by null
“O.K.,” Smith said. “Duende.” He took a slug of water from his canteen, rinsed the taste of grit and blood around his mouth, and spat it out again. The Marabouts inched forward through the cordite haze, pale dust settling on their robes, on the breech of their cheap Indonesian rifles. Smith switched his internal playlist to shuffle and sang out in a clear, bright voice the first thing that came to him.
“There may be trouble ahead, but while there’s moonlight and music and love and romance, let’s face the music and dance . . .
“Before the fiddlers have fled, before they ask us to pay the bill, and while we still have the chance, let’s face the music and dance . . .”
And through the force of his imagination, disappearing into the song, he was back in summer stock years ago doing an Irving Berlin tribute at the Morris Amphitheater in the heat of an August night in Storrs, singing his heart out, a talented fresh-faced kid full of ambition and the optimism of youth, singing as moths fluttered to their deaths against the bright globes of the footlights, his voice ringing out perfectly pitched and full of emotion, the best damn tenor they’d ever heard way out there in the wilds of Connecticut, the best they would ever hear.
8
THE LOST PATROL
1.
Sous-lieutenant Evariste Pinard of the Foreign Legion, commanding the relief column from Dahkla, rode shotgun in the lead truck. He caught a close-up of the severed head through the lenses of his high-powered Épervier jumelles and a sweet panic gripped his guts: Morning sun, rising from behind the distant peaks of the Guelta Mountains, suddenly illuminated the vacant eye sockets; they blazed for a moment with a kind of supernatural fire. Fifteen years in the Legion band had taught Pinard much about the oboe (how to play it while marching the crawl, how to shave a good reed, how to blow the lowest low notes without excess vibrato); his duties in dingy Legion recruiting offices across Metropolitan France had taught him much about the cardboard despair of drunken young men, and a hardscrabble childhood had taught him much about violence and loneliness. But nothing had prepared him exactly for this. Death. Well, here it was!
By damping the filter of his Éperviers against the glare, Pinard was able to make out two more heads, these impaled on sharp bits of rubbish behind the smashed gates deep inside the exercise yard.
“Tabarnak ostie!” he swore. “C’est un vrai bordel!”
The driver, a strong-smelling, bass-voiced Mongolian corporal named Hehu Keh, glanced over at Pinard apprehensively from behind the wheel.
“Mais, t’as vu quelque chose, le chef?” he said in French flattened by the accent of Ulan Bator. Their convoy consisted of six French army-surplus Peugeot P4 LVRAs, lightly armored and painted UN blue, an excellent target for anyone who wanted to shoot at them. Caporal Keh was on loan from the 2e REP, the Foreign Legion’s lone parachute regiment, based out of Calvi, in Corsica. He’d had a soft life on that rocky island, a barmaid girlfriend, not too bad-looking, Sundays at the beach. Now this bastard of a desert, the smell of massacre in the air.
“Arrêtez le camion!” Sous-lieutenant Pinard ordered. The Mongolian stomped the brakes with such force, Pinard went flying against the dash. “Putain de merde, taboire!” he swore. “Keh, t’es un crétin d’un wanker!” He dropped the binoculars and grabbed his walkie-talkie. “Attention les camions! Arrêtez!” he called urgently. “Arrêtez immédiatement!”
When nobody else stopped—the multilingual UN troops under Pinard’s command didn’t understand French, had only a smattering of Dutch in common, and probably had their walkies tuned to the wrong frequency anyway—Pinard stuck himself half out the window and began to wave his arms.
At this signal, the second Peugeot (containing two British Pakistanis, a Latvian medic, a Catalan, a Hungarian Legionnaire named Stefan Szbeszdogy, all-weather equipment, two crates of RCIR reheatable meals, and eighteen hundred liters of water) veered wildly into the dunes. The third and fourth trucks, packed with arms and ammunition, and the remainder of the fifteen-man force (a Brazilian explosives expert, two Turkish naval ensigns, and five diminutive Dyak militiamen from Borneo, their tea-colored skin covered with intricate tattoos), stampeded after the second like a couple of scrapies-maddened cows. And it was only with much swearing over the walkie in several languages and the use of more frantic arm-waving that Sous-lieutenant Pinard managed to get this rolling Babel under control again.
