Cold Allies

by Patricia Anthony

  Rita walked away through the stacks of books. By the oak table, General Lauterbach was waiting again, an unchanging caricature of a man. She wondered what truth the aliens wanted to tell her about him.

  “I envy you,” the general said. “What makes you so goddamned special?” Suddenly he blinked. His hazel eyes lost their whetted edge and seemed simply unsure. “I shouldn’t have put it that way.”

  “Leave me alone,” she said. “I don’t want you here.”

  Rita wondered how the general would taste. Of cordite, most probably. And the flat flavor of hot steel.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  Embarrassed, she let her eyes drift to the tapping sleet at the window. The ghostly, translucent Lauterbach was as disturbing as the flaccid Dr. Gladdings. She had remembered the general as neat and self-possessed. Now he was messy, gale-tattered.

  “I remember the first time I met you,” he said in a dreamy voice, a voice so private, she felt she was sipping at his thoughts. “Standing there,” he murmured. “A strong woman amid the smell of burnt bodies. Strange how admiration can come in the oddest places. Do they love you? The aliens? What can I do to make them love me, too? Please,” he said in a gasp, as though he had just then awakened. “Help me.”

  She turned. “What do you want me to do?”

  His face creased into a puzzled frown. “I can’t seem to remember. I dreamed earlier about falling and then about fire. The people in Warsaw. The President ...” The knitted weave of his thoughts faltered, dropping a stitch. “Listen to me, Rita,” he said urgently. “I need the aliens. Don’t you see? Tell them I’m sorry about what happened in the Pyrenees, what I forced them to do. I just want to talk. To explain things. I have something here ... something ...”

  Hands trembling, he took a piece of paper from his breast pocket Unfolding the page, he smoothed it out on the polished wood.

  “I need ... I need ...” His voice died in miserable confusion.

  And he evaporated. She looked at the table and the blank white paper lying there.

  WARSAW, POLAND

  The sun was rising, turning the leaden sky a pinkish gray. Smoke from burning buildings made a sooty streak across the clouds.

  Baranyk got to his feet. From where he stood he could see the ruins of Stalin’s Palace of Culture. Once, not so long ago, the old Georgian’s muscular, revolutionary-style erection had dominated the city. Stalin had always been an invincible prick.

  “After Stalin, we are all impotent,” he muttered into his vodka bottle.

  “Sir?” Zgursky asked.

  “You are a good boy,” Baranyk said, clapping his arm around the aide’s shoulders. Under the general’s weight, Zgursky sagged. “A good boy.”

  “Yes, sir,” Zgursky answered. “Thank you, sir. Wouldn’t the general care for some breakfast now?”

  Baranyk hugged the sergeant tighter, crushing the boy’s head against his chest. “No,” he replied. “The general wouldn’t care for breakfast” Impulsively, he kissed the top of the aide’s cropped head.

  When Baranyk released him, Zgursky staggered away, a stunned and disapproving expression on his peach-fuzz face. Baranyk’s booming laugh echoed amid the ruins. “I love you, Zgursky. I love you so much, I want you to accompany me to the artillery emplacements now.”

  Zgursky sighed, wiped the top of his head, and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Baranyk put down the empty vodka bottle and walked, the aide tagging after. The side street Baranyk chose was miraculously intact, its tree-lined length serene. A block later, they began picking their way through rubble. Along with the tang of smoke, the general caught a whiff of putrefaction rising from the shattered buildings. Not a dead cat. Not a dog. They had long ago been eaten. Only one thing left in Warsaw could smell like that.

  The morning’s vodka rushed up his gullet. He leaned over in time to keep the flood from splattering his uniform. The pale vomit was streaked with red.

  “Are you all right, sir?” Zgursky asked hesitantly.

  “Of course.” He waved the solicitous sergeant off and walked on, Zgursky a little camouflage shadow at his shoulder.

  “Perhaps you should go back to barracks and lie down, sir. You might need rest.”

