Gorgeous East

by null

  Smith had been under fire twice before: first in the bar of the Stamboul Palace Hotel with a .25 caliber automatic; second during Basic when a drill instructor fired a full clip of 5.56 into the air an inch over Smith’s head just to make him piss his camos, which he did. Neither experience prepared him for the relentless pounding that began with a single, exploratory mortar round from out of the darkness just beyond the rim of surrounding dunes. Smith and Iain and twenty more Legion volunteers under Colonel de Noyer’s command were now blue-helmeted MINURSO peacekeepers using the block house as a forward observation post. Mere observers, officially neutral.

  But here they were, hopelessly beseiged.

  Mortar rounds drop with a sharp whistling sound and can be avoided by the agile, quick-thinking combatant. Rockets, on the other hand, are almost completely silent as they fall, many times more powerful, and obliterate everything for meters around the point of impact. After the first mortar, a couple of rockets smashed into a stony guelb just beyond the fort’s defensive perimeter. The unmistakable shudder and thud sent everyone scrambling in crazy darkness for their Rangers and substandard UN-issued American-made body armor.

  In the midst of this chaos, Colonel de Noyer emerged from his quarters in full dress, with his uniform splendidly arranged. He had chosen tenue de ville, not tenue de combat for the coming battle. In other words he had forsaken desert camos, body armor, and boots for his fancy white evening uniform and patent leather shoes—more appropriate for an official event at the Élysée Palace than combat. The breast pockets of his white uniform jacket showed row after row of colorful ribbons and service medals; the gold braid on the crown of his best kepi shone bravely in the predawn light. The Legionnaires gaped.

  “Th’ Colonel’s gon’ fock’n bonkers!” Iian whispered to Smith. “Them’s the togs y’ wear to your funeral!”

  “Better hope not,” Smith whispered back. “Because it’s your funeral too.”

  Phillipe ignored the uneasy whispering engendered by his gleaming dress whites, unlocked the armory, and distributed assault rifles and ammunition like a counselor handing out canoe paddles and life preservers at summer camp. According to MINURSO regulations, peacekeepers were not allowed to carry anything other than small arms. They had been issued only the standard 9mm Beretta pistols and Legion FAMAS 5.56s and a single Browning 12.7mm tripod—the famous douze-sept—at least as old as the Algerian War. The Browning might have been effective for a little while against a massed assault on the fort, but its firing pin had been lost somehow along the road between Dahkla and the desert and the big gun now functioned only as decor.

  “We are at war, gentlemen,” Colonel de Noyer announced in a calm voice to the startled Legionnaires. “Ignore that pale rag”—he gestured to the blue UN flag flapping on its pole from the battlements—“today you fight for the honor of the Legion. Remember—the Legion is your country.” And he calmly ordered his men to their posts.

  The next two rockets hit the perimeter wall, snaking an instant skein of cracks from foundation to battlement. Another blew a chunk of the only remaining tower into the dunes. The barrage continued as the sky brightened. A direct hit on the barbed wire and sandbag redoubt guarding the gates blew the two Legionnaires on point twenty feet into the air and destroyed the fort’s first line of defense. The sun, rising, revealed the overwhelming numbers of the enemy: Block house 9 stood surrounded by at least two battalions of Marabout fighters, their shoulder-mounted Oblomov 89mm rocket launchers gleaming like spearpoints must have gleamed in the smoky, desperate light of battles past.

  Twenty-one lightly armed men, even if they are Legionnaires, cannot stand against an army of two thousand outfitted with modern artillery. Reinforcements, days away at MINURSO Command Headquarters at Dahkla, within sight of the blue-green waters of the South Atlantic, would never make it in time. Colonel de Noyer and the remaining Legionnaires of the garrison had the example of Camerone and a hundred other hard-fought last stands to steel their nerves for death. They might surrender, of course. Surrender, though an indelible stain on the honor of the Legion, was always an option. They discussed this matter in hushed voices, like cowards, and with the hopeful certainty of desperate men: Surely, the Marabouts would hold them for ransom? Such an outcome wasn’t unheard of in this part of the world! But the Marabouts quickly rendered such discussions pointless. A large red bee banner rose from their midst, the deguellere, the throat-cutter that spoke a language everyone understood. Surrender or fight on—it didn’t matter now—the defenders of the block house would be butchered.

