Silence.
More shots, close, point-blank. Mercy shots.
A dark hand clutching a gun came over the back of the truck. A figure in dust-caked goggles with its face wrapped in a dark blue veil. The apparition looked at the two of them and murmured something unintelligible. A man’s voice. The veiled man vaulted over the back of the truck, landed in a crouch and pointed the gun at Laura. Laura lay frozen, feeling invisible, gaseous, nothing there but the whites of eyes.
The veiled man shouted and waved one arm outside the truck. He wore a blue cloak and woolen robes and his chest was clustered with blackened leather bags hung on thongs. He had a bandolier of cartridges and a curved dagger almost the size of a machete and thick, filthy sandals over bare, calloused feet. He stank like a wild animal, the radiant musk of days of desert survival and sweat.
Moments passed. Katje made a noise deep in her throat. Her legs jerked twice and her lids closed, showing rims of white. Shock.
Another veiled man appeared at the back of the truck. His eyes were hidden in tinted goggles and he was carrying a shoulder-launched rocket. He aimed it into the truck. Laura looked at it, saw the sheen of a lens, and realized for the first time that it was a video camera.
“Hey,” she said: She sat up and showed the camera her bound hands.
The first marauder looked up at the second and said something, a long fluid rush of polysyllables. The second nodded and lowered his camera.
“Can you walk?” he said.
“Yes, but my friend’s hurt.”
“Come on out then.” He yanked down the back of the truck, one-handed. It screeched—bullets had bent it out of shape. Laura crawled out quickly.
The cameraman looked at Katje. “She’s bad. We’ll have to leave her.”
“She’s a hostage. Azanian. She’s important.”
“The Malians will stitch her up, then.”
“No, they won’t, they’ll kill her! You can’t let her die here! She’s a doctor, she works in the camps!”
The first marauder returned at a trot, bearing the belt of the dead driver, with rows of bullets and a ring of keys. He studied Laura’s handcuffs alertly, picked the correct key at once, and clicked them loose. He gave her the cuffs and keys with a little half-bow and a elegant hand to his heart.
Other desert raiders—about two dozen—were looting the broken trucks. They were riding thin, skeletal dune buggies the size of jeeps, all tubes, spokes, and wire. The cars bounded along, agilely, quiet as bicycles, with a wiry scrunching of metal-mesh wheels and faint creak of springs. Their drivers were wrapped in cloaks and veils. They looked puffy, huge, and ghostlike. They steered from saddles over heaps of cargo lashed down under canvas.
“We don’t have time.” The big raider with the camera waved at the others and shouted in their language. They whooped in return and the men on foot began mounting up and stowing loot: ammo, guns, jerry cans.
“I want her to live!” Laura shouted.
He stared down at her. The tall marauder in his goggles, his masked and turbanned face, body cinched with belts and weaponry. Laura met his eyes without flinching.
“Okay,” he told her. “It’s your decision.” She felt the weight of his words. He was telling her she was free again. Out of prison, in the world of decisions and consequences. A fierce sense of elation seized her.
“Take my camera. Don’t touch its triggers.” The stranger took Katje in his arms and carried her to his own buggy, parked five yards from the truck.
Laura followed him, lugging the camera. The bulldozed roadbed scorched her bare feet and she hopped and lurched to the shade of the buggy. She looked down the slope.
The iron stump of a vaporized tower marked Ground Zero. The atomic crater was not as deep as she’d expected. It was shallow and broad, marked with eerie streaks, puddles of glassy slag broken like cracked mud. It looked mundane, wretched, forgotten, like an old toxic-waste excavation.
Jeeps were peeling away from the bunker, roaring upslope. They had soldiers in back, the test site’s garrison, manning swivel-mounted machine guns.
From half a mile away they opened fire. Laura saw impact dust puffing twenty yards below them, and following that, languidly, the distant chatter of the shots.
The stranger was rearranging his cargo. Carefully, thoughtfully. He glanced briefly at the approaching enemy jeeps, the way a man would glance at a wristwatch. He turned to Laura. “You ride in back and hold her.”
“All right.”
