Chapter 2 – Chapter 2

Most of the first day in the refugee camp was spent in tracking down the seven families for which I had letters. I couldn't go straight for the families, though. I spent half of my time interviewing generally. I would have to produce a news piece on this visit or there would be questions why I'd done this. I had managed to come up with enough other names of people in the camp—from refugees who had made it to Beirut and had urged me to do something—so that it would not raise suspicion when I asked for these specific seven families also. It broke my heart, though, to interview people who I knew were not going to be leaving the camp before the gas attack—if the intelligence on that was correct.

Despite the reticence of all to leave Syria, most of the seven target families were willing to make the extreme change, conditioned, I'm sure by the truly primitive conditions in the camp. It nearly broke my spirit, though, when I couldn't convince two of the families, both of four, to go with me. They either didn't believe the letter was genuine or they would not attempt the change. I was equally saddened to find that another of the families had recently lost a daughter. They told me she had died and showed me photographs of a lovely young woman of nineteen or so, but the mother just started wailing and the father closed down when I asked what she had died of. Outside their tent, others were willing to tell me that Syrian camp guards had come and dragged the young woman out of the tent and away. I didn't really need to hear more of the specifics on her demise then.

Toward nightfall, having had what success I thought I was going to have, although I'd make another run at the holdout families the next day, I started looking for this Asu Gemal, who Hal had told me to be sure to convince to leave. Finding him wasn't that easy, and I soon realized why.

I went through the camp's bazaar, asking shopkeepers if they knew where I could find a young man named Asu Gemal. Each time I got hard looks, and more than once, the shopkeeper, after giving me a hard look, spat on the ground and turned away. At last one, obsequious and sweating fat man, though, gave me a licentious look and told me I'd find Asu on his back in the tent of one Sargon. He had no trouble giving me directions. And I had no trouble then either knowing why I'd gotten the reaction I had from the others or why Hal had picked me for this assignment. It also started me to thinking that maybe this Asu Gemal was key to the whole operation.

At the designated tent I paid Sargon for two hours with Asu, and, although he gave me a surprised and then a speculative look, he took my money, told me to wait a moment, pushed aside a carpet hanging, and went into an attached, smaller tent adjacent to the larger one.

The young man was already on all fours, his pert little butt pointed to the entrance of his small tent, when I entered. He was mostly naked, with a small and berry-brown body, which was very well proportioned. His only attire were gold serpentine bracelets on his biceps and flat sandals on his feet with laces of gold string winding around his well-turned calves nearly up to the knees.

There were condoms on a small ivory-inlaid table at one side of the entrance into the tent and a chair on the other side where I could fold up my clothes. Most of the space in the tent was taken up by a large bed with silken sheets on it and a mound of garishly colored pillows in silk cases.

I was hard by the time I'd taken my clothes off and folded them and crowned myself with a condom. There was a bottle of lubricant on the table too, but I could tell by the glistening wetness of the young man's well-opened hole and the slickness of his spread inner thighs that he'd already been prepared.

I knew what I had to do. And now I knew why it had been me who Hal was forcing to be here. And I only had a couple of days.

I approached the young man from the rear; crouched over his hips; pulled his face around to mine with a hand gently cupping his chin; and, to a surprised look on his face, gently took his lips with mine and kissed him deeply. After positioning the bulb of my cock at his channel entrance, where he was stretched enough for me to hold the bulb just inside the entrance, I encircled his waist with my arm. While holding his lips with mine, I slowly and deeply entered him with my cock. He was open, but I am horse hung, so he still was belabored to take me.

He was sighing and moaning as I began to stroke inside him slowly, with long, deep strokes. He writhed a bit in my embrace and purred, obviously not having been treated anything like this by his other customers in the rough and tumble camp, and came for me, having moved one of his hands back to stroke his own cock.

He gave me a dreamy look as I picked him up and laid him on his back on the edge of the bed and, after cleaning his cock with my mouth, kissed all up and down his body. He sighed for me and kept whispering words in Arabic that I recognized as endearments. When I entered him again with my cock, he wrapped his legs around the small of my back, holding me close into him, and pulled my face down to his for a kiss, while I slow-stroked him to my own ejaculation. He was a beautiful young man. A face that was more beautiful than handsome. Almond-shaped eyes with large, brown pupils. Long, dark eyelashes. Rose-bud lips with a shy smile even with the mixed pain and pleasure on his face of taking a big cock. I knew mine was bigger than most he took. That it was a challenge to him.

Not long after that I took him again, with his chest on the surface of the bed, pillows under his belly to lift his buttocks to me, his legs spread wide, and his arms extended, hands clutching at bunched-up sheeting and fists opening and closing to the rhythm of a fuck that was harder and even deeper this time. From the noises he was making and the countermotion of his hips, I didn't think that his response to the cocking was all an act by a talented rent-boy.

