“Where the hell is the promised land?” Lili demanded.
“A place where men and women can be honest with each other, and share their responsibilities, and base all relationships on truth, not inadequacies and fear.”
“What do you mean by fear?”
“Most relationships are based on fear to varying degrees; fear that your mother will be cross, fear that your teacher will be angry, fear that your boyfriend will leave you, fear that your boss will fire you, or fear that the Russians will kill you.”
“What do you mean by inadequacy?”
“An example of a relationship based on inadequacy is a marriage that a woman enters into because she’s frightened that she’s unattractive, or she’s frightened that she’ll never get married, or she’s frightened that she can’t support herself.”
Slowly Lili said, “Then we are pioneers and explorers, and what we are discovering is a better way to live.”
“Hopefully, yes.”
* * *
Sand and rock spurted into the shell hole where the American war photographer and three Sydonite soldiers pressed themselves into the shuddering earth. Another shell burst at the far lip of the crater, half burying their legs. The next one will get us, thought Mark, his lean body cringing against the hot earth. I must not panic, I must not panic, I must not panic, he chanted silently to himself, like a mantra; if the next one does not get you, you will have to run, and if you panic, your legs will turn to water, and you’ll move so slowly, you’ll get hit immediately. I must not panic, I must not panic. He brushed his dirty-brown hair off his forehead and knuckled the dust from heat-sore gray eyes.
At his side, two soldiers leapt up as another shell whistled overhead; they struggled up the sliding sides of the crater, trying to run forward as the ground crumbled under their legs, and the shell ploughed into the sand behind the crater.
A burst of gunfire caught the men squarely in the neck and chest, and flung them back into the shell hole. Their blood splashed over the two remaining men crouched in the crater and Mark wiped some of the spattered drops off his camera. Mark’s wide mouth was bleeding, his big lips were suncracked and his thin face was covered with sun blisters; his small, pugnacious nose was pink and raw because he always forgot his sunblock.
Another shell howled overhead, and bullets smacked into the sand around the crater. “No way I’m going to get killed while being unprofessional,” Mark muttered as he reloaded his camera. “When they roll my carcass over, the last shot will be fit to print.”
In the few seconds the distant mortar took to reload, two Sydonite soldiers and an officer hurled themselves forward into the shell hole, falling over their dead comrades. They scrambled to their feet, pushed the bleeding bodies to one side, and started to position a missile launcher.
Mark noticed that the young officer was using an infrared tracking device to aim the missiles. For once, thought Mark, King Abdullah’s petrodollars have been well spent. The officer was calm and businesslike, they would have been proud of him back at Sandhurst. Did this quietly competent youth know that he was in charge of a suicide mission? Mark wondered. Major Khalid had tried to stop the photographer from coming out with this patrol. With hindsight, Mark realized that the major was too insistent that this was merely to be a routine reconnaissance mission, of no interest to the Western press. But, because so much desert warfare was carried on at night, when it was impossible to take photographs, Mark had argued with the Major. What the callous bastard had not chosen to spell out to Mark was that the platoon had been sent out as cannon fodder, to draw the guerrillas’ fire, and the Major didn’t want any half-baked heroics from an American journalist.
Again, Mark wiped the lens of his Nikon, composed the shot in his mind’s eye and carefully photographed the dead men, who were huddled together in the dirt like sleeping children; both were drenched in blood and the smaller soldier had a boot print clearly stenciled in carmine across his face. Concentration steadied Mark’s hands and wiped the panic from his body, as he cleared his mind to get the high definition which made his pictures look so vivid. A Mark Scott picture could be sent by wire around the world and not be reduced to a blur when it was printed.
Mark’s panic surged back as soon as the shutter clicked, and he watched the other three men in the shell hole work to wipe out the enemy position, grimly aware that this was their only chance of getting out alive. One soldier loaded the first slim missile down the launcher’s muzzle, and the officer watched his tracking device as it hurtled forward in a high arc.
From the hillside ahead, another shell roared over the shell hole as the angle of the missile launcher was lowered and again fired at the mortar emplacement ahead, which was tucked under a rocky overhang behind a wall of sandbags.
Mark focused carefully on the intent faces around the launcher. These men would have no chance of leaving this crater alive unless they could get a rocket into the eighteen inch gap between the rocky overhang and the sandbags to blow out the gun and the men manning it.
Another adjustment to the weapon, another rocket down the spout, another retort as it was fired. This time, no answering shell screamed back from the hillside ahead.
The Sydonite officer ordered another round and again there was no response.
The air was harsh with heat, smoke, and the sweetly pungent stink of war. Now Mark fought relief with the same intensity that he had earlier fought panic. Cool it, cool it, for Chrissake stay cool, stay down, stay alive. Mark had often seen men jump up in elation, believing they had been snatched from the jaws of death, only to be mown down by an enemy who understood that his last chance would be the other side’s carelessness.
The young officer ordered his two remaining men to crawl forward, one by one, taking advantage of every rock and every rise in the cracked earth, as they snaked forward, until they were below the rocky hill.
