sun was at zenith. It was hot, extremely hot.

Having the usual pasty white hide that most Riyadh based Americans usually sported, I was determined to catch a few rays up on the roof of the villa despite the insane heat of the mid-day sun. Throwing the last of the beer down, I had shucked the tan sweat-soaked flight suit and hiked up the stairs to the flat, walled-in roof which each villa featured. On cool winter evenings such private roof areas were a favorite refuge for Saudi families, who enjoyed the opportunity to savor the open sky and mild temperatures. In the middle of summer, however, no one--not even the Arabs--came out onto these flattened residential frying-pans. Opening the roof door, a blast of super-heated air swept into the entrance and I entered into a white cauldron of shimmering sunlight. It was like leaving a refrigerator to enter a volcano cavern that was hotter than the surface of the sun.

I had brought a book with me, and my sunglasses, along with an old tan camo-fatique cap I had become used to wearing for an eye-shade. The taste of the beer lingered pleasantly as I settled down on some old sun-bleached cushions we kept for lounging on. My God, but it was hot up there. A weird thought suddenly flashed through my head. Room temperature is 300 degrees Kelvin; on the sun's surface it's 5000 degrees Kelvin!

I had been baking for less than 15 minutes, determined to do a flip-side thing--exposing each half of me for about that long--and was lying on my back, book grasped in hand, head propped up against a foam pillow. I was finding it hard to read, so intense was the heat, and every so many minutes little fragments of our crew lounge conversations about the early Eagle deliveries to Taif kept filtering back into my thoughts like sneaky little phantoms of recollection.

Suddenly, the roof-top door opened. "Hank?" came the soft, feline voice I am so fond of. "Out here, Sooks." I moved the book aside, turned my head and squinted towards the dark slit of the door, being held open and ajar by several inches.

"How was the flight, Tiger?" The door was still only slightly cracked, and I couldn't see anything through the narrow dark opening. "Nothing special, sweat thang, just a routine flight out west to Taif."

"Tired?"

"Nah, just trying to catch a dose of Vitamin D. What's up?" The narrow darkness of the doorway suddenly expanded widely and I could see Suki outlined in its ebony blackness...a golden figure with a solar aura. She was standing there, lounging in the dark of the entrance structure with nothing on but an exceptionally wicked and high-cut black nylon tank suit. "Mind if I join you?" she purred, as if I had any choice in the matter.

"Come on, but I'm just spending a few minutes up here--you could roast yourself like a mutton kebab with anything more than a quickie in this heat."

She lowered her sunglasses just a fraction and gazed at me under those wispy eyebrows for a second, before stepping across the two meters of space to join me on the cushions. I could smell the scent of clean skin waft over me as she settled demurely down next to me. My skin was already so overheated in just the few minutes I had been out under the sun that her smooth, cool flanks felt like fiery ice on my own, as she slid her hand over my chest. "You're sweating already," she observed, bending her head to dart her small, moist tongue over my dripping pecs. "Mmmmmmm, salty!"

Clearly, Suki was hungry. Sometimes I felt she resented my being able to fly off into the depths of the cool skies while she had to endure the insufferable heat of this parched land; and there were times when the strength of her resentment came through in the roughness of her playfulness at such moments as this. She had taken my left nipple into her mouth and using her small, even teeth, nipped the tip of it with something less than a gentle touch. I started, dropped the book and looked full at her.

The mischievous irony was there in her eyes. Even hidden behind the dark Foster-Grants with their thick, black frames, I fancied I could see it playing in the pools of her eyes. I glanced down at her slim, elegant body, taking it fully in as I guessed at her thoughts.

The black tank suit was one of those high-cut things that cleaved the thighs on both sides of her mons, leaving a silky mound prominent between her legs as it rose up and then fell back to rise again at the apex of her perfect belly. The suit clung to her curves with a grip that always produced an erotic thrill in every single molecule of my maleness, and it further rose from the swell of her belly to caress the two, firm mounds of her separate, lovely breasts before clustering in a few ripples of the stretchy fabric at her neck. Already perspiration was starting to dampen the Lycra, and the darker, moist patches under her breasts shown out against the dryer fabric which adhered to her.

It was always like this whenever she deliberately opened the floodgates of her powerful sensuality and let it flow over me. The effect was like some overwhelming tidal wave of sexual lava, smothering me inexorably in its irresistible wake. I reached out to cup one of those soft yet firm breasts in my hand and tried to peer through the glasses at her hidden eyes. "Are you trying to turn me on, Sooks? If you are, it won't work, because I've been on for hours."