“Okay, help me with her.” They set Katje into the vacated cargo space, on her side. Katje’s eyes were open again but they looked glassy, stunned.
Machine-gun fire clattered off the wreckage of one of the halftracks.
The lead jeep suddenly lurched clumsily into the air. It came down hard, pancaking, men and wreckage flying. Then the sounds of the exploding land mine reached them. The two other jeeps pulled up short, fishtailing in the shoulder of the road. Laura climbed on, throwing her arm over Katje.
“Keep your head down.” The stranger saddled up, threw the buggy into motion. They whirred away. Off the track, into wasteland.
In moments they were out of sight. It was low, rolling desert, studded with red, cracked rubble and heat-varnished boulders. The occasional waist-high thornbush, tinsel-thin wisps of dry grass. The afternoon heat was deadly, blasting up from the surface like X-rays.
A slug had hit Katje about two inches left of the navel and exited her back, nicking the floating rib. In the fierce dry heat both wounds had clotted quickly, dark shiny wads of congealed blood on her back and stomach. She had a bad cut on her shin, splinter damage, Laura thought.
Laura herself was untouched. She had barked a knuckle a little, flopping down for cover in the back of the truck. That was all. She felt amazed at her luck—until she considered the luck of a woman who had been machine-gunned twice in her life without even joining a goddamned army.
They covered about three miles, careening and weaving. The marauder slowed. “They’ll be after us,” he shouted back at her. “Not the jeeps—aircraft. I’ve got to keep moving, and we’ll spend some time in the sun. Get her under the tarp. And cover your head.”
“With what?”
“Look in the kit bag there. No, not that one! Those are land mines.”
Laura loosened the tarp and pulled a flap over Katje, then tugged the kit bag loose. Clothes—she found a grimy military shirt. She draped it over her head and neck like a burnoose, and turbanned it around her forehead with both sleeves.
With much jarring and fumbling she managed to get Katje’s handcuffs off. Then she flung both sets of them off the back of the truck, flung away the keys. Evil things. Like metal parasites.
She climbed up onto the cargo heap, behind her rescuer. He passed her his goggles. “Try these.” His eyes were bright blue.
She put them on. Their rubber rims touched her face, chilled with his sweat. The torturing glare faded at once. She was grateful. “You’re American, aren’t you?”
“Californian.” He tugged his veil down, showing her his face. It was an elaborate tribal veil, yards of fabric, wrapping his face and skull in a tall, ridged turban, the ends of it draping his shoulders. Crude vegetable dye had stained his cheeks and mouth, streaking his creased Anglo face with indigo.
He had about two weeks of reddish beard stubble, shot with gray. He smiled briefly, showing a rack of impossibly white American teeth.
He looked like a TV journalist gone horribly and permanently wrong. She assumed at once that he was a mercenary, some kind of military adviser. “Who are you people?”
“We’re the Inadin Cultural Revolution. You?”
“Rizome Industries Group. Laura Webster.”
“Yeah? You must have some story to tell, Laura Webster.” He looked at her with sudden intense interest, like a sleepy cat spotting prey.
Without warning, she felt a sudden powerful flash of déjà vu. She remembered traveling out to an exotic game park as a child, wit
h her grandmother. They’d pulled up in the car to watch a huge male lion gnawing a carcass at the side of the road. The memory struck her: those great white teeth, tawny fur, the muzzle flecked with blood up to the eyes. The lion had looked up calmly at her through the window glass, with a look just like the one the stranger was giving her now.
“What’s an Inadin?” Laura said.
“You know the Tuaregs? A Saharan tribe? No, huh?” He pulled the brow of his turban lower, shading his bare eyes. “Well, no matter. They call themselves the ‘Kel Tamashek.’ ‘Tuareg’ is what the Arabs call them—it means ‘the godforsaken.’” He was picking up speed again, weaving expertly around the worst of the boulders. The suspension soaked up shock—good design, she thought through reflex. The broad wire wheels barely left a track.
“I’m a journalist,” he told her. “Freelance. I cover their activities.”
“What’s your name?”
“Gresham.”
“Jonathan Gresham?”
