W E B Griffin - BoW 03 - The Majors

by The Majors(Lit)

  Sidi-bel-Abbes, legendary home of the French Foreign Lagion, was their first stop. It was something of a disappointment.

  The museum was interesting, but you can only take so many museums, and Local 133 had been on tour for sixteen days so far, and they had enough museums to last them awhile.

  The legionnaires, except for their funny hats, looked disappointingly like Americans. Their uniforms were Americai khaki and U.S. Army work clothes, and they drove jeeps and

  Dodge three-quarter-ton trucks and GMC six-by-sixes, some of which, the machinists and tool and die makers agreed among themselves, they had made back in Detroit. The legionnaires were armed with good old U.S. Ml Garand rifles and Thompson

  .45 submachine guns and Colt.45 automatics.

  And then something happened that made everybody really hate the god damned French Foreign Legion. No sooner did they get out of Sidi-bel-Abbes, than they got stuck behind a

  French Foreign Legion convoy that moved down the road like a god damned snail.

  "Pass the sonsofbitches!" the machinists yelled at the bus driver, but the bus driver simply shrugged his shoulders.

  It was not that there was any good reason to go faster, and they really couldn't have gone a hell of a lot faster on the narrow, winding roads. It was simply that they were part of their culture, and a vehicle in front of them going five miles an hour less than they were capable of going was almost insulting.

  Not that it was uncomfortable in the air-conditioned bus.

  There was a refrigerator with soft drinks (Coke and some local orange soda that the Americans didn't like and some Algerian beer, which was nearly as bad). And the scenery was spectacular, if you liked rocks. Everybody oohed and aahed at first, and then they got bored with the mountains.

  They went through Tiemcen to Geryville. They stopped in

  Geryville for lunch, and everybody was pleased with that. It gave them a chance to stretch their legs, take pictures of camels and great big Arabs on little tiny donkeys, and have a little lunch. And the French Foreign Legion convoy had disappeared.

  They wouldn't have to swallow their dust from here on in to wherever the hell they were going next. But when they left

  Geryville, the Legion convoy was on the road ahead of them again. Bastards!

  They were going next to Colomb Bdchar, via Am Sefra.

  Fourteen miles out of Am Sefra as the crow flies, and thirty--six miles out as the road wound its way up and around the mountains, four 105 mm artillery shells furnished by the United

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  States of America as military aid to the Republic of France and captured by the Arme Nationale pour Ia Liberation d'Algirie were detonated under the road.

  The plan was to blow the shells when the bus was directly over them. The ANLA sous-chef who pressed the plunger had been well trained when he had been in the French Army, but he was a little nervous, and he pressed the plunger a halfsecond early.

  The charge exploded under the bus's engine. The force was sufficient to send what was left of the engine sailing fifty feet into the air, and to neatly sever the bus's frame immediately behind the engine compartment. The driver and Mr. and Mrs.

  Rudolf Czernik, of Hamtramck, Michigan, who were riding in the forwardmost passenger seats, died instantly.

  The back of the bus pushed what was left of the severed front of the bus approximately ten meters farther down the road before it dug into the macadam surface and stopped.

  Six more tourists, including one of the interior decorators from New Hope, Pennsylvania, died in the initial explosion.

  Four others, riding near the front of the bus, suffered injuries that were to be fatal. Many others were injured, some seriously, some slightly.

  But the ANLA plan to kill all on board was a failure: those to the rear of the bus were either unharmed, slightly injured, or simply badly shaken up.

  Within moments of the explosion, legionnaires from a jeep which had been following the bus managed to get the rear door of the bus open. They began to unload first the unharmed passengers and then the injured passengers. The dead were left where they were.

  The surviving passengers were herded into a ditch by the side of the road and told by a legionnaire with a heavy German accent to stay down and not move.

  There was weapons fire now, the sharp crack of.30 caliber rifles and light machine guns, the heavier, booming crack of

  .50 caliber machine guns, the crumping boom of mortars. The noise was deafening. One of the members of Local 133, ignoring his screaming wife, crawled out of the ditch and reclaimed an Ml Garand and two bandoliers of ammunition frown a legionnaire who lay in the road with half of his head blown off. He crawled back into the ditch, opened the action halfway to see if the rifle was loaded, and then crawled to the lip of the ditch.

  He couldn't see anything, but he emptied the clip into the granite mountain above them, and then he loaded a fresh clip into the Garand. He turned to his wife: "Francine, for the love of God, shut the fuck up!"

  The firing lasted about five minutes. The smell of gunpowder was in the air.

  Then there was silence.

