Jerry watched the stars wink on. Evening. It was evening.
“I mean, everyone’s scared sometimes, aren’t they?” the pilot asked. “I wasn’t any more scared than anyone else.”
Pa turned to Jerry. “Why don’t you look in the cooler, Jerry? I bet there’s some ice cream there.”
Jerry looked behind him and saw a Coca-Cola cooler in the grass. He lifted the lid. Inside, nestled into chunks of ice, was a white plastic spoon and a pint of Blue Bell Strawberries and Cream.
“Growing boys like sweets,” his Pa said.
Jerry licked the ice cream off the paper lid. The pilot threw a stone into the lake. The concentric circles caught the candy-pink glow of the dying sun.
“You like throwing things?” Jerry asked. He popped a frozen strawberry into his mouth and sucked on it.
“What do you mean?” The pilot’s voice was sharp.
“Chunking rocks. Throwing missiles.”
Justin started to lunge to his feet and come after Jerry, but Pa stopped him. “Boys,” he said indulgently, grabbing the pilot’s arm. “Sometimes they play too rough. Sometimes fathers have to intervene. Why don’t you have some ice cream, Justin? Some ice cream will take your mind off things.”
With a surly tug, the pilot freed his arm. “Nobody likes killing, kid, unless he’s sick. And nobody but a coward punches out unless he has to. My RIO was wrong, you know that? Tyler wasn’t flying that plane. He couldn’t feel the way the pole was jerking. It wasn’t that I was scared of landing. We were going down,” he said. Doubt fogged his eyes. “We were going down.”
Then he started throwing rocks again, his movements furious.
Jerry was finishing up the pint of Blue Bell when the man in the camouflage and the Nikes came walking down the hill. He stopped near Jerry and sat, arms around his knees. He stared out into the water.
Jerry saw the man was crying. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Guy’s a loser,” the pilot muttered. “A fuck-up. A real gomer.”
The man swiveled. His eyes were a pale blue and Jerry could see the edge of the lake and the trees through them. “I need your help,” the man said. Then his face went blank, as though the next thought had dropped through the gauzy pan of his brain.
“Let me tell you about chunking missiles, kid,” the pilot said, ignoring the soldier in the camouflage. “You know when your plane’s sick. You can feel it. There’s this part of you that becomes part of the plane.”
Jerry turned to the soldier and saw the man wasn’t looking their way. Wasn’t listening. He was staring across the lake, at the clatter of the reeds, an expression of longing on his face.
Suddenly the soldier in the Nikes stood up. Across the grass an Arab was walking, a swarthy ANA officer. The two confronted each other: the Arab yearningly; the American in stunned recognition. Then the Arab went to the tumbledown boathouse. Doorknob in hand, the Arab paused. Finally he shook his head and walked inside.
“You become the plane when you fly, Justin,” Pa was saying. “But you don’t become the plane the way this man would become the light.” There was a smile, sweet as brickle and chocolate, melting down Pa’s face.
“Gordon doesn’t know it yet,” Pa said so lovingly that Jerry felt a jealous pang. “But he would like to fly the light.”
Jerry put the empty ice-cream carton back in the cooler. When he looked again, the transparent man in the camouflage uniform was gone.
THE PYRENEES, ABOVE THE SWITCHBACK AT LLIVIA
He heard them coming long before he saw them. The army moved with a low, grinding noise that echoed back and forth between the limestone canyons. Like the warning growl in the throat of a tiger.
Gordon glanced behind him. Rover hung low near the CRAV obediently, just as he had been told. His light was so dim it was barely discernible from the moon-splattered rocks.
Quickly Gordon swiveled his head around. He wondered when the tanks would come into view. Just out of sight of the plastiqued switchback, he wouldn’t see the Arabs until they were on him.
And then, if luck was with the Allies, the Arabs would stop. The whole line of vehicles would stop. He imagined them rolling blind up the sharp S-curve, each tank commander not realizing that the vehicle ahead wasn’t moving until he almost collided with it.
