Gorgeous East

by null

  Pinard studied this scene carefully, silently counting the enemy. He could guess what had happened to the other two trucks and to the deserters—and couldn’t suppress a bitter little jolt of satisfaction at the thought that they might have met a painful fate: Seeking to escape death at the hands of the Marabouts, they had driven their Peugeots directly into the arms of Death Herself.

  “Mes enfants,” Sous-lieutenant Pinard whispered. “With a truck, we can make the coast. Otherwise . . .”

  “How many do you think there are?” Szbeszdogy hissed, barely audible.

  “About fifty indigènes. Men and women. Not counting any kids asleep in the trucks.”

  “Kids?” Szbeszdogy said, blinking.

  “That’s right,” Pinard said. “They bring their kids along sometimes. But, even if there are kids—” He left the thought unsaid. “With these odds—”

  “Pah,” the Mongolian cut in. “Twenty to one. That’s nothing for us. Not with one of these—”

  He unlimbered the rocket launcher, flipped up the sights, adjusted the target distance on the infrared scope. Then he set the weapon aside, primed and humming with readiness, and the three of them pooled their ammunition: Not including the nine 9mm rounds in Sous-lieutenant Pinard’s Beretta pistol, there remained six fifteen-round clips for the 5.56mm and two concussion grenades.

  “Plenty to go around,” Caporal Keh grunted. “Six rounds per Marabout.” Sums had never been the Mongolian’s strong point.

  “You hit the lead truck with the first rocket,” Pinard said. “But only at my signal. Understand? Put the second round where you think it will do the most good. Then run like hell to catch up with us, laying down fire all the way.”

  “Oui, le chef.”

  “We’ve got one chance,” Sous-lieutenant Pinard concluded. “We’ve got to make them think the whole Legion is attacking. We’ve got to . . .” But his words were taken by a sharp and unexpected gust blowing up from what seemed like all directions at once—this was the drimoom, the wind that heralds the dawn—bringing with it the smell of blood and burnt rubber, traces of the other two Peugeots burned to the gunnels somewhere out in the dark, their occupants decapitated, slaughtered.

  Pinard turned to the Hungarian. “Let’s have that water. Might as well finish it off.”

  Szbeszdogy nodded and drew the gallon jug, now barely a third full, out of the rucksack. The three men drank eagerly, long indulgent swallows, more than they’d had in days. This polluted swill seemed like the sweetest drink they’d ever tasted. When the water was gone, they rose, adjusted their uniforms.

  “Le drapeau,” Pinard said gravely.

  Szbeszdogy nodded. He pulled out the Legion tricolor they’d found amid the rubble at the blockhouse, discarded the plastic case, and shook it out. MINURSO regulations allowed only the powder blue UN banner to troops under its jurisdiction; to display any national flag was a gross breach of the mandate, might even be construed as an act of war. To hell with that now.

  The Hungarian grinned. “MINURSO no more,” he said and he held the tricolor in his fist and it flapped noisily in the breeze. “I piss on MINURSO!”

  Pinard tied the tricolor to the back of the Hungarian’s rucksack. Unfurled by the wind, it’s golden fringe and laurel wreaths flashed boldly in the half light.

  “At three,” Pinard said, holding up three fingers. “Un . . .”

  The stars waned above. Pink flushed the sky, dawn on its way. But down here in the desert, in the Empty, there was no light except for the twin faltering beams of the headlights below. Pinard could barely see the faces of the Legionnaires at his side. Suddenly he recalled the opening strains of Mozart’s Oboe Concerto in C Major, saw the notes in his head like crows swirling above a fallow field in winter, then they flew off and were gone.

  “Deux . . .”

