by Ben Bova
The pilot mopped his face with a dirty handkerchief as he came toward us. His shirt was dark with sweat, sticking to him.
“UN blokes should be here soon enough,” he said.
“You’re not leaving us here alone!” I said.
The pilot stretched his arm and pointed. “That’d be your reception committee, I expect.”
A cloud of brown dust was scurrying along the road toward the airstrip. I squinted and made out a truck. But it seemed to be a grayish brown color, not the glaring white of the UN.
“Well, good luck,” said the pilot. He stuck his hand out.
I didn’t take it. “What if that’s not the UN?”
“Who else could it be?”
Julia smiled and said, “I’m sure the captain has a schedule to maintain. We shouldn’t keep him, dear.”
The pilot laughed. “Well, yes, sort of. Got to taxi over to the fuel dump and fill up the tanks and all that.”
“Carry on,” said Julia. “We’ll be fine.”
I wanted to say otherwise but I didn’t want to look like an asshole in front of them. So I strained my eyes watching the approaching truck, then looked at the gaggle of laborers who had unloaded the plane, then at Julia. She seemed completely in charge of herself, totally unperturbed. What if that’s not the UN? I asked myself. What if it’s bandits or one of those warlords come down here to steal the medical supplies?
But I just stood there like a dumb jackass while the pilot climbed back into his rattletrap cargo plane and started the far-side engine with an explosive roar that made me hop almost out of my skin. Julia sat on one of the wooden crates. I stared at that approaching truck with my stomach churning inside me, and the plane trundled off noisily toward the fuel dump at the far end of the flyblown, almost deserted, sun-blasted airstrip.
“It is the UN, darling,” Julia said. I saw that she held a small pair of field glasses to her eyes. Where did she get those? I had never seen them before.
But I sure felt relieved at her announcement. And even more relieved when she passed the binoculars to me and I could see the blue United Nations symbol on the side of the white truck. It was all covered over with a film of gray-brown dust, of course.
The truck bore four Pakistani soldiers and a Canadian captain in desert camouflage uniforms and blue UN helmets, plus the doctor who was leaving Eritrea. He was an Indonesian, small, dark, and very happy to be on his way home.
“It is hopeless here,” he told me somberly, while the plane taxied back from the fuel dump. “Absolutely hopeless.”
Great news.
“Surely it can’t be all that bad,” Julia said with a smile.
The Indonesian merely shook his head. As soon as the crew popped open the hatch in the plane’s side he scampered for it, without another word. While the local laborers sweated to load the truck, the plane took off, engines howling, blowing gritty dust in our faces. Then it dwindled into the burning sky and disappeared. All of a sudden I felt very alone in a strange and barren landscape of brown hills and unbearable heat.
Julia snapped me out of it. “Well, then,” she said cheerfully, “shall we put our bags on the truck?”
The Pakistani soldiers did nothing to help us. They stood around—uneasily, I thought—and squinted toward the distant bare hills, heavy automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. Their fingers were never far from the triggers.
The Canadian captain introduced himself as Ralph Eberly, from Vancouver. He supervised the loading, even helped Julia with her luggage.
“It’s not far to the field hospital,” he told us. “Then we can get out of this awful heat.”
“It’s air-conditioned?” Julia asked hopefully.
“It has a roof and some shade,” answered Captain Eberly. He was very young, tall and gangling. His uniform was covered with dust but his square-jawed face was freshly shaved and his blue northern eyes looked alert and undefeated.
We rode the rattling, jouncing truck over the rutted unpaved road away from the airstrip, with me, Julia, and Captain Eberly squeezed onto the bench behind the driver, Julia in the middle. The young Canadian explained the local situation as he kept his eyes straight ahead, watching the road over the driver’s shoulder.
“Most of the fighting’s down toward Massawa and Asmara. And along the border with Sudan, of course. Things have been fairly quiet here for a while. Occasional band of thugs, but they’re driven by the famine more than anything else. Steal food when all else fails.”
“The hospital?” I asked.
The captain glanced at me, looking glum, then returned to watching the road. “Not much, I’m afraid. Converted from an old church. We’ve patched up the roof and put up as many tents as we could. Was hoping there’d be more tents in the supplies you brought in with you.”
“We had nothing to do with the supplies,” I said.
“Understood. But still . . .” Eberly shifted unhappily on the bench, turned to eye me directly, with Julia between us. “You see, the countryside’s been devastated by the fighting. People are starving. And sick. Everything from typhus to cholera. Schistosomiasis, dengue fever, you name it and they’ve got it.”
“Is that smoke?” Julia asked, pointing past the driver’s ear.
“Dust,” said Captain Eberly, shaking his head. “That’s the settlement. Your destination.”
It had been a town once, I saw as we approached the field hospital. Or at least a village. There were burned-out remains of circular huts and cinder-block houses on both sides of the stony, rutted road. The only building that looked occupied had obviously once been a church, with a pitched roof and the charred stump of a steeple.
Beyond the church-turned-hospital was the tent city. There must have been a thousand tents there, at least. Big khaki-colored army tents close to the hospital’s dried mud walls, neatly laid out with military precision. But farther on the tents were smaller, scattered haphazardly as if they had been set up quickly, desperately, to keep pace with the growing influx of the sick and dying.