And when they were bottlenecked along the S-curve like the worst of bumper-to-bumper traffic, the Israelis would blow the limestone wall.
Gordon wouldn’t hear the rumble as the cliff came down. He’d be dead before that.
His first death had been a lightning bolt: a hot blast of stinging shrapnel, a clap of thunder. This time he knew it was coming. His teeth chattered. He shook so much that the robot arms shuddered in their mounts and clattered like Rover.
The sound of the approaching army grew louder. It wasn’t a growl anymore; it was a roar.
Gordon was going to run. He knew it. No one should have to have this sort of courage. He was breathing hard now, gulping air. His face wore a mask of greasy sweat.
Someone put a hand on his arm—Pelham, probably. Gordon nearly came out of the command chair screaming.
Just a robot, he reminded himself. Sweat rolled down from his brows and dropped, stinging, into his eyes. He fought the urge to close them. He fought the intense need to blink.
I’m just a robot.
THE PYRENEES, BELOW THE SWITCHBACK AT LLIVIA
Wasef checked his digital watch. Three in the morning, he saw with surprise.
Settling back into his seat, he watched the lead tank, a ghost in the moonlight, negotiate the long S-curve of the road. Above him a limestone cliff rose to dizzying heights, its moon-soaked face marred by small fissures and rain-gouged holes.
Beside him Gamal stirred, and Wasef wondered if the boy had been asleep. If he had been dreaming.
“What time is it?” Gamal asked, yawning.
“Zero three hundred.”
The road ahead, dull pewter in the moonlight, seemed to hang to the side of the mountain as though dangling by sheer grit.
“I’ve made you a promise,” Gamal told him. “Now you make me one.”
“Yes, all right,” Wasef said. The jeep was fully into the switchback, and the high cliffs blocked the moon.
“If I don’t get back,” Gamal said, “tell my father I love him.”
“You’ll be there to tell him yourself when we meet his division in France.”
The idea of France was so strange. There was no place for him below, Wasef knew. Spain was distant as the years-old memory of Egypt; and France was a mist-and-shadow place. Wasef belonged here, in this no-man’s-land of giddy heights and dark stone.
They moved out of the end of the S and around a blind corner, the jeep hugging the wall. Below him the mountain fell away so far, Wasef could no longer see the stream. They were now even with the immense peaks, like flies bumping the ceiling of the world.
The jeep braked hard, throwing the colonel forward against the front seat. “What?” he asked. Then he heard the shouts from the lead tank.
“I don’t know, sir,” the driver said, turning around.
Nudging the rear bumper of Wasef’s jeep, the following tank stopped. Its commander was standing up in the turret, calling to the tank ahead.
“Maybe an obstacle,” the driver of the jeep said.
Wasef climbed over the front seat, the hood, and pulled himself one-handed up on the deck of the forward tank. In the muted glow of the T-62’s headlights he could see something blocking the road. Lifting his night-vision scope, he began to pick out details, unexpectedly familiar details. Treads, metal arms resting about a round turret.
For a moment he thought he was dreaming. Then he dropped the glasses. “Fire!” he screamed.
The sergeant gave him a puzzled look. Did the tank co
mmander not see it?
“Kill it, damn you! It is the American remote!”
The commander looked down into the hole and snapped out an order. The turret made a grinding noise as the barrel of the cannon moved into firing position.
The little remote stood its ground, no missile tubes showing. Was it incapacitated? Wasef wondered. Was the operator crazy?
“Fire,” the TC said.
The tank shook as the shell left the tube. The jolt knocked Wasef to his knees. For a heartbeat the mountain lit up with flame, a hot strobe that cast the naked rocks in orange and hard black shadows.
The robot was no djinn, Wasef saw to his relief, but a solid thing of plastic and steel. The armor-piercing shell went right through it, flaying steel skin, laying open sizzling wire nerves and computer-component organs. The force of the impact swatted it around a half-turn. An instant later it burst into flame.