Gresham looked at her for a long moment. Surprised, thinking it over. He was judging her again. He always seemed to be judging her. “So much for deep cover,” he said at last. “What’s the deal? Am I famous now?”
“You’re Colonel Jonathan Gresham, author of The Lawrence Doctrine and Postindustrial Insurgency?”
Gresham looked embarrassed. “Look, I was all wrong in that book. I didn’t know anything back then, it’s theory, half-ass bullshit mostly. You didn’t read it, did you?”
“No, but I know people who really thought the world of that book.”
“Amateurs.”
She looked at Gresham. He looked like he’d been born in limbo and raised on the floor of hell. “Yeah, I guess so.”
Gresham mulled it over. “You heard about me from your jailers, huh? I know they’ve read my stuff. Vienna read it too—didn’t seem to do them much good, though.”
“It must mean something! Your bunch of guys on little bicycles just wiped out a whole convoy!”
Gresham winced a little, like an avant-garde artist praised by a philistine. “If I’d had better intelligence.… Sorry about your friend. Fortunes of war, Laura.”
“It could have just as easily been me.”
“Yeah, you learn that after a while.”
“Do you think she’ll make it?”
“No, I don’t. If one of us took a wound that bad, we’d have just put a bullet in him.” He glanced at Laura. “I could do it,” he said. He was being genuinely generous, she could see that.
“She doesn’t need more bullets, she needs surgery. Is there a doctor we can reach?”
He shook his head. “There’s an Azanian relief camp, three days from here. But we’re not going there—we need to regroup at our local supply dump. We have our own survival to look after—we can’t make chivalrous gestures.”
Laura reached forward and grabbed the thick robe at Gresham’s shoulder. “She’s a dying woman!”
“You’re in Africa now. Dying women aren’t rare here.”
Laura took a deep breath.
She had reached bedrock.
She tried hard to think. She looked around herself, trying to clear her head. Her mind was all rags and tatters. The desert around her seemed to be evaporating her. All the complexities were going—it was stark and simple and elemental. “I want you to save her life, Jonathan Gresham.”
“It’s bad tactics,” Gresham said. He kept his eyes from her, watching the road. “They don’t know she’s mortally wounded. If she’s an important hostage, they’ll expect us to head for that camp. And we haven’t lived this long by doing what FACT expects.”
She backed away from him. Switched gears. “If they touch that camp the Azanian Air Force will stomp all over what’s left of their capital.”
He looked at her as if she’d gone mad.
“It’s true. Four days ago the Azanians hit Bamako, hard. Fuel dumps, commandos, everything. From their aircraft carrier.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Gresham grinned suddenly. No reassurance there—it was feral. “Tell me more, Laura Webster.”
“That’s why they were taking us to the atom-bomb test site. To make a propaganda statement, frighten the Azanians. I’ve seen their nuclear submarine. I even lived aboard it. For weeks.”
“Jesus Christ,” Gresham said. “You saw all that? An eyewitness?”
“Yes. I did.”
He believed her. She could see it was hard for him, that it was news that was changing the basic assumptions of his life. Or at least the basic assumptions of his war, if there was any difference between his living and his warring. But he recognized that she was telling him the truth. It was coming across between them, something basic and human.
“We gotta do an interview,” he muttered.
An interview. He had a camera, didn’t he? She felt confused, relieved, obscurely ashamed. She looked back for that moral bedrock. It was still there. “Save my friend’s life.”
“We can try it.” He stood up in the saddle and yanked something from his belt—a white folding fan. He flicked it open and held it over his head, waved it, sharp semaphore motions. For the first time Laura realized that there was another Tuareg in sight—a buglike profile, almost lost in heat haze, a mile to the north. A dotlike answering flicker.
Katje groaned in the back, a raw animal sound. “Don’t let her drink too much,” Gresham warned. “Mop her down instead.”
Laura moved into the back.
Katje was awake, conscious. There was something vast and elemental, terrifying, about her ordeal. There was so little that talking or thinking could do about it—no way to debate with death. Her face was like a skull and she was fighting alone.
