Cold Allies (10 page)

Rita ran her hand through her short, curly hair. She was sweating, she noticed. Sweating like a pig. “No, general, I don’t.”

“The mutilations are rare: about one percent of the dead.

You and the platoon can handle that. The Arabs don’t wear dog tags, so the ruse should work. When you strip the Americans, remember to take off socks, underwear, everything. I doubt the Arab doctors will look close enough to notice differences in dental work. At least that’s what I hope,”

“You’re telling me to desecrate corpses?” Rita snapped. ‘‘What kind of order is that?”

“Not desecrate—” he began.

She didn’t let him finish. “What about those American boys’ parents? Their wives? Lord, general, has the Greenhouse Effect changed us that much?”

Lauterbach was staring at her, his mouth open. Finally he managed to say, soothingly, “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You didn’t upset me,” she said. “You offended me.” He reached out, put his hand, wiry and warm, on hers.

“We’re losing this war,” he said. “Our weapon stockpiles are low. We can’t make armaments, we can’t fight a war without fuel. Rita, for God’s sake.” His voice was so low and intense, she had no choice but to listen. She would have heard that voice even if miles away. It was a voice to make Allied soldiers weep from Lisbon to Warsaw.

“If we don’t get help,” he told her, “our surrender is inevitable.”

He pulled away first. His fingers trailed over hers. She wondered if the gesture was accidental or affectionate.

“You know what they call me?” he asked with a sad, lopsided smile. “Loon. They call me Loon. You know why!’

Guardedly she shook her head.

“Everyone thinks I’m crazy. Good. Let the Arabs think that.” There was a manic glint in Lauterbach’s yellow eyes, a hard, topaz sparkle that scared her. “No one believes me, Rita, but there are aliens out there. God’s given us a wild card. God’s given us a miracle. And I have it in my hand.”

The rotors idled quietly. Outside in the overcast day a Humvee sped across the tarmac, its engine growling. One soldier called to another, laughter in his voice. The breeze from the open door smelled sweet, but it didn’t lighten the atmosphere in the helicopter. Rita could feel the weight of the air on her shoulders. It was thick and soupy, like the false environment in an aquarium.

“I want more than life itself to talk to those aliens.”

In his voice was a startling tremolo of desire. “But if I could communicate with the lights,” he said, “it’s possible they wouldn’t help. They might not understand armed conflict.”

Then the general gave her an unexpected, disarming smile, and to her profound astonishment, he winked. “But maybe we can trick the Arabs into thinking the lights have joined us. No harm in that, is there?”

THE PYRENEES BELOW BAGNERES-DE-LUCHON

Someone had painted a crude symbol on the T -72, Colonel Wasef noticed. A sign to ward off demons.

The tank commander must have been nearly out of the hatch when the blow fell, or else the impact of it threw him partially out. He lay half over the deck, his eyes wide with surprise. The bloodless hole in his head went straight through to the other side. An impossible wound, bordering on the ridiculous, a wound that might be made in a cartoon character.

Hearing footsteps approach, Wasef started. It was only Captain Mustafa. Quickly Wasef smoothed the fright from his features, but knew that Yussif had seen.

The captain’s face was so taut, Wasef knew that his friend, too, was having trouble keeping the fear in check.

“The engine has not been shut off,” Wasef said. “No, Sir.”

The two stood for a moment listening to the agitated grumble of the diesel engine. The T -72 needed a tune-up, Wasef thought, and from the wreath of smoke around the rear of the vehicle, smoke that stank of carbon and unburnt fuel, he decided it could probably do with a ring job, too. All the vehicles were old: the planes, the trucks, everything. Only spit and baling wire held the Arab army together.

“Someone should turn off the engine,” Wasef told the captain. Yussif paled, the blood draining from his face so much, his skin mimicked the pallor of the corpse.

Mustafa wasn’t merely frightened; he was paralyzed. “I’ll do it,” Wasef said quickly, and wished he had not volunteered.

Skirting the driver’s entrance, he climbed up the deck and peered around the dead TC into the hatch. On the floor of the tank lay the gunner. He was an odd, yellowish color, the shade of spoiled goat cheese.

