What Lies Ahead for all of us after 9/11?

One patriot writer, Bill McIntyre, looks back to the day he met Mohammed Atta.

By Greg Szymanski, JD
June 2, 2007

While attending law school, I worked as an RV and Yacht salesman, earning enough money to pay a high tuition and support a meager lifestyle. I used to enjoy spending days out on the open road or on the Pacific as I became hooked with this type of gypsy-feeling of always traveling but never going anywhere.

Looking back on those years, I cared little for the patriot movement and
maybe I was better off because as they say ignorance is bliss. In fact, I
purposely put the patriot concept out my mind as I essentially spent four
years learning the law and learning how to think in a a so-called logical
and organized lawyerly manner.

In other words, I set a goal, graduated and accomplished it. But what
then?

In law school I never really thought about it, but it hit me hard the day
after I received my JD. So, I sold my live-a-board boat in Ventura Harbor, bought an RV and started traveling. Maybe I really started running away from myself and the California bar exam, which to this day I haven't taken.

Or maybe I just wanted to become another of America's lost souls, looking for but knowing he could never find the American Dream.

Of course, 9/11 came, which happens to be my birthday, and everybody said their world changed forever.

However, mine didn't as I ended up going back to my old world of being a patriot-journalist and radio broadcaster, looking for the truth but
knowing the truth wouldn't even set me free now.

I ended up as we speak in the Colorado high country and my motor home in New Orleans, used as a place to house the homeless, a story however too long and involved to get into now.

My Arctic Beacon web site and radio show, called the Investigative
Journal, has gained mediocre popularity as well as a mediocre way to make a living, But the sad part I've learned over the years is that most
people, even your best friends and loved ones, don't really want to know
the truth, don't really want to support the truth and would rather go on
living and funding lies.

After awhile this wears on one's soul, especially making my profession
seem meaningless at times. It makes you question your very existence,
leaving you in some sort of suspended state of loneliness or insanity. The truth in a sense has a strange and crazy way of isolating you, making you feel your living in a world of your own.

And I have to laugh out loud sometimes when I read some of my past
articles, articles bent on exposing evil and telling the untold story. I
have to laugh or maybe cry sometimes because I wonder if they really did any good or just served to make good people more miserable.

I know learning some of the truth through my many interviews and articles has made me miserable. It has made me come to another juncture in my life where I either continue writing and embarking on a new truth radio station or I go back to living on a boat, study for the bar exam and wait for the world and myself to come to an end.

I know if I choose the latter, it would make the many Illuminati-Vatican
members and disinformation artists I've met over the years very happy.
But one thing I do know, whatever choice is made, I will not die living a
lie like the people mentioned in the above categories for if you look
closely at outlets like The American Free Press, RBN and GCN radio, many of their writers and broadcasters are filled with misguided hatred and lies, not filled with the spirit of God and truth.

And I guess knowing I will not die living a lie is in itself is a
victory, the only question remains is it worth it to try and wake people
up from a deep sleep or is it better to go at it alone.

And I guess it is really not up to me since if enough people come forward after reading this with moral and financial support, then perhaps I should stay and fight the so-called good fight. But if not, these last
five years have prepared me to go it alone, knowing it is better to have
tried and failed then to not have tried at all.

But whatever happens to all of us is of course God's will. So whether we
are directed to sail the ocean alone or enlighten millions with our
findings will soon be determined, not by power and money, but by our
creator who has a plan so much bigger than ours but so much harder to
understand.

In the meantime, I'd like to reflect back to my RV selling days when I
met another patriot in hiding by the name of Bill McIntyre. Bill sold
RV's as well while he pursued his writing career. He recently sent me an
article about how he met Mohammed Atta, the infamous fake hijacker when he came to buy an RV from Bill.

When I read Bill's story, it made me think about both my lives, the ones
before and after 9/11. It also left me thinking what should I do now.

I hope you enjoy Bill's story about how he met Mohammed Atta.

Meeting with Mohammed
©William McIntyre

Writers live many lives and in the living people tell them their
stories. Sometimes truth finds the writer and sometimes the writer finds
more than the truth, like a meeting with Mohammed

In the universe there are no accidents. I hold it to be true. So,
when three razor-faced young Arabs ambled into my writer’s day-job
reality I did not question. I trusted it. Their tribal moves were
familiar from my times on reservations across the years. I’d run with
“Skins”. So who better for the universe to deliver these tribal types to
but me on an RV sales lot in Ventura California where I was playing
salesman to pay the bills. It was spring 2000.