The convoy regrouped, engines idling, behind the cover of a sheltering dune two clicks to the southeast of the block house. The Peugeots drew into a circle like covered wagons huddled against Indian attack and the men dismounted and assembled in the lee of the dune as Pinard crawled to the top. Visibility is excellent in the desert. Rock formations six or seven kilometers off can seem just a few hundred meters away. The half-destroyed walls of Blockhouse 9 could be seen clearly from here, heat-haze dancing above the ragged battlements. Shattered sandbag redoubts showed the effect of shoulder-fired rockets. The watchtower was gone, the gates blown apart.
Pinard felt a kind of déjà vu as he examined the ruined old fort through his binoculars. He’d seen dim, black-and-white photographs of similar outposts in the campaign histories he’d been forced to study during his officer training at Saint-Cyr. Too many Legion grunts had died building and defending Block house 9 and many others like it during the brutal Moroccan campaigns of a century ago. In those days it was the Legion, vastly outnumbered, holding a chain of forts strung across the Sahara against the wild surge of the desert tribes. All that was gone, ancient history; now the Legion had returned to Africa in the name of peace. And yet the horrors of bygone wars—full of massacres, torture, merciless reprisals, and counterreprisals—still haunted their regimental subconscious like a battalion of ghosts.
Pinard slid back down the dune. Marabout insurgent fighters favored hit-and-run tactics, usually at night, and there was a good chance they’d find the fort abandoned. But the sneaky cunts just might be dug in behind the rocket-blasted walls.
“Many dead inside, maybe some wounded,” he announced, waving in the direction of the block house. “So we must—” He stopped himself. The blank look on the faces of his subordinates corresponded with their lack of French. His hold over them was slim: only the sous-lieutenant’s single bar, gold on black and newly issued, pinned to his epaulets.
The sun continued to climb, searing the plain. The simoom blew from the south as if from the wide-open vents of a blast furnace. Pinard stood there for a long minute, panting—even his tongue was sweating. In such heat it was not possible to think. Then he turned to Legionnaire Szbeszdogy. The Hungarian, also detached from the Musique Principale by Colonel de Noyer, played the French horn.
“Stefan, on a besoin des volontaires. Dites en hollandais.”
“Oui, le chef.”
Szbeszdogy spoke Hungarian and Spanish and Dutch; but Dutch only if he thought it through in Hungarian first, translated into Spanish in his head, then translated from Spanish into Dutch. (He’d once lived with a Spanish student nurse for six raucous months in Amsterdam; he’d learned his Spanish from her and his Dutch from the hash bars of the Leidseplein, was good with drug lingo and sex talk and bad at everything else.) The orders emerged slowly, half Dutch, half sign language: They would uncrate the FAMAS 5.56 rifles and the big Browning Douze-Septs. They would establish a defensive perimeter. A party of volunteers would advance on the fort.
No one moved. The two British Pakistanis, childhood friends from East London drafted into the Pakistani army during the course of an unfortunately timed vacation to their paternal homeland, shifted uneasily in their rope-soled combat sandals.
“What’s the bloody Frog tryin’ to say?” one of them whispered. “An’ why’s he speaking German?”
“Bollocks if I know,” the other one said. “If them Marabouts is runnin’ about choppin’ ’eads, I say we mutiny and run like hell back to Dahkla.”
“I’m for you,” murmured the Catalan, who understood English. “If the bloody officer don’t li
ke it, we shoot him first.”
The Dyaks, squatting in the sand oblivious, twittered happily like a flock of small brown birds. Suddenly, they climbed back into their truck for a mid-morning nap. Pinard didn’t bother to go after them. No one spoke Dyak and the Dyaks pretended not to understand anything else. In any case, UN troops couldn’t actually be ordered to do something they didn’t feel like doing. They could only be requested very firmly to volunteer. If they refused to volunteer, a charge of noncooperation could be brought, but only after weeks of paperwork submitted in several languages and long legal briefs filed with JAG lawyers in Brussels. Such was the state of discipline in UN MINURSO, currently under the command of the controversial Dutch pacifist general Kurt van Snetters.
“J’appelle les volontaires!” Pinard shouted angrily. “A patrol. For reconnaissance. Immediatement!”
