A Desert Called Peace

by Tom Kratman

  By noon Hennessey had finished packing. He rang for a bellhop, "el butones," to come and carry his bags to the lobby of the hotel. At the front desk he tried, and generally succeeded, in being pleasant to the obligatorily polite receptionist. He was about to turn to leave when he heard a very sweet voice behind him hesitantly ask, "Pat?" He turned then to see who belonged to the voice he didn't recognize.

  "Oh, it's the girl from last night." Hennessey forced a welcoming tone into his voice. He took one of her hands in both of his. "Look, I'm really sorry for having left the way I did. I really haven't been quite right for a few days now."

  However, as soon as she had recognized him, Lourdes had immediately begun a lengthy and heartfelt apology of her own. Talking at cross purposes, and simultaneously, the two continued for half a minute before the realization that neither had heard a word the other had spoken stopped them both completely. Twice more they began to speak at the same time only to stop cold again. Finally Hennessey decided to be a gentleman and let Lourdes speak first.

  Almost taken aback by being allowed to speak after three false starts, Lourdes said, in English, "I'm so sorry for saying those terrible things about you last night. I feel like such a horrible person. No wonder you didn't want to talk after losing your family like that. Will you please, please forgive me?" Her enormous brown eyes were eloquent with sincerity.

  Hennessey shook his head as if he didn't understand why she should feel repentant. "There's nothing to forgive. Your friend was doing her best to cheer me up. I wasn't in the mood to be cheered, I guess. You were perfectly right to call me stupid. But I don't know any other way to be right now. I should be apologizing to you. As a matter of fact," he added with a sad but ironic grin, "I was apologizing to you."

  A sudden rumbling in his stomach told Hennessey that it had been almost a full day since he'd taken any sustenance beyond a heavy dose of alcohol. He asked the girl at the front desk if he could leave his bags there over lunch. Of course an establishment as thoroughly accommodating as the Julio Caesare would have no problem guarding a few bags. On an impulse Hennessey asked Lourdes if she would care to join him.

  "Are you sure you want company?" she asked.

  "Please. I promise to be civil. And I've never cared to eat alone."

  Nodding assent, Lourdes joined Hennessey on the way to one of the Hotel's four restaurants. Before leaving the lobby Hennessey tipped the bellhop who had moved his bags. Despite the receptionist's assurances that they would be safe it couldn't hurt to keep the help on his side.

  The young woman was fine company, perhaps because she was trying her best to cheer the sad man accompanying her. Over a meal of prawns on rice, her conversation kept up a light mood. Hennessey was surprised to find himself sometimes honestly smiling.

  Objectively—and without lust, it was far too soon for that—Hennessey found himself appraising the girl. Looks twenty-one, maybe twenty-two. Nice hair, light brown shading to blond. Good facial structure, high cheekbones. Nose a little prominent but overall a good shape. Slender and tall, her breasts would look better on a shorter woman. Nice posterior. Very beautiful eyes, large and liquid brown. Also a good heart or she wouldn't be here with a broken down, miserable old fart like me.

  As the meal neared its close, Lourdes asked the question she had wanted to ask since Hennessey had left the disco the night before. "How did your wife die?"

  Hennessey paused before answering. It wasn't easy for him to think about. He returned his fork to the plate and sat back against the chair. "Lourdes, that's some of my problem. I don't know, not exactly anyway. All I do know is that she and the kids were caught in my uncle's office building when the airship hit. That, and that they were not killed right away." Hennessey paused to rub away the beginnings of a tear.

  Lourdes likewise didn't respond immediately. After a brief pause of her own she simply said, "Poor man."

  The mood chilled, the meal was finished mainly in silence. Assuming that the loss of his family was too painful for him to talk about any more, Lourdes went along. Soon the lunch was ended. Before the two left the restaurant, Lourdes—feeling quite forward and even daring— wrote her home and business phone numbers on a napkin, and pressed it on him. "Pat, when you come back to Balboa, and if I can help you in any way, please call me."

  Hennessey nodded as he paid the bill. Then he escorted the woman to his car and drove her to her work. When he returned to his hotel he was informed that he would be able to fly to the Federated States the following morning.