“Push it off the mountain,” he ordered. He was turning away when the TC began to scream.
Nightmare was back full force. A blue light had burst out of the burning guts of the robot and was making for them at dizzying speed.
The TC pulled himself from the turret and ran, pushing Wasef aside in his haste. The tank began to move, not forward to push the demolished remote from the road, but backward.
“Stop!” Wasef shouted.
No use. The tank hit the jeep with a squeal of buckling metal, crushing it into the T -72 behind. The first tank lifted as it began to climb the wreck.
In the sickly light from the burning robot, Wasef saw Gamal trapped in the accordioned backseat. The captain’s eyes were bulging with terror as he pumped rounds from his sidearm into the tank’s impervious armor.
The T-62’s treads clanged a quick rhythm up the metal chassis of the jeep. Dropping to his knees and sliding, Wasef grasped the scorching metal of the cannon to stay his fall.
“Stop! Stop, damn it!” Wasef beat the butt of his own Glock 9mm into the decking of the driver’s cubbyhole.
The tank clambered the rest of the way. A shriek of metal drowned out Gamal’s final scream.
Turret closed, the T -72 was trying to retreat. Incredulously Wasef saw it collide with the tank to its rear, then watched it, transmission still grinding in reverse, slew right, and tumble off the mountain.
“Stop!” Wasef shouted.
But his men weren’t stopping. They were falling back in a panic, firing machine guns at the cavorting light. Wasef heard bullets ping off the metal deck beside him, heard the peevish whines of the ricochets. With a gasp he dove for the safety of the hatch. Too late. Bullets slammed into his stomach, his legs—one, two, three—their impacts like fists. He sprawled face-up across the night-cooled metal.
“Stop,” he whispered. Above him the stars twinkled like distant artillery.
No one, not even the stars, was listening. The three remaining members of the first tank crew abandoned their vehicle and fled into the darkness, through hysterical gunfire.
A cramp stitched Wasef’s belly. He drew his left leg up to ease the pain. He was suddenly very tired. Too tired to move, to think.
From the switchback came an earth-shattering series of booms, so loud that the mountain shook to its foundations. Somewhere rock was falling, clattering like metal rain.
Wasef moaned as another cramp hit and bent him in two.
When it was over, he lay back panting and sweating in the cold, star-struck night. He heard his men screaming but was too exhausted to go see what was wrong.
All the victims of the famine, even Zahra, had left life furtively. Sometimes he imagined he had been there when her death came. That she had passed away in his arms and not in an official army letter.
Zahra died in black and white, embossed with a governmental seal.
He rolled his head to the side. Zahra was there in the reeds, an arm’s reach away. The papyrus was tapping in the wind. “So tired,” he told her. He was so tired of it all: the fighting, the foxhole nights.
Zahra smiled. The Nile at her feet reflected the stars. Something was burning, something that stank of smoldering insulation.
Sharp-toothed pain bit again. He raised his shoulders weakly. Somewhere under him, he knew, Gamal lay buried in a steel grave. How odd fate was. He’d thought that Gamal, not he, would be shot by his men.
It was too quiet. There was no rumble of engines, no squeak of sprockets. On the other side of the switchback something was happening to Wasef’s army. Something ...
He sucked in a breath and held it, hoping the agony would leave. He closed his eyes. Zahra was standing ankle-deep in the blue Nile, blue as the desert sky, blue as lapis stone.
The reeds were clattering.
IN THE LIGHT
Across the silent library, someone was weeping. Rita made her way down the aisle of books, books silvery in the glimmer from the high windows. At an oak table trimmed in a barley twist design sat General Lauterbach, his head in his hands.
She walked over. At her approach, he raised his head. Not weeping, she saw. Laughing. Lauterbach was laughing.
His face, unlike Dr. Gladdings’s, didn’t change. Muted light glinted off his balding head, off the stars on his collar. Through his shoulder she could see the edge of the stacks, the spines of the books.
“It worked,” he said.