  There came the sound of helicopters. The lithe, blond woman recognized that sound. Help was on the way. Help had come.

  She put her hand on her ankle. The pain made her want to scream. She had thought she had sprained it. She now realized, dully, that it was broken. It was already swelling and turning blue.

  The sound of the helicopters came closer and closer, and then two flashed overhead. Over the sound of their engines and the fluckata-fluckata-fluckata of their rotors she could hear the sharp cracking roar of machine guns. She waited for the sound of helicopters landing. She had seen helicopter ambulances on television. If they had helicopters with machine guns, they were certain to have helicopter ambulances.

  But there were no helicopter ambulances, and in about ten minutes the sound of the helicopters with the machine guns died out. The helicopters were now flying high, back and forth along the road.

  Legionnaires had now formed a defensive line around the surviving tourists in the ditch. A legionnaire with a medical kit came over to her and looked a moment at the ankle and took a hypodermic needle from his bag. He smiled at her.

  "I don't want that," she said. She hurt, she hurt as badly as she had ever hurt in her life, but she wanted to be conscious.

  She didn't want to be unconscious, not knowing what was going on, here in the middle of nowhere, where she didn't really know what had happened, only that she had almost been killed.

  "No, non," she said, then, "nein," remembering that some of the legionnaires seemed to be German.

  He pinned her hand painfully to the ground with his knee, grabbed her arm roughly with one hand, and injected her through her blouse sleeve with the other.

  "Damn," she said, and then it was as if the lights and the sounds and everything else went off.

  She became aware, first, of an old-fashioned ceiling fan turning and creaking above her. She focused her eyes on it.

  Then she smelled the smell of a hospital. It was disinfectant, what she thought of as chloroform, even though she knew that wasn't what it was.

  Her mouth was absolutely dry. When she tried to lick her lips, her tongue was dry. She pushed herself up on her elbows.

  She had the worst headache she had ever had. Even her eyeballs hurt, as if something was pushing them from inside her skull.

  There was a pitcher of something, probably water, and a plastic glass on a small table beside her. She rolled on her side to reach for it. Then she became aware of her leg. There was no pain, but it felt very heavy. She threw the sheet off her and looked.

  She was in a rough white hospital gown. No buttons. It tied in half a dozen places. Whoever had tied her into it hadn't done a very good job. Her body was exposed from the waist down. She pulled the gown closed over her midsection and upper legs.

  She wondered where her clothing was; there was no closet in the room. Her foot and ankle were
in a dirty white plaster of Paris cast. She moved it from side to side. There was a dull pain, nothing that really bothered her.

  She wondered where she was, and looked around for a button to call for a nurse, or a doctor, or somebody. She found it, but someone had tied it in a loop, for some reason just out of her reach.

  She pushed herself upward on the bed and decided that she would sort of crawl up the headboard and reach the damned cord.

  Then there was a knock at the door.

  She slid quickly back into the bed, pulling the sheet over her, and tried to pull the hospital gown, which had ridden up, back down again. The sheets were thin, translucent, and she didn't want whoever it was at the door to see her hair down there.

  There was a second knock.

  "Come in," she called, and then she remembered something from her high school French. "Entrez," she added.

  He was an officer in a French Foreign Legion uniform, a parachutist's camouflage uniform. He was as deeply tanned as she had ever seen a man tanned. His muscular arms, exposed to the biceps by the neatly rolled up sleeves, were almost chocolate brown. His hair was bleached nearly white. His eyes were hidden behind gold-framed aviator's glasses. He was, she realized, the most handsome, sexiest, most masculine man she had ever seen.

  He sort of backed into the room, as if finishing a conversation with someone in the corridor.

  "Good afternoon," he began, artificially cordial, reassuring.

  "I'm Lieutenant Edward C. Greer, of the United He stopped in midsentence. "Holy shit!" he said.

  She didn't say anything. Just waited for him to go on.

  "United States Army," he picked up. "I'm temporarily stationed with the French Foreign Legion in Colomb Bdchar.

  You're in a French Foreign Legion hospital. The doctors assure me that you are in no danger. Arrangements are being made to fly all the Americans from the tour out of here. It will take a few more hours to make the arrangements. In the meantime, if you will give me a name and address of someone you would like notified, the American consul general in Algiers will telephone them and assure them that you're all right."

  She nodded.

  "Except, of course," Lieutenant Greer said, "I don't need your address."

  "I thought maybe you'd lost it," Melody said.

  "If we can get you into a wheelchair," he said, "I can get you through on the radio. That would be better for your parents, if they heard from you, yourself, rather than one of those State

  Department assholes."

  "I'm fine, Ed," Melody said. "How are you?"