I leaned towards her, folding over the right side of her body and fitting one knee between her sinewy, slender legs. Automatically, she applied gentle squeezing to my leg, bringing her thighs together, tantalizing, forcing me to work for the foothold. Lowering myself upon her I felt the firm swells of her breast pushing up on my chest, the tight nylon fabric straining to contain them within. And then, pushing her head back, I mouthed her neck, the damp and silken black hair of her lovely head falling back down her shoulders as I entered her mouth with my thirsty tongue.

The cavern of her mouth felt like a wet maelstrom, as she sucked with hot passion upon my probing tongue. Her eyes were flickering with animated delight behind the sunglasses as I pulled them away...resistance was futile, and I knew it! Above my back I could feel the fires of hell burning down upon us both, but I lost interest in everything except this surging, female liquid life-force that was struggling to capture me within it. I was probably already burned, but what the hell!....the burning sensations beneath me were far hotter than those above, at the moment. Soft fire below or solar crucible above…it was all the same in this strange land of extremes.

Inchoate gurgles were coming from her throat as I gripped her tight little butt in my hands and squeezed the taunt cheeks under the flimsy nylon which restrained them. One hand slipped between her legs, and as I forced her own legs apart she languidly drew a finger between the nylon edge of the suit and the right cleft of her thigh, exposing a few wispy curls of jet-black down. Drawing the fabric back, her whole mons was now exposed and she thrust it up towards my face like an ocean wave eager to break upon my mouth. I lowered my mouth to the inviting mound and slipped my tongue deep into her heated cleft. A surge of vibration shook her as my tongue massaged the small protruding swell of her mons. "UnnnnghGH!" Her back was arched now, and her hands were up above her head, as if seeking some sort of surrender.

Truly excited myself, now, I pushed her knees up and apart, and grasped her butt in both hands, twisting her litheness and turning her over so that she came around and into a dog-style stance. She could feel from the strength in my grip of her female body that I was powerfully up now, and very much ready for her. She shook her black mane to the side and, nearly grunting the words from her lowered head, snarled "Now, Tiger, now!"

Mounting her from behind was always a supreme turn-on for her. It was one of her favorite positions, to take it from behind. I would straddle her beautiful firm ass, spreading her knees with my own, and with one hand reach out and grip her neck to shove it down so that her back bowed and her proud, heart-shaped butt reared skyward. Thus splayed, her beautiful breasts, despite the restraint of the tight nylon, would sag down and move liquidly with every small movement of her small chest. They were lovely love objects, thus displayed, and I felt the surge of raw lust build within me.

Then, I would grasp the nylon edge of the suit, pulling it over her ass and to the side with one hand, exposing her entire rump with its small brown sphincter and moist cleft, with the other hand grasping the fabric of the suit in the small of her back, using it like a harness to keep her in position as I prepared to sheath my throbbing self deep inside her waiting recess.

Her head shook from side to side, freeing the mass of coal-black hair, as I placed myself against her cleft. Feeling the dribbling moist heat of her passion at its tip, I suddenly reared up into her, filling all of her smallness in the searing flash of an instant. The fullness of my attack was electric and she shook as if impaled on me from end to end. At the same instant, letting out a growl from deep, buried parts of her femaleness, she ground her muscles tightly in to grip me and started a rhythmic squeezing that  milked rhythmically with surprising power. It was as if she were trying to suck all of me up into her compact body, gyrating and rocking as I began to thrust in and out of her slippery recess.

I found myself pounding into her faster and faster, harder and harder, the sun stunning me as I felt the blood rise within my veins to the bursting point. I was engorged with power, enraged with a lustful savagery which only she could create and bring into full being with the magic of her magnificent womanly chemistry.

We were both nearing a climax, nearly spent on each other, and as I slammed into her harder with each thrust, she bucked and reared back to receive each intrusion as if she were dying to take more even than I had to give.

Her whole body was wet with perspiration, and we were both instinctual animals rutting under the ferocious Saudi sun, as we soared higher and higher towards total fusion. I gripped her small waist and pulled her back upon me with renewed force. She quivered then, and I exploded fully into her with the hot magma of my passion. She gasped as she felt the flood come into her and fill her with stickiness as I spewed the ancient seed of life’s renewal. As the final spasm shook us, I grasped her butt in both hands and gripped her in an embrace of steely possession, and we were both at once entirely spent, consumed, and exhausted.

After a few seconds I once again became aware of the sun overhead, the extreme heat of something which could no more be denied in the desert wastes than the need for food and water. We were both exhausted, and Suki pulled away from me, drawing the tight black nylon back over her rear once more. "Ahhhhh, Tiger. You were an animal just now." I looked over at her eyes, now hidden again by the sunglasses. "I think I married not a pilot, but a savage beast!"  The word ‘beast’ had a delightful, ego satisfying sound to it the way she said it. She knew how to feed my ego so perfectly.