They started to scramble upwards. When they were closer to the enemy mortar emplacement, a grenade was thrown into the gap from which the gun barrel still projected. Caution saved them. With a howl of pain, a man’s body was catapulted out by the blast. Behind the billowing pall of dust and smoke, Mark saw the machine gun whipping to and fro on its tripod.
“Better use the back door,” said the officer. “Grenades may have weakened the roof of that cave.”
They crawled out of the heat into another opening in the rock, part of an interconnected labyrinth across a limestone cavern, packed with stores which looked like the usual guerrillas’ jumble of substandard or obsolete arms and explosives. Over a hundred crates, containing 1000-gram sticks of TNT were stacked by polyethylene bags, each containing 24 sticks of gelignite. Beyond was a box of safety fuses and a crate of No. 27 instantaneous aluminum detonators, half-hidden by a tangle of Cordtex detonating cords. Further back in the cave were a few primer sticks of TNT and two boxes of TNT flakes. The hot dessicated air of Sydon had preserved the arms from rust, but nitroglycerin had soaked through the wax coating of some of the cartridges, so the pile was liable to explode at the slightest impact.
“Why did we bother?” the young officer was cheerful as he spoke to Mark in his correct, but guttural English. “One cigarette would have done our job for us.” It was a weak joke, but to the four survivors of the fourteen-man platoon which had set out that morning, it was hilarious.
Bright sunlight slid through slits in the rock and illuminated the interconnected caves as Mark wandered below the stack of old equipment. Seeing that some of the crates were marked in Cyrillic script, as well as English, Mark used his Swiss army knife, the only weapon he ever carried, to lever out the nails. The crate was full of Russian MUV igniters, for use in priming booby traps.
Further back in the cave, Mark found crates of Kalashnikov rifles, Chinese grenades, 122mm BM 21 Katyusha rockets with 20 kilo warheads and a Goryunova SG-43 machine gun. The inner cavern was a treasure trove of Soviet arms, and, unlike the elderly Western supplies near the entrance, they were clean and new.
Mark quickly moved to the devastated front of the cave, where the mortar still stood among the debris of fallen rock and torn flesh. The six bodies wore ragged U.S. army surplus battle fatigues. One man was still alive, although his chest was a gaping hole filled with blood; his lips stretched wide in agony as he tried to speak. Realizing that the man might live long enough to give them useful information, the Sydonite officer reached for his water bottle and dribbled some liquid into the cracked mouth. As the dying man mumbled a few words, Mark realized that they were not Arabic. The dying man was dark haired and olive skinned but, as Mark looked at the dirt-caked face, he realized that those features were unmistakably Latin.
“Cubanos?” Mark asked.
The man hissed his last words. “Si. Viva … re … revolución.”
Four of the dead men were Cubans. One of the corpses wore a neck medallion with Castro’s head on it. The other two enemy corpses were unmistakable Arabs; one had a prayer written in Arabic script on a scrap of cloth tied around his right wrist. “He asked the Prophet to guide his hand,” explained the officer, tossing away the rag.
“Mercenaries?” asked Mark.
“Sure,” the young officer answered. “Intelligence warned us that the Fundamentalist guerrillas had Soviet equipment. It’s not surprising that they also brought the men to use them.”
He ordered a soldier to carry the damaged explosives down the hillside; they then threw a grenade into the lethal pile and destroyed it.
The four survivors waited until starlight before approaching the nearest village. They entered the settlement with caution and were similarly greeted, then escorted to the headman’s house. A young boy in white came forward and offered a brass bowl of dates. Wearily, Mark pushed the food away.
“You will eat!” the young officer angrily told him. “While you are with my men, you are my responsibility, so you will eat and drink when I tell you.”
Mark apologized. He never remembered his physical needs while he was working; his goal was first to get his pictures, then to get back alive.
“And now we sleep,” the officer told him. Obediently, Mark stretched out with the three soldiers on the mud floor of the hut.
At dawn, Major Khalid drove into the village and Mark shipped out on a truck that was crammed with wounded men. This was going to be a stinking, uncomfortable ride, Mark thought. Then, to his surprise, two black-veiled peasant women also climbed onto the truck. Between them, they carried a seven-year-old girl, her abdomen greatly swollen above filthy swaddled bandages which bound her legs together like a mummy. The child was running a high fever, her eyes rolling upward and her cheeks dry and flaking, as she lay across the legs of the two peasant women.
When the truck reached the hospital, Mark helped to carry the wounded into the building. Then he heaved his kit bag on to his back and set off for the gate. He was almost out of the hospital grounds, when a male nurse ran up to him. “Come,” said the male nurse, “come—take picture.” Mark followed the male nurse along the hospital corridor. Outside the casualty room stood a gray-haired, tired, skinny woman, with her hands thrust into the pockets of her white coat. “You are a journalist?” she asked Mark.
“Sure.”
“To whom do you sell your photographs?”
“Time, Newsweek, all the European magazines; my agency sells worldwide.”
“Then I want you to photograph that girl. It must be done without her mother’s knowledge or she will prevent it.”