But, these three guys were not “Skins” in the REZ slang of Native
America. Not Sioux, Cheyenne, Hopi, Navajo or Zuni. Nope these were
Bedouin. Familiar Bedouin tribal rhythms lifted these three lightly
across the RV lot toward me. They were the young desert horsemen I’d
seen, as a kid near Cairo, riding Arabian horses like the wind by the
Great Pyramid. These three were without their flowing Bedouin robes and ragged turbans. Dressed in cheap-chic they styled toward me. In Vegas slacks and Polo shirts, Gucci knock-off loafers, gold chain and short GQ hair cuts they came. Too casual they were acting with their little grins of secret spiritual mission hidden just behind their lively dark eyes. They reminded me of young Hopi men eager for the sacred dances.

They smacked of Hollywood as well as Vegas, and Palm Beach even.
But, lying just beneath their polite shyness, I sensed the ghost of
mosque, fasting and prayer, and the cool fire of the devout. Indeed these
were very “serious” dudes for sure, playing their Steve Martin roles of
wild-and-crazy guys out for a fun afternoon’s RV shopping. Of all this I
was reasonably certain before many words were spoken.

“Hi”, I beamed. “I’m Bill”. You guys lookin’ to buy an RV?”

I gave it my best red blooded American Boy Scout glad-hand welcome.
The “pros” in the sales office had caught sight of the three chicsters
truckin’ through the front gate. They had dared me, the writer guy, to
work the dark skins knowing I would. This old RV sales salt nick-named
Gator didn’t want to “waste his Up” (his first place in the salesman
rotation), with Hindu, Arab, or Mexican moneyless looking losers. Sad.
But the way it some times is in the high dollar RV sales game.

Between awkward clumsy handshakes and their thick Arabic accents,
faltering English trickled through. The littlest guy, making the
introductions, started playing me right away introducing them so fast he
knew I couldn’t catch a name. With a touch of hipster charm he first
introduced himself. “Mohammed Khalid al Mihdhar”. That much my struggling ear caught as I flipped open my pocket pad eager to jot them all down.

But, Mohammed Khalid al Mihdhar wasn’t about to let me write. I
couldn’t speed scribble all of the others names he ran by me at such a
mind stumping pace. And each of their names seemed to be an Ali, Abdula or Mohammed this or that – Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Mohammed al Hazmi, said-so-fast-you-just-couldn’t-tell. I could tell I was being put-on by Mohammed Khalid al Mihdhar. This I knew. And he knew I knew by the way he tried to hide his impish little grin. But why? Why rattle off their names so fast nobody could catch them? That was the question. Their act had me snagged. I was up for it. Writer’s curiosity. I had to bust into their game.


Khalid made their pitch. “Yez, Bill. We look for RV, as you say,
but not one so big as thez.”

His close-shaved rose-tan face was a-glow with some sort of glad
expectancy of the moment. His eyes darted toward the flashy forty-foot
monster diesel motor home a few yards away.


“Ah, something smaller, easy to drive yes”? Ali Abdul asked.

“Smaller maybe like a second car?”, I ventured.


“Yez. Exactly.” Khalid answered. “Perhaps for twenty thousand
dollars cash. You think ez possible Beel? For twenty thousand?”

He’d put his money cards on the table like an amateur or so I
thought. Twenty grand they had to spend and they had the cash with them I could feel that for sure. But, in the big dollar world of RV buying,
twenty G’s wouldn’t buy them much. At least not what they were looking
for I suspected. My job, as under-cover-writer RV salesman was to “bump” these masquerading sons of desert Sheiks up the money ladder and entice them to pony-up their twenty grand as a nice down payment on sixty to a hundred thousand dollars worth of recreational rolling stock.


“I’m sorry I missed your names,” I smiled, stalling to get a better
feel.

“Ali Abdula-Aziz”, chimed in pronouncing it more slowly, pointing
to himself and then rattled of the others as fast or faster than Khalid
had before.

“Well, Abdula”, I began, seeing his attention rapt on each of my
words like a traveler in a strange land listening for directions that
would lead him out of a place he was eager to leave. “Maybe we should
take a look at a few RV’s.”

As I watched Abdullah’s eyes and face, seeming so awash with the
keen importance of his mission, the two other chic-sters leaned close.
They were the same trim size, had the same light tribesman step, same G.Q close cuts with musk cologne wafting. They were partners, it was plain. Un wound from the same womb they appeared to be, of blood brotherhood and journey to somewhere joyous beyond this mundane place and time.