  Did the boy know how poorly he slept? Baranyk wondered. The aide’s cot was in the next room, close, so Baranyk’s low call would rouse him. Perhaps he had heard the creaks of the bed as Baranyk tossed and turned. The general darted a glance in the sergeant’s direction, but Zgursky had his head down watching where he put his feet.

  “Am I a bad commander?” Baranyk asked quietly.

  Zgursky’s head came up fast.

  “Tell me the truth, sergeant, good Ukrainian boy that you are. Do the men say I am a good commander or merely a drunken one?”

  Much to Baranyk’s astonishment, a gamin smile spread across Zgursky’ s face. “The men think you are a better commander drunk than any ten sober Arab generals.”

  Baranyk stopped. Zgursky backed away quickly, as though fearful he might be kissed again.

  “Kiev—”

  “Forget Kiev, sir,” the sergeant said in a voice so sharp it flirted with insubordination. “Can’t you forget Kiev? You shout orders in your sleep, and I know you are fighting the battle all over again.”

  After a moment, Baranyk asked, “I talk in my sleep? What do I say?”

  “You try to call the tanks up, sir. You try to order the infantry back. Sometimes you call Major Shcheribitsky’s name so loud, he wakes up and comes down the hall to see what is wrong.”

  Baranyk took a deep breath that tasted of vomit and soot. “I see.”

  “Sir? You are the best commander I have ever served under,” Zgursky told him. “You don’t lose your temper. You always listen to us. That is the important thing. Forgive me for speaking frankly with you, sir.”

  “Yes, of course,” Baranyk murmured as he began picking his way through the rubble.

  He rarely lost his temper, except in defense of his men. That much was true. Unlike a Patriot missile, he never exploded at his mark; rather, like the ERINT, he used the power of his own bull-necked kinetic energy to crash his way through. He had risen through the ranks with an unerring radar for seizing opportunity, and with an unstoppable stamina.

  Now all of that was gone. The Arabs had surrounded Warsaw, outnumbering his army five to one. The ANA wouldn’t launch a frontal attack, wouldn’t meet them like men, head-on. Why should they? he asked himself bitterly. The bombing, as it had during the Great Patriotic War, would again wear Warsaw out. When the Arabs crossed the Vistula, they would be met with apathy, not bullets.

  The street emerged on a fussy little square with a fountain. On the western side, the side that had been hit, ruined buildings stood like movie-set facades, their blank windows open to nothing. Five women and a mob of filthy children were rag-picking in the charred ruins. Zgursky at his shoulder, Baranyk walked over to the fountain and washed out his sour mouth with the algae-covered water. Then he scrubbed his face.

  “Now,” he said, straightening his uniform. “Do I look presentable?”

  “Very presentable, sir.”

  “My eyes not too bloodshot?” he asked. “I do not smell too much of vodka? I do not stumble or slur my words?”

  “No, sir. Not at all, sir.”

  “You would tell me, Zgursky? We will go see Colonel Jastrun now. It would not be good for the Poles to see me drunk. I do not wish my men to be ashamed of me.”

  Zgursky’s young face tightened. “Sir,” he said, “your men will never be ashamed of you.”

  CENTRAL ARMY HOSPITAL, BADAJOZ, SPAIN

  Just before dawn, the American general came back. Amazed to see him so early, Sabry turned his wheelchair from the window, tearing his gaze from the unlighted staff offices and the huge, f
loodlit prisoner compound beyond.

  “Sorry to disturb you, sir,” Lauterbach said. “But the nurses said you were awake.”

  In the dim light from the bedside lamp Sabry noticed that the American’s face was drawn.

  “No bother,” Sabry told him. He gestured at a vacant chair. “Please. Sit down.”

  Lauterbach glanced at the chair, hesitated, remained standing at parade rest.

  “General Sabry,” he began in a soft but formal tone, “I regret to inform you—”

  Fear pulsed through Sabry like the cold touch of anesthesia. “Sit!” he said so loudly that a flicker of astonishment crossed the American’s face. “Please,” he added. “Please sit. It is always hard to give such news. I’ve done it many times. Indulge me, please. I want to talk.”