  Pinard locked the first 5.56 round into the chamber of his FAMAS, set it on three-round bursts, and folded out the short stabby bayonet. His hands were shaking. What did it matter, where you died, in the desert, in France, in Canada, in your bed, in the ocean. A disturbing thought occurred to him—he had never really loved anybody in his life, not really. At least not as an adult. Certainly not a girlfriend—there had been only whores, of varying price—not his mother, another whore, or his older brother who had become a policeman in Ours Bleu after doing half the coke in Canada. Maybe he’d loved his father once and been loved, but he couldn’t remember exactly; his father had died when Pinard was five, killed by a falling tree at a logging camp way up in Lac St. Chretien, near the Arctic Circle. They had polar bears up there in those days; his father sent him a postcard once, showing a huge shaggy white beast, with a red gaping mouth full of sharp teeth. The polar bears were gone now. The Legion was his family.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Pinard saw the Mongolian set the rocket launcher to his shoulder. A slight nod. Ready.

  “Trois!” Pinard shouted. “À moi la Légion!”

  And he jumped up, shouting at the top of his lungs, and firing his rifle into the blue swirl of startled Marabouts. He heard the cries of terrified women, the hoarse exclamations of men, what sounded like an infant crying—but he kept firing. Then the Mongolian’s first rocket struck the stalled Peugeot dead-on with a whump, and the truck blew and blue-robed men flew into the air and pieces of steaming metal sizzled by, and chunks of human flesh smacked wetly into the sand, and Sous-lieutenant Pinard, bayonet fixed, hurled himself down the slope toward the guelb, toward the smoke, toward the screaming, and the brightness of flame.

  9

  EPITAPH

  FOR AN ARMY OF

  MERCENARIES

  1.

  The Monument aux Morts glistened darkly over the parade ground at Aubagne in a driving rain. In twenty-one white coffins on twenty-one black catafalques draped with sodden regimental flags, in the forecourt of the Legion crypt, lay the heads of the Heros de la Vide—as they had been dubbed by France-Soir—all that remained of the slaughtered garrison of Block house 9.

  Generals wearing clear plastic rainslickers over their uniforms stood at attention beneath the dripping canopy of the grandstand as la Musique Principale played a familiar dirge. Politicians raised hands to hearts; journalists slouched, damp, filterless Gauloises Bleus smoldering cynically between their lips. Flocks of sullen blackbirds, feathers hunched against the rain, watched from the bare branches of the clipped plane trees up and down the parade ground. For nearly two hours, patriotic speeches echoed from the loudspeakers in waves of damp static, full of phrases like sacrifiée pour le bien des autres and ces braves soldats, mort pour la France au bout du monde. . . .

  Meanwhile, the bronze doors to the crypt stood open to welcome the disembodied heads. Down a flight of rain-slick marble steps, behind another set of bronze doors in a crystal reliquary in dimly lit silence lay the Legion’s most sacred relic: the wooden hand of the legendary Capitaine Danjou, officer in charge that famous day at Camerone, who, dying, made his men swear to hold out until the last drop of blood, thus setting the pattern of pointless heroics and pyrrhic last stands for the next hundred and seventy-five years. Encircling this fabled prosthesis, on the walls of the subterranean chamber, hung marble tablets inscribed with the names of the dead—37,000 perished Legionnaires—the Roll of Honor. Here too, engraved on a plaque donated by English veterans of the old 1e REP, was the following inscription:

  These, in the days when heaven was falling,

  The hour when earth’s foundation fled,

  Followed their mercenary calling,

  And took their wages, and are dead.

  2.

  After the appropriately rain-drenched ceremony in honor of the heads, a luncheon was provided for dignitaries and media in the 1e RE mess: The menu included salade verte, poulet Marengo, légumes, and flan, served with a good white table wine pressed from grapes out of the Legion’s own vineyard at Puyloubier. The half-dozen postcard-perfect Legionnaires allowed to attend, selected for their physical beauty by the regim
ental public relations officer, were ordered not to get drunk, a restraint in the presence of alcohol entirely out of keeping with their inclinations.

  But Sous-lieutenant Pinard, Legionnaire Szbeszdogy, and Caporal Hehu Keh, those men directly responsible for the rescue of the heads from the hell of Western Sahara and their return to France pickled in barrels of UN ethanol, were each for their own reason conspicuously absent from both memorial ceremony and sober, funereal lunch.

