by David Poyer
“How many technicals?” The man doesn’t answer. “How many tanks? Are there any tanks? Are there Americans with them?”
“No tanks.” The prisoner can speak, at least. He seems either astonishingly ignorant or damaged in the brain. “You have . . . qat?”
Ghedi ignores this. “Who is your general?”
“Awsami Michel.”
Ghedi looks at Juulheed, who shrugs. It sounds Tawahedo. “A Christian?” he asks, but gets only another gap-toothed gape.
Juulheed spits. “Shall I shoot him?”
“No. That would be a waste.” He says to the man gently, “Will you join us, brother? It is said: ‘Those who believe fight in the cause of God, while those who disbelieve fight for the cause of tyranny.’ If you wish, you may return to your comrades. But I ask: Will you join us instead? Fight under the banner of God, and win eternal Paradise?”
The man hesitates, and Ghedi puts his hand on his shoulder. When he looks up there’s a spark of hope in those battered eyes. He nods.
“Put him in the first rank to go forward,” Gehdi says, stroking the man’s hair. Juulheed smiles in understanding as the bloody man falls to his knees, kissing his hands, sobbing thanks. Men outside the tent murmur among themselves. They look astonished.
Ghedi’s turning away when he thinks of another question. “Where are you from? Where do you call your home?”
“Ashaara City,” the man murmurs. Juulheed waits a moment more, then has one of his men lead him away.
“The lieutenants from the west are here,” Hasheer announces at the tent flap.
They’re the ones who marveled at his action with the enemy soldier. Juulheed rises and searches them, laying their weapons on a side table. Ghedi embraces each as he comes forward. Most are older than he, late twenties or early thirties, but they greet him with honorifics, calling him General or Orcharder. They have no troops for this battle, but they’re vital all the same. They’re from other Islamic militias, from the backcountry tribes whose women and children have been herded into the camps. Nassir has sent imams into those camps to preach and recruit. Now there are small bands all across the country.
“There is chai,” Ghedi says, “and rice, and bread and cold lamb. We Waleeli eat simply, but fight hard. As you’ll see today, when we crush the dogs of the foreigners and take Uri’yah.”
He’s unrolling a map when a commotion starts at the tent flap. A woman’s confronting Juulheed. “I will see him,” she cries shrilly. The tall Waleeli stands nonplussed, unwilling either to touch her or to let her pass.
“What is it she wants?”
“She says she is of your family,” one of the westerners says. “We found her on the road. When she heard we were coming to see you she insisted on accompanying us.”
Ghedi sets the map aside. He comes forward, studying her face. It’s been many years. She looks very different. She’s taller.
But it’s his sister. It’s Zeynaab.
The others look on astonished until he explains. Then they congratulate him. He asks her if she’s seen Nabil, if Nabil’s with her. She says no, after they were separated she never saw him again. He presses her to him, then holds her away to search the hollows of her cheeks, the dark pain of her eyes. She’s suffered. That much is plain.
But he has a battle to plan. He tells one of his lieutenants to take her to his tent and give her water and rice. Then pushes her from his mind and tells Juulheed to send a technical with a white flag to the roadblock.
BUT Michel refuses to meet. He sends the patrol back with the message that other attempts at communication will be fired on, unless they bring a surrender. Ghedi smiles. This general doesn’t trust his men. He’s heard how others have gone to fight the Waleeli and joined them instead. He keeps thinking how gaunt Zeynaab looks. He sends her back to his tent to make sure she eats and rests.
He stands in the wind, peering through his goggles, considering again if this is the time for battle. Is the darkness in the east taller? The wind stronger? He’s still gaining recruits. But the enemy’s reinforcing too. Juulheed stands behind him, voice a low gabble as he continues his endless conversation with himself.
He keeps coming back to that road. His force travels off-road. They’ve ditched every vehicle that won’t stand up cross-country, and his scouts have donkeys and camels. But the enemy opposite came down the road. They’re from the city, city soldiers.
“See what they’re doing over there?” says one of his lieutenants, a still-unbearded boy. “Those are mines. They’re laying mines.”
