Submission

by Harrison Young

  While she was putting it on, he took a pretty good rifle out of the back of his jeep, unfolding the towel it had been wrapped in. It had a sling, and he slung it over his shoulder.

  “Where did you get that?” she said, looking grave.

  “Ian.” It was awesomely hot. “Here,” he said abruptly, taking off his straw hat and putting it on Allison’s head. It made her look adorable. “I should have thought of that sooner.”

  “Suppose I told you Tommy wasn’t really my husband?”

  “But he is.”

  “Suppose I asked you to strip?”

  “That would be dangerous.”

  “You haven’t yet, you know. Just took off your shirt once. Since you’re determined not to fuck me, why should we have any secrets? You undress and we will be friends in the sunlight. I will explore your body with my fingertips, while you tell me about your childhood.”

  “I want to teach you to shoot,” he said. “Lie down right here. No, stupid, on your stomach.” He squatted beside her and showed her how to hold the rifle. “Now look through the sight, but don’t put your eye right up to it. There will be a bit of recoil. What do you see?”

  “Desert.”

  “Look along the base of those rocks. What do you see?”

  She applied herself to the task. “Little rats with long tails.”

  “There are hundreds out here. Would you like to shoot one?”

  “Why not?” she said.

  “The trick is to be entirely relaxed,” he said. “Just put the cross on one of them and watch him for a while to see how he moves.”

  She fired immediately, and a little body leapt into the air.

  “Very good,” he said. “I didn’t say you could fire yet, but very good.”

  “Beginner’s luck,” she said.

  She killed two more before she missed.

  “Your turn,” she said, rolling over and handing him the rifle.

  “I know how,” he said, automatically checking to see that the rifle was “clear,” with no round remaining in the chamber. It was an unbreakable habit.

  “Well then,” she said, “stay in practice.”

  Philip lay down where Allison had been. She knelt astride him like an oriental masseuse. “So you think I have talent?” she said as he studied the area.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” he said.

  “Spy training,” she said.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Can you take the head off that flower over there?”

  “Possibly.” It took him three shots to do it.

  “Would you get off me now?” he said.

  “What if I don’t?”

  “I will have to put the rifle down to make you get off, and it will get sand in the action, which will be bad for it.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  They walked back to the jeep and he wrapped the rifle up again. “Now the pistol,” he said, gathering up half a dozen milk cartons. “This is actually quite a bit harder.”

  He set them out on top of various rocks in the area where there was a good backstop.

  “The point of all this,” he said, “since you keep accusing me of being a spoilsport, is that I am extremely fond of you, you are alone most nights, and it is getting a little dangerous here in Alidar.”

  “Yes, the Buhara seem to be remembering their Shia heritage.”

  “Or something,” he said. “Anyway, unless Tommy objects, I’d like you to keep this. Here, watch how you hold it.”

  Allison missed the first few times, but again she caught on quickly.

  “Do I get an ‘A?’”

  “The lesson isn’t over yet. I have to show you how to clean it.”

  Philip had to admit that half the point had been to get into the Baxters’ house, which he had become curious to see. When they’d invited him to dinner, it had been at the Hilton. He caught himself wondering if Allison knew how to cook.

  The house turned out to be only marginally less boring than his own. He had seen the same exact sofa in five living rooms now. They’d been out in the desert for an hour and a half, plus an hour in the car, and they were thirsty. He insisted she clean the pistol before doing anything else, and then clear out the drawer of her bedside table to make a place for it. Allison opened a quart bottle of the German mineral water everyone bought and set two glasses on the table.

  “Well, that was interesting,” she said. “I appreciate the lesson. I’d like you to teach Tommy to use it too, because, well, I doubt he’s ever handled one, and if it’s going to be around the house, it would be smart.”

  “Any time,” he said.

  Silence.

  “And you are very nice about it when I go on about sex.”

  There was really no answer for that.

  “I do very much like running with you. I can say the most outrageous things – which I’m sure you recognise I don’t really mean – and for some reason I am confident you don’t repeat them.”

  “I don’t.”

  “It is extremely helpful to be able to use bad words and pretend. It is a release, I guess.” Pause. “I do warn you I will probably keep trying to undress for you.”

  “I can handle it.”

  “I know you can. You seem to be able to handle a lot.” Pause. “Do you ever think about...what you did in the war? Killing people, I mean.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And you can handle it?”

  “I am embarrassed to say that it never bothered me at all – then or now.”

  “You never felt you should be punished for it?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t think all this physical fitness has anything to do with it? I mean, I do know that you run in the desert – which, incidentally, you might offer to do with me once in a while.”

  “We can do that if you like, but one has to be careful. Could I have some more water, please? No, from the tap is fine.”

  She went to the sink, and while her back was to him asked how many people he had killed.

  “As a sniper, ten.”

  “In a whole year?”

  “They were carefully selected. And hard to get to.”

  “Um.”

  She was standing with her back to the sink, now, facing him. He had turned his chair to face her. Both of them were sweaty and gritty and sun-struck, and getting stiff in the air-conditioning.

  “Would you mind, awfully, if I did one more flagrant thing,” she asked, “before you go home?”