  At that moment, Pinard, freshly released from the Legion infirmary, stood painfully at attention in full dress uniform as if for parade inspection in a small, stale-smelling room in a low-eaved building on the outer fringes of the base. The green walls of this room were peeling, its small window covered with a rusty steel grate like the window of a prison cell. Seated facing Pinard on the other side of a long, graffiti-scarred table, wreathed in cigarette smoke, three lean, dour-faced men wearing nondescript dark suits. These were the nameless interrogators from the Deuxième Bureau, the Secret Service of the French Army, called le gestapo by those who knew it well.

  “Describe what happened to the Mongolian,” the first interrogator said. “His nom de guerre was”—he paused, checking his notes—“Hehu Keh, correct?”

  “Yes, Caporal Keh. As I told you, monsieur—”

  “No, no.” The second interrogator waved a narrow hand. “Reply to our questions without qualifications and without second thoughts, even if we ask them a hundred times. We have our methods, you see.”

  The third interrogator, studying his well-manicured fingernails, said nothing.

  They were treating Sous-lieutenant Pinard like a criminal, but he had expected this reception: In France, in the legal system enshrined in the Code Napoléon, you were guilty until proven innocent. In the Legion everyone was automatically assumed to be a criminal; this general suspicion a result of the long tradition of offering escaped convicts and various sorts of villains a refuge in the ranks. The interrogators from the Deuxième Bureau were themselves part of a long tradition: those faceless men, their identities unknown to history, who had established the service in 1871 had been educated by Jesuits in a famous Jesuit lycée in Paris. And after the fashion of any good Jesuit confessor, it was the aim of the interrogators to elicit a confession of guilt from Sous-lieutenant Pinard, even if he were entirely innocent of the crime in question. For which of us, they reasoned, is not guilty of something?

  Pinard told them in detail all he could remember about finding the hijacked trucks in the desert, and about the firefight that followed:

  Caporal Keh blew the stalled Peugeot with his first rocket, detonating mortar rounds and other ammunition stored in the bed, and obliterating an unknown number of Marabout children asleep in the back atop crates of 12.7mm shells. The desert lit up with this massive explosion, which also instantly flattened ten or fifteen of the Marabout fighters. Shards of metal flew through the air, steaming chunks of tire, body parts. As Pinard and Legionnaire Szbeszdogy charged down the slope, the head of a child ploughed into the sand like a cannonball, not half a meter off their left flank.

  The Deuxième Bureau interrogators exchanged a glance at this horrific detail.

  “Please, no more heads,” the first interrogator said. “There are entirely too many heads in your story already.”

  “And what’s this about children?” the second interrogator said, looking up from his notes. “You didn’t mention any children in your written report.”

  “No . . . ,” Sous-lieutenant Pinard said uneasily. “I suppose I forgot.”

  “Forgot about a child’s head?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “Tell me, where do they come from, these headless children?”

  “The Marabouts are not an army in the modern sense,” Pinard said, remembering the Commentaries of Caesar he’d read at Saint-Cyr. “They’re a nation under arms, like the barbarian invasions of ancient times. They campaign with their wives, their children, even their grandmothers—”

  “We are not interested in strategic opinions or historical analysis,” the second interrogator interrupted harshly. “Confine yourself to what actually happened.”

  “Make no mistake,” the first interrogator added. “You stand before your judges.”

  The wound in Pinard’s thigh was now beginning to throb.

  “And please don’t mention these supposedly dismembered children to anyone,” the first interrogator added. “Think what the press would do with such a story. This is classified. Comprends?”

  “Oui, monsieur.”

  “Continue.”

  The battle for the remaining Peugeot dissolved in Pinard’s memory into the flash and blur of tracer bullets, eruptions of bloody sand, the dim shapes of screaming Marabouts. Fighting back to back, firing their weapons in tightly controlled bursts, Sous-lieutenant Pinard and Legionnaire Szbeszdogy gained the meager shelter of a pile of flaming rubble a meter or so away from the second truck. There, just as Pinard blew off the last of his 5.56, a Marabout round ricocheted off a rock and struck him in the thigh. Another grazed his ear and left temple, releasing a blinding gush of blood and, wounded and nearly blind, he made what peace he could with the merciless deity every soldier must face in the end: the God of Battles.

