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“One of our international studies guys came up with the Western Sahara, a country without a government, always teetering on the edge of anarchy. Great place to grow a terrorist organization from scratch like sea monkeys in a jar! We quietly moved into the refugee camps out here, first Awsard, then the others. We started slowly, learning the language, devising an ideology, a brand-new religion, blending folk stories and myth and the Koran and just some totally made-up shit and then preaching it to the people with absolute sincerity. It’s a fact that desperate people will believe anything that promises them a way out—”
“Tell me about the bees,” Smith interrupted again.
“The bees are excellent, don’t you think?” Ralph grinned. “Our consultant at Ogilvie in New York gets the credit for that one. Every great belief system needs a visual symbol, he said, something that can be scratched into the dirt with a few quick strokes. Bees because they sting, you know, because they hurt and no one forgets a bee sting, and because raising bees is good for the environment. We’re very green, you know. And because bees produce honey, which is an excellent protein that indigenous people can eat to survive.”
“Except your bees don’t make honey at all,” Smith said. “All they do is sting!”
“My bad,” the Gateway admitted. “We picked the wrong species, you can’t be all right all the time. So once we had our bees, we invented a myth to go along with them, some bullshit about a messianic figure called Al Bab—Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Iman, right?—being asleep in a cave for a thousand years, then there’s a swarm of bees sent by Allah to sting him awake, to wake his ass up to get busy saving the world. And man, what a beautiful synergy! We had our initiation rites. Every religion’s got to have an initiation. You know, baptism, circumcision, whatever? Like show me the madman who dreamed up slicing the foreskin off some poor little kid’s dick so he’ll be more pleasing to God! Makes our bees seem like an eminently reasonable alternative.”
“What about cutting off people’s heads?”
“That was my idea,” Ralph said, pride in his voice. “Heads are very primal. Like the Aztecs and that wall of a million skulls Cortés saw when he marched into the Valley of Mexico. And the Dyaks riding around on motor scooters in Borneo a couple of years back slashing off people’s heads like cantaloupes left and right. And shrunken heads in the Amazon, and headhunters in New Guinea, you know, stuff like that. Puts a chill right up your spine. Throw a couple of severed heads into any mix and you’ve got what? Fucking absolute beautiful terror!”
Smith didn’t want to listen anymore. Disgust and horror rose up like bile. “Shut up, you sick fuck!” he shouted. “Just shut up!”
“Face reality, dude,” Ralph said, sounding hurt. “The planet’s overcrowded with people, literally crumbling under the weight of billions of feet, billions of tons of human shit. The human footprint’s got to be smaller. What did Trotsky say? The revolution must be watered with blood!”
“Non, Robespierre said that . . .” It was Phillipe’s voice, sounding dry and dusty, as if it came from beyond the tomb.
Smith spun around to see his commanding officer standing there, more or less steady on his feet, lucidity once again shining from his watery blue eyes.
“You will permit me, Milquetoast,” Phillipe said. He took the FAMAS rifle from Smith’s hands and flipped up the stubby bayonet affixed to the stock.
“Do you remember a little man named Hanz Milhauz?” he said to Ralph. His tone, though conversational, calm, contained an explicit threat.
Ralph blinked up at him and began to tremble.
“Ah, I see.” The colonel nodded. “You don’t remember him. But then, you probably never knew his name. You murdered him at the Awsard camp six years ago. You cut off his head and subjected his body to indignities. Does this sound familiar to you?”
“If you kill me now, you won’t”—Ralph’s voice crackled with fear—“won’t get out of here. Think about that?”
“Something very important is missing,” the colonel said, his eyes carefully searching Ralph’s face. “Not even Hitler or Stalin could murder so many innocent people simply for a few stupid, abstract ideas. Hitler genuinely hated Jews. This was not an abstract idea with him. He hated them personally, each and every one. Just as Stalin hated the kulaks because he envied them their beautiful farms and plump, pretty wives. All politics is personal, don’t you agree?”
A tear squeezed out of Ralph’s close-set eyes and rolled down his round cheek.
“I offer you here a last chance to explain yourself,” Phillipe said gently. “Try again, please.”