Their boyish enthusiasm was infectious. My own sleeping tribal
blood stirred in its Scotch-Irish Plains tribes mix. In my eyes they saw
the willing acceptances of the secret tribal quest they were obviously
on, whatever it was.

As Abdula made his fast-talker introductions of the other two I was
wondering if everybody Moslem was named Mohammed in Islam. In my sublime “Amaraken” ignorance I wasn’t sure. Smiling over-politely at me,
Abdula-aziz murmured asides to Khalid and al-Hazmi in hushed phrases of Arabic or Egyptian maybe, who could tell. With slight nods of heads
toward the row of Volkswagen Rialtas, lined up against the front fence
line, I heard the whispered name of Allah, Allah, praise Allah.

I realized they were praying as they talked or talking as they
prayed. All three were fingering a rope bracelet of prayer beads. This
was no ordinary mission they were on.

A quick burst of Arabic between the three with English chards like
twenty thousand and RV, slipped into the mix of prayer and whispers.

There was urgency of word it seemed from the scraps of English
laced into this desert lingo of sheiks and sultans, holy men and princes,
or ‘terrorists’ the fleeting thought came and went. I smiled in my
passive-aggressive American desire to win friends and influence people.
My earnest smile and honest eye was waiting out their grinning Bedouin
confab.

I was catching on – these three were Royals – rich oil brats; sons
of petroleum sheiks out on a lark to hit the great American road. Or...
they were buying fleet rolling stock for the royal family’s desert RV
whims. Every legendary RV salesman had stories of selling at least one
fleet to a Riyadh Royal.

In their “fine” threads, accessorized perfectly in just slightly
gaudy gold, and leather tassel loafers, the three anxiously glanced back
over their shoulders toward the opened door of the first sleek little VW
Rialta. I glanced in the Rialta’s open doorway, and glimpsed the golden
hem of a long olive dress slide back from sight and a charcoal pant leg
over small tassel loafer move into shadow.

That neatly pleated charcoal pant leg must belong to the prince I
found myself thinking, smelling pools of oil money commission; enough to skip work for a year and just write - the constant writers dream. The
reverent eyes of all three young dark skins were fixed on that doorway.

Whispers of prayer came from the three. “There is no God but
Allah.” “Mohammed is his prophet.” The soft flow of reverence cradled
softer tones, “Allah be praised.” “Praise be to Allah.” And this
reverence was not skyward thrown but lilted toward the open RV where a
shadow man moved within.

I was wrong, it hit me. I was not about to sell a fleet of pricey
VW’S to four high-born Saudi oil brats. No. The thick feel of reverence
for the Shadow-One told me different. This must be the “Special One”
protected by the young mosque guards. I had my own time in with native
medicine people, sweat lodge leaders – Sioux pipe carriers, Hopi elders,
Tibetans and the like. I knew tribal reverence in those that worship and
protect a Chosen One.

I was being pulled in a soft force field. My feet were moving in
step with the three toward the window-shade silhouette bent forward
searching the chic little RV interior. A Ventura sea breeze eddied around we four fluttering forward for the door. They edged passed me. A few steps ahead, then a half dozen, they were suddenly scurrying emissaries, like Chang to the High Lama in Lost Horizons. That was it! Their airy movements betrayed them. They were comfortable with wearing robes – desert sandals not showy disco garb.

Abdula ducked into the low doorway, reporting in Arabic to the
unseen one. His instant puppy-like body language and scraps of English
explained what had transpired with this RV sales guy, me, who was
standing just outside now, body blocked by the three body guards.

I caught slow movement in the corner of my eye. The back of a tall,
hunched-over, olive skirted golden hemmed veiled figure in black strap
clog heels, went slouching out the front gate like a vanishing desert
breeze.

“You see,” Abdula was speaking at me, suddenly tense, trying to
hide his discomfort with my closeness to the doorway and the one within. “Mohammed looks for an RV such as this.” He paused glancing quickly back into the rear of the Rialta, and back at me. “But, the price… this one ez how much?”

“Sixty Thousand,” I answered casually, ready to open negotiations.
My ears locked on the faint drift of Arabic floating from the yet unseen
Mohammed inside, obvious master of the others. God, I wondered trying not to grin at my thought, were all Arabs named after Mohammed like so many Mexicans friends in my high school had been named Jessie after Jesus?!

“But for twenty thousand we could get what?” Abdula asked.
“Something like thez?” He turned a step caressing the Rialta’s glassy
lacquer paint job on the sleek airplane style cabin line. He was
whispering another prayer.