  “If you like.”

  So she came over and sat on his lap, and put her arms around his neck. “Will you take me away, Philip, to a country where no one knows us, and we can live happily ever after?”

  “In another life,” he said, and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

  25

  A plain girl who falls in love becomes beautiful. Allison became sexy. Her legs began to cross in a different way. She found herself wearing stockings more. Her skirt rode up. The feel of her skirt against her hips turned her on. She found herself turning in her chair, leaning forward, reaching for things – all in ways that accented her breasts. Looked at in the mirror, her breasts seemed more satisfactory. Men noticed her at parties more. She sensed other women’s envy. Most of all, she herself felt the glow. She had sat on Philip’s lap once, for two minutes, but the imprint of his thighs remained, as if she had been branded.

  “In another life,” he had said. Having reinvented herself once, she should be able to do so again.

  Allison supposed it was odd for a girl who has killed fourteen people to worry about breaking her husband’s heart, but she did. Tommy had always been so decent, so understanding when she got impossible, that he clearly must love her. She hadn’t asked him lately. Used to, but had sort of dropped it. As an experiment, the next night he was home she spontaneously did some of the things she knew he liked that she’d maybe been neglecting. In bed, that is. And watched his reactions. And her own. They were just two warm bodies.

  Three
nights running she pummelled him with sex.

  “Sweetheart,” he said, “are you all right?”

  “I have an itch to please you,” she said.

  “So I see,” he said. “Don’t stop.”

  She didn’t. But they were no longer friends in the dark. There was resentment somewhere. It was gone in the morning – but fine; he wouldn’t mind, really, if she disappeared. Other girls would sleep with him. If they didn’t already.

  Disappearing would have several advantages. For example, the police had unfortunately noticed that the bullets that had killed the computer programmer and the old Buhara merchant had come from the same gun. Maloof had friends in the police. Or his friends had friends.

  And the rumour that the killer was a woman had now been confirmed. If, as she made her rounds, she were to do anything to attract attention, she could be in rather sudden trouble. She had a mental picture of the chador being stripped off by an angry crowd and knives appearing. Why this troubled her so, after all she had done, she could not explain.

  Also, quite a lot of money had accumulated in the funny little bank in Switzerland, which it was impossible to spend.

  Also she wanted a child. Philip’s, since you ask. And if they ran away and changed their names perhaps he would be less reticent.

  Also, to be honest, she was very tired sometimes.

  And the rush was gone.

  Allison had always been disciplined about her work. No footprints. No freelancing. No picking up guys on the spur of the moment, even when she badly wanted to. No dalliance with other women, even when there’d been a wife down the hall in New York she could have enslaved and it had been sixteen months between assignments and the urge to exercise power had been so fierce she’d had to pinch her own nipples in the shower. By the standards she held herself to, in fact, her wantonness with Tommy the previous weekend had been a lapse. It was out of pattern. And it had left her so unfulfilled she wanted to ask Maloof to cane her.

  Maloof wouldn’t have done it. Out beside the Jebel, he wouldn’t have had a cane. And he would have started wondering about her.

  An assassin has to manage her employer very carefully. They assume you’re mad, no matter what they say, and you have to keep reassuring them. Not that Allison had ever had another employer. But she’d thought about the subject a lot. That is, she’d thought about Maloof.

  Allison liked to believe that Maloof quite fancied her, as the English would put it, that it was only his own self-discipline and sense of mission that kept him from making her his mistress. He could have. She would have agreed. He had a wonderful body, the little she had seen of it. She rejoiced when he touched her – even a hand on her shoulder, or the way he stroked the back of her neck before he sent her away. She had had a crush on him at first. Died for each Wednesday to come. She’d outgrown it eventually. Had to. Kings have commitments. She understood. But there had always been a sort of gravitas in their dealings: the way he handed her the gun, his interest in each success, his careful detachment on the rare occasions when he let her please him. He was everything a parent or a lover ought to be. Well, almost. She liked to think he would have been hers, if there hadn’t been a throne to claim. In another life.

  It would be possible to be angry at Maloof for what he had turned her into. But, hell, she had been soft clay when he found her, a girl who wanted to be shocked, who invited violation. And he had always been so gentle, had taken such pains, had made her wealthy, had made her learned in a way. She knew so much more, thanks to him, than other women about sex and its feral cousins.

  Shooting people was not so bad – compared to selling cigarettes, for example, or drug companies experimenting on rabbits, or, to hear them tell it, being an investment banker. You just had to concentrate on what you were doing. You needed discipline. You needed, as Maloof had told her, a little more self-knowledge than the average citizen. And you had to expend yourself sparingly – on a husband, if you had one, on a bunch of hairdressers, on the Stairmaster, and on carefully selected individuals, primarily in Europe, who when the stars came into alignment it was possible to fuck or kill in perfect anonymity. You just couldn’t ever get sentimental. Which was hard.

  Allison knew better than to fly first class when she was working. She sat in the back of the bus, dressed like a schoolteacher, not attracting attention. It was safer.

