Cold Allies

by Patricia Anthony

  “The nearest town!” Sabry shouted over the growl of the engine.

  “Sir?” The major’s eyes were blank with fear. “Damn you! The nearest town! What is it?”

  “Figueras, sir,” the driver answered.

  “How far?” the general asked, turning away from the paralyzed officer.

  ‘‘Twelve kilometers due east,” the driver said. “We will have to go through Figueras, sir, to cross the bridge there.”

  “Defensible?” Sabry asked el-Hakim, raising his voice to be heard over the engine noise.

  The major didn’t answer.

  “Where are the maps, damn it!” Sabry screamed.

  “Sir,” the driver said. “Figueras, if you’ll recall, is a crossroad town. There are flat marshes leading to it, and a river valley. Probably very defensible, sir.”

  Sabry felt hot embarrassment rise in his face as he realized that he, too, had caught the panic. Hysteria was making morons of them all.

  Sabry tore the radio from el-Hakim’s hand. ‘They overran us, sir,” the major was babbling. “Where did they get so much fuel for their planes? How could that happen? And there was no artillery, did you see that? No artillery. Colonel Wasef’s division should have been on the heights.”

  Sabry tried to raise Colonel Abbas. All that came over the radio was the roar of ECM.

  Yes, Wasef should have been on the heights with his artillery and Sagger missiles. What had detained his flanking division, his favorite officer, his only son?

  The radio spat static. “Colonel Abbas?” Sabry called.

  Sabry could hear terror in the colonel’s high-pitched shout. “Sir!”

  “We regroup in Figueras, colonel,” Sabry told him. There was no composure anymore, not for Sabry, not for his men. There was only a fifty-kilometer killing ground from here to Perpignan, a slaughtering floor, a place of shame.

  “Yes, sir.” But there was a question in the colonel’s voice.

  Sabry knew what that question was: How in the world do we regroup? The army had become a mass of lemmings. They might not stop until they foundered in the Mediterranean Sea.

  “Send word down the line, colonel,” Sabry told him. “Tell them they stop and regroup in Figueras or our own tanks will kill them and get the slaughter over with.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sabry put the radio down and stepped up into the cupola rim, pushing his bulk through the hole. Raising his field glasses, he made a sweep of the pale green grass, the river, and the abandoned town beyond.

  A flash. Sunlight winking off metal, perhaps. A second flash, then the ripping sound of a shell overhead.

  All of Figueras had begun to twinkle, a daylight sparkler.

  “Artillery!” he screamed, dropping down into the cabin again. In his corner by the radio, el-Hakim sat frozen. The driver was jigging back and forth along the grass, bruising the tires on stones, slewing the rough-riding vehicle so sharply, Sabry almost fell to his knees.

  Too quickly the Allied artillery found Sabry’s range. The earth shook. Red light strobed from the open cupola. Thunderous cracks-near misses. Sabry was flanked. Turn back, and they would fall into the deadly French rain. South lay the sea; to the north, the mountains.

  A shell slammed into the BRDM’s side. The vehicle reeled, tolled like a bell. Sabry was flung against the bulkhead. Blood gushed from his nose, pooling warm in his lap.

  The driver was shouting something, but all Sabry could hear was an angry-hornet buzzing.

  He had to think. If he didn’t act quickly, everyone under his command would die. If he didn’t act now, the next shell would kill him.

  He glanced up and saw the driver staring. Sweat had turned the boy’s white undershirt dark, and blood trickled from his ears and nose. Sabry reached for the radio and screamed into it, “Surrender!”

  Outside the cupola, fireworks flickered like a Judgment Day cryptogram.

  The BRDM scout was motionless now. Sabry wasn’t sure whether it was the engine that had failed or the courage of the driver.

  “Give me your undershirt!”

  The driver couldn’t hear. Either the explosions were too loud or the boy, too, had gone temporarily deaf. With quick, impatient gestures, the general made himself understood.

  Snatching the offered undershirt, Sabry crawled up in the cupola. He lifted the makeshift white flag in the air. At that instant the scout vehicle lunged as though trying to mount the sky. From the depths of the cabin something snatched the general’s legs and jerked him hungrily down.