  Lauterbach perched on the edge of the chair, hands on his knees, as though poised for escape. The wind shifted, carrying predawn cool and the scent of pine through the open window. “Do you know the problem with Westerners?” Sabry asked, staring at the fierce halogen brilliance of the prisoner compound, the tall spires of the guard towers. “They don’t listen well. Had we won the war, we would have taught you to listen.”

  “A rather bloody lesson, don’t you think?”

  The hospital quiet was thick, like the silence at the bottom of the ocean. Far down the hall Sabry could hear faint clinks of metal on metal as the medication nurse began rounds.

  “I loved my son. He is dead, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  Sabry glanced around the small, antiseptic room. “It is too quiet in this hospital, you know. Your doctors and nurses never argue and rarely laugh. Five Arabs in a room, and there is bedlam. Allied soldiers, even as they are dying, I have noticed, scream hoarsely, as though ashamed.”

  Perhaps he was making the man uncomfortable. Perhaps he had said something he shouldn’t. Lauterbach’s face was impassive.

  “My son, Gamal, understood Westerners,” Sabry told him. “He received his doctorate at Cal Tech. I sent him to the Pyrenees. Perhaps he screamed there as you might: an inhibited, apologetic scream.”

  “Don’t do this to yourself, sir. Our job demands we put people at risk. There’s no evil in that. No reason to feel guilty. If you’re a good commander, you try to minimize the risk. That’s all you can do.”

  An inexplicable, overwhelming sorrow filled Lauterbach’s face.

  “Gamal changed, you know. When he was a boy, I would take him out to the desert. We had a place there, little more than a shack. Those were simple times.”

  Lauterbach made a noncommittal grunt. The man was no longer listening; he was thinking about something else, his expression as contrite as it was pensive.

  “When my son was older, and came back from the States for his visits, I could see him growing less and less simple. Sadder as well. How did he die?”

  The question roused Lauterbach from his thoughts. He shot a cautious look at Sabry. “Quickly,” he said.

  Sabry knew the American was lying. A terrible death, then. He shifted his gaze to the window and saw the lights of the compound dance through his tears.

  “You know, I am very much a Muslim—”

  “Tell me what disposition you would wish for his remains. He’s been buried, but I’ll make sure that—”

  “Listen to me!” Sabry shouted. His tone was so preemptive, so harsh, that a guard opened the door and looked in. Lauterbach waved him away.

  When ‘the soldier closed the door, Sabry leveled angry eyes at the American. “Do not interrupt me with your damned, cool reason! You do not know what I was going to say.”

  “Yes, sir,” the American said. “You’re quite right. I’m sorry.” And leaned back in his seat.

  “The mullahs promise Heaven to those who die in battle, but the battle must be holy, and I’m not sure this war was. In any case, I can talk to Gamal no longer. What good is heaven, I ask you?”

  Amazingly, Lauterbach smiled, irony in his eyes. “I’m sure I don’t know, general. I lost a wife through divorce and a daughter to cancer. I believe at the time I asked myself the same thing.”

  “Did Colonel Wasef survive?”

  The American seemed puzzled. “Excuse me?”

  “Colonel Qasim Abdel Wasef. He was in the Pyrenees, too.”

  “Oh, yes. The commanding officer. No, sir. He did not survive the engagement.”

  “And how did he die?”

  Lauterbach’s face shut down and for a long moment he was silent. Could it have been such a terrible death, Sabry wondered, that even the American was awed by it?

  Finally Lauterbach took a long breath. “Friendly fire,” he said.

  WARSAW, POLAND

  Baranyk put his cup down with a wince, trying to ignore the fire the coffee had reignited in his gullet. By the bunker wall Zgursky stood chewing hungrily on a sweet roll, a look of intense enjoyment on his face.

  “Well, colonel,” Baranyk said, turning to Jastrun. “No bombings today if the weather remains socked in. Those Arab pilots cannot find their cocks with two hands.”

  At the fancy German phased-array radar screens, one of the specialists tittered. Jastrun’s lips curled into an arch though indulgent smile.

  “Warsaw is a big target,” the colonel said. In the forced tolerance of the Pole’s gaze Baranyk saw questions. Jastrun was wondering what the Ukrainian was doing here.