  First Landing, 17/7/459 AC

  "I won't stand for it. I just won't stand for it. That money's mine. I'll sue, I swear I will. I've made promises. There are 'causes' . . ."

  Annie, seated in a typical lawyer's client's leather chair turned to her cousin, Eugene Montgomery Schmied, and said, "Oh, shut up, you mincing little fairy."

  I hate squabbling families, thought the attorney and executor, John Walter Tweed. Steepling his fingers in front of his receding chin, he cast his eyes on Eugene and said, "That would be a very grave mistake, Mr. Schmied. Your uncle arranged his will quite carefully. Should you—or anyone—in person or by proxy attempt to contest his will or its codicil you will be utterly cut off from everything. This state will honor such an 'in terrorem' clause, I assure you. And First Landing is so chilly this time of year." The lawyer smiled nastily.

  The reading of Uncle Bob's will and its last minute video codicil had started with a rash of crocodile tears, all but for Annie—whose tears were sincere, and Patrick—who felt nothing. Indeed, so still and detached was he that he might as well have been the chair he sat upon, that, or a corpse himself.

  Tweed cleared and throat and asked, "Now if I may continue without further interruptions? Good. Colonel Hennessey . . ."

  Deadpan, he said, "I'm not a colonel anymore."

  "Nonetheless, your uncle referred to you as such in his codicil. His so referring also indicated a true change of heart as concerned his feelings toward you. So, unless you object strenuously, I will continue to so address you."

  Hennessey shrugged his indifference.

  "Very good then. To continue, you are, in the main, your uncle's primary beneficiary. What this means, as a practical matter, is fourfold. You have inherited the chair of Chatham, Hennessey and Schmied. You have also the control of your grandfather's trust, the William Hennessey Fund. You are the inheritor of his personal and real property upon the demise of your aunt, Denise—Robert's wife— who retains a life estate. . . ."

  1050 5th Avenue,

  First Landing, 17/7/459 AC

  Annie shivered slightly as her cousin tossed a switchblade knife onto the kitchen counter before removing his suit jacket. "Where did you get that thing?" she asked.

  Hennessey pointed to a place over a cabinet. "Right there, where I stashed it the last time I visited."

  "You really haven't changed since you were little have you? Everything is violence. Why?"

  He quoted, "'Force rules the world still, has ruled it, shall rule it. Meekness is weakness and strength is triumphant.'"

  "You can say that? After everything that's happened?"

  "After everything that's happened, Cuz, how could I say anything else?"

  Annie didn't like knives. She didn't like guns. She, quite reasonably, didn't like violence. But cousin Pat would not be found dead without a weapon; he'd always been that way. She changed the subject.

  "What are you going to do now, Pat?"

  He shrugged. "Go home . . . back to Balboa, I mean, not Botulph. Bury what I have of my family . . . first haircuts and things . . . then . . . hurt a lot. Drink a lot. Eventually die."

  Annie grasped at straws. She did not want her cousin to die, nor even to hurt. She did not want to mention, or even let his mind dwell on, what the fireman had told them near the wreck of the TNTO earlier in the day, namely that it was unlikely that much in the way of remains would ever be recovered. She asked, instead, "What about the company? The trust?"

 
Again, he shrugged. "What do I care? The only good thing about Bob changing the will is that Eugene won't have the money to send to 'Save The Whales,' 'Meat is Murder,' "Fur is Forbidden,' or the World League. For the rest? Eh? Who cares?"

  "Actually," Annie said, "he seems to have acquired a taste for swarthy men, of late. I'd expect a lot of the money to go the People's Front for the Liberation of Filistia. And, Pat? It's a lot of money."

  He just looked at her, so much as to say "can't buy me love."

  Herrera International Airport,

  Ciudad Balboa, 18/7/459 AC

  David Carrera, Linda's brother, was waiting at the Aduana, the airport customs office. Although a lieutenant in Balboa's "Civil Force," the successor—such as it was—to the Balboa Defense Corps, itself a successor to the old "Guardia Nacional," still David wore civilian clothes.