Mark followed the white-coated woman to a small beige room where the girl lay on a stretcher, her stomach bloated, as if she were pregnant. A female nurse was gently unwinding the bandages that held the child’s legs together. Mark had asked no questions, because the urgency in the doctor’s voice had told him that whatever he was going to see might be important. In silence, he prepared his cameras, while the nurse rigged a drip into the girl’s thin arm; as she increased the volume of the liquid flowing into her vein, the girl slipped into unconsciousness. The smell of septicemia pervaded the small room.
As the bandages were removed, Mark saw a mass of pus and blood oozing between the little legs; her delicate young genitals were caked in a brown paste of what looked like chewed grass. As the nurse gently sponged water over the stinking mass, another nurse held the small dusty feet together, then eased the girl’s thighs apart, allowing the coltish knees slowly to fall outwards.
The lips of the girl’s vulva were speared by a row of long acacia thorns lashed across with black twine. As the caked paste and scabs of blood were washed away from the cat’s cradle of thorns and string, Mark saw cloudy green pus trickling from a tiny opening at the bottom of the closed slit. Quickly, he photographed, as the nurse snipped the threads, picked each piece off with tweezers, then carefully, so as not to break them, pulled the thorns out, one by one. The last thing Mark saw was the child’s mutilated genitals gaping bloody and rotten as the last thorn came out. Then he fainted.
Mark opened his eyes in an emergency room, reached for a kidney bowl and vomited the remains of the previous night’s milk and dates into it. The woman doctor heard his retching and came over to him. Mark said, “What had they done to that girl? That’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.”
“They made her into good marriage material.” The doctor was unable to keep the fury out of her voice. “A virgin bride and a docile wife. They do that in most of Africa and also some of the most primitive communities in the Arab states. They circumcised her; they deliberately mutilated her genitals. First, they cut out her clitoris and all of her labia minora; a wife that cannot fully enjoy sex is less likely to stray.”
“But who did it?”
“Probably the village midwife used the razor, while the girl’s mother and her sisters held her down. Of course they have no anesthetics. Then, earth or ashes would have been rubbed on the wound to stop the bleeding. Then they sewed her up, as you saw, with thorns and twine. They leave a miniscule opening for urine and menstrual blood. Then they bind her legs together to immobilize them.”
“Why is her stomach so swollen?”
“It is swollen with blackish, foul-smelling blood.”
“But what happens after she’s married?”
“What do you think? Her husband cuts her open with a dagger, then runs around the village, waving the bloodstained blade so they can all see that the bride has just been deflowered. It goes without saying that mutilated women feel severe pain during intercourse, and sometimes the husband doesn’t cut enough, so when the girl has her first child, she splits open like a melon.”
“Are they all … operated on at such a young age?”
“The earlier a child is mutilated, the greater is the damage, since infantile and adolescent masturbation teaches the orgasm.”
Mark heaved a further mouthful of bile into the bowl. “What do you want me to do with the pictures?”
“Photographs may alert the Western World to what is happening here.” The doctor pulled off her heavy-framed spectacles, and rubbed her tired eyes. “I was one of the doctors who gave evidence to the United Nations Commission that investigated female circumcision in the Gulf States, but their report was ignored. However, as you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. I see cases like that girl every month, some are even worse.” She sighed. “But the government of Sydon, which pretends that this practice no longer exists, would be unable to ignore a photograph in an American magazine. Western pressure would force the Sydonite government to take action.”
“Do you mean King Abdullah?” asked Mark.
“No, not the King. The Department of Health suppresses all information. I think they keep the facts from the King because many of his Western reforms are unpopular.”
Mark felt a quick sympathy for this doctor. Pity for the wretched peoples of the earth was the driving force in his life; however many corpses he photographed, however many of his friends disappeared in combat zones, Mark’s compassion was as profound as it had been ten years earlier when, an ide
alistic teen-ager, he had run away to his first war. He said, “Before I leave Sydon, I am to photograph King Abdullah. I will try to show him the pictures.” Behind the doctor’s spectacles, Mark saw gratitude and hope.
* * *
From his army helicopter, Mark saw Semira on the skyline. The political capital of Sydon rose in tiers of white fortified walls from the green plain that lay below it, on the bank of the country’s only river. As the helicopter flew over the white-domed rooftops, Mark could see the Royal Standard flying from the castellated towers of the Palace that crowned the ancient town. Even though he was stuck in the desert, Major Khalid had been able to pull the necessary strings to arrange Mark’s audience with King Abdullah because Major Khalid wanted full credit for the discovery of the enemy arms dump, the existence of which had been proved by Mark’s photographs.
Mark was conducted by two ADCs into the King’s presence. The King rose from behind his elaborate antique French desk.
“Salaam Alaikum.”
“Alaikum a Salaam.” King Abdullah preferred the simple traditional greeting of peace to the elaborate extended courtesies which were his birthright, as the fourteenth hereditary ruler of his country. “Intelligence tells me you have been in the Eastern Hills with Major Khalid, and that you are one of the survivors of the Major’s assault on the guerrillas in Wadi al Hasa. Let’s look at your pictures.”
Lace II Page 6