“I have been explaining,” Ralph said. “You weren’t listening.”
“I heard every word,” Phillipe said. “You weren’t explaining. You were preaching to a fool. And I’m afraid Legionnaire Milquetoast here is a fool, otherwise he wouldn’t be in this predicament. Try again. Speak to me. One man to another.”
Ralph Wade moved his lips desperately, but this time no words came out.
“As I suspected.” The colonel nodded. “You do not have a genuine personal life. You’re not really a human being, only a sack full of foul air. Through some terrible oversight you were born without a soul. Hélas, there is only one thing to do with such an abomination—”
Smith lunged, not fast enough. The colonel stabbed down hard with the bayonet and buried it to the stock deep in the stony heart of the Gateway to the Age of the Hidden Imam, once known as Ralph T. Wade III, who coughed painfully, a bright mouthful of blood spilling down his bare chest, and died.
Smith began to weep. From exhaustion, from fear. It was dark now. With the morning light the Marabouts outside would get a good look into the room and see their precious Al Bab lying there dead.
“When you meet the devil you must not hesitate, you must kill him,” Phillipe said, sounding perfectly reasonable. “I swore I would claim my revenge for the murder of poor Milhauz and now I have. But to finish the job I must cut off his head.”
Smith watched as the colonel began sawing away with the blunt edge of the bayonet, ill suited for such a purpose. It was, after all, a stabbing weapon. They would be clawed apart for this, eviscerated by the blunt fingers of an enraged Marabout mob, their lifeless carcasses fed to those horrible stinging bees. But soon, Smith’s fear gave way to another sensation. He felt the relief of the traveler who at last comes within sight of the friendly porch of his own house after many hard years on the road. And now, overwhelmed by weariness, he lay back on the futon and fell instantly asleep.
12.
In the morning, they counted the bodies. Legionnaires Dessalines, Babenco, Vladimirovitch, and twenty-two Moroccans, all laid out side by side, equals in death. A Legion victory but a very costly one—casualty rate, 50 percent. Corpses decompose rapidly in the desert heat; in some cases, gases trapped in the viscera can lead to the most gruesome explosions. Immediate burial is a necessity.
Solas, still toting the large caliber Browning, supervised the burial detail, one long narrow grave for everyone. The surviving twenty-seven Moroccans, now prisoners of the Legion, worked with their entrenching tools for two hours as the sun rose over the desert. When they were done, Sergeant Ladjal and the rest rolled out their mats and prayed for their dead comrades in the first flush of heat.
Pinard ordered the mass grave to be filled without further ceremony, but Szbeszdogy intervened.
“You’ve got to say something, Capitaine,” he insisted. “The Moroccans have their prayers. We need a few words for our dead.”
Pinard agreed reluctantly. He stepped up on the mound of displaced sand and took off his borrowed Moroccan cap. The men, both Moroccans and Legionnaires, squinted up at him.
“I can’t tell you I knew these three all that well,” Pinard said. “Dessalines was a big brute, tough but superstitious as a woman. Babenco—who knows?—the man never said much of anything, but he was from Uruguay, which I understand is a quiet sort of place. And Vladimirovitch, thick-skulled and dumb as an
ox. I didn’t like them and they didn’t like me. But none of that matters now. They are at last, officially, heroes. Their names will be inscribed on the black walls of the Legion crypt in Aubagne along with the names of forty thousand others, men from every nation in the world and every profession and all walks of life. Princes, doctors, chimney sweeps, artists, drunks, marshals of France. I don’t know if there’s a god and frankly, I don’t care. But if there is, for these three, it’s the God of Battles. So to this fierce and pugnacious being I say receive the souls of Dessalines, Babenco, Vladimirovitch. They were Legionnaires: They did their duty and are dead. Now bury them.”
Pinard stepped down off the mound and put his cap back on and the Moroccans went to work filling the grave.
“See what I mean?” The Hungarian chuckled. “One would think you’d spent your whole life shut up in a library.”
“Shut up, Szbeszdogy.”
“In all seriousness,” Szbeszdogy said. “You have a kind of natural eloquence. If poetry displeases you, what about politics?”