Indeed, I felt very much like some sort of sated primitive savage. As I sat admiring her damp, passionate beauty, stretched out and spent under the savage glare of the merciless sun, the intrusively loud, bellowed strains of an amplified prayer call came blaring out over us. It was the Islamic Holy day, and in the background we could both hear the muttered imprecations of some Wahabbiyah Imam reciting the Holy Koran into the electromagnetic reaches of inner space from his minaret.

The absurdity of the moment seized us both, and simultaneously we had found each other grinning from ear to ear over the splendidly wicked irony of having been caught mating like raw, rutting beasts in the burning desert at the precise moment of high prayers on the Kingdom's Holy Day. The laughter brought both of us back to earth, and mindful now of the exposure each of us had had to the unforgiving sun, we hastened to gather up the few small articles strewn about us there and darted back into the roof entrance's doorway. It would undoubtedly be a fine sunburn, and I was badly in need of some water right away!

The thoughts of that moment on the roof of the previous week, suffering extreme pleasure in the midst of a moment of extremely religious piety, under an eternally merciless Arabian summer sun, filled my thoughts as the student climbed up to our pre-planned cruise altitude. My attention snapped back to the instruments before me. Taif airspace warning radar had guided us over on a tight, high and fast vector towards Jeddah--one which, as I recalled it, would take us very close to Makkah. Not quite over it, for such things were forbidden, but pretty damn near. Near enough to gaze down and spot the small disruption of habitation in the sere, hilly desolation of summer heat that marked Makkah out upon the otherwise drab uniformity of a Hejhazi landscape, and muse pleasantly on the delights of being able to do 'other' things while the brothers were all clustered in the mosques thanking God for imagined blessings. The thought that Suki had been in the same basic posture of 'supplication' as the brothers, while they were prostrating themselves, was momentarily a delightful flash of mildly sardonic awareness, as the Eagle continued to slash silently through the upper reaches of the deep blue frozen stratosphere.

The flight continued. Our twin Falcon escorts maintained station until we were released to vector back to Dahran. At the juncture, they veered off to dash back on reheat to the new coordinates, while we set our own course homeward. My student, Hamed, was eager to get back to base to attend some sort of gathering one of his sidiyks had going that night, and I?...well, I was still taking my time mentally going over the lovely curves and the spirited passion of my beautiful Japanese she-wolf, who waited for me back home. That moment on the roof had been unique, dazed by the sun as we were. It had been the mating of the sun-crazed and completely uncaring, a primitive merging with the ultimate powers of the eternal universal currents, and it had been a frightfully powerful fusion of our two physical bodies and souls that would linger in my thoughts long afterwards.

Late in the day, with the sun tentatively hovering like a red ball on the horizon, we set up our final approach to King Khalid Military Air Base, landing checklist run through, all systems in the green and on the beam for a set-down after chasing streams of electronic energy across the skies of the Kingdom  for hours on end. I let Hamed do the approach and was amazed and pleased when he set the bird down as light as a feather on the two main gear, gradually keeping the nose up as the craft shed airspeed through aerodynamic braking until the nose wheel finally touched. It was no ‘Chinese landing’, as they used to say in the bad old glory days, but a perfectly mild, moderate, balanced ending to an otherwise balls-to-the-wall flight in this land of extreme contrasts.

When the bird had rolled to a stop on the ramp, I popped the canopy and Hamed and I grabbed our gear and ambled stiffly down the ladder as the ground crew met us. Both of us streamed with perspiration once the aircraft AC was cut off, and the dry heat of the desert flooded into the cockpit. Hamed was a good student, and now he was off to join his friends for a bachelor's party in town...not much excitement for a married western infidel, as I well knew. As for myself, I stopped by the life support room, dropped off all my personal equipment, filled out the flight debrief forms in ops, and then grabbed a cup of coffee--extremely bad over-boiled Air Force coffee, but with caffeine nonetheless--to guzzle on the way to my car.

As I opened the car door, still damp with sweat, the bellow of evening prayer call sounded out across the dusky flightline, and my thoughts were once again straying back to quarters, to the beautiful she-tiger whose powerful passions so amazed and stimulated me. Extremes....the thought lingered....I was extremely glad to be on my way back to quarters, where Suki would be waiting to spring upon me once more....

Maybe there was even an overlooked stray beer left... and then, a healthy bowl movement in E flat. It wasn't a perfect life, perhaps, but then, what was perfect in an imperfect universe? Except the moments of lust, passion, amusement and raw life, and the occasional blasting of your own ass across the skies at twice the speed of sound for thrills?

It recalled to mind an old fighter pilot saying that some young jock had repeated in the briefing room one time, about how piloting a hot plane was better than sex (was it “…the most fun you can have with your clothes on?” Something like that).

The poor speed-crazed kid was still in love with fast airplanes; he had obviously never met a Suki of his own who could shoot him out of the skies with a single glance!