  Eyes scanning the thickening line at the Aduana, David finally caught sight of his brother-in-law. Sallow skin and bags under his eyes; Jesus, Patricio looks like crap!

  Moving forward to the officer in charge of Customs, David flashed a badge, pointed and spoke a few sentences. Rank had its privileges. The customs man smiled assent, then gestured for Hennessey to come forward.

  Waved through after a very cursory inspection, Hennessey passed Customs then stretched out a hand to David.

  David smelled alcohol, a lot of alcohol, on Hennessey's breath. He decided to ignore it, asking only, "How was your flight, Cuñado?"

  "It was all right." He shrugged. "Right up to where I nodded off to sleep and awoke screaming. The stewardesses were upset with me; bad for passenger morale I suppose, especially these days. On the plus side they fed me booze until I fell asleep again, that time without dreaming."

  The two walked without further words to where Hennessey's car waited. At his mother's insistence David had taken a police flight down to the airport to drive Hennessey home. Before turning the keys over to David, Hennessey removed his jacket, opened the trunk, and put on a shoulder holster bearing a high end, compact forty-five caliber pistol in brushed stainless. Then he put his light jacket back on.

  Trees, rivers, bridges, towns; all flashed by without comment or conversation. Only once on the long drive eastward did Hennessey make a sound. That was when he inadvertently drifted off to sleep and awakened, as usual, screaming. He did not say of what he dreamed. He didn't need to; David knew already, at least in broad terms.

  At length the car passed into Valle de las Lunas, then up the highway toward Ciudad Cervantes, the provincial capital.

  Just before reaching the city, Linda's brother flicked the turn signal to head down the gravel road that led ultimately to Cochea, the Carrera family ranch, and the house Hennessey had shared with Linda.

  "No," said Hennessey. "Take me into town please. I need to go to the liquor store."

  David sighed, nodded, flicked off the turn signal and continued straight ahead into the city.

  Hennessey heard it as a warbling cry, coming from hundreds of throats. He recognized it immediately; he had heard it in the very recent past.

  As little emotion as he had shown, now his face became a cold stone mask. "Drive towards that sound, please, David," he requested.

  Again with a sigh, David turned the wheel of the car to bring it in the direction of Parque Cervantes, the practical center of the city. The park was square, with a bandstand in the center, surrounded by broad, paved streets. Stores fronted the streets, facing the bandstand.

  Traffic slowed as they neared the park. Reaching the southeast corner, David merged into the traffic and did one complete loop around the square.

  IV.

  While David watched traffic, Hennessey watched people. There, in the middle of the park, around the bandstand, stood a fair mob, certainly several hundred, perhaps even a thousand. Though as swarthy as Balboans, they were not Balboans. Hennessey would have known this from their signs—"Death to the Federated States," "Allah smiles upon the Ikhwan," "Long live the Salafi Jihad," and such—the women's tongues flicking back and forth in a Yithrabi victory cry; and the happy faces of people celebrating as though it had been themselves who had struck against a great and infinitely evil enemy.

  "There are a lot of damned wogs here now," David commented. "They call themselves Salafis and are nothing but trouble."

  "Salafi means those who follow Islam's oldest ways . . . or think they do," Hennessey explained.

  "What's the difference?" David asked.

  "Well . . . for one thing, I think Mohammad probably had a pretty fair sense of humor. The Salafis don't." To himself he whispered, "Then again, neither do I now . . . and I follow the old ways, too."

  His finger pointed, "Pull over and park, please, David . . . in behind the car with the green bumper sticker."

  Tanned from years in the Balboan sun, with hair naturally dark where it wasn't tinged with gray, only Hennessey's gleaming blue eyes might have given him away for the gringo he was. No matter; he kept his eyes narrowly slitted as he emerged from the car, leaned against its side and watched the local Salafis at their victory celebration. No flicker of emotion betrayed what he was feeling over people celebrating the murder of his wife and children.

  Even as the celebration began to break up he did not move from the car on which he leaned, arms folded nonchalantly.

  He smiled broadly as a group of six men walked toward the car just ahead of his own; the one with the green bumper sticker that said, in Arabic, "There is no God but God."