  “You find yourself praying,” he said, his voice nearly a whisper. “Even if you believe in nothing at all.”

  “Surely even an atheist has belief after a fashion,” the first interrogator suggested, a Jesuitical smirk on his face. “He believes in science perhaps.”

  “Ni l’un, ni l’autre.” Pinard shook his head.

  “Passons, passons.” The second interrogator made an impatient gesture. “This is not the place for amateur theological discussions.”

  Pinard continued.

  As a dozen of the enemy closed in, Caporal Keh came careening down into the guelb from his hiding place above, rocket launcher at his shoulder, an inchoate Mongolian war cry on his lips. He fired his second and last boudin into the melee; the concussive whump gave Pinard and Szbeszdogy just enough cover to scramble into the cab of the idling Peugeot. Pinard threw himself behind the wheel and jammed the truck into gear and accelerated, fully intending to swing back around to rescue the embattled Mongolian. But burning debris now illuminated Keh’s fate: His head, eyes still blinking as if in surprise, suddenly rolled from his shoulders and the headless corpse toppled into the sand. He had been cut down with a single blow from a Marabout scimitar. Such was the end of the valiant Hehu Keh, Legionnaire, ex-private of Mongolian People’s Army, masturbator, lover of barmaids, the deepest bass voice in the Legion. Marabout bullets crashed against the armored flank of the departing truck, a kind of valedictory drumroll to speed Keh’s departing soul off to the Mongolian Valhalla. One of these sent a sharp piece of metal slamming into Szbeszdogy’s ribs and he fell back, screaming in pain.

  “There was nothing we could have done,” Sous-lieutenant Pinard continued, keeping his voice steady with effort. “I’ve thought it over and over a hundred times and I still say there was no way to save Keh. We had no ammunition left and I couldn’t see because of the blood in my eyes. Anyway, there wasn’t enough time, we were taking heavy fire. The truck was pointed toward the horizon and I hit the accelerator. Before I could turn the wheel, it was too late, they’d got to him”—a lump rose in his throat—“Messieurs, I would like to recommend Caporal Keh for the Medaille Militaire. If you permit me, for the record: Caporal Keh acted with fierce courage, beyond the call of duty, with no regard for self—”

  But Pinard’s speech was interrupted at this point by a voice from above: “No use wasting a medal on a dead man, is there, Pinard?”

  The sous-lieutenant looked up, bewildered. The voice, familiar, pompous, issued from a camouflaged speaker box in the ceiling. Up there also, the tiny lens of an electronic eye. He had been listened to, watched the whole time.

  The voice belonged to General Victor le Breton, second in command of the 1e RE, a big, obnoxious man, dangerously ob
ese and very vain, who had his unique, showy white uniforms custom-tailored at the Yves St. Laurent atelier in Paris. In full dress, a hundred golden medals pinned across his chest, he resembled an ornate, gilded ship scudding before the wind.

  “Is that you, mon general?”

  “No, it’s the voice of God!” the general answered.

  The Deuxième Bureau interrogators, Jesuits that they were, seemed displeased by this blasphemy.

  “You are familiar with article seven, section two of the Legion Code?”

  Pinard hung his head. “Of course.”

  “Repeat the pertinent injunction for me.”

  “ ‘I will never abandon my dead or wounded,’ ” Pinard said in a flat voice, recalling the pledge they’d made to the pile of heads back at the blockhouse. That one at least had been honored.

  “Where are the earthly remains of Caporal Hehu Keh at this moment?”

  “We searched for his body, sir,” Pinard said desperately. “We couldn’t find anything. There was a sandstorm. It was the season of many such storms. We couldn’t even find the Berm in that mess. We set out for the block house in the teeth of the storm two weeks later to retrieve the heads with the wind howling around us like the devil—we had to abort that mission. It took us two more weeks to get the heads back to Dahkla. As for finding what was left of Keh . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “And what about the two missing men?” the general boomed down at him. “You returned to France with twenty-one heads. There remain a twenty-second and a twenty-third head. Am I not correct, Pinard?”