  “Perhaps Scuds.” Baranyk looked at the green radar screens.

  “Yes. Perhaps Scuds.” The colonel shifted on his feet uneasily. Baranyk wasn’t sure what made the man nervous: the possibility of missiles or the Ukrainian’s presence.

  “Would the general care to see something else?” Jastrun asked at last.

  A polite way of indicating that the tour was at an end. Baranyk ignored him. “Tell me, colonel. If you could ask the spirit of Kazimierz the Great for one gift, what would it be?”

  The colonel’s smile vanished: Baranyk had made a poor joke.

  “Targets?” Baranyk suggested.

  The Pole’s eyes narrowed. He was thinking furiously now; he was considering his situation.

  “Forgive me for being ignorant of this miracle of German engineering,” Baranyk said with a slow, cunning smile. “But is it not true that if the Arabs shell, this radar can track the incoming shell and find the Arab emplacement even before they hit here?” .

  The Pole held his back stiff, as if awaiting a blow. “Yes,” he said, drawing out the word into three cautious syllables.

  “So the Arabs bomb instead.”

  A pause. Jastrun’s eyes were asking questions so fast, so furiously, that Baranyk imagined he was looking through them into the working guts of a computer. “Yes.”

  “I am thinking that if I mounted a small attack, a small one, you understand, we might provoke them into shelling.”

  Jastrun leaned forward in interest. “Have you discussed this with General Czajowski?”

  “It is just a thought as yet,” Baranyk told him, making a lazy, dismissive gesture with his hand. “I thought I would speak to you first, to see how you liked the idea.”

  Jastrun pursed his lips judiciously. “Perhaps you should speak to him and then to me.”

  “Ah, yes. Chain of command,” Baranyk said with a sly, ironic grin. “I remember how important that was in the Red Army. Good day,” he told the insulted Pole cheerily before the man would come up with a rejoinder.

  Zgursky followed him out the bunker door. “Allies,” Baranyk laughed, slapping the aide’s belly with the back of his hand. “God preserve us from allies.” He pointed toward the hushed and opalescent east. “Not even the Arabs hate me so much.”

  Still chuckling, Baranyk made his way past the sandbags at the side of the bunker and walked across the packed dirt yard to the sheltered ta
nks. Gutzman was at one of the Hammers, performing some arcane maintenance ritual. At their approach he glanced up, an oil rag in his hand.

  “Has the general come back for another lesson on the Hammer?” the lieutenant asked.

  Baranyk regarded Gutzman, who seemed pleased, and then Zgursky, who decidedly did not. “I think I should be the driver today. Let us have the sergeant be the gunner. And you, who have more experience, will be our tank commander. Choose our vehicle. I am under your orders, lieutenant. “

  Gutzman climbed onto the tank’s deck. Baranyk climbed to the driver’s hatch and eased himself into the plush reclining seat, pulling the hatch closed behind him. Just before he put on his goggles, Baranyk turned and saw Zgursky staring at him in dawning horror. “We are armed and fully functional?” the general asked, slipping the headgear on.

  In his ear he heard Gutzman’s calm voice: “Armed and ready, sir.”

  Baranyk started the engine and put his hands around the steering T. His palms, he noticed distantly, had started to sweat.

  At one side of his vision were the gaily-colored gauges: red for the reactor heat; blue for the KPM; yellow, a cautionary, cowardly color, for his directionals.

  He turned the tank south, a cautionary, cowardly route. In his ear he heard a relieved sigh. Zgursky.

  The Hammer moved like a huge, fat luxury car: a Russian Zil or an American Cadillac. At twelve kilometers per hour, he drove past the countersunk munitions bunkers.

  “Where to, sir?” he heard Gutzman ask.

  “I thought we might try something different today.”

  A gasp in his ear. Zgursky knew. He’d known from the moment Baranyk had mentioned the plan to Jastrun.

  Ten meters, twenty, Baranyk counted, hoping he had found his mark: “Brace yourselves!” he called and floored the accelerator, slewing the big tank left. He muscled it over the barricades.