Cold Allies (29 page)

“You are not sending a division,” Baranyk persisted.

A short hesitation. In that brief silence Baranyk could hear his world crumble. “No,” Lauterbach admitted.

“You never were.”

“No.”

“You will let the Arabs have Poland, to keep Germany safe. Tell him, T. Williams. Admit it.”

Over the speaker came the sound of Lauterbach clearing his throat. The apartment was hushed now, except for the crackle of the fire. Soldiers were seated on the living-room floor, their terrified eyes on the speaker.

“I cannot allow that to happen,” Lauterbach said.

“What?” Baranyk pulled his gaze away from a young Polish boy’s blanched face, the memory of the little dead girl following like an afterthought.

“I said I cannot allow the Arabs to have Poland. It will upset the balance of world power. You have to look to the future, Valentin Sergeyevich,” he was saying.

Baranyk was trying to understand. The future? But there was no future. Didn’t the American realize that? There was no tomorrow for Warsaw. There were only eventualities.

“I’m looking ten, twenty years ahead, as America should have done after the Second World War ...”

“What shit,” Baranyk whispered. His eyes went to the window and the softly falling snow. Suddenly an idea came to him. It was a nasty idea, and it moved in him as a worm through a corpse. “How do you plan to stop them?”

“You must understand the necessity,” the American said.

Baranyk exchanged a horrified look with Czajowski.

The American was saying, “I don’t make this decision lightly. I’ve tried everything. God. I’ve tried. Believe me ...”

“Don’t ask me to believe you!” Baranyk shouted. “How can I believe you? You will not let the Arabs have Poland, so no one may have Poland. You will make it unlivable for a thousand years!”

“It will be a surgical strike. Low yield.”

Now that Lauterbach was finally speaking, he wouldn’t shut up. Baranyk wanted to clap a hand over the speaker as if it were the American’s mouth.

“There’s a chance for you,” Lauterbach was saying. “There will be some warning. I can’t tell you more than that. Get into the basement. Take food and water. Maybe you can ride it out. I wish ...” His voice foundered, struggled to go on. “I wish you all the luck ...”

Lauterbach must have hung up, because Baranyk realized that he was listening to the hum of an empty line.

He looked around. None of the soldiers had moved, and for a moment he had the frightening thought that they were dead, all of them dead, their insides crisped to cinders.

IN THE LIGHT

“You must leave now,” Dr. Gladdings said.

Rita was standing in the entranceway before the heavy double doors, Dr. Gladdings beside her.

“They’re coming. You have to leave,” he told her.

Her hand dropped to one of the scrolled knobs. Cold. Cold. Like the touch of frozen flesh. Ice sweated from the pores of the metal skin.

“No,” she whispered, snatching her hand away.

But suddenly she was outside, at the curb, in the dull, gray day. Above her head the ice-bound branches chimed softly. On the ground a few dead leaves caught the wind and sailed scrape-stop-scrape along the asphalt.

“Dr. Gladdings?” she called, turning to the closed, unlit building.

Around her sleet began to hiss on the gelid ground.

“Dr. Gladdings?”

Something huge was coming down the wintry, tree-lined street, its headlights bright halogen stars in the gray afternoon. It crawled along, scattering drifts of brown leaves. Over the dark square of the driver’s window was a sign that read CHARTER.

The bus stopped at the curb, brakes groaning. The ribbed metal of its sides wore a matte finish of dust.

A hydraulic sigh. The door opened. On a high bench seat sat the driver, a lump of ill-shaped clay.

“Get in,” he said.

She blundered back, back down the sidewalk, toward the safety of the library. Her shoulders and the rear of her head bumped against the inside of the windshield.

The bus stank of stale air and mildew. The windows were dry, but rain chattered and gossiped on the roof. In the middle of the banked rows of seats a man was screaming.

“We going to fuck now?” a boy asked.

She whirled. In the front row a Navy flier sat, smiling bitterly. “Hey, driver,” he said. “You want to order us to the backseat so the captain and I can fuck?”

The bus lurched as it drove off. Rita grabbed the frigid steel bar of the driver’s seat and hung on. The screaming man was an ANA private, a Turk, too old for his rank, too old, it seemed, even for the service. He was ranting as he shrieked, a hopeless, futile babble. Beyond him in the shadows was another ANA soldier. A young Libyan corporal.

“Look, honey,” the pilot said. “I don’t have anything against dark meat, but could you make your breasts a little bigger?”