  Sabry forced open his eyes. Blood had glued them shut. He was lying on his back in the cabin of the BRDM, afternoon sunlight from the rent in the scout’s side painting Major el-Hakim in brass. An unexploded shell lay across Sabry’s leg.

  He tried to move. Splintery pain halted him. Outside the ruins of the vehicle was a long, wide silence, a hush that stretched for miles. El-Hakim, chest pinned to the wall by the thick, unwieldy point of the shell, was staring at his commander reproachfully. Blood had crusted down his chin like a dark, untrimmed beard.

  “Major,” Sabry whispered.

  The major’s glazed eyes did not shift. The grimace of pain did not soften.

  Sabry could not get his mind to work. Wasef and Gamal were waiting, waiting for his army to punch through France. Yet it seemed he also remembered that in the sweet spring grass of Catalonia his army had been ambushed.

  A rattle and clang at the side of the BRDM.

  “Sir!” an American voice shouted. “Hey, sir? There’s an unexploded round in here. And some fucking high-ranking Arab!”

  A moment later, Sabry felt the ruined scout bounce. He blinked up into the face of an American lieutenant. Under the rim of the helmet, the boy’s eyes were wide with awe.

  What was it Sabry wanted to say? Ah, yes. He remembered. “Surrender,” he whispered.

  The boy left.

  Later, five more Americans pushed their way inside. They bent to examine Sabry’s leg, the shell, the corpse of Major el-Hakim.

  “Surrender,” the general said, but they weren’t listening.

  Westerners never listened. That’s what the entire war was about.

  “We can’t move that shell. Amputate?” a lieutenant asked a captain.

  The captain nodded. “Leg’s a goner, anyway.”

  “Surrender,” Sabry said. Couldn’t they hear? He was surrendering his army, the best part of himself.

  The captain bent over. “What’s he saying?” A sergeant shrugged. “Beats me.”

  “I don’t like the looks of that scalp wound. We’ll give him a local. Get a tourniquet on that leg.” The captain knelt beside Sabry and looked into his eyes. “General? Can you hear me? Can you understand English?”

  “Yes,” Sabry told him.

  The captain turned to the sergeant. “Start me an IV drip, please.”

  Sabry grabbed the captain’s hand and held it fast. “I surrender to you.”

  The officer moved his brief attention from the sergeant to Sabry. “Okay. You’re going to be all right. We’ll have you out of here in five minutes. Harris?” he shouted. “Make sure you hold that chopper.”

  The sergeant ripped the sleeve of Sabry’s battle shirt and expertly slid a needle into Sabry’s elbow. A private tore open the buttons of the general’s blouse and set the cold pads of an EKG on his chest.

  “Where’s the lidocaine?” Sabry heard the captain ask in a voice calm as a placid lake.

  Easy for the Americans to be calm, Sabry thought. The Allied army was a killing machine. The M1-A1s never broke down like the old Soviet tanks; he had never seen the Allies flee in panic. Oh, Allah. How had he lost the Western campaign?

  “General? General?” The American captain was shaking his shoulder.

  Sabry open
ed his eyes.

  “You’ll feel pressure, and possibly some discomfort. Please don’t move. There is an unexploded shell on you. If you’re in too much pain, just tell me.”

  Just tell him. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? Sabry heard the twin snaps as the surgeon put on his gloves. And faintly, just before he fell unconscious again, he heard the noisy whine of a saw.

  “I surrender,” he mumbled. No one was listening.

  AUTUMN, WARSAW, POLAND

  In the watery light, Baranyk sat on the bench, drinking Polish vodka and watching Chopin. The composer regarded Baranyk with irritating forbearance, as though absolving him for the dusty and drunken intrusion into his rose garden. There was a white streak of pigeon shit on Chopin’s cheek. Baranyk wondered where the pigeon had gone and if it had ended up as someone’s poor dinner.

  “Fuck you,” Baranyk told Chopin, lifting the bottle in a toast. “Tchaikovsky was better. Shostakovich and Prokofiev were better. Even Moussorgsky was better, and he was a goddamned lazy Russian. A worthless son of a bitch.”