  "What the fuck are you doing here, anyway? Are you out of your mind?"

  "I'm not here," Melody said. "Today I'm in either Strasbourg or Cologne, I forget which, looking at a cathedral."

  "You almost got your ass blown off, you know that?" he said, angrily.

  "You look pretty good yourself," Melody said. "That's a

  really nice tan."

  "You're not telling me you came here just to see me?" he challenged.

  "I'm queer for desert and rocks," Melody said.

  "Hey, that was a long time ago," he said.

  "Six months. I thought maybe six months would change things."

  "There have been bandits in this area since before the time

  of Christ," he said. "While the French make every effort they

  can to police the area, obviously they aren't always successful."

  "Those weren't bandits," Melody said. "Whoever it was,

  was trying to kill us."

  "And the French Foreign Legion isn't exactly a police force, either."

  "What was that, a speech someone told you to give?"

  "His Esteemed Excellency, the Deputy Consul for Public

  Affairs himself," Greer said. "I told him he'd better come give it himself, but he said he was going to be needed in Algiers to handle the public relations end of this incident."'

  "What are you doing here?"

  "Learning," he said.

  "Learning what?"

  "That escorting a civilian bus with a platoon of troops doesn't always guarantee the safety of the bus, for one thing," he said.

  "Don't you care that I love you?" Melody asked.

  "If that fucking charge had gone off a second later," Greer

  said, "we'd be sending what was left of you home in a rubbe

  bag."

  "Were you out there?" Melody asked.

  "I was in one of the gunships," he said.

  "Why didn't you land and help us?" Melody demanded.

  "That was their game plan," he said. "They set that charge conveniently close to an area big enough to take a couple of

  H-21s."

  "That's the one with a rotor at each end?" she asked.

  "Yeah, the Piasecki. Flying Banana. We gave the French fifty, sixty of them. What we were supposed to do was lose our cool when we heard about the bus, and then rush in with

  H-21s and medical people. When we did that, they would knock out the H-21s."

  "But we were civilians," Melody said.

  "You were either French or American, which is nearly as good. You blow away one Frog or two Americans and you get a guaranteed ticket to heaven."

  "Would that have bothered you?" she asked.

  "Would what have bothered me?"

  "If the bomb had blown me up?"

  "What they're doing now," he said, "is sending patrols through the mountains over the airfield. As soon as they've been cleared, the air force is sending in a couple of transports from Morocco. They'll fly you to Algiers."

  Melody started pulling open the bows fastening her gown.

  "What the hell are you doing?" Greer asked.

  "Looking," she said.

  "You're all right. You must have slammed your anlde into a seat or something. You weren't hit."

  "I may not have been hit," Melody said. "But I'm not all right."

  "What's the matter with you?" he asked, and she heard the concern in his voice. Her nipples were standing up. She was glad for that. She knew he liked it when her nipples were erect.

  "You tell me," she said. "You're the one who runs away hDm me."

  "Hey, I thought that was all settled. Different folks. You're your kind of people, and I'm my kind of people. You want to close your god damned robe? Before somebody comes in here,

  1kw Christ's sake!"

  "Have you had a lot of girls since you came here?" Melody sked.

  "What do you think?"

  "Tell me."

  "Lots of girls."

  "You used to tell me I had the prettiest teats in the world," she said. "You find anybody with prettier teats, Ed?"

  "Jesus Christ! You're really a fruitcake, you know that?"

  "I went to bed with six different guys," she said.

  "Shut up!"

  "I fucked six different guys, some of them two and three times, and it was never like it was with you," she said.

  "Goddamn you, will you shut up!"

  "So I figured it was worth the trip over here," she said. "It took a little doing to get the money from my father. After what

  I got into with you, he decided I needed a keeper. I had a hard time ditching her. The cops in Coblenz are probably dragging the river for my body."

  She looked up at him and forced a smile on her face, and then she saw his cold eyes and rigid jawline and that was too much. The whole trip, even nearly blown up, had been for nothing.

  She let out a little howl, and threw herself on her side. "Get the hell out of here!" she said. "Leave me alone!"

  She heard footsteps and figured that it was him, leaving the room. But then the bed sagged, and she knew he was sitting on it. She held her breath for a moment, and then rolled over to him, her arms out, reaching for him.

  "Oh, baby," he said. "Jesus Christ, I've missed you."

  "That's why you sent me all the letters, right? Not even a lousy postcard!"

  "I just didn't want you to get into something you shouldn't," he said.


  She moved her face to his, found his mouth. She put her tongue in his mouth, felt him shiver, as he always did. Then she thrashed around in his arms.