“Don’t insult me!”
A delegation of the Moroccans, led by Sergeant Ladjal, approached. Solas stood guard warily, 50-caliber rounds ready in the breech.
“A word, your honor,” Sergeant Ladjal said in French. He bowed deeply, nearly bending himself in two at the waist, then squatted in the sand.
“Alors?” Pinard said, looming over him.
“What do you plan to do with us?”
Pinard thought about this for a moment. “Nothing,” he said. “We’ll take some supplies and a truck and your weapons and you’re free to go back to Laayoune with the rest.”
The sergeant nodded thoughtfully. “It is as I feared,” he said. “I beg you not to do this thing.”
“I don’t understand,” Pinard said, baffled. “You wish to remain our prisoners?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Why?”
“The major was a cruel man,” Sergeant Ladjal said. “He was a bad officer and interested only in his own comforts. So it doesn’t bother us that you killed him. But if we return to Morocco with our commanding officer dead and our weapons confiscated, and you and your men escaped, it will go very badly for us. I will certainly be shot for cowardice, as will the two surviving corporals. The other men will be thrown into a terrible prison for a very long time. We are not very good soldiers, but soldiers are only as good as their officers allow them to be. We could become very fine soldiers indeed and you, monsieur, seem like a very fine officer. And so, my men and myself, we would like to volunteer with the Foreign Legion.”
“I see.” Pinard nodded, suppressing an urge toward hilarity. But Szbeszdogy, lacking Pinard’s naturally restrained temperament, broke out laughing.
“This is not a joke,” Sergeant Ladjal insisted, wagging his head sourly. “Please understand we do not come to you with nothing. Our pockets are full, so to speak—we have something to trade. Some very valuable information.”
Szbeszdogy stopped laughing.
“Yes?” Pinard said.
“The Marabout hive, their citadel is well known to us”—Muhammed Ladjal gestured at the distant peaks, now covered in snow—“not far from here, in the Guelta range.”
The word citadel conjured for Szbeszdogy visions out of The Arabian Nights: crenelated towers, moats, invisible castles inhabited by djinns and ogres and an enchanted princess or two. You would need an army of knights to assault such a place. Pinard, who had never read any tales of djinns, ogres, or princesses, thought only of stone walls, barbed wire, and gun embrasures. In either case, a formidable obstacle.
“On a plateau between two peaks,” the Moroccan continued. “Lightly held. Not a job for a brigade, not even a company. Ten men, perhaps twelve. A patrol. The element of surprise.”
Pinard drew the sergeant to his feet and kissed him on both cheeks.
13.
An absolute stillness hung over the mountain redoubt of the Marabouts. Smith snapped awake in the predawn darkness, immediately aware of the absence of sound. He opened the interior door a crack. The large room beyond stood deserted. Phillipe took the Gateway’s severed head by the hair and without saying a word to each other they walked through the bungalow, also deserted, down the long corridor and out the front door unmolested. No one stopped them because there was no one to do so. Even the bees were gone, their massive hive silent.
“They cleared out,” Smith said, not believing the empty village, the hovels denuded of every last scrap. “You really think they’re gone?”
“Oh, yes.” Phillipe smiled through broken teeth. “They’re gone.”
“Why . . . ? Did they . . . ? Where . . . ?”
Dazed, Smith couldn’t frame the right questions. But Phillipe seemed temporarily revitalized. Killing Al Bab had sent a jolt of energy through him. Perhaps he had consumed, like a hero out of ancient myth, some of the life force of his vanquished enemy through the blade of his sword.
“Marabout fighters surprised me while you were asleep,” Phillipe said. “They had their guns on me, they were about to shoot. I merely showed them this—” He offered Ralph’s severed head to the pale inspection of dawn. “And they got a good long look and went away quietly. An hour later I heard them all moving out, a kind of sad creaking as they took off their belongings that was the sound of the archimposter’s schemes falling apart piece by piece. This happened yesterday. You’ve been sleeping for twenty hours. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Thanks,” Smith mumbled.