Mines! He’s not thought of this. He frowns. “We have no way of detecting mines.”
“No, General.”
“But, who knows where each mine is buried?”
“The enemy, General.”
“Who else?”
The youngster searches for a moment before he has the answer. “God knows.”
“That’s right. And He will reveal them to us.”
“That’s so, General. You’re right!” The boy gazes at him with adoration. For a moment Ghedi wonders: Is this idolatry? Blasphemy? Then dismisses it. All that he does is dedicated to His glory.
“We will attack,” he announces. “Gather my lieutenants for salat.”
HE leads the prayer, half his lieutenants standing with weapons in hand, the other half praying; then taking turns. Just as the Book describes, and it’s not lost on them. They bow and kneel, murmuring. He stands from the final prostration, dusting sand from his knees; his troops carry no prayer rugs.
He stands for an endless moment, watching the wind shape the green-fringed silk above his tent. Feeling, more than thinking, how each fold and snap and rustle has been predetermined since the creation of the world.
And suddenly he experiences a world filled to bursting with meaning. Not one grain of dust exists without infinite love. Not one thought passes through his mind without being lovingly created by God Himself. The world’s the mind of God, and he himself is His thought. He bows again, though they’re done praying. God does what He wills through him, and all his heart says yes to that subjection. “Praise be to God, the All-Merciful,” he murmurs. To God Himself, close as his heart, far above as the blinding sun that blazes through his closed lids.
“Did you see his face? It shines,” he hears one man whisper to another. He opens his mouth to correct him, then closes it. If a story makes men brave, he will not take it from them.
He discusses the plan with Juulheed, who’ll lead the armor. Examines the sky again, then says, “Farewell, and God be with you.” He waves as his talkative deputy climbs into the Fiat, wishing he could ride with him. The armored cars bump awkwardly, gathering speed, then swerve off to the west, into the hills.
Two trucks with dead engines have been towed into position flanking the tent. They’ll provide splinter protection. Out here there’s no other cover, and they can’t stop to dig in as the enemy has. Like a caravan between oases, they must go forward or die.
“Screen forward,” he tells Hasheer, and goes inside. He does not want to watch this opening of the battle, when a hundred men and women, enemies, prisoners, those being punished for unchastity or impiety, are driven into the enemy’s line. The soldier he forgave and welcomed this morning will be one. They’ll be shot down, the enemy taking them for the first wave before seeing they’re unarmed. Others will step on the deadly charges beneath the sand.
That’s out of his hands. All will be as God wills.
Engines roar as a dozen technicals start up. He lifts the flap of the tent, ties it up. He won’t be able to see the battlefield for long, but what there is to see, he must.
There’s one radio, but not enough receivers to make it tactically useful. In front of him’s a board with colored boxes, in each, a cell phone. Each phone connects him to a sector commander. They have flag signals too, but the phones are his main communications.
A crack, and the sky splits. Ocher dust erupts to his front. Artillery or mortars. He wishes he’d brought the Gelhirs’ c
annons. Then shakes his head and reaches for the next phone. They have gasoline for one attack. If the enemy realizes this, that they need only hold to win, he’ll have to stagger back into the desert with whoever remains. He must spend fuel, ammunition, lives, like a wealthy merchant. If he loses, he’ll be a beggar.
Three hundred yards in front of his lines the technicals pivot, spewing dust as they race across the desert. The dust plumes grow. They’re caught by the growing wind, whirled into dust devils, blown downwind in a seething cloud the color of earth.
Into his enemies’ eyes.
“Attack,” he says over and over, laying down one phone, picking up the next. “Attack. Attack.”
The towering darkness grows. It’s almost on them.
Within minutes all visibility vanishes. The desert plunges into night, the sun replaced by a russet fog through which invisible things lunge. Mortar bursts erupt, and the clatter of machine guns. And far away, the screaming of men. Ghedi hunches over the map. Its traceries of lines and cross-hatchings suddenly seem unreal, its sheath of powdery sand its only truth. What can he say over these telephones? His men know what they must do. In the corner of the tent, Hasheer looks apprehensive.
