A tremendous weight knocked Clyde forward. Someone had tackled him; but the tackler had failed to wrap his arms firmly around Clyde’s body. Clyde came close to falling down face first on the cold, steel floor plates. But a reflex took over. As he had been trained by various wrestling coaches starting in elementary school, he took the weight on his upper right arm and rolled through to a standing position. He turned and found himself looking at al-Turki from a distance of perhaps six feet.
Al-Turki had not been fooled by Clyde’s playing possum in the back of the plane. Judging from the look on his mashed-in wrestler’s face, he was surprised by the way Clyde had rolled through his attack. And it was not an entirely unpleasant surprise. He advanced, and Clyde instinctively fell into the traditional match opening position, then dropped his right leg back half a step and went into the stutter-step stance, extending his baseline for the charge he knew al-Turki would make.
Al-Turki grinned. He squared off and bent his knees, patiently regarding his prey, readying an attack. He started talking to Clyde about something. Clyde couldn’t hear him. It was probably some kind of chatter about wrestling.
Clyde knew he would have to move quickly and decisively. His opponent probably outweighed him by a few pounds and was a late-model hard body. In wrestling, weight and strength were the ultimate trump cards and would eventually win out, even over the vastly superior wrestling skills that Clyde had learned from wrestling against Dhonts his whole life. Time was on al-Turki’s side. Even if it wasn’t, he presumably had a gun, and though Clyde hoped the man would not be stupid enough to fire it in a cargo hold full of jet fuel and botulin toxin, he did not want to tempt him.
Clyde launched his attack first, wanting desperately to look like a blur, but knowing that, suffering from the combined effects of age and cold, he moved at freeze-frame speed. He feinted toward al-Turki’s right and then ducked under the Iraqi’s left arm, spun behind him, and, with his right leg, kicked the inside of the man’s left knee. His momentum combined with al-Turki’s surprise at the move allowed him to complete the motion and take the other down. Clyde, no featherweight, fell fully and hard on top of al-Turki, but feeling the muscles underneath his opponent’s suit, he instantly sensed that he would have little chance of holding him down. He thought about trying a judo chop—he had practiced them once—but he had as much chance of penetrating the muscles of al-Turki’s neck as he did of biting through the airplane’s deckplates with his incisors.
Al-Turki tried to reestablish his base on hands and knees, but Clyde kicked out his right leg. Then al-Turki executed an escape maneuver called a Granby roll, which worked more or less perfectly; he was almost out of Clyde’s control when Clyde, in desperation, laid a cross face on the Iraqi, putting his full weight behind the blow, slamming the bone of his forearm across the Iraqi’s nose and shattering it. Blood spurted out. Al-Turki’s lips moved, and Clyde could barely hear him uttering some kind of exclamation of pain and surprise in Arabic. While the Iraqi was in shock, Clyde reached around his body and jerked the gun out of his shoulder holster, then flung it back into the darkness of the cargo hold; it spun off into the jungle gym and disappeared. One less thing to worry about.
Al-Turki inhaled deeply and shouted for help as loudly as he could. Both he and Clyde knew that this was hopeless, but only al-Turki knew that the shouting was just a cover for another maneuver: with his free hand he reached around and got a grip on Clyde’s testicles. Clyde felt it coming at the last moment and twisted away, losing his grip on al-Turki, who was quick to capitalize on the situation with a chicken wing on Clyde’s left arm. Clyde hollered. The pain from the testicles was bad enough. Al-Turki twisted, trying to wrench Clyde’s arm out of his socket.
But here al-Turki’s tremendous strength and Clyde’s slight weight disadvantage led to an outcome neither man expected: Clyde was lifted completely off his feet. This reminded him of a trick maneuver that Dhonts liked to execute when they were showing off: kicking against al-Turki’s legs and midsection for traction, he did a somersault and straightened out his arm. Al-Turki still held the left, but Clyde’s right was free, and so he returned the favor, reaching out to grab al-Turki’s balls. Al-Turki let go. Clyde got away from him.
Al-Turki was still shaking his head in annoyance and, Clyde thought, genuine fear. You should have anticipated this, you son of a bitch, Clyde felt like saying. Of all the hick towns in the world, you picked the wrestling capital of the universe… You made your bed, you have to lie in it.