The Dyaks could be heard twittering dismissively from inside the truck. The British Pakistanis backed away, shaking their heads. The Turks and the Brazilians and the Latvian hoped Pinard would decide to turn around and head back across the dunes as fast as possible. A deep sigh, which was the mutinous Catalan expelling breath, rose into the superheated air.
Only Legionnaires Hehu Keh and Szbeszdogy took up their FAMAS assault rifles and stepped forward.
2.
It’s a female did that,” Caporal Keh said, not bothering to keep his voice down anymore. An unpeopled silence hung heavily over the smashed and crumbling battlements of the block house.
Pinard agreed. “Just the kind of thing a woman would do. Cut off a man’s bite and shove it in his mouth.”
“Them Marabout bitches fight alongside the men,” Keh said. “Just for the pleasure of mutilating enemy corpses afterwards.”
“Like the War Women of the Apaches.” Szbeszdogy nodded. He had just finished reading a Hungarian translation of Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star.
Pinard, Keh, and Legionnaire Szbeszdogy crouched in the narrow band of shade directly below the severed head almost certainly shoved into its shell-hole niche in the wall by the same band of Marabout insurgents who had attacked the UN team site at Om Durga a couple of months back. That time they struck just after midnight, killing everything alive, even the company dog and two egg-laying chickens. The proof here was the mysterious hieroglyph carved into the powdery bricks, the graphic symbol of the Marabout insurgency, their swastika, their hammer and sickle: an eye shape, crossed with three parallel slash marks meant to represent—though the significance remained uncertain—a bee, stinger attached.
“Someone take it down,” Pinard ordered vaguely, at last. He looked away. The dead mouth, stuffed full of the ultimate indignity, leered at him with a rigor mortis grin.
Szbeszdogy suddenly leaned over and vomited up the few crumbs of UN protein crackers left in his stomach.
“What did you do in the 1e RE?” Keh said, amused.
“Musique Principale,” Szbeszdogy admitted, wiping his face.
“Another musician!” Caporal Keh offered a derisive snort. “Regardez comment c’est fait, les musiciens!” And he reached up and grabbed down the head by jabbing two fat fingers in the empty eye sockets, wrapped it in a shred of camouflage meshing, and tied the meshing to his belt, the head bouncing against his thigh like a soccer ball.
“Back in Mongolia, it was my job to gut the sheep and crack their skulls.” He smiled at the memory. “My mother made an excellent stew with the brains and glands. How much difference, I ask you, is there between a sheep and a man?”
“Quite a bit, actually,” Szbeszdogy deadpanned. “For one thing there’s the wool.”
“For another thing, Mongolians prefer to fuck sheep,” Pinard said. “When they’re not jerking off. C’est correcte, Caporal?”
The Mongolian didn’t find this amusing. He had been caught last year naked and drunk out of his mind on the eve of Camerone Day—the Legion’s most sacred celebration—masturbating frantically in the middle of the parade ground at the 2e REP’s headquarters in Calvi and had become the laughingstock of the regiment. It was for this he’d sought reassignment to MINURSO.
The sand, blown by the simoom into little furrows, looked as white as snow in the hot glare. Flecks of feldspar glittered pinkly in the drifts. The tops of the Peugeots could be seen as a thin black line over the dunes in the heat-haze. No one seemed to be manning the Brownings, their main source of covering fire.
The Legionnaires malingered there in the narrow shade beneath the wall a moment longer.
“Could be booby-trapped,” Szbeszdogy offered presently. “Or an ambush.”
“Possible.” Pinard shrugged. Though they hadn’t taken fire advancing to the walls of the fort.
“Stop!” Caporal Keh said, nearly shouting. “Do we talk or do we go in?”