And they were dying, you could tell just by looking. It was like a scene out of Auschwitz, gaunt hollow-eyed men and women and children, too weak to do more than stare blankly at their own doom, arms and legs like sticks, flies crawling on their faces, into the corners of their eyes, clothes in dirty rags. Babies too weak to cry, their bellies bloated, lying naked on the filthy ground.
“They keep trickling in,” said the Canadian grimly as the truck squealed to a stop by the hospital. “Emptying out the countryside. They know there’s some food here. Not enough, though. Not nearly enough.”
It took a real effort to pull my eyes away from the haunted black faces and glance across at Julia. She looked stricken.
“My dear lord,” she murmured. “My dear lord.”
ARTHUR
The trouble with spying is that it’s so damned difficult to get disentangled once you’re involved in it.
Nancy Dubois had fallen in love with fencing. Once I had arranged her first lesson, and dinner afterward, she had promptly gone out and bought herself a full outfit—padded jacket, trousers, mask, glove, and several foils—and shown up the following Monday evening ready to pay for a season’s worth of lessons.
Now she showed up each Monday evening. She had become one of the gang. We usually went out for a bite to eat after each session, eight to twelve men and women ranging from a couple of teenagers to my age pushing tables together at the local HoJo or McDonald’s.
The hell of it was that I had learned virtually nothing about what the executive committee was up to. Six weeks of fencing lessons, six evenings out with Nancy, and nothing to show for it except some veiled hints about deals with Japan aimed at stopping the European takeover bid. Nancy seemed pleasant enough, sociable with the other fencers and friendly with me. No hint of romantic inclinations, though, and I was afraid to push in that direction for fear of driving her away. And, to tell the truth, I really wasn’t that interested in her. I wanted information from her, not se
xual gratification.
Yet she didn’t look as if she would drive away easily. I thought that perhaps she was waiting for me to make a move.
To call our run-down little gym a fencing academy was overly grandiose, but there was something about fencing that encouraged such formalities. Our teacher—a Latvian immigrant who worked daytime as a Federal Express driver—was by nights our maestro. He was almost a midget, slim as a saber blade, with a wild shock of strawberry-blond hair. On the fencing strip he could move faster than the eye could follow. He was excitable, and that unruly shock of hair sprang up when he took off his fencing mask. He often lapsed into his native tongue when a student particularly annoyed him.
I whipped off my mesh mask after my lesson and saluted formally with my saber. The maestro returned my salute.
“Thank you for the lesson, maestro,” I said perfunctorily. I was sweating hard; physically tired and emotionally weary.
On the other side of the gym a pair of fencers danced up and down the long narrow mat of their fencing strip, blades clicking as they grunted or shouted, “Eh-lah!” when they lunged. Others were working out in the corners of the bare room, practicing the elaborate steps and hand movements. The gym smelled of perspiration, rang with shouts and fervent discussions that often rose to arguments.
“Your mind is not on the lesson,” said the maestro. A stranger would have had difficulty understanding the Latvian accent.
“I’m sorry—”
“Since you brought that little brunette here, you think more about her than about your lessons. No?”
It was so. With a sheepish grin I replied, “I imagine you’re right.”
“So”—the maestro was peeling off his cracked, stiff old leather glove as the two of us walked off the strip, his voice low and confidential—“put her in bed, make love to her, and get her out of your thoughts. The first tournament comes in two weeks and I need all your attention on it.”
I had to laugh. The maestro didn’t know or care about what his students did while he himself was driving his FedEx truck. Fencing was all that mattered.
“Good advice, maestro,” I said. And I had to admit that it probably was damned good advice.
Instead of going out with the gang after the session, I invited Nancy to dinner. She easily accepted and we each drove our own cars—my Infiniti and her Taurus—to the quiet little seafood restaurant by the Sound where we had gone the first time, six weeks earlier.
Nancy was in the frilly blouse and knee-length skirt she had worn at the office. As we chatted over our meal and I kept pouring the wine, I tried to maneuver the conversation to the inner workings of the executive committee. Nancy skillfully stayed away from the subject.
Finally, in exasperation, I came out with it. “Nancy, I’ve got to know what the executive committee’s up to.”
“Up to?” She managed to look innocent, almost.
“Something’s going on.”
Nancy gave me a coy smile. She had a heart-shaped face and she could dimple very prettily. “Oh, Arthur, something’s always going on. You know that.”
“I think it involves the lab.”
She made no reply.
“If it does,” I said, “I’ve got a right to know what it is.”
“Have you talked with Johnston?”
“He was evasive.”
Nancy made a shrug that said, So what do you expect me to do about it?
“There are more than two hundred people at the lab,” I said. “Very dedicated, very talented people. If the executive committee is doing something that’s going to affect them, I ought to know about it.”
She sighed. “Sid would go spastic if anybody gets a whiff of this.”
“A whiff of what?”
“I really can’t tell you, Arthur,” she said, looking genuinely troubled. “You wouldn’t be able to keep it to yourself and Sid will know I’m the one who told you about it.”