  The next Marabout rocket barrage blew the UN flag and eight defending Legionnaires from the battlements. Scraps of pale blue cloth, khaki uniform, bits of meat and bone, head, torso, condensed into a bloody cloud before falling to earth in a kind of thick pink rain. Five more died in a series of blasts from a battery of small howitzers that shook the ground like the aftershocks of a medium-sized earthquake. Colonel de Noyer quickly separated the remaining eight Legionnaires into flying squads. These, dodging from sandbags to rubble and back again, accounted for thirty or more of the advancing foe with close-range fire, but were finally driven back and scattered.

  Smith, in B Squad, floated through this desperate fight in a state of detachment that was the onset of shell shock, rendered half deaf by the concussive blasts and humming to himself in this temporary deafness one of his favorite numbers from Guys and Dolls: Luck be a lady tonight! Luck don’t ya ’member, I’m the fella you came in with? Luck be a lady tonight!

  None of it seemed real. He was watching a funny movie about a ham actor who had joined the Foreign Legion. He was thinking about ducking out to the lobby for some popcorn, extra butter, but didn’t want to miss the big action sequence.

  When the Marabouts came pouring into the block house through the shattered gates at about one in the afternoon, blue djellahs flapping around their bodies like the dark wings of birds of prey, only five Legionnaires remained standing. Two were soon mauled by flying shrapnel: Legionnaire Achilles Argos and Caporal-chef Pantocras Constantin—a last remnant of the old Greek mafia from Basic; both pitiless bullies whom Smith despised. The operational force of the garrison was now reduced to three: Legionnaire Caspar P. Milquetoast, Legionnaire Jaime Velázquez—a dour Spaniard who played the Chinese chimes in the marching band—and Smith’s unfortunate copain, Iian McDairmuid, Squad A’s sole survivor. The poor kid had clearly hitched his wagon to a falling star.

  “I told ye ther’d be fock’n punishment,” Iian gasped, limping along, clutching his FAMAS—he had taken a hit to the big toe—“an’ punishment there is!”

  “I don’t need to be remind—” Smith began, but in the next moment was knocked flat by the shock wave of an exploding howitzer shell. When he picked himself up, he found he couldn’t speak.

  Colonel de Noyer led this battered remnant to a sandbag-step redoubt constructed earlier against the rear wall of the latrines as a defensive position of last resort. As they hunkered down, they could hear the Marabouts screaming and firing off their weapons and whirling around in a violent frenzy in the main yard. They were out there chopping off the heads of the wounded and the dead and generally smashing and destroying everything.

  “Don’t fancy making my last stand by the fock’n terlets,” Iian said, trembling. “Can’t we call for help?”

  “A nice idea,” Colonel de Noyer admitted. “But our satellite phone—” He didn’t finish the thought. The garrison hadn’t been issued a satellite phone. An old-fashioned hand-crank shortwave was their only means of communication with the outside world—completely useless this far out in the desert. They were underequipped, undermanned, underprovisioned. The usual Legion sketch.

  “Got a confession t’make,” Iian said, his wandering eyes wide with fear. “I’m too young for the fock’n Legion, only seventeen. Used forged documents t’ enlist”—he turned desperately to Phillipe—“you got to get me out of this, Colonel!”

  “I will see that you are repatr
iated with an official apology to your parents,” Colonel de Noyer said. “But we must first defeat the enemy and return to France. Until then you are a Legionnaire.”

  Smith hadn’t yet regained his voice. Wasn’t this the scene in the movie where the relief column arrived from Fort Tokotu?

  Blood flowed from shrapnel wounds in Legionnaire Argos’s forehead. He was blind. He groaned darkly and his FAMAS slipped from his blood-wet hands.

  “For your wounds, mon enfant.”

  The colonel reached into his pocket and extracted a silk handkerchief embroidered with the arms of the de Noyers—three ravens on a red ground, bar sinister—the same heraldic device his Crusader ancestors had carried on their shields in their wars against the Saracens of Outremer.