Warily, she sat across the aisle from the American pilot as the bus drove into the night.
Don’t make a sound,
she thought.
Don’t move. Don’t draw any attention.
She sat like a child in church, hands folded in her lap, deciding that, if she stayed very still, danger might pass her by.

The sound of rain on the roof grew heavier. The driver turned on the wipers.

“Hey,” the pilot said, leaning toward the driver. “Where’s my F-14? Or did I learn that lesson already?”

Rita looked out of the corner of her eye and saw they were in a desert. On either side of the road, black sand dunes hunched like waiting assassins in the dark.

“Gosh, folks,” the young, dark-headed pilot said. “You already taught me I’m a coward. I just can’t wait to see what you’re going to teach me now.”

Behind her the screaming man’s voice rose to a keen, thin garrote of a wail, then lowered to a blunt-instrument moan; an unending assault of sound.

The bus pulled up next to a tapestried tent agleam in torchlight. The door wheezed open. A Saudi officer, a hatchet-faced, cruel-looking man, boarded; he gave one curious glance to the pilot and another to Rita before he strode down the aisle. Very slowly, very cautiously Rita turned and peered over the seats. The Saudi skirted the screamer and sat down beside the corporal.

Now the wailing man was beating his head against the window. Along with the ever-present rain, there was the hollow-melon drumming of a skull on glass.

“Please. Where are you taking us?” she asked the driver politely, in the voice one uses to address the powerful: a priest, a president, a murderer.

He didn’t answer. They were moving out of the desert and into the chill, waiting stars.

“It’s all an illusion,” the pilot laughed.

The stars gathered, as though for warmth, in the center of the windshield. A moment later they sprang away. Rita saw the bus was landing, coming down in a moonlit forest.

With an imperious snap the door opened. A cold wind whipped in the doorway, carrying with it confetti flakes of snow. There was no sound now, except for the old man’s howls.

“Last stop. Get out,” the driver ordered. The pilot stood.

Fearing to be left behind, Rita got to her feet as well. “I think we’re home,” she whispered to the pilot.

The boy’s lips twisted into a patronizing smile. “Just play along,” he said. “It’s easier that way.” He walked down the steps. Then the two Arabs left, abandoning the hysterical old man.

The driver turned in his seat, his eyes flicking by Rita and resting on the screamer. Below those pitiless, bulging eyes, his nose was a daggered beak.

The driver started to rise, but Rita said, “Please. I’ll get him, I’ll get him.”

The driver settled into his seat like so much khaki ice cream. In the dead, oblivious silence, she inched her way down the aisle.

“Shhhh,” Rita said. She grabbed the old Turk’s wrist.

His flesh was firm, his skin feverish. His eyes were wide and blank.

“It’s going to be all right now. They brought us home,” she told him gently, even though she knew he didn’t understand a word.

CENTRAL ARMY HOSPITAL, BADAJOZ, SPAIN

Sabry rolled his head listlessly to the side when he heard the door open. The doctor coming in with a shot of Demerol, he hoped. His hip was starting to ache, and there was a tingling foretaste of agony in his thigh.

It wasn’t the doctor, it was Lauterbach.

The American was followed by a blond man in a business suit. Sabry caught himself staring. How long had it been since he’d seen a three-piece suit? Five years? Six?

“General Sabry,” Lauterbach said. “This is Mr. Thornson from the International Red Cross. He’s here to observe the treatment of prisoners, and I’ve told him you wish to make a statement.”

The man’s eyebrows were cottony, his eyes a faded blue. He took a small tape recorder from his pocket and set it on the nightstand.

“I have been told you were beaten,” Thornson said. “In violation of the Geneva Convention. Is that correct?”

Sabry looked at Lauterbach. The general was standing, hands clasped behind his back, facing the night-darkened window.

Thornson, too, looked at Lauterbach. “You told me you struck him.”

“Repeatedly,” said the American.

The tape recorder was running, Sabry noticed in disbelief.

“Why?” The man from the Red Cross sounded mildly irritated.

“I was angry,” the American replied. “He would not respond to my questions.”

“The man was coming out of anesthesia.”

“That’s correct, sir. I slapped him to wake him up.”

“I see,” Thornson said. “Would you care to make a complaint, General Sabry?”

There was remorse in Lauterbach’s face, but a remorse too keen to have been caused by the manner of interrogation. No, the guilt was for what Lauterbach had learned.

I told him too much,
Sabry realized, his own guilt making him flush. He glanced at the man from the Red Cross to see if he had caught any hint of the shared sin. But Thornson was staring in pity at the IV in Sabry’s arm.