“About what?” I insisted.
“I can’t.” She shook her head.
I reached across the table and took both her hands in mine. “Nancy, you’ve got to. You can’t tell me that something’s so important that Sid Lowenstein is about to go ballistic over it and then not tell me what it is!”
“He’d fire me.”
“He won’t know you told me. I’d never tell him—”
“He’d know it was me. Nobody else would let you in on it.”
She’s playing with me, I realized. She’s leading me on, reeling me in like a fish. She wants something from me and she’s not going to spill the beans until she gets it.
“Nancy, is there some way I can protect you from Sid? Would you like to transfer to another position at headquarters?”
Her eyes widened just for a flash of a second. Then she regained control of herself. “I work for Sid. If he finds out I’m even suggesting that the executive committee’s thinking about your division, he’d boot me out on my butt.”
“So how can I help you?” I asked. “What can I do to protect you?”
She hesitated a moment, the tip of her tongue peeking out between her teeth like a little girl waiting to unwrap a big birthday present.
“There’s going to be an opening next month in the marketing department. The chief assistant to the VP of marketing is quitting.”
“And you want the job.”
“I’d be good at corporate marketing, Arthur. I could make vice president in a few years.”
“Who else is in line for the position?”
“Nobody even knows it’s going to open up! Not yet. The guy who has the job now hasn’t told anyone he’s quitting.”
“Except you.”
She smiled knowingly. “Except me.”
“You really want to work for Uhlenbeck?” I asked. “The man’s something of a dimwit, isn’t he?”
“That’s the whole point! I can take over the department, do his work, take his job. I’d do a better job than he can, really I would.”
I could feel myself starting to grin. “So moving you to marketing would be a good thing for the corporation.”
“Of course it would. I wouldn’t think of doing it if it weren’t. We’re all loyal Omnitech people, aren’t we?”
I laughed. But then I got back to the point. “So what’s going on inside the executive committee? What are Sid and Johnston up to?”
She took a deep breath, as if she were about to tackle some monumental undertaking. I have to admit that I enjoyed the way the frilled neckline of her blouse moved when she breathed.
“So?” I asked again.
She leaned across the table, lowered her voice. “They’re talking with Kyushu Industries about selling the lab.”
“Selling?” I felt as if I’d been punched. “To Japan?”
“Omnitech would keep a license to develop any new product lines the lab produces and sell them in the U.S. Japan gets the rest of the world market.”
“Jesus H. Christ on a motorcycle.”
“It’s merely in the talking stage, from what I hear,” Nancy said swiftly. “Nothing may come of it.”
“But they’re willing to sell the laboratory?” I could barely believe it. “Sell it? Sell us? Like a bunch of baseball players?”
“They’re desperate to fight off this takeover bid.”
I sat there, stunned, wondering what I could do now that I knew what was going on. Would being owned by the Japanese make any real difference? Yes, of course it would. I’d had a virtually free hand with Omnitech; Johnston and I understood each other. With the Japanese it might be very different. Very different. They’d want to control their investment. Maybe I could quit and start a new lab somewhere else. Most of the staff would come with me. But the lawyers would try to stop me. It’d be a mess, a god-awful mess.
With a start, I realized that the waiter was standing beside our booth.
“Coffee, sir?” the waiter asked for the second time.
Neither I nor Nancy wanted anything more. I handed the waiter my plat
inum American Express card and signed the bill with hardly a glance at it. We left the little restaurant and stepped out into the sighing breeze of a late September night.
“It’s chilly,” Nancy said.
I looked down at her. In the light from the parking lot she smiled up at me. Invitingly, I thought.
“Do you live far from here?” she asked.
“About fifteen, twenty minutes,” I replied.
“I’ve got to drive all the way back to the Bronx.”
Without really thinking about it, I suggested, “Why don’t you come up to my house?”
She said, “I’ll follow your car.”
She had expected the invitation, obviously.
Nancy seemed quite sure of herself; not at all hesitant or nervous. She parked on the driveway behind my car and we entered the house through the garage. She gave the kitchen an approving once-over as I led her toward the living room.
“I don’t do much cooking in here,” I admitted. “That’s why it looks so sterile.”
She smiled and murmured, “That’s a shame.”
The living room, with its cathedral windows and sunken fireplace area, really impressed her.
“A fireplace!” Nancy went straight to it and ran her hand along the white-painted bricks.
I turned on the gas flame, low, and she sighed and sat on the curving sofa facing the fire. As I went to the bar to pour a couple of snifters of cognac, I knew where we would make love. But you’ve got to be careful, I warned myself. Don’t rush things. Don’t scare her off.
I needn’t have worried. I had forgotten that Nancy liked to play games; before the snifters were half finished she was playfully auctioning off her clothes.
“Now the bra,” she was saying as she sat on the thickly carpeted floor at my feet, the firelight warming her bared shoulders, a sly smile on her lips. “The bra costs twenty-nine ninety-nine, retail. But under the circumstances I think I should get a lot more for it. A lot more.”
Grinning down at her, I said, “It’s used.”