  Caporal-chef Constantin, though himself suffering from a vicious-looking wound, his left trouser leg soaked in blood from the thigh down, took the silk handkerchief and pressed it to his comrade’s face and spoke to him softly in Greek, and Argos’s bleeding stopped, as if by a miracle. In the last moments of life these two hardcase alpha-dog bastards displayed a childlike tenderness toward each other. Argos’s father and grandfather and great-grandfather—a morsel Smith now remembered from barracks-room talk—had been sponge divers in the Greek islands. How nice, he thought, his mind drifting in the current, how calm and quiet to be walking around in one of those old-fashioned diving outfits on the bottom of the sea.

  “Pick up your weapon, Argos,” the colonel said gently. “Be ready when they come.”

  But blind Argos wouldn’t listen; the Greeks trembled, ready only for death.

  3.

  Battle, like a poorly orchestrated piece of music, is composed of hectic clamor followed by inexplicable lulls. Now a few quiet minutes slipped by. High cumulonimbus clouds trailed along the blue sky above like man o’ war jellyfish. Smith collapsed, panting, against the sandbag wall, and watched these magnificent, airy constructions sail over the horizon. Phillipe removed his officer’s kepi, its gold braid shining in full sun, and wiped his forehead on the now tattered white sleeve of his dress coat. Smith understood suddenly why the man had worn it: If you’re going to die, die in your best clothes. Unidentified tearing sounds could be heard from around the side of the latrines. Not much time before the Marabouts found them, finished them off.

  “Remember, mes enfants,” Phillipe said cheerfully. “Always save the last bullet for yourselves.”

  He uttered this death sentence with a pleasant smile on his face and no more emotion than one might reasonably display while ordering a jar of bath salts from the little shop at the Legion caserne in Aubagne. He was an aristocrat, the last offspring of an illustrious line going back before the days of Charlemagne, to the origins of the French nation. His ancestors had stood at the side of Louis IX, had willingly followed that sainted king into unendurable captivity in Egypt. Such men were made for mornings like this, for the last desperate minutes of a lost battle. Phillipe withdrew a platinum cigarette case—a birthday gift from his famously beautiful wife—and offered his last smokes to the men.

  “Smoking is bad for you, mon colonel,” Smith said, forcing an actor’s grin. “Causes cancer.”

  “I think we might risk a cigarette at this point, Milquetoast.”

  But Smith had no stomach for smoking. The others, livid, trembling, weren’t able to bring a cigarette to their lips.

  “Permettez . . . ,” Phillipe murmured politely and lit up.

  “I know it’s been said before,” Iian blinked, his eyes fixed in their sockets at last. “But I don’t really want to die.”

  Smith didn’t say anything.

  “That’s all you’ve got f’ me?” Iian retorted. “Nothing? You got me into this, and now y’ got nothing to say?”

  “I got you into this?” Smith began in anger, but stopped himself. Then he said quietly: “I wanted to die when Jessica left me, when my singing career went south—maybe that’s why I went to Istanbul in the first place, maybe that’s why I joined the Legion. Now that I’m going to die, I don’t want to die anymore. Talk about a cliché.”

  “Fock’n Legion,” Iian groaned. “The fock’n French Foreign Legion. What was I fock’n thinkin’?”

  “You weren’t,” Smith said. “You were drunk most of the time.”

  “You could have gone over th’ wall back in Paris, and fock th’ Legion! Bet you wish you dun it now!”

  “Maybe.” Smith nodded.

  “Attention, les deux,” Phillipe interrupted sharply. “Allow me to call your attention to the facts: Before the Legion, you had nothing, and if you died, you died for nothing, like a million other poor idiots every hour of every day. Now, though you still die for nothing, you die for nothing in the service of France and you will join on the Elysian Fields forty thousand brave Legionnaires who have already done so. Vous avez mes felicitations. Congratulations. Vive la Légion!”

  “Fock France,” Iian spit out. “Fock the Legion.”

  The colonel opened his mouth to answer this outrage but Marabout fighters surged around the corner from the exercise yard thirty meters away, driving a couple of stumbling, mangled Legionnaires before them as a human shield. Smith recognized Grabner, a German who had run a foam club in Ibiza and was caught there dealing heroin; escaping from the hands of the Spanish police, he’d made it to France and joined the Legion. The other one was Pelletier, a sour Belgian about whom nothing was known, his face now a mess of raw meat, half shot away. The Marabouts had blasted off every available rocket and mortar and blown off every artillery round and thrown all the grenades at their disposal in the assault on the block house and were now armed only with these hostages and their more or less reliable Indonesian-made Kalashnikov knockoffs.