  The Salafis joked and played amiably among themselves as they came closer. Hennessey's smile broadened even more.

  CLICK.

  He said, loudly and in adequate, if badly accented, Arabic, "Your Prophet was a sodomite and a liar. Your mothers were whores. Your fathers were their pimps. Your wives specialize in fellating barnyard animals and all your sisters came from sex change operations. You are fools if you think your children are yours."

  David looked questioningly at Hennessey; the Balboan had not a word of Arabic. He needed none, however, to understand the import of what was said. This was as plain as the wide-eyed rage and hate on the faces of the men who now ran toward them waving signs like clubs and shouting their fury. One young man, in particular, outdistanced the rest.

  For a moment David knew fear. He need not have. Lightning-fast, Hennessey's left hand pulled back his light jacket even as his right sought to draw the pistol.

  Hennessey's right on the pistol, his left swept up to block and deflect the sign that the nearest of the Salafis sought to brain him with. Whispering, "Bastard," at the same time, he drew the pistol and smashed its muzzle once, twice, three times into the area of his enemy's solar plexus. Every blow felt like the lifting of a burden. The Salafi's breath left his body in an agonized whoosh.

  One down, five to go. Before gravity could pull the first one to the ground, Hennessey had brought his focus to the main body of his assailants.

  The gang attacking Hennessey could see in his eyes that this one was not going to run. They could also read that their intended victim intended to kill or maim as many as he could before he went down. They could see from the gun that he had the means to do so. Like any street gang, anywhere, these were no heroes. While they all would have advanced confidently on someone who showed the slightest fear, when faced with a target like Hennessey they stopped cold.

  Had they run, some might have lived.

  A quick but delicate squeeze of the trigger and the pistol recoiled in Hennessey's hands. His mind provided details his eyes could not possibly have seen; a burst of flame, the spinning half-ounce lump of bronze-jacketed lead, the bursting of shirt and flesh and blood and bone. The first target's back arched as he was impelled to the ground.

  A chorus of screams arose from bystanders, Christian and Salafi both, as the crowd ran and sought cover.

  The four still standing didn't have time to close on their victim before the next of them went down with a slug that ripped through his arm and one lung. Again, Hennessey smiled sli
ghtly at the satisfying recoil. His victim, now fallen to the street, wheezed faint screams, blood bumbling from his mouth and the hole in his chest.

  The other three, torn between fight and flight, made the worst possible decision; they did nothing, frozen in fear. Quickly but carefully aligning the barrel, Hennessey shot one through a head that burst under the impact like an overripe melon dropped from a height. Recovering the pistol from its heavy recoil, his smile grew broad now as he squeezed the trigger yet again to ruin the left side of another assailant's chest. Hennessey didn't need X-ray vision to know that he had exploded the man's heart.

  The last Salafi standing was like a deer caught in the headlights of a semi-tractor, frozen, helpless . . . already dead.

  He did not shoot that last one standing; not immediately. Instead he walked forward calmly, spit in the frozen man's face, and then kicked him in the crotch. The Salafi bent over and melted to the ground.

  "Attack MY family will you? Celebrate their murder?" He took a short step forward, bent over at the waist, then calmly placed the hot muzzle against the man's head. Again, he shrieked, "Attack MY family will you?" The Salafi barely registered the pressure and the smell of crisping hair as his brain went scampering like a frightened rabbit. With such a helpless target, Hennessey had leisure to rise and walk around to a better firing position. He didn't want an innocent bystander to take a bullet that passed through his intended target.

  Carefully gauging angles, he knelt down and pulled the thug's head up by the hair, jammed the pistol—hard, hard enough to break the skin and the bone beneath—into the man's face. Then he grinned even more widely, withdrew the pistol slightly, and fired. David, standing nearby, was spattered with blood and brain.

  Hennessey stood again and turned his attention to the first man, the one who had tried to brain him with a sign. The Salafi began to beg for his life in mixed Spanish and Arabic. Hennessey said, "Fuck you," then shot him through the stomach, savoring the resulting scream.