As hours passed Laura did what she could. A word or two with Gresham and she found what little he had that could help. Padding for Katje’s head and shoulders. Leather bags of water that tasted flat and distilled. Some skin grease that smelled like animal fat. Black smudge on cheekbones to cut the glare.
The exit wound in the back was worst. It was ragged and Laura feared it would soon turn septic. The scab broke open twice during the worst jolts and a little rill of blood ran across Katje’s spine.
They stopped once when they hit a boulder and the right front wheel began complaining. Then again when Gresham spotted what he thought were patrol planes—it was a pair of vultures.
As the sun set Katje began muttering aloud. Bits and pieces of a life. Her brother the lawyer. Mother’s letters on flowered stationery. Tea parties. Charm school. Her mind groped in delirium for some vision, miles and years away. A tiny center of human order in a circle of desolate horizon.
Gresham drove until well after twilight. He seemed to know the country. She never saw him look at a map.
Finally he stopped in the channeled depth of an arroyo—a “wadi,” he called it. The sandy depths of the dry river were crowded with waist-high bushes that stank of creosote and were full of tiny irritating burrs.
Gresham dismounted, shouldering a duffel bag. He pulled his curved machete and began chopping bushes. “The planes are worst after dark,” he said. “They use infrareds. If they hit us at all, they’ll probably take out the scoot.” He began placing bushes over the buggy, camouflaging it. “So we’ll sleep away from it. With the baggage.”
“All right.” Laura crawled from the back of the buggy, battered, filthy, bone-weary. “What can I do to help?”
“You can dress yourself for the desert. Try the knapsack.”
She took the knapsack around the far side of the truck and fumbled it open. Shirts. Spare sandals. A long, coarse tunic of washed-out blue, wrinkled and wadded and stained. She shrugged out of her prison blouse.
God, she was so thin. She could see every rib. Thin and old and exhausted, like something that ought to be killed. She tunneled into the tunic—its shoulder seams came halfway down her biceps and the sleeves hung to her knuckles. It was thick though, and beaten soft with long wear. It reeked of Gresham, as if he had embraced her.
Strange thought, dizzying. She was embarrassed. She was a spectacle, pathetic. Gresham couldn’t want a madwoman.…
The ground rose up and struck her. She lay in a heap of her own arms and legs, wondering. A muddle of time passed, vague pain and rushing waves of dizziness.
Gresham was gripping her arms.
She looked at him blankly. He gave her water. The water revived her enough to feel her own distress. “You passed out,” he said. She nodded, understanding for the first time. Gresham picked her up. He carried her like a bundle of balloons; she felt light, hollow, bird-boned.
There was a lean-to pegged to the wall of the arroyo. A windbreak with a short arching tent roof of desert camo-cloth. Under the roof a dark figure crouched over the white-striped prison form of Katje—another of the Tuareg raiders, a long sniper’s rifle strapped to his back. Gresham set Laura down, exchanged words with the Tuareg, who nodded somberly. Laura crawled into the tent, felt rough wool beneath her fingers—a carpet.
She curled up on it. The Tuareg was humming tonelessly to himself, under a ramp of blazing stars.
She was woken by the steaming smell of tea. It was barely dawn, a red auroral brightening in the east. Someone had thrown a warm rug over her during the night. She had a pillow too, a burlap bag stenciled in weird angular script. She sat up, aching.
The Tuareg handed her a cup, gently, courteously, as if it were something precious. The hot tea was dark brown and frothy and sweet, with a sharp minty reek. Laura sipped it. It had been boiled, not brewed, and it hit her like a hard narcotic, astringent and strong. It was foul, but she could feel it toughening her throat like tanned leather, bracing her for another day’s survival.
The Tuareg half turned away, shyly, and discreetly lifted his veil. He slurped noisily, appreciatively. Then he opened a drawstring bag and offered it to her. Little brown pellets of something—like peanuts. Some kind of dried scop. It tasted like sugared sawdust. Breakfast. She ate two handfuls.
Gresham emerged from the lightening gloom, an enormous figure wrapped to the eyes, yet another bag slung over his shoulder. He was tossing handfuls of something over the dirt, with swift, ritual gestures. Tracer dust, maybe? She had no idea.
Islands in the Net Page 38