  Flying back from an assignment somewhere a couple of years ago, with all the adrenaline gone, she had watched from across the aisle as a soldier and the girl beside him start to talk. She was an uncomplicated girl. Pretty now, but she’d spread when she had children. Probably went to church. The soldier was also uncomplicated, and wanted to impress her. He had stuff on his uniform. The girl asked him questions. She never touched him, the way a girl would have in a bar in New York, but meticulously pointed to one badge or ribbon after another, while he politely explained about the use and maintenance of helicopters. In which the girl expressed interest. And before Allison’s eyes, these two uncomplicated people fell in love. Just like that. You could tell by the way they talked more and more quietly, as if it were a very private conversation, and got shy but kept talking.

  So now she had her own soldier, who could be her twin, who was not uncomplicated any more than she was, who pushed all her buttons, who took her running, who wouldn’t sleep with her no matter how much he wanted to – and she kept remembering the couple on the plane.

  You’d think God was out to get her, making her fall in love. She hadn’t cried yet, actually, on getting home, but she might pretty soon.

  26

  The army do ask a man to take risks. Even a very small army. So it did not surprise Philip to find himself at the Great Fort, accompanied by a dozen of the soldiers who liked him, remembering how to employ the mortar.

  Ian Elliot, man of parts, had come up with a training manual, which was helpful, and the crown prince had contributed a lieutenant, who was useless.

  If you just stand over there, sir, out of the sun, we be done in no time.

  Ibrahim’s plan – which Philip had helped him think up, and for which skill at camouflage was gratifyingly essential – was to fight a series of delaying actions, falling back gradually to this hill. At that point the invading force would be twenty-five miles from the city, dusty and annoyed, and eager to attack. There was no role for foreign assistance, though Philip assumed the king would ask for help rather than lose the war.

  The soldiers were supposed to think the Fort was simply a good place from which to practise adjusting fire. Philip alone knew that he was registering preplanned bombardments in spots where the contours of the land would cause untrained troops to “bunch up.”

  Bunching up is to ground operations what original sin is to Baptists: the innate propensity of men under pressure to congregate, to use the same path rather than walking abreast and five metres apart as instructed, to keep moving forward when the man ahead stops, even to gather in a company area to gripe. Teaching soldiers not to bunch up is the holy crusade of the world’s non-commissioned officers. Philip had been a soldier for less than a week when a sergeant stuck his head out of a one-storey headquarters building and yelled at a group of them, “Spread out, men. One ass chewing could get you all.” It was an old joke. Centurions probably used it.

  Troops who have bunched up make wonderful targets, whether for arrows or artillery. Much of the legendary carnage of war, about which songs are sung and banners hung in chapels, has resulted when a sufficient number of soldiers bunched up, or were caused to bunch up, precisely where their opponents were ideally situated to bring fire or sword to bear on them. This is called a killing zone. In such a place, soldiers are often handicapped by their own compression, and casualty ratios can be so lopsided as to seem miraculous. This was what Philip was arranging on Ibrahim’s behalf. The terrain below the Fort was perfect for it.

  Although their acquaintance had been brief, Philip thought the mortar a very pleasant old-fashioned weapon. It was easy to use, and easy t
o set up. Didn’t even have a trigger. Made a nice sound when you fired it. Unlike an artillery piece, which was elevated a certain number of degrees above horizontal, a mortar tube performed at an angle closer to vertical. The projectile made an elegant, profligate loop, taller than it was wide, and after a remarkable length of time aloft, produced a bloom of smoke the requisite distance away. Followed by the sound of the explosion. A competent crew could be extremely accurate with it. When you were done you could break it down and carry it with you, like the lares and penates of the Romans, to the next camp. Three men were sufficient. Philip had carried the base plate once in a training exercise. Not a trivial burden, but it gave you a certain status.

  Ibrahim’s army had turned out to have three mortars, for which the corporals had dug three pits, spaced far enough apart that one artillery shell, in the awful event that the enemy had artillery, could not blow them all up at once. And Philip had methodically determined and taught the men to duplicate the settings which would make smoke bloom in the right places. He gave each target a codename and had the teams practise shifting fire. When he had them fire simultaneously at a single target, they cheered. God is merciful, and they hadn’t had a misfire, but he also showed them what to do if that occurred. There being no dummy round to use as a training aid, he had bought a small rubber ball in the souk and fitted it with cardboard fins. It wouldn’t give his corporals the right feel, but at least he could teach them the procedure of slowly tipping the tube and “pouring” the unexploded round into some brave soul’s hands. One made do.

  Once the corporals had finished their lessons, Philip decided to walk the military crest of the hill, the inflection point from which it would be possible to cover the lower slope with small arms fire, and above which defenders would have cover in mortar pits and attackers would be impossible to see. The hill was generally symmetrical, but folds in the land made certain aspects easier to defend.

  It was pretty clear which direction the Zaathi would attack from. Staring in that direction, which as it happened was also toward the city, Philip felt an unexpected calm descend over him. It was a beautiful piece of geography he had been sent to guard – a hill of red sandstone rising in the middle of a reddish desert. Ibrahim’s plan was also rather beautiful. The city would be spared. There was no reason, really, that the tiny nation which had been poured into his hands shouldn’t survive.