“Perhaps it would be best if you left the room, General Lauterbach. “

Lauterbach started. “What?” he asked faintly, and Sabry saw then that under Lauterbach’s crust of guilt lay a soft, unbearable pain.

What drives a man to despair?
Sabry wondered. Shame, of course, but that was an Arabic answer. Maudlin Americans grieved most over unrequited love.

Thornson said, “He’s obviously afraid of you. I doubt he wants to lodge the complaint with you in the room.”

“I understand.” The American nodded, spun on his heel, and walked out.

When the door closed, Sabry asked, “Did he tell you that he hit me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did he tell you what questions he asked?”

“No, sir. He told me he considered your conversation classified. “

Sabry motioned Thornson closer. His eyes narrowed with cunning; his smile grew edged. Lauterbach wanted to commit a sort of suicide and was asking Sabry to be the gun. But sometimes a gun’s aim was off. Sometimes the bullet didn’t kill; it maimed.

“He never touched me. We talked of the weather, of my leg. Just between us?” Sabry whispered. “I think the man is insane.”

EASTERN RADAR ARRAY, WARSAW, POLAND

The room was dark. Outside, the clouds had cleared. Zgursky stood in the window of the command room, caught in a shaft of moonlight.

Baranyk recalled that the flash of the Hiroshima camera had cast sooted shadows on walls, a portrait of the dying. He looked around the room and wondered what snapshots the flashbulbs of Warsaw would take.

At the radar screens, technicians hunched, a line of trolls in the green radiance of their VDTs. Near Zgursky sat Major Shcheribitsky, some trick of the warring lights—green and moon-pale—making his pock-marked face seem young.

Behind the closed bedroom door voices rose and fell, the sound of Czajowski’s and Jastrun’s argument. Baranyk wondered if the incandescent glare would catch their Punch-and-Judy silhouettes, too.

Baranyk asked Zgursky quietly, “Do you remember when I gave you your stripes?”

In the moonlight, Zgursky turned, the enchanted heir of a doomed kingdom.

“Do you remember, sergeant? I had the major call for you. Remember that, Gennady Ivanovich?”

Shcheribitsky slowly raised his head.

“To tease you, the major acted very distressed, and from the look on your face, I’m sure you had decided I was about to blame you for everything, for the fall of Kiev, for the crucifixion of Christ, perhaps. You were shaking in your boots, and I had no idea why.” Baranyk gave a soft laugh. Shcheribitsky chuckled with him.

Zgursky managed a smile.

“We have had some good times,” Baranyk told them. “Haven’t we? Despite the war, some good times.”

“Yes, sir,” Zgursky whispered.

Baranyk knew what portrait the blistering camera would make of them: three resigned figures, an image of good friends.

“Should we go into the basement, sir?” Zgursky asked.

Shcheribitsky shook his head, a beam of moonlight toying with his chestnut hair. “Quicker this way,” he said.

Very quick: a flashbulb. Baranyk pictured the winter melting into a second, momentary spring. In her cubbyhole of ice the dead little orphan would thaw and then burn.

“Remember when Corporal Lozhovska’s team was to move the T -80,” Baranyk asked, “but it was raining so they closed the hatches? And the Tatar driver ran over the car of the Minister of the Interior because he couldn’t see? It was hell trying to convince the Poles the Muslim was a loyal Ukrainian and the destruction of the minister’s new Volvo an accident.”

A grin tugged one side of Zgursky’s mouth.

“Remember the good times,” Baranyk said.

The argument beyond the door crescendoed. Shcheribitsky raised his head like a fox sniffing the air. Jastrun burst into the room, still raging.

“We must surrender!” he cried.

Czajowski was at his heels. “I will get on the phone again to Lauterbach. I will talk to him. He will listen to reason.”

The colonel whirled on his commander, his face so twisted that in the green light of the radar screens he resembled a terrorized demon. “He does not answer the
phone!”
Jastrun screamed. “Damn you! He does not come to the
phone!
We will surrender now. Don’t you see? Lieutenant—” He snapped his fingers. “Lieutenant—”

An officer stood up, awaiting orders. It was obvious that Jastrun had forgotten the man’s name.

“Lieutenant. Get to the radio station immediately. Send out a message to the Arabs that we offer terms. And tell the citizens of Warsaw to go to their basements ...”

“Ignore that order,” Czajowski told the man as the lieutenant took a hesitant step to the door.

“You will kill them!” Jastrun screamed. “If you do not tell them what is coming, you will murder everyone!”

The men at the radar screens watched fearfully, uncertain which officer would win, and whose orders they would obey.