Sometimes Allah was unexpectedly kind. The T-72 gave a last chugging twitch and fell silent. It had run out of gas. Relieved, Wasef clambered down to the grass.

‘‘Could the blue light be American?” the captain asked. “I don’t think so,” Wasef told him. “If they had such a weapon, we would now all be the color of cheese and have holes through our bodies.”

Yussif leaned over to whisper into Wasef’s ear. “Yes. If one possesses such a weapon, one uses it to destroy armies, not a single tank.”

Wasef gave a nervous nod.

“Yet it trails the American robot,” Yussif went on, pointing down into the ravine. “See the marks of the treads’!’

Yes,
Wasef thought. The blue light was not American, but it had some special relationship with the Allies, a relationship Wasef was not canny enough to understand. He stared at the tread marks in frustrated dismay.

“The robot has gone back up the ravine,” Yussif said. The platoon will kill it.”

And then what?
Wasef wondered. He had the impulse to tell the captain to pull his platoon out and send them back to base.

“The men are frightened,” Yussif admitted. “They are illiterate, mostly, and superstitious. Once they believe the Americans are protected by djinn, they will not fight.”

“Superstitious, yes,” Wasef said absently. His own master’s degree in electrical engineering was no insulator against such unfounded and primitive fear. Before the killing heat came to Egypt he had imagined himself one link in a long proud line from the builders of Giza, a line superior to the filthy Algerians, more intelligent than the backward, sheepherding Libyans. Now he wasn’t so sure. They, at least, knew the methods of dealing with the supernatural.

He glanced over at the squad who were standing near a tree, as far from the tank as they could get without being reprimanded. No one was sitting down; no one-was squatting. They fingered their weapons and looked nervously around the glade.

Wasef cleared his throat.

“What, brother?” Yussif asked, leaning forward to catch any word of wisdom, any hint of direction. Loyal Yussif, Wasef thought fondly, would jump off a cliff if he were asked. But, like the rest of the army, he needed to be shown the path up the mountain.

Wasef gave the captain a level, encouraging look. “Tell the men these deaths are proof that we do battle with the forces of darkness. Tell them that, as Allah is good, justice will prevail.”

Yussif smiled as though he had been granted a generous and unforeseen absolution. “Yes, Qasim. As Allah is my witness, we shall prevail.”

IN THE LIGHT

He drove the bus through the sharp edge of night into day. Below, in fierce, bright light, Florida stretched, its white sand a chalk line between the cobalt blue of the sea and the enameled green of the hind. Justin saw home, and his hands clenched on the wheel so hard, they trembled.

On a small side street of a quiet subdivision in Boca Raton, Justin brought the bus down and parked before a pink cinderblock house.

“Don’t you want to go in?” the exec asked.

Justin stared out the bus window. The house was just as he’d remembered: the mango tree, thick-trunked and wide-leaved, dominating the front yard; the bed of jasmine and bird-of-paradise blooming just beyond. An ocean of emerald grass lapped at the pavement.

“You’ve come all this way,” the bus driver said. “Don’t you want to see your mother?”

The bus doors opened, and Justin stepped out. Above his head, he noticed, the palms made a clattering sound in the breeze. He bent to pick up a fallen coconut and held it to his chest, running his hands along its smooth, green surface.

Florida smelled the same: lush and moist and verdant, as though the air itself were about to bloom. Above the roofs of the houses, toward the sea, blue-gray clouds massed, the sight of them at once languid and anticipatory.

“Do you like it?” the exec asked. “Is it what you were looking for?”

Without answering, Justin skirted the house and headed for the backyard. There was the screened porch he remembered; here the budding lemon tree. And there stood his mother, hanging laundry on the line.

“Mom,” he said.

She turned and gave him a smile. The features didn’t stay put long enough for recognition. Her nose grew short, and then long. Her mouth rearranged itself several times indecisively. Her hair went chameleon-like from brown to salt-and-pepper to white.

“I see you’ve brought friends,” she said. Her voice was undecided, too, changing from alto to soprano and back again. The timbre of it was all wrong. “Let’s go in and have some milk and cake.”

He trailed after her, a chick inescapably captured in the gravity of a mother hen. The screen door, which always needed oiling, squeaked just as he remembered. The kitchen was the same, too: all sunshine yellow and white.