“The Marabouts believe Al Bab is immortal,” Phillipe continued. “Always dying, always resurrected. This head represents just one of the forms of their prophet. Killing him only released his soul to inhabit a higher form. We were the instruments of that release, you and I, Milquetoast. Perhaps the Marabouts think we’re a couple of angels and, like their bees, sent by heaven. In any case, I imagine they’re relieved. New belief systems are generally very demanding. Now they can go back to the relative luxury of the refugee camps. Free logs of UN cheese and so on.”
Smith and Phillipe wandered slowly through the darkened town, the former stumbling a little, freedom an unfamiliar taste in his mouth; the latter swinging Al Bab’s severed head jauntily by the hair, like a lantern. Halfway down the slope a man in a dirty denim jumpsuit, camouflage grease smeared across his hawkish features, stepped out of the shadows. In his hands a gleaming chrome Kalashnikov, its stock inlaid in silver with the Moroccan star.
“Where did you get that ridiculous weapon, Pinard?” Phillipe said.
“Colonel de Noyer?” Pinard cried, squinting into the gloom.
“Yes, I’m afraid so.”
Pinard could hardly conceal his dismay at the sight of this walking skeleton, otherwise known as Phillipe de Noyer—remembering the elegant officer, accomplished pianist, and Satie fanatic, second in command of la Musique Principale. The treasured husband of the woman he loved. To this vigorous, talented person the present emaciated toothless apparition bore no resemblance. For his part Smith, astonished, couldn’t help gaping at Pinard. One thought kept running through his head: He had cried out from the darkness of captivity—à moi la Légion!—and, damn, if the bastards hadn’t come for him.
“You remember Legionnaire Milquetoast,” Phillipe said, gesturing to Smith. “Smith, my former adjutant, Sous-lieutenant Pinard—”
“That’s capitaine,” Pinard corrected. “Field commission.”
“Congratulations.” The colonel nodded. “Well done.”
“Mon capitaine.” Smith saluted. Pinard eyed him coolly.
“So you made it this far, Milquetoast,” he said.
“I did, sir,” Smith said. But meanwhile, he thought, cocksucker, I never wanted to see your ugly face again! Between the two of them there was, and would ever be, the kind of natural antipathy that goes beyond personality and upbringing, that is rooted somewhere deep in the blood.
Pinard offered Colonel de Noyer a foul-tasting Moroccan cigarette from a requisitioned
pack; as an afterthought he offered one to Smith. The men lit up and smoked for a long minute without speaking. It seemed they were standing on the parade ground at Aubagne in full dress, not exposed on a frozen mountaintop in the expectant moments before dawn, targets for snipers, an ambush.
“By the way, Milquetoast,” the colonel said, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke into the brightening sky. “I’m recommending you for the Croix de Guerre. You could have escaped without me, you didn’t. Eh bien, bravo!” Then to Pinard, “Should anything unfortunate happen to me, please make a note of this commendation.”
“Oui, mon colonel.”
Cold wind swept down from the peaks above, redolent with snow. Phillipe was on his feet and lucid, even garrulous—but the last fires of his life were clearly extinguishing themselves as each second gave way inexorably to the next. He faltered suddenly, and put his hand on Smith’s shoulder to steady himself.
“Are you able to walk, Colonel?” Pinard asked anxiously. “They’re waiting down there, ready to take this place by storm. If I don’t get back soon we’ll be caught in our own firefight!”
“Who’s waiting?”
“Legionnaires Szbeszdogy and Solas.” Pinard grinned. “And a few new volunteers.”
“Good. Shall we go, mes enfants?”
Phillipe removed his hand from Smith’s shoulder and took a step forward unaided, then another, and soon they were moving down the slope.
“Glad you showed up, Pinard,” the colonel said. “I didn’t want to carry this ugly relic all the way back to Aubagne.” He raised the head, an expression of terminal horror fixed to its fat cheeks. “Meet the great and terrible Al Bab. Strangely, he was an American. What was that name again, Milquetoast?”
“Ralph T. Wade III,” Smith said, “of Marin County, California.”
“Half the trouble in the world seems to be caused by Americans.” Phillipe shot Smith a critical glance.