Khalid and al Hazmi followed him with their eyes whispering
prayers. I raised my hiking boot into the doorway of the plush little
carpeted Rialtas cabin. The short man busy searching the storage space
behind the back seat cushions turned to me. Hair cut close, gold watch
and necklace flashing. His green Polo shirt hung loose over his pleated
charcoal slacks and soft oxblood loafers. With a trapped look in his
small black eyes, his thin mouth opened in the tortured gape. Horrified
his face was becoming, eyes searching for escape from being trapped by me
in the doorway. His tight mouth began twisting into a soundless cry. Like
an enraged terrified woman imprisoned by that which she hated most the
Cobra eyes willed me back out the door.

Abdula shifted back to move me away a step from the Rialta. “Now Beel the
mileage on this one ez...?”

From times with medicine people I knew to show reverence to the
elder or the chosen by not looking directly at them. I turned my back out
the open door and gave Abdula more than the distance he wanted between
us. I saw Khalid and al Hazmi next door crawling in a big rigs basement
storage compartments.



“Seventeen to twenty two miles per gallon. It’s a low, sleek,
aerodynamic Winnebago body with the new two hundred horse V6 Volkswagen
engine.” My pitch pulled me together again from the disarming shock of
feeling such contempt directed at me by the space-cold eyes of the
Mohammed with in.

Noticing I had shown respect, Abdula raised a polite eye of doubt.
“Seventeen to twenty miles per gallon, really?”

“People have reported getting twenty two – depends on how you drive
it and where – uphill, downhill, what the weight and what the wind and
weather conditions are.”

Abdullah’s polite voice came from above and over my shoulder. He’d
lifted himself back up into the oval doorway shielding his master
Mohammed. “So the power Beel, on hills and the towing for trailer…?” In
the slant of sun shade his face loomed above Khalid and al-Hazmi, who had
darted back, touching shoulders to make it three again, protecting the
sacred one whose vacant face slowly appeared behind them in cabin shadow.

My usual cross-culture spiritual ignorance was hard at work as I
stood looking at the three Bedouin guardsmen and their charge.

Did Arabs name only high priests Mohammed, I wondered, returning my
eyes to the four. Mohammed was their prophet I knew. Mohammed, harbinger
of the world’s largest religion, Islam. Mohammed, messenger of the Koran.
Almost all of Arabia and North Africa was Moslem. Endless summering high
school surfing buds of mine had brought back that religious tid-bit long
years passed.

“Yeah”, I began the answer to the question I’d forgotten,
intentionally averting my eyes in a direct way that would again show I
knew to look away.

I felt Abdula, al Hazmi and Khalid’s attention uneasy and uncertain
on me, for so obviously paying reverence to number four Mohammed, as I
continued pitching the VW, with my eyes away meeting none of theirs.

I started my RV salesman walk around the Rialta - slow step by step
showing off this proud sleek Arabian steed, air cooled and perfect for
their deserts. I pitched with my deliberate eyes never lifting to seek
the one inside. I drew the crowd of three with me. They followed me light
on their loafed feet, happy at my respect and moving close with me, like
a robe flows, following in the wind. I did my demo of the sleek little
airplane of an RV from front bumper to back and two thousand pound tow
hitch welded underneath the rear.

And then, as I cut a crescent around to the other side, there were
four. I felt, though I did not look up, a very “different” presence, come
in behind me. Mohammed from within was with us. I left space for him to
step into. Still behind his braves, his faithful trusting shields, with
us he was. His presence cloaked us in the reverence his charges paid him
in their every action.

With Mohammed a step behind, the three subdued their boyish grins
and teen-like body language. They pulled themselves in for abject service
to anything he might do or ask or desire. This was plain. Their coltish
movements drew down in slightly surprised sheepish supplication. And they
too looked not directly at this smaller blade of a man for whom, I
sensed, they would give their lives.

I had paid similar homage before to a Hopi Sun Clan Chieftain who
prays up the sun each dawn. It was a wild and holy knowing that my own
mix of Anglo and Native blood rose to. The slight but perceptible
arrogance in my deliberately averted eyes lured all four of my Arab flock
like trout to golden sparkle, so foreign I bet it was to them in America.

In the Rialta’s lacquered paint reflection I saw the four a step
behind me. All were Marine straight, trim, and hard, their disco duds
clinging to their camera-thin model bodies. Mohammed was shorter than his
faithful three, lighter and much more bonded to the ground, with sure
step and royal manner.