Ghedi grabs his Kalashnikov and runs outside. Hasheer tries to stop him, but he shakes him off.
Outside the dust is choking, whipped into the air by wheels and the enormous breath of the storm. The wind sends it into his teeth. His men fight swathed to the eyes, their weapons wrapped to exclude the grit. The enemy, though, are city folk. This howling chaos is new to them. On the other hand, there are the mines. Many of his men will die. This he accepts as right, and the manifest will of one who determines from eternity the fate moment to moment of His every creature. He laughs aloud, a toy of God who wills all that He wills.
The technical’s already rolling, a Toyota pickup in the green and tan tiger stripes of those who were first to join. The men reach to haul him aboard. They scream, waving rifles. Under their headscarves a glistening membrane is plastered over their eyes. Plastic wrap, looted from one of the WFO trucks. He stuffs his pockets with rounds from the open box stenciled in Chinese. A shell explodes so close the blast ripples the murky air, and he screams too, God is great, God is great. The engine snarls and the truck slams against something he can’t see. Engines roar from all around him. Other shadows loom, tearing along with them. The enemy has trucks too, but from each of Ghedi’s flutters a long banner of black-and-green fire.
The storm hits, bellowing like a thousand engines, and they plunge blind into darkness. Clinging with one hand, firing with the other when he glimpses a target. Bullets whine past and snap into the frame. Cartridge cases spew, flying, rolling underfoot. A glimpse of wire to one side, but somehow they’ve arrowed into a gap. An enormous bang; a truck flips, throwing off men and weapons like a bucking donkey as it cartwheels. A machine-gun team their driver swerves instantly to head for. The oversized tires bottoming in shallow trenches, the men hurl the plastic grenades in every direction. They crack savagely, spraying death in the form of hundreds of tiny steel balls. Ghedi and every other man in the truck fires as fast as he can, the machine gun slamming slugs right over their heads, deafening him. The taste of smoke and powder, the gritty dust clogging mouth and nose, the exhaust from worn-out engines. His Kalashnikov barrel so hot he lets go the handguard but keeps firing, ramming in magazine after magazine.
Then suddenly he’s in the air, flying. He turns over and crashes to the sand. Tires grate past as he grips at the dry dirt, then spots a crater and rolls into it. A man stares at him stupidly. Ghedi tries to fire, fails, jerks the bayonet out and runs it into him. A crunching give. The man screams and drops his weapon, clawing at Ghedi. Someone else shoots him and his head splatters like a ripe pomegranate. Another truck tears by. The men in it fire at them but the bullets crack into the soil and the body that now sags lifeless.
Two of his men haul him up. They stagger into the murk, trailing the technicals. Screams and moans all around. Broken bodies, blood, a screaming camel dragging half its body across the sand. He’s lost all orientation but the wind. He lets it drive him forward, stopping only to snatch up a new weapon when his grows too hot to hold. His hands are blistered claws. A man with gray in his beard kneels in the dust, clutching his belly. His eyes bulge as he stares at a pool of his own entrails. Past him trucks lurch, troops clinging to their sides as if to a bucking boat. They carry not the Waleeli banner, but the black, yellow, and green of the old national flag, before the president put the red star on it.
A shout. “Airplane! Airplane!” And a screeching louder even than the storm as a shape sweeps overhead. It’s followed by a noise he’s never heard before: a deep bellow that suddenly turns the whole inside of the storm yellow with flame.
He’s both terrified and joyous. The terror’s part of the joy, the joy’s part of the wind, God’s entering him as he fights for God. This is Paradise despite the screams as men burn alive, whirling like Sufis, lighting up the bloody murk. The planes tear over again and muffled whoomphs echo over the plain, the gasoline smell’s suffocating, but he doesn’t fear them. They can’t see within the murk, the dust; all they can see is confused struggle. They’re bombing both sides as they swirl in the demonic brew of battle.
Another explosion flings him through the air and he crashes into soft things, bodies. They push back, cursing: aim rifles; lower them at sight of his armband. The dead man at their feet wears a string of amulets, inscribed with a holy verse that deflects bullets. Another bends and strips it off the corpse and slides it onto his own arm.