“I will try Lauterbach again,” Czajowski said.

“You have sucked the American’s cock!” Jastrun shouted. “And now they kick you for a whore!”

Shcheribitsky roared, “Shut up!”

Baranyk was taken aback by his aide’s vehemence. To Shcheribitsky, apparently, sins were not all equal. For the Americans to bomb Warsaw was a transgression to be sure, but for the colonel to admonish his own commander—that was an offense in the sight of God.

“Be reasonable, colonel,” Baranyk said. ‘There is nothing to be gained by surrender. The Americans will bomb anyway.”

“Don’t you see?” Jastrun threw his arms wide, as though to carry them all into the mutiny with him. “If the Arabs know what is coming, they may shoot the planes down.”

Baranyk’s stomach curdled. Holy Father. To help the Arabs hunt the Americans down. The idea had a certain ugly seduction.

It struck him suddenly that what he most wanted in the world was a drink. He wondered if there was time for Zgursky to find him a bottle, and if he dared give the boy such an order.

“A good soldier knows when to fight. He also knows when fighting is useless,” Baranyk said.

“You
dare tell
me
what a good soldier knows?” Jastrun blurted, turning on Baranyk. “You and your Ukrainian fatalism? Will you let Warsaw fall as you did Kiev, with your head stuck in a bottle of vodka?”

A blur at the corner of Baranyk’s vision. Shcheribitsky had launched himself from his chair. Head lowered, the smaller major hit the tall, thin Pole in the stomach, driving him backward. The breath exploded from the colonel’s lungs in a loud
oof.

Arms locked, the two men staggered into a table and then into a pile of helmets. They went down. Helmets clicked and rolled like skulls.

Furious grunts from the struggling men. Fists smacked flesh. The wooden floor creaked. Jastrun, the victor, sprang up and ran for the door.

“Colonel? I will shoot you,” Czajowski said mildly.

Jastrun whirled, his hand on the doorknob. The Polish commander had drawn his sidearm, a blue steel Makarov, and was aiming it at Jastrun’s chest. On the floor, Shcheribitsky was getting up, cradling his bleeding face.

“I beg you to sit down,” Czajowski told the colonel. “There is a bullet in the chamber, and my arthritis makes my fingers stiff. I haven’t the control of the trigger that I would like.”

Jastrun froze. Prudently keeping his head down, Shcheribitsky was crawling away.

“Colonel?” Czajowski asked.

“Please,” Jastrun whispered. Tears glistened on his cheeks. “Please. We will never forgive ourselves if we do not warn them.”

Was this the way the flashbulb would catch them? Baranyk wondered. Was this to be their last testament? Would tourists, years from now, marvel at the silhouettes of dying men with hands at each other’s throats?

‘‘Target acquired,” a technician said. Czajowski’s gun hand fell limply to his side. “Target acquired and tracking now, sir.”

Baranyk went over to the technician. “One?” he barked. “One, sir,” the man replied, his voice a little hopeful. “No IFF. Too slow to be a missile. A plane, then. At fifty-five thousand feet. Too high for a bomber, don’t you think, sir? It might be an Arab recon.”

Baranyk said, “A gravity bomb. On an old B-52.”

Some sixteen kilometers distant, Arab AAA began to rattle.

“Let us fire our last missiles!” Jastrun begged. “Please let us fire our last few missiles to bring it down.”

“No,” Czajowski said.

The white mark on the screen inched closer and closer, approaching along the polar route.

Suddenly Czajowski spun and went to the bedroom. “I will call Lauterbach again,” he said. “I will call the Americans, and they will listen to reason.”

The Pole slammed the door. The crash made Baranyk flinch even though he was expecting it, even though he knew it was not the last sound he would hear.

“I remember when I was a boy,” Zgursky said, “and we had a cow who didn’t like to be milked. She would piss on you, isn’t that funny? When you got close to her flanks, she would piss.” His laughter fluttered high, higher, dizzily out of reach. “I remember—”

“Twelve kilometers out,” the technician said.

Baranyk held his breath. The Arab AAA rattled angrily beyond the window.

“I traveled once to St. Petersburg,” Zgursky was saying in a rush. “My father became angry because we were lost. Such a big city. My mother laughed at him. I remember ...”

Quicker than a heartbeat, Baranyk thought. One blinding flash, and they would all be soot on a bare, standing wall.

“My sister was allergic to oranges,” Zgursky prattled. “And what did her new boyfriend give her? But she ate them anyway. Welts all over, and still she ate them.”