I finished my pitch back around by the open door where it started.
My eyes were still off on the seaward horizon. I shut up and waited.


“Bill?” A completely different almost silent voice intoned “Bill is
this the best for long distance traveling?” The English was all but
perfect.

It was the coldly commanding voice of Mohammed addressing me
directly. His voice parted his surprised shield of protectors. He stood
shorter than they but much greater baring a great weight on his pious
shoulders - a weight of bitter and long endured suffering. Holy faces I
had seen, joyous in service to their God, or their people. But this face
before me, Mohammed’s face, struck me in a forbidding chamber of the
heart and silently recoiling corner of soul. The cold brilliance of his
intelligence burned. Pointed creases slanted downward from his eyes, like
channels for endless tears.

The black eyes peered up into mine, examining my mind and manner. I
returned a respectful gaze, game for this meeting with such a one as he.
Then I noticed he was wearing eyebrow pencil. I suddenly spied it. Light
brown pencil filled-in the darker stubble of his absent eyebrows. Are
these guys gay I thought. God! This guy’s a rich Arab queen out squiring
his boy toys. No. Such a crude conclusion didn’t fit the gut feel of it.
Touched up eyebrows or no these three devotees and master were married to
a much higher purpose than the guilty desert pleasures confessed by El
Orance (T.E. Lawrence).

In his onyx eyes I could see Mohammed knew I was looking at his
penciled eyebrows. Like Norma Desmond fearful a close-up would betray
fatal flaws, his square jaw tightened. He was repulsed by having to face
such a lowly one as I. I could tell. With a royal wave of hand he moved
a step to me, in some inner depth of pious superiority. Then, raising the
sword of his eyes into mine Mohammed vanquished me with an icy look,
dismissing me with the power of an inner resolve from vast stretches of
pious meditations.


“Do you need a special license to drive one?” He asked it quietly
turning to the Rialta.

“No none at all.”


“If say the four of us need to travel long distances, this will
sleep four and give us all the comforts of home with great gas mileage?”
I had to strain to hear him over the not too distant freeway noise.


“Yes. It’s completely self contained. A luxury hotel room on wheels” I
started a slow circle again.

“We do not concern ourselves with luxury. And the tow hitch, it can
pull how much?”

“Twenty five hundred pounds.” He was gliding beside me, taking in
every detail.

“And this is dependable for long distances?” He made no eye contact.
“Many, many, hours of driving?”

“It’s a Volkswagen runs forever engine on a Winnebago lives forever body.
It is dependable to the max.”

“The power. It has sufficient power on hills and in mountains?” He bent
slightly to look at the tires.

Behind us, the three “followers” whispered and talked praying like
excited school. One said something serious in Arabic. The other would
answer half in English. All kept their obedient eyes on Mohammed’s every
move as if at any moment he would reveal the answer to everything.


“Like what kind of distance? Where you thinking of going?”

Carefully, I could tell, he considered what he would say. “We may
have to make trips to San Francisco and Salt Lake, Denver and maybe New
York.”


“San Francisco’s no problem. You go straight up I-5. And Salt Lake is a
flat run across from Reno. New York you can flatten-out by driving down
around Santa Fe, south of the Rockies.”

“You would not drive over the Rockies in this.” He paused to
inspect the trailer hitch.

“You could – but if you’re gonna haul a ton behind you on that hitch,
with four inside, on full tanks of gas, it’ll be a slow trip over the
Rockies. Fifty in the slow lane uphill all the way.”

“Speed we don’t need. Time we have.”

I felt the slightly hidden insult to me and America’s obsession
with speed.

“If you’re not in a hurry to get over the Rockies - Then it’ll
get-ya there no problem.”

“With two thousand pounds towing?”

“Yeah. I think they even make little steel covered tow trailers
just for the Rialta.” I lied to make a sale knowing I could get one
built.

“Really. A covered trailer with steal locked doors?” He concealed
his interest.

“Yeah steel. I’m not sure about the doors but I could check that
for you.”


He peered into the Rialta’s back window. “And new it runs how
much..?”

“Ah, sixty grand, new, give or take some tax.”

A smug grin faintly shaded Mohammed’s face, reflected in the window.
“With your taxes it is always take.”

“With your oil it is always give?”

“Our oil is the will of Allah.”

Abdula took a silent cue to end my audience with his master. “And,
the hitch Beel”, Ahmed said, thinking up the question as he shouldered
between us, “It can pull how much?”

“Twenty five hundred pounds.”