Pinard unclipped a grenade from his belt and lobbed it over the rubble blocking the main gate. The blast shuddered the old wall; a cloud of brick dust, dirt, and small stones blossomed into the air. The Legionnaires hurdled themselves through the falling cloud, over the rubble and into the blockhouse yard, firing their weapons. Three full clips of 5.56 exploded simultaneously. Severed heads went spinning wildly in a rain of bullets like grotesque bowling balls. Piles of shattered debris littered the yard. Smashed furniture, plastic bits of laptops, books with every page torn to shreds, scraps of choral sheet music. The entire contents of the enlisted barracks and officers’ quarters, even the wooden slabs from the latrine pulled out and rendered into bits. This total destruction seemed the result of a dark animal urge. A bear with a dog in its teeth, shaking until everything has been shaken apart. Gory patches of splatter in the sand indicated the places where the Legionnaires of the garrison had been decapitated. Scratched here and there gleefully in the bloody muck, the bee hieroglyph.
Pinard moved through the mess cautiously at first, FAMAS held ready. But the fort was completely deserted. There could not be a more deserted place.
“Ces sales chiens de Marabouts!” the Mongolian growled. “I knew these men. True, most of them were assholes—”
“But they didn’t deserve to die like this,” Szbeszdogy said, kicking a head out of the way. “Butchered like pigs.”
“Maybe not,” the Mongolian agreed.
Working through the debris a couple of minutes later, Pinard found three more heads. He conquered his squeamishness this time and, following the Mongolian’s example, took hold of the heads by the empty eye sockets. It was the easiest way. The hair shaved in the boule à zéro style favored by the Legion offered no purchase; the ears and nose had been lopped off by the Marabouts, mouths stuffed with withered genitalia. He thus assembled eight heads in a gruesome pile. Thirteen more were discovered by Caporal Keh laid out grotesquely, like cabbages, in a couple of rows in the dirt behind the latrines.
Pinard studied this macabre display, horror and rage boiling inside him. The completeness of the massacre brought to mind other notorious Legion slaughters—the debacle at Camerone; the rout and murder of the Forestier expedition in the Hoggar in the 1880s. But more immediately the many atrocities perpetrated by the infamous el-Krim during the Moroccan wars. El-Krim’s special trick, the flaying alive of captured Legionnaires, was done in such a way that they lingered, skinless, for days. Though some he buried up to the neck in sand and covered their heads with honey, leaving ants and dung beetles to finish the work.
The head of Phillipe de Noyer, Block house 9’s commandant, Pinard’s superior and a mentor to many in the 1e RE, no doubt lay somewhere in the surrounding mess. But it would be now impossible to identify the colonel’s mutilated, sun-blackened head from all the other mutilated, sun-blackened heads by facial characteristics. Forensic specialists in Aubagne would have to rely on DNA samples, dental records. Of course the bodies were nowhere to be found, another sign the Marabouts had been at work. They’d left no corpses at Om Durga either, only disembodied heads.
“I know what they do with the bodies!” Szbeszdogy cried. “They eat them! They’re a
bunch of fucking cannibals!”
“Du calme!” Pinard said sternly. “C’est du merde, ça, Szbeszdogy! Psy-ops lies!”
“Ask me, a Legionnaire makes a pretty indigestible meal—” Caporal Keh began, then he paused: An unmistakable rumbling echoed across the desert like distant thunder.
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“Listen—”
They raced up to the parapet to see the telltale plumes of diesel exhaust in the distance. The Peugeot LVRAs, hurriedly reloaded with all guns, ammunition, and equipment, were moving off. Pinard watched helplessly through his Éperviers as the trucks pulled out of formation and lurched in a westerly direction over the last dunes at the rim of the horizon.
“Putains! Lâches!” Szbeszdogy shouted. “Come back!”
Caporal Keh raised his FAMAS and got off a quick burst at the retreating trucks, before Pinard ordered him to desist.
“Don’t waste ammunition!”
“Nous sommes fini!” Szbeszdogy groaned and slumped down against the parapet.
Unfortunately for them, the Hungarian was right: They had come three hundred kilometers and four days across the desert from Dahkla and through the Berm at passage fourteen, sector twenty-one. A massive sandstorm from the direction of the Saharoui refugee camps at Tindouf on day three had cost them eighteen hours. There is nothing to do during a sandstorm like that but hunker down and wait, the sky going purple-brown, the hot air thick as soup with flying particles, nearly impossible to breath without a respirator. It was the season of storms, another one might blow up at any time. Being left out here in le Vide—the Empty—was like being left in the middle of the ocean on a flimsy raft with no water, no food, no radio, no compass. All this gone with the trucks.