  Leaning back on the bench, Baranyk lifted his face to the sun. November already, and the hot breeze made him sweat.

  He closed his eyes and let the warm sun beat on his lids.

  “Fuck the Russians, too,” he whispered.

  The sound of footsteps on gravel. He turned toward the museum, a huge Napoleon pastry among the flowers, and saw Andrzej Czajowski making his way over. The Pole was singing “Mother of God” as he walked.

  Czajowski stopped at Baranyk’s side and gazed down with the gentle understanding of Chopin, of Mary. His uniform hung on him, a suit on a straw scarecrow. There were dark bags under his eyes.

  “You sing your national anthem off-key,” Baranyk told him.

  The Pole smiled. “This is not a crime.”

  “It should be.”

  Czajowski appeared to be waiting for an invitation to sit down. When none came, he sat down anyway.

  Baranyk contemplated the statue, the pigeonless lawn. “Does it bother you,” he asked, “that everything we lived for is gone?”

  Czajowski lifted an eyebrow.

  “Communism,” Baranyk explained. “Communism has become a crazy aunt Tatiana: no one in the family dares mention her name. Once it was a good thing to be a proper Communist. Once I won medals for this very reason. Now I am supposed to be ashamed of it? How is it that we speak of our former lives in whispers?”

  “Oh, that” Czajowski shrugged. “If you must know, I believe Communism was Hell designed by incompetent bureaucrats.” The Pole sat silently for a while, staring at Chopin, as though waiting for the composer to scoff at Communism, too. “Perhaps the past wouldn’t bother you if you didn’t drink.”

  “Ah, but I drink to forget,” Baranyk said, tipping the bottle to his mouth.

  The Pole gave him a critical glance. “By now, surely, you have forgotten your own mother.”

  Air-raid sirens began to shriek. Neither man moved.

  “General Lauterbach thinks to send a division to help break the siege,” Czajowski told him, stretching his legs on the gravel walk. “He plans to meet with Wiederhausen.”

  “Wiederhausen would rather eat shit than get his army dirty,” Baranyk sniffed. “He will dig in at the German border. Lauterbach doesn’t dare send a division. He has more Arab prisoners than Allied soldiers. If he turns his attention away, the Arabs will revolt.”

  Czajowski had begun humming the anthem again, much to Baranyk’s annoyance.

  “I tell you, Andrzej,” Baranyk said. “When the Arabs learn how little materiel we have, and they crush through us on their way to Germany, the Americans will see the wisdom of negotiation. Germany will not hold. Do you hear me? Germany cannot hold.”

  A distant smile on his face, Czajowski continued humming. Baranyk wondered how the man could find the tune amidst the shrieks of the sirens. A moment later, with a fierce rattling sound, AAA stitched the blue sky.

  “If this is a Scud and not bombers,” Baranyk muttered, “I will have that antiaircraft commander’s balls for dinner,” he said, and then guffawed, “Meat for a change.”

  “It would be nice to have more of the American ERINT missiles to shoot down the Scuds.”

  Baranyk looked at the Pole in disbelief. “And perhaps we can have Mickey Mouse climb out of his Florida ocean like a drowned rat to deliver them. And Prince Charming Lauterbach will bring them strapped to his white charger. Or perhaps your beloved Virgin can simply make more ERINTs, since the Americans have such a problem with production. Do you miss the birds?” Baranyk asked.

  Czajowski turned a questioning face toward him. “Every pigeon a roasting hen; every sparrow a squab. Warsaw is empty of rats, have you noticed?” Baranyk said. “Are you hungry enough so that you wonder at times how surrender tastes?”

  In a soft voice Czajowski asked, “Do you want to surrender?”

  “Three months we have been trapped here,” Baranyk replied. “What will happen when winter comes?”

  “It was winter when the Germans left Leningrad. It was winter that defeated Napoleon in Russia. The Arabs are not accustomed to the cold. Perhaps—”

  “Wake up, my friend. Mickey Mouse is dead. There are no more Communists. And there are no more winters like that,” Baranyk told him. “What do we fight with when the ammunition runs out?”