I lifted my eyes. Mohammed was back in the plush upholstery
of the gleaming Rialta. Khalid and al Hazmi were squatted down
inspecting the basement storage on a big diesel bus.. Abdula started
their way leaving me alone. Okay… My duty was to trial-close Mohammed and
get a few dollars down, run the credit app, and beat him up on payments.
It was, after all, the American Way. Make the sale. I took a step to the
open Rialta door and leaned half my body inside, with one knee on the
carpet floor.

There I was, in my cool fly fishing shades, with my Wyoming bucking
bronco ball cap, kneeling before Mohammed who was turning again to meet
my eyes with his. His calm face became indignant, disgusted and then
furious as he slammed shut the rear storage lid and searched out the
window for his three human shields out kicking tires.

Small yet un afraid of anything, I could tell, but his own failings
in the eyes of Allah, he was left alone with the infidel again! Just a
stride away me the un-clean one, far too close.

The soft shoe shuffle of Abdula and company came scuffing back
around me lifting the disgust from Mohammed’s face. His trusty three had
returned, tardy, like straying boys, but they had come home.

I was out before their body language could infer I go. That very
first look of pious revulsion in Mohammed’s eyes was starting to haunt
me. That first turning stare at me, his delicate hands rising to half
block the face from unclean gaze, almost feminine.

Who was this Mohammed? Nothing was fitting now – not his cold
manner, his hushed voice, the priestly power of his presence, or the
unswerving crush of accusal from his stone eyes, abomination that I was
to him. An abomination he felt such unrelenting contempt for, it was
hard for him not to turn his repulsed face away.

Glad to leave the three in the steel and plush polyester cabin I
breathed the sea air already knowing I would never forget this Mohammed,
much like the first faithful believers of the Prophet Mohammed must have
known, in the presence of the profit “The Upright’ ‘The Trustworthy One’
‘The True’ touching their souls with his new message of Islam.


The message “There is no God but Allah. Salam, Peace. The perfect
peace that comes from total surrender to Allah.” This was Islam from the
Koran given by the angel Gabriel to Allah’s messenger Mohammed. Six
hundred years after Christ. Eight hundred miles from Cairo, in a cave it
was given him, on Mt. Hira, a brief stroll from Mecca.

La Ilaha, Illa, Allah – There is no God but Allah. And Mohammed is
his prophet. Persecuted into flight like Christ Mohammed was, for
reciting the holy Koran that Allah had revealed to him in voices and
dreams. The holy message that within a hundred years uplifted millions to
cast the crusading invaders back from glorious Baghdad and Damascus all
the way through Spain to France before the avenging wave of Islam could
be checked.

Could not this Mohammed in the RV be like the Prophet in spirit and
manner on his own mission to deliver some fierce and holy message?
Visions of this Mohammed’s darkest meditations invaded my mind.
Unspeakable colonial devastation’s of his Bedouin culture, by Turkish,
German, British, Israeli, and American. Imperial Juggernauts savaging
Arabs from all sides over air conditioned oil dollars dredging motes of
wealth around fortressed sheiks the empires put in power, leavening the
tribes to their Koran, their desert and their oil for Judao-Christian
capitalism to plunder.

He was getting to me, this Mohammed, with the condemnation of his
black eyes. I had to fight his excommunication so worthless and vile was
I in his accusing looks.

Abdula came the few steps to me. “Mohammed wants to know how much ten
thousand down would make the payments.”

“On this Rialta? Well lets see, on fifty five thousand plus tax that
would leave ah, say seven hundred a month depending on your credit”

Abdula leaned out of the oval door, with Mohammed the chosen
telling him what to say.

“Bell, say twenty thousand cash, Mohammed asks if any RV like this
we can buy?”

“Not really. These are pricey. And used Rialta’s just don’t come along.
Everybody hangs on to them.”


I’d done something right it looked like. Akmed came shoulder to shoulder
“So Beel. Say if older used one like thez cost what?”

Mohammed was behind him in the doorway, no blame in his eyes,
cleansed somehow in his moments out of sight. Or maybe it was my quick
exit. They tossed a scatter of relaxed Arabic around. Maybe Mohammed had
ordained me trustworthy. I could sense a shift in to relaxed mode by his
three musketeers. One little step into healing, was my thought, for all
our fathers sins and transgressions against one another.

“No, these Rialtas are too expensive, guys.” Instant smiles crept
across three thin faces at me calling them guys. I was averting my eyes
again from Mohammed, above us in the doorway. He stepped down.

I looked directly at him. “Twenty grand just won’t buy you a new
unit like this. But, you can maybe get a good used RV from a private
party for that much.”