Ghedi’s in a secondary trench system. Ahead he makes out the low buildings he saw that morning. Beyond them is the roadblock, then Uri’yah itself. An emaciated woman crawls through the dust as if swimming; she drags a dead child. One of the refugees driven into the minefield. There’s no point feeding those who can’t fight. But how has she gotten so far? And what grim determination drives her on, hauling her dead with her?
He’s gathering his men when a yell comes from the direction of the huts. A line appears, wavering shadows dotted with pricks of light. Bullets whine and snap. Ghedi fires back until he’s out of cartridges. The men search bodies, but find only a few rounds. The advancing line fall to their bellies and fire. Then a few rise and rush forward as the others lay down a hail of fire. His men hug the ground. One breaks and runs, throwing away his rifle. The attacking line rise and rush again.
A blow rocks his head back as something invisible strikes his mouth. When he puts his hand to it, it’s numb and wet. Motors bawl in the murk. When he looks behind him men are scrambling down from trucks, aiming rifles. They’re not Waleeli. His little party’s surrounded and falling fast. A poppy-colored flame lights the murk again, and a wave of heat, smoke, and gasoline fumes rolls across the desert.
Ghedi looks forward, at the huts. He gets to his feet and rotates the stubby bayonet out again and locks it. “God is great!” he shouts. “Follow me!”
Lurching like a camel spider, he claws his way over the lip of the trench and charges into the gun flashes. And hears, behind him, the eager shouts of the men who charge with him, into the face of Death itself.
When tubby shapes snarl from the murk ahead and the charging line slow, twist to look behind them, then scatter in panic, he still lurches ahead. As lances of fire and smoke erupt from the bannered turrets and four, six, eight RPGs fly overhead and detonate on the trucks behind him, he screams and brandishes the rifle in the air.
The steel hulls of Juulheed’s armored cars churn past from their great loop to the west and back, taking the enemy positions from behind, grinding over trenches and bodies and hastily discarded rifles, utterly shattering the enemy front. Ghedi stands erect, chanting into the sky through a smashed mouth filled with blood. The road to the capital’s clear. No barrier remains between the Waleeli and their goal. “This is what God and His messenger have promised us.
“There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet!
”
The chanted refrain from all around on the battlefield is echoed, as by an inhuman choir, by a roar from the very sky.
19
The Empty Quarter
GRÁINNE stood watching the rig with hands on hips, ignoring glances from men in dirty uniform trousers, sweat-soaked T-shirts, green hard hats with names and rank insignia, muddy boots. Even through shades and a bush hat, the glare was like a hot lead helmet. Far off a mirage danced on a salt flat, wavering and jerking like a lure dangled by the devil to tempt men to doom.
The soldiers were from Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 133, out of Gulfport, Louisiana. They called themselves “Seabees.” They’d introduced themselves as steelworkers, equipment operators, electricians. There were even a few women. One had given her the camouflage pants she wore.
She’d met the lieutenant in charge, and they’d followed her Land Rover from their airport staging point up the road to Nakar, where she’d led them off-pavement. Minutes later his Humvee had pulled up as he waved her over. “Sure you know where you’re going, Doctor?”
But here they were, all the same. He’d told her 133 had teams and equipment to drill not one, but five wells at once. After the meeting with Ahearn she’d explored her conscience and her maps, trying both to test her hypothesis about the paleowater lens and to actually provide fresh water to the nomad Nasaris.
She’d plotted five locations. Four were in already-known artesian formations, where she was fairly sure they’d find water close to the surface, though it might not recharge. Which would mean the wells would run out, maybe in a month, maybe a year. There was a reason this was desert.
Number Five wasn’t going to hit water. At least, not for a long time. If it came up fresh, Ashaara’s future would be different. If it came up brackish, or contaminated with salts or sulfates . . . no geologist could change what was under the ground.
Now that fifth rig, perched on the blasted side of what looked almost like some ancient volcanic crater, was roaring its way down into the dry dirt, sending fine blue smoke drifting on the desert wind.