It had been my intent to convince him that I wasn't the usual client. To press this home, most of the second hour was spent with us reclining on the bed in an embrace, Asu cuddled into my chest, and me prompting him to tell me all about himself and clucking in sympathy and giving him praise as I could in an effort for him to like me. But I needed him to love me, to be lost to me in the same why I was lost to Hal Hessler—or whoever that American spy really was.

I felt I was close to that near the end of the second hour, when he gently pushed me on my back, crowned my cock with a condom he applied deftly with his teeth, and rode me to another mutual ejaculation.

He asked me as I left if I'd be back, and I told him then that I thought I loved him and would be back the next night.

"How much?" I asked when I was back in the main tent with Sargon.

"You know the hourly rate," Sargon said.

"No, I mean how much to buy him and take him away?"

Sargon gave me a speculative look. "He is very valuable to me. He is my livelihood."

"I see openings to three other tents from here," I said. "I don't think he's your only livelihood. And I don't think you'll have a problem replacing him well enough to satisfy the men in this camp." I didn't want to reveal that I thought that Sargon and his whole stable would be dead within a few days.

"But he is my best. I would . . . no, I must say, I have hoped that there would be a way for Asu."

"A way?"

"He is like a son to me. I had hoped he could get out of the camp and into Lebanon."

I didn't know if he was just jacking up the price, but I asked, "Why do you say that?"

"Asu is here in hiding. The regime is looking for him. He was the catamite of a very important general before he escaped to here. He heard things he should not have heard, including that he was going to have to die for what he knew. So he escaped to here."

I felt the tumblers falling into place—both why, perhaps, that the Syrians were going to gas the camp, an attack on their own people—to be rid of Asu—and why Hal's people wanted him—to wring Syrian state secrets from him. "I can take him to safety. How much?"

I was at least a bit exhilarated the next day when I convinced one of the holdout families to leave with me. But I spent much of the day worrying about what I was going to do about Asu. I couldn't deny it. I was more than a little in love with him myself even after only two hours with him. I had paid an exorbitant amount for him—Hal obviously had known what I needed a big chuck of Syrian money for—and left it to Sargon to explain that he'd been sold and that it was in his best interests to leave with me.

Before I left for Sargon's tent, I called a clerk I trusted completely in the Beirut news office, thankful that cell reception carried to this border area. Then, as I moved through the bazaar toward Sargon's complex of tents, I gathered what was needed for the plan that I had hastily forged.

Asu greeted me with a broad smile on his face, tears in his eyes, and on his back with his thighs spread open and pillows under the small of his back. I nearly couldn't hold myself from firing off as I kept my eyes on him and stripped near the entrance. I reached for a pile of condoms.

"No need for that if you are clean," he called to me in a whispery voice. "Sargon is a doctor. He tests frequently. I am clean. I would like to feel you inside me."

I rushed the bed, barely making it there, between his thighs, my lips plastered to him, and my cock sliding inside him, with both of us moving our hips, when one, two, three strokes I had flooded his insides with my cum.

Asu's eyes went wide as our lips parted. "You really do want me. You really do love me."

"Yes, I really do want you and I really do love you," I murmured, my voice choked with emotion, because I knew it was true and now Asu knew it too. This was the zenith of his decision to make. If he told me he didn't want to go with me, I'd let him go and find some way of dealing with Hal and his CIA operations. But I would let him go inside Lebanon. I owed him that much.

"Sargon told me, but I couldn't be sure . . . not until you were willing to make love to me with no condoms."

"But you were willing to let me bareback you."

"Of course. I love you. And you are my savior."

I had never gone completely soft and felt myself hardening again.

"I must fuck you again. Now. I can't help myself. Hard and deep. Full possession."

"Yes, please. Do whatever you want with me. I'm yours."

No forced backup, as with Hal and me. An unconditional surrender.

"Give me full control," I commanded. And Asu went limp under me.

I raised up on my knees, between his thighs. His knees bent and his feet were flat on the surface of the bed. He let his torso, head, and arms dangle back toward the mattress, and panted and groaned and moaned softly as, my arms encasing his waist, I pounded, pounded, pounded his ass channel hard and deep, making him totally, fully mine. He gave himself to me completely, and I managed a nearly mutual ejaculation.

Laying there, him in my arms, as we cooled down in a postcoital reverie, I told him what must be done the next day and kissed away all fears and concerns he had.

"When must you leave tonight?" he asked.

"I have paid for you and I have paid for this tent for the night. I'm going to be inside you, fucking you, making you mine, all night." He moaned as I started once more doing exactly what I told him I was going to do. Asu never wavered in giving me anything I wanted and in whispering to me of his love and total surrender to me.