Not burned to death. Vaporized. Baranyk rolled the idea around his mind like a bitter cherry.

The tech’s voice rose. “Moving away now! Sir! It is moving away!”

A flat bang. Gasps peppered the living room. Baranyk turned to the mute bedroom door. In three strides he was there, his hand on the cool knob, his heart in his throat.

Blue smoke layered the brightly lit bedroom’s air. Czajowski stood, pistol in hand.

The phone lay in pieces, its plastic cover burst. “He wouldn’t speak to me,” Czajowski said with an apologetic shrug. “Lauterbach wouldn’t come to the phone.”

KAMPINESKA FOREST, NEAR WARSAW

The world was shades of film-negative gray. Across the snow, moonlight cast latticework shadows. The old man’s shrieks echoed among the pines.

“Why doesn’t somebody shut him up,” the pilot muttered.

The two Arabs, arms folded, danced a jig of cold. “Hey!” the pilot shouted. “I’d like to go to Florida now! You hear me, you assholes?”

A sharp rattle. Rita turned. Two soldiers in calf-length coats emerged from the gathered trees, AK-47s in their hands.

“Oh, hey,” the pilot said. “This is good. This is creative.”

The soldiers’ frightened gazes brushed Rita and fixed on the shrieking man. The screamer fell to his knees. Guttural orders from the soldiers. A Slavic language. Russian? Czech?

“No,” the pilot said. “No, really. This is great.”

The Saudi officer was inching away. Any minute he would run and the soldiers would kill them all. The soldiers’ voices grew shriller, more alarmed. The Saudi froze; but the old Turk got to his feet. Arms outspread, he made his cringing way toward the soldiers like a dog coming to heel.

A shout. A warning? Then an end-of-the-world crack as an AK spat flame. The top of the screamer’s head exploded. He dropped. The pilot stumbled back whimpering, his cheeks chicken-poxed with the screamer’s brain.

A firefly mass of bobbing lights hurried through the forest. A voice snapped in Slavic-accented English, “American? You are American?”

Aimed flashlights struck bullet-blasts of color: the aqua of the pilot’s shoulder patch; the strawberry spill of blood on his cheeks.

An officer pushed his way into the barrage of light, his boots squeaking in the snow. Two angry lines bracketed his mouth. The muscles in his jaw worked.

The pilot lurched in wind-up-toy circles. He stumbled over the body of the screamer and fell into a drift.

The officer stepped over the corpse and pulled his sidearm from its holster. Grabbing a fistful of the pilot’s hair, he shoved the 9mm to the boy’s throat “American pilot!” The officer’s words emerged in cartoon-balloons of fog. “What are you doing with Arabs? Will you kill us and then betray us to the enemy, too? What are your orders?”

“I don’t remember,” the pilot babbled. “I can’t ... Maybe it was a CAP mission for the bombers. Maybe ...”

“Where are your bombs? Your plane?”

“I punched out! Oh, Jesus! I punched out! I didn’t mean it. And I told them stuff. I told them everything! I’m sorry if I—”

“General Lauterbach will want to see us!” Rita said.

The officer turned.

“You’re allies, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Once I thought we were.” His eyes were arctic blue.

She stepped toward him and stumbled. Her numb feet seemed to have merged with her boots, so she couldn’t tell where leather ended and skin began. “Help us,” she told him. “We’re going to freeze to death.”

“We will all be dead in a few minutes.” Skirting the dead body, the officer walked into the circle of blinding light. “Stand him up, captain! Stand the pilot up.”

The Navy boy, frenzy consumed, had fallen facedown. “If we shoot him on the ground, we will make a mess of it.”

“Wait!” Rita gasped.

A barked order. The dry rattle of cocking guns. The Saudi officer, ablaze in the light as though already transcended to Heaven, covered his face and moaned.

“Wait a minute!” Rita shouted. “For Christ’s sake wait just a minute! What’s the matter with you people?”

It was a trick, that was it. Any moment, Dr. Gladdings would walk out of the hazy, monochrome moonlight to ask what she thought of death.

It sucks, that’s what she’d tell him. Death was a crock. Her nose was running, the mucus freezing on her lips.

Wanting to plead, she opened her mouth. The icy breeze stole her breath.

Beyond the screen of trees came a loud
chug-chug.
Fire stitched a red seam across the night.

The forest was thinner than Rita had imagined. Beyond the fringe of pine, buildings were etched in the glow of the barrage.

The flashlight beams lowered, casting polka dots on the snow. The soldiers stood swathed in moonlight, their rifles pointed down, their heads lifted to the flashing sky.