“For twenty thousand?” al Hazmi smiled, in sudden interest.

“Yeah. Just give a good mechanic fifty bucks and have him check it
out”

Mohammed moved in much more softy than before “So, Bill, this can be
done? To pay an RV mechanic to check out a used RV not from your lot?”

“Sure. Just call and set it up with Service.” Abdullah’s eyes
became uncertain.

“Just call our shop Abdula, and make a service appointment. Then, drive
it in and they’ll put it up on the rack and look it over. They’ll check
the transmission, breaks and engine and let you know if there is anything
major wrong.”


“This is done?” Mohammed asked with a little less disdain, and only
a hint of suspicion.

“Sure that’s the smart way to go any time you are going to shop used.
Get it checked out by a pro.”


A sudden glad burst of Arabic between them all came and went like
wind on water. The three disco-kids walked off talking excitedly with out
realizing they were leaving Mohammed unattended.

This was my last chance to get a number and work them by phone.
Never let an “Up” (a sale prospect), leave the lot without getting the
phone number. The RV salesmen’s anthem. And, after all I was a writer
playing RV salesman to make a living. I tugged out my pocket note pad.

Mohammed started after his three guardians. “Ah Mohammed. I can
call you if a nice used Realta comes in on trade.” I had pen to paper
ready to write.

“No no.” He dismissed the mere thought of it, taking longer strides
for the gate.

“Well, you guys come back by. We get new stock in all the time. Say, by
the way, what do you do?”

My words slowed him. An exasperated look crossed his face. He’d
given up fighting my infidel brashness. I stuck out my hand to shake
which he obviously didn’t want to do.

“I am an airline pilot.”

“Oh you fly”, I chirped surprised. A completely different crossword
puzzle of him began assembling in my mind.

He turned back for the gate, me right beside him. “An airline pilot
huh. My dad was with TWA. I flew all over the world as a kid. I was in
Cairo when they built the Hilton on the Nile.” I saw a hint of surprise
flick across his careful eyes. In my ‘Oh gosh Yankee way’ had I broken
through? Side by side we were half way to the gate where his three Sancho
Ponza’s clustered, lighting up smokes against the breeze.

With my ball point ready to spell the longest hardest Arab name in
history I asked, “ So, Mohammed what is your last name?”

His eyes came up to mine very put off by my insistence.

“Atta,” he answered frowning.

“Hata?” I choked back a surprised laugh. “Well that I can spell - and
remember. H-A-T-A. That’s short enough.”

“Atta! Mohammed Atta!”

Oh “Atta. Got it.”

My lame name humor he did not get. I once more put out my hand. He
paused, just a step, and gave in putting his stiff delicate fingers
forward to jerk back out of my hand clasp, coldly. Never did he want to
touch me or be touched by me. So plain it was on his face as he turned
away.

I watched them go, the hang of their loose shirts waving like short
robes against their trim waists. A black, smoke windowed, new model
four-door nosed into sight. The long veiled one was driving in dark
shades.

The four climbed in putting on their own shades and then vanishing
behind the dark tinted windows. Slowly they cruised up the onramp through
parked bulldozers and broken concrete construction piles wreckage onto
the freeway and away into the swift flow of south bound weekend traffic.

That night I ranted to my wife about the strangely captivating Arab
and his gang of three. How clearly unforgettable they remained with time.
I took notes of everything I remembered for I knew not what reason other
than being the writer compulsive. I kept my lead sheet with “Mohammed
Atta” at the top as a keepsake of bewilderment, and hopeful talisman that
such an unlikely meeting between strangers from stranger lands could be
mystically the beginnings of understanding.

When that first shot of Atta and crew flashed on CNN I rose from my
dinner shocked. I knew that face from somewhere. The photos merged with
memory in minutes when his name was broadcast. Mohammed Atta. The
strangely short Arab name I’ jokingly jotted down. The realization that
it was the very same Mohammed Atta washed over me like the nation’s shock
seeing the towers falling. I was hit in the gut by the raging symbol of
their suicides, slaughtering thousands in an inferno of religious
loathing in the crowning symbol of western money and power.


The fact that I’d met Mohammed in the midst of his fateful
pilgrimage to Allah, left my mind troubled with visions of those last
moments. I saw the jet’s nose hurtling at windows of terroized infidels
paralyzed by its subsonic rush toward them; every one in that last
horrified closing second seeing faces through the glass pains of plane
and tower before the crystal shatter and exploding flame took them all to
their heavens and hells, leaving behind havoc and certain war. And it was
all driven by the same hand I’d felt sjerked stiffly from mine to take
the wheel of his charriot of holy deliverance for the glory of Allah and
jihad.