But then his face did alter. It went from a smile to a grimace of concern. “Rita?” he whispered cautiously, as though afraid his voice might shatter her, and the library, into silver-plated pieces.
“Rita? Is that you?”
“Too bad they killed us both,” she told him and walked away.
“Rita!” he called.
She didn’t stop. Dr. Gladdings was waiting for her by the fireplace. “I have a question about pain,” he said.
“Really?” She cocked her head and listened: the general’s calls were silenced, absorbed by the cottony air.
“Come,” Dr. Gladdings said.
She followed him to an anteroom. On the marble floor a soldier was dying.
He was an Arab, she saw. An officer. One arm in a cast. Blood had turned the uniform below his waist a clotted, dirty red.
“Do you think he will die?” Dr. Gladdings asked.
Rita studied the man’s injuries. Through a hole in his left thigh pumped arterial blood. The tear in the lower quadrant of his shirt suggested a serious abdominal wound. The officer was raising his knee gingerly toward his stomach, as though in great pain.
She looked at his face. He smiled weakly at her.
“Is there a hospital near?”
“No,” Dr. Gladdings said.
‘Then he won’t make it,” she concluded.
“Which is better: pain or death?” Dr. Gladdings asked.
‘There shouldn’t be any pain,” Rita said.
Death had always been a thing she dealt with easily. Pain, on the other hand, was not. It was the babies in the hospital mewling in their sleep, it was the adults whimpering in their delirium, who had pushed her into pathology where she saw only the consequences of suffering, not its messy, inhuman process.
Dr. Gladdings’s lips stretched into a sagging-dough smile. He handed her the pointer. “Kill him,” he said.
She took the stick. The wood was as cold as frozen metal.
“Kill him,” Dr. Gladdings coaxed. “Look how he wants you to.”
The Arab was staring up at her, his liquid eyes dark with yearning, his long face tight with pain.
“It’s all an illusion,” she told Dr. Gladdings, “Lauterbach, this Arab. It’s all some sort of game.”
“Won’t you play a hand of poker with me, then?” the doctor asked, teasing. “Won’t you play a little, Rita? You were always such a serious girl.”
She brought the pointer down and tou
ched the Arab to the right of his sternum. His dark eyes widened in surprise. They didn’t shut again.
Rita whirled and walked into the main part of the library.
Outside the windows, freezing rain was covering the leaves with ice. Lauterbach wasn’t there. The Arab, when she tried the anteroom a while later, was gone as well.
NEAR FIGUERAS, CATALONIA, SPAIN
Frustrated, horrified, General Sabry stood up in his BRMD scout, holding the cupola cover before him like a shield.
It was all happening so fast that Sabry couldn’t think. His troops had lost their reason in the blood-soaked marshes near Perpignan. He’d called for a strategic fallback by figures. The tanks should have leapfrogged, making the French bleed for every kilometer they gained. But somewhere in that retreat they’d lost leadership just as they had lost communications—jammed by ECM and terror. His demoralized men transformed a retreating army into a scrambling mob.
The French must have been hoarding petrol. That was it. They had hoarded their jet fuel and lied to their Allies. Hadn’t Sabry read all the intelligence reports? The Americans had been on their knees begging for fuel while the French insisted they had none.
Now the French were spending every stockpiled drop to kill Sabry’s two divisions. Jaguars and Mirages. A never-ending deluge of fire and steel. The Dauphin helicopters stayed airborne after the initial disastrous air combat, not bothering to keep to nap-of-the-earth flight. After the first hour of battle nothing Arab moved in the skies; and now all that was Arab on the ground was fleeing.
Behind him he heard a bone-shattering boom as a HOT missile hit. A second struck a BMP nearby, sending flames and smoke rushing skyward.
Sabry pushed his bulk down from the cupola and dropped into the cabin of the BRDM. Major el-Hakim was cowering against the wall. The cramped interior of the scout vehicle was filled with the sharp stink of nervous sweat.
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