“I’ve missed you,” Justin said as he took a seat at the at the kitchen table. To his left sat the bus driver, chair faced the wrong way, arms resting on the metal bar of the back. To Justin’s right Harding sat, fingers laced on the Formica

There was the sugar bowl he remembered from childhood, the ceramic one with the flowers on the side. The coconut in his lap, Justin watched his mother take down four plates and carry them to the table.

“Do you hear it?” he asked his mother.

She glanced up at him curiously, her eyes shifting from blue to hazel to black. “What?”

‘That sound of the palm trees tapping. Do you hear it?”

“It’s just the wind,” his mother told him.

“Yes,” he said. “Just the wind.”

She poured milk in four glasses and set the chocolate cake on the table.

“Justin was just going to tell us about war,” Harding told Justin’s mother.

“Were you, dear?” his mother said.

The palm trees in the front yard rattled like icy castanets.

Justin looked up into his mother’s face and saw that her eyes had changed to green.

“How
is
war?” she asked.

They were all staring at him now, the bus driver and Harding and his mother. The clatter of the palm trees was so huge a sound, he could scarcely think.

“I’m scared all the time,” he whispered.

The air in the kitchen was cool and thick. “Tell me,” his mother said.

He remembered planes erupting into fire, coming down over the desert in graceful orange arcs, like falling stars he might have once wished on. The worst, he remembered, were night landings, the carrier below in the darkness, a lit postage stamp in the immensity of the sea. The carrier was such a tiny thing, he was constantly amazed to find it. Sometimes, when the seas were high, he pictured the hook not catching and his plane tumbling and crashing on the deck.

Wrapping his body around the solidity of the coconut, he said, “I wish I could go home.”

He flinched when he felt Harding’s mushy hand touch him. “You
are
home,” the exec said.

But Justin had remembered the thing he most wanted to forget: Boca Raton as it truly was. At high tide, he knew, fish swam in empty houses, crabs’ scuttled through backyards, and walls and fences stood like reefs against the pummeling of the long breakers.

“I wish I could go home,” he whispered, and neither Harding’s touch nor the cool sound of his mother’s voice was any comfort.

IN THE PYRENEES BELOW BAGNERES-DE-LUCHON

Pelham hadn’t ordered him out of the chair, so Gordon went on, making slow and cautious time up the ravine, Rover bobbing behind his unit, keeping out of sight.

Gordon’s tubes were erect, his missiles armed. He drove with his thumb on the firing stud.

Lucky, that, he thought, when he rounded a bend in the stream and found an Arab detachment waiting.

There was the guy with the mortar calmly settling the CRAV in his sights; there were the rest, not thirty yards away, hidden in the boulders as best they were able. And here was Gordon, tubes upraised, ready for the showdown.

It was Dodge City allover again.

Before Gordon had a chance to react, a few AK rounds pinged off his hide. Surprise brought his thumb down on the stud.

Missile One launched with an ear-splitting hiss, rocking the CRAV on its springs. The blast of the propellant blinded Gordon; an instant later he was deafened by the missile’s explosion. Even before the CRAV was fully steadied, even before he could see where he was going, he spun right, hoping to avoid the returning fire.

There wasn’t any. Looking down into the clear stream, he saw the water was threaded with syrupy crimson. Funny how blood mixed with water, he thought. Funny how beautiful it was. It made delicate, curlicue feathers, deft as a painter’s strokes.

When the smoke cleared, he saw the small Rattlesnake missile had hit the rocks to the rear of the squad. The burst of shrapnel and stone had been intensified by the contained space. Men and pieces of men were tangled like flood debris.

The knot of shredded corpses stirred. Slowly, gradually, a man crawled out from under, dragging pink streamers of his own intestines. Rover drifted past Gordon and settled, gentle as milkweed fluff, on the soldier. When the blue light lifted a moment later, the man was no longer moving.

“Get back here!” Gordon shouted, embarrassed and sickened at the same time, as though he had caught his dog worrying a neighbor’s pet rabbit.

Rover floated toward Gordon and stopped a few feet away. In the back of his mind Gordon could hear a chill, questioning rattle.

“You don’t do things like that, damn it!” he shouted.