Was Abdula and Khalid, and al Hazmi beside him screaming ecstatically to
Allah in that last eye-blink of life? “God is good. God is great!!”

Did those three Disco-Dudes even know that flight that day was
their last trip and ticket to paradise? Had Mohammed kept that secret?
Had they taken the crew hostage terrifying the passengers with ripping
white throats of captive stewardesses - those three polo-shirted Bedouin
guys I had walked with and played?

In the vast wake of media grieving I vainly tried to cast off the
pall of that chance meeting, trying to connect the why. What perfection
of self distruction. Atta had known in that last disgusted frown, when he
told me his name, that soon it would be burned forever in my mind.

My mind wondered through the months of wreckage looking to connect
the dots of my conflicted sadness and shock at seeing the end of those
four horsemen of the apocalypse, and the thousands they killed, along
with the our times hopes for peace. Those accusing eyes of Mohammed
taunted me. Had I done something more, something less that day, was there
the remotest possible chance I could have tipped his resolve just one
degree off their compass heading to martyrdom?

Or, if I had given my one moment of terrorist suspicion its head,
might not I have called the feds and maybe.. Yet when I did call the FBI
with my story there was only a minutes interest and no follow up
response. So, I wondered on obsessed by the universes mysterious reason
for my meeting with Mohammed. In the insomnia of Ground Zero watching, a
chance look at C-SPAN began absolving me of my guilt. Journalist Roger
Morris, co-author of The Making Of Las Vegas And It’s Hold On America,
written with Journalist Sally Denton, was confessing that as a senior
staff member of the NSA under Johnson and Nixon, he was unprepared for
the depth of the root corruption in American Politics.

Morris and Denton had found that almost every important story
they’d come across about organized crime, drug trafficking, gun running
and political corruption at every level, sooner or later traced back to
Las Vegas. Morris related that since 1947 Vegas had become a
trillion-dollar world wide empire of unprecenidented political and
economic power, built on gambling, gangsters, and politicians.

This unholy national alliance of money, mob, and government, had
fostered decades of covert US foreign policy, sheltering money laundering
and international arms trafficking via Vegas to the Middle East and
Central America.

To offer personal proof of such dark scenario –“Connecting the
dots” as he put it - Morris confessed knowledge of covert US government
corruptions of Mid East countries, including Saudi Arabia which he
admitted with no pride, he’d been involved in at the NSA. Knowing this he
had not been surprised by 9/11. In fact, because of the ravaging of these
countries by 75 years of increasingly corrupt US foreign policy, Morris
said he was only surprised 9/11 hadn’t happened sooner.

Was this was the rage smeared cockpit window on the world of
Mohammed Atta? Was it his crucifixion world view of his people’s
holocaust on the cross of a completely corrupt Judeo Christian Manifest
Destiny? If so, there were no greater symbols of this than the World
Trade Center, The Pentagon and the White House.

What dark genus it will turn out to be if history comes to feel
somehow Atta “knew” what would follow his flight to paradise. Did he
“see” in his jihad meditation the towers falling, triggering a zealous
president’s attacks and no-bid contract occupation of Islam. Will
histories lesson be that Atta was tricking American into the endless
street fights of its imperial downfall?

Had Mohammed’s long hatred of our boots on the necks of so many
peoples in so many places, imprisoned by our World Bank CIA economics
locking up fifty percent of the worlds resources for our five percent of
the planets population, push him over the “terrorist” point of no return?

Had Mohammed Atta seen all we have seen since 9/11and so much more
ahead before he disintegrated with his first trophies of jihad? Will
history find that he knew he started more than we dare suspicion like his
prophet Mohammed with the message of the Koran? Either way how hollow it
must have sounded to Mohammed there at the gate, hearing the last thing I
said from behind him as he moved away. “Mohammed!” I’d shouted to him
putting my note pad back in my shirt pocket. As he half glanced back with
a final disgusted look I’d raised an open palm of peace toward him.

“Salam Mohammed” I’d called out, “God is good. God is great.” I’d
yelled it to show off my knowledge of Islam as if my ignorant innocent
offering of those simple words in that last-chance moment could heal the
million wounds of past and make peace across the blood and oil soaked
sands of time.

“Salam, Mohammed…and to all souls perished, past, present and
future…Salam Mohammed. Peace.