  “We throw stones,” the Pole said. “I don’t know. Do you want to surrender? It is not your fight. It is not your country.”

  The alert wasn’t for a Scud. Bombs began to fall east of them, a sound like giants on the march. Baranyk took a breath. Warsaw smelled like a defeated town. It stank of cabbage and exhaustion and roses.

  “Fuck surrender,” he snarled.

  “The men gossip that you are becoming an alcoholic.”

  Baranyk sat up from his comfortable slouch and looked Czajowski in the eye. Nearby, much too close, a bomb vibrated the earth. Both generals flinched, then saw each other’s embarrassment.

  “Fuck you, too,” Baranyk laughed.

  CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL

  Gordon tracked a strip of sunlight across the linoleum of the clinic floor. Inch by inch, it made its way toward him, a quiet incursion.

  “Maybe you’d like to talk about what happened,” the doctor was saying.

  Gordon put his foot out. A wavelet of sunlight splashed over his slippered toe.

  “Sergeant Means?”

  Gordon looked at the window. The screen divided the yard into small squares of information, like pixels. In the window, a pointless movie was playing: three Arab prisoners in a flower bed planting chubby-faced pansies under the watchful eye of their guard.

  The doctor was a voice-over. “Sometimes it helps to talk about things.”

  Steps. A walk-on part. A new voice said: “Well?”

  “No response. He’s not aphasic, I think. He responds well to orders.”

  Gordon had always responded well to orders. Go here. Go there. Stand and die. The movie screen with the Arab prisoners blurred.

  The voice-overs were silent for a moment. At his side he could feel the intense scrutiny of the camera, its lens a dead fish eye.

  “The colonel’s here. He wants to see him.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  Lots of quiet footsteps. An exit; an entrance. Gordon felt a touch on his arm and reflexively turned. Pelham was looking at him. “Hello, sergeant,” the colonel said.

  There was a creak in the sound track as the colonel took a chair.

  “I brought you something,” he said.

  From his pocket he took a Milky Way bar and set it on the table between them. Its wrapper the same sweet brown as the man’s hand.

  “Hide it,” Pelham said.

  Hide it. Like a CRAV amo
ng the rocks.

  “Go ahead, son. Hide it.”

  Gordon snatched the candy from the table and shoved it hurriedly into the pocket of his pajamas. Pelham was watching him. Gordon didn’t know what else he wanted him to do. Gordon would do anything. Hadn’t he proved that already? Why were they testing him again?

  “That’s right. That’s good.” The voice was meant to be soothing, but there was something wrong with it. Something sad and horrified. “You just keep it out of sight, son. Maybe I could bring you one of your comic books, too. Would you like that?”

  Gordon closed his eyes. He was at the lake again. Jerry was fishing, and the alien sat baiting a hook.

  “You’re back,” the alien said.

  “Yes.” At Gordon’s feet, water lapped against the pilings.

  The reeds across the lake tapped out an eerie movie score. “I like this,” Gordon told him.

  Soft edges, that was the thing. Hard edges hurt when you fell down. You could bust your chin open. You could crack your skull.

  Nintendo had soft edges: the round, pumpkin heads of the Mario Brothers, the indistinct beep-beeps as they moved.

  This calm lake, this quiet grass, he knew, was an illusion without razor-edged sorrow. “I could stay here forever,” Gordon told him.

  The kid, Jerry, whirled around with a glare of jealousy. The alien, face sagging, dropped his sinker into the lake and smiled.

  “Good,” Pelham was saying.

  Gordon opened his eyes.

  “It’s good, cheating every once in a while, don’t you think?”

  Gordon had lost the thread of the plot. He stared at Pelham curiously, and then turned to look out the window. To his relief that same movie with the Arab prisoners was playing, the same stars, the same extras.

  Nothing at all had changed.

  CENTRAL ARMY HOSPITAL, BADAJOZ, SPAIN

  Rashid Aziz Sabry grasped the cold metal bars in his hands and attempted the walk back. At the end of the walkway his physical therapist, Lieutenant Alvarez, crouched in wait like a spider.