  “If I don’t make it . . . ,” Iian whispered now.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t either.”

  “You’re a slippery bastard, you’ll make it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’ll find m’ dad, right? You’ll tell him—”

  “I will,” Smith said, cutting him off. But he wouldn’t.

  The colonel tossed aside his cigarette. His pale, haunted face gleamed with sweat like a block of ice in the sun.

  “Voilà un joli petit coup de main”—a nice little battle—“before the end. Fire at my signal.”

  “Wha’ about our guys?” Iian gestured.

  “I place their souls in the hands of the Almighty.” Colonel de Noyer brought the stumpy FAMAS to his shoulder and began to fire in long, ropy automatic bursts.

  “Poor miserable fucks!” Smith murmured, but he didn’t like Grabner or Pelletier at all and was really thinking only about himself. He leveled his own weapon and fired until his clip ran dry. Iian fired, tears streaming down his cheeks. Velázquez fired. The wounded Greeks huddled together down behind the sandbags, whimpering for mercy like dogs and calling on the Virgin. Enemy rounds found them there as they cowered and they died like that. Bullets splashed into the walls of the latrine, into the bloody dirt. Velázquez collapsed, without so much as a grunt—though no visible entry wound could be seen—inscrutable in death as he had been in life, the sound of the Chinese chimes perhaps ringing his entry into the long, vaulted corridors of death. A moment later a round slammed into Iian’s forehead, which exploded like a red flower blossoming and he dropped, arms flailing; he too was dead.

  Smith tossed down his own empty FAMAS and grabbed the kid’s rifle from the dirt and kept firing. He didn’t spare a moment’s remorse for his dead copain because he knew they would drink together soon again in hell. But, impossibly, he wasn’t hit. The bullets just seemed to break away from him for reasons that had everything to do with wind shear and trajectory and nothing with the will of God—or maybe this was wrong, maybe wind shear and trajectory were the will of God made manifest. Or maybe God just loves a good tenor. Then Smith’s ammunition ran dry. He and the colonel, invisible for the moment, stood safely enveloped in a billowing cloud of dust and propellant gas. They were now the last s
urvivors of the garrison.

  “You breathe still, mon brave Milquetoast.” Phillipe nodded in his direction.

  “I guess I’m hard to kill,” Smith said, trying not to sound afraid.

  “A good quality in a soldier.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Patience. They’re coming.”

  Vague shapes began to emerge, groping through the dusty atmosphere. The colonel seized an assault rifle and pulled the trigger to an empty clicking sound. Nothing left. Not a single round.

  “Merde, c’est fini.” He heaved his spent FAMAS in the general direction of the enemy and turned to Smith with his final command. Not the expected, fix bayonets! Rather, casually: “Why don’t you sing something, Milquetoast.”

  “You mean ‘Le Boudin’?” Smith said, surprised—then, he wasn’t. This is why he’d been recruited into the Legion in the first place. For this last moment, for a final song.

  “No.” The colonel shuddered. “Not that.”

  “O.K.,” Smith said. “What about ‘Sous le Soleil Brûlant d’Afrique’? Or ‘Eugénie’?” Two more venerable Legion standards.

  The colonel shook his head. “I don’t want to die with the sound of that military claptrap in my ears. You’ll be the first to hear the news—I now officially resign my commission in the Legion with the intention of abandoning the craft of war altogether and returning to my wife in France. Something I should have done many years ago.” He smiled distantly. “What a fine woman she is, my Louise! So sweet and so clever! And so beautiful, let me tell you. I thought absence would keep our love fresh. I am a fool. The truth is simpler, absence is just absence. All those hours we could have spent together. All the children we never had.”

  Smith kept his eyes on the armed cloud, boiling, about to burst, just ahead.

  “So what do you want me to sing?”

  “Why not something from the American musical stage.” The colonel put his hands in his pockets and slouched elegantly against the blood-spattered wall of the latrine. “Something perhaps a bit melancholy as befits the occasion of our death. This is your final performance, Milquetoast. Put the ego aside. Find some duende, disappear into the song.”