No. None of you are valuable. None of you are important.
To keep them out of the invisible perimeter around wind farm and crumpled skycruiser, she waited for the turbine blade to pass before shooting the closest one through the self–healing cloth.
They went to ground, but it wasn’t going to ground as the well–financed Beiruti troops might have known it; there was no fading into nothingness provided by light–bending cloth, no approaching ball of flame from an auto–laser–triangulation–retaliation device, just hunkering behind walls and debris. They had to know she would be on one of the towers, but with the wind too strong to place spying nanobots, even if they did have them, and with both distance and the vibration of the blades interfering with the detection of sound and shock wave signatures, they had no hope of knowing which one.
Now choose, Sophia thought coldly. How badly did Amr the Unbeautiful wish to seize the Beirut II? Badly enough to bombard the wind farm with rockets? He could destroy her, but not without destroying Tripoli’s main source of power; not without plunging his city into darkness.
And perhaps the turbines could never be rebuilt. Perhaps the city would go into eternal darkness, as so many cities and countries across the world had done, with no more fossil fuels to burn and anyone with money gone to join the sky collectives.
A skylife wasn’t completely free of danger. The continuously flying, solar–powered, high–altitude townships must land once a month or so to replenish their supply of water. Accidents could happen. The Beirut II was proof of that. Still, a skylife was better than a landlife, even if Beirut had been forced to appropriate billions of dollars that technically belonged to Tripoli so that all of its wealthy citizens and their families could become airbound.
A decade later, the rage of those who were left behind was undiminished. The enemy was within reach, at last; on the ground, like a bird with a broken wing. Sophia would permit them no hostages.
Two more men crossed Sophia’s invisible line. She shot them, too. Killing was easy, when you accepted it was the only way to survive. She had been a killer since birth. In the summer when the heat wave had come and the crops failed, when Beirut and Tripoli were one country, she had patrolled the border against bread–thieving black market incursions; learned to kill twice with one shot, to kill the men who came and the families who now would not eat.
She killed too by being wealthy, by reaping the world’s inequality to pay for chemotherapy developed by a global corporatocracy. Was that different to a bullet through the heart?
Bullets were cleaner than starvation and the horrors of lawlessness. She hadn’t always been so wise. The old woman, who fought for money and had no scruples, had tutored her. One, Khadija had whispered in her smoke–ravaged voice, gnarled feet bare on the pine bark like a perched owl. One is five hundred thousand lira. Nine more and I can go home. Ten is enough to pay my bills today.
You fill your quota like you have a bag to be filled with geese, Sophia had accused from the lateral branch below, lowering her spotter’s scope. She’d signed up to defy her father, who wanted her married and safely out of the police force. Despite the jeers of young men who had failed to complete the commando course, she’d earned her sword–and–tiger badge in just a few months. This was her first deployment and she was uncomfortable with the intimacy of the stalking phase. She could never be so intimate with men at home; see the sweat beading in their chest hair or the smoothness of skin over breastbone, the movement of their Adam’s apples as they took long swallows of purified river water.
If you can look in a wild animal’s eye as you take its life, Khadija said, you can look into the eyes of a man.
But Sophia couldn’t. Khadija told her to aim for the chest. To pretend it was empty jackets on a clothesline. Even a weepy girl could shoot an empty jacket, couldn’t she?
Her mother’s empty jackets had filled three walk–in wardrobes. Sophia had wept over those jackets. The first and last time she had wept as an adult.
Now she scanned for the sniper that belonged to the combat platoon. She had the superior position. The only ridgeline that offered a comparable elevation was two kilometres away, too far away for backwards Tripoli to threaten her in these high winds. The sniper must position himself closer, in the ruins of Ehden.
There.
Sophia killed him and continued to search for the arriving support platoon. Most likely they would stay in the shelter offered by the mountainside, but if they were malnourished, or exhausted by the climb in the cold and the snow, who knew what mistakes they might make?
Her helmet told her that six skycruisers had landed in Beirut port. Troops had disembarked. Snowmobiles were being charged. New estimated time of arrival was noon the following day.
She didn’t get another opportunity to thin the enemy’s numbers. An hour before sunset, however, the small figure of a child was pushed by a rifle butt out into the snow from behind a concrete wall.
The child struggled with something square and presumably heavy. Snot and tears dribbled down his red face. Sophia wanted to shoot through the wall, to kill the unseen man who must be threatening him, but such solid evidence of trajectory could only end in her death. Calming herself, setting her emotions aside, like burying the bones of a meal in the snow, she watched the child wade through whiteness toward the Beirut II.
She couldn’t allow an unidentified device to be brought any closer.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
With her lungs half–emptied, in the millisecond before the blade of the wind turbine obscured the shot, she squeezed the trigger and the rifle kicked.
The small body fell.
Nobody moved to retrieve him.
Sophia switched the movie back on in her head.
Husband, I am leaving you, said the beautiful actress, her head bowed. Her bosom heaved. Distress made manifest. The jilted husband stared at her flimsily clad breasts, no doubt thinking they would soon belong to another man.
The sun went down and spotlights came to life around Turbine Two, maintaining the snowy surroundings as brightly as daylight. She had counted on the constant illumination. Her invisibility cloth permitted enough visible light to pass unidirectionally through it for her targeting to be unimpeded, but infrared radiation did not pass through at all. Unless she removed the drapes, revealing her location, her thermal imaging components were useless.
Sophia ate a small bar of chocolate and switched her insulation suit to its nighttime setting. She hadn’t washed her hands. Her fingers, when she licked the chocolate from them, tasted of gunpowder residue and light machine oil.
Patience was everything, and her gut told her that the old woman would come.
§
“You did what with an orphan boy?” demanded the president of the City–State of Tripoli.
The meeting room, a shadow of its former glory, showed plaster where the solid gold embellishments had been chipped away, melted and sold, but the two dozen men around the polished table were well enough accoutred to heavily distort the mean atomic mass back in the direction of one hundred and ninety–seven amu.
Yet not enough wealth to buy even one skycruiser, the president thought, despairing.
Prayer beads slipped through the fingers of the man he confronted across the table, Amr ibn–Amr, Commander of the Maghaweer.
“The cedar forest below Ehden,” the commander said as though the president had not spoken. “We must set fire to it. You will give permission, of course.”
The president, who in his youth had led the Lebanese soccer team to statistically improbable World Cup glory in the year before the first Beiruti skycruiser launched and the country was divided forever, recalled a hundred thousand flags flying in the great stadium, each one stamped with a green, stylised cedar.
“No,” he said.
He still heard the drums in his dreams. The ululation of the women. The people had voted for his familiar face, jug–eared and broken–nosed. His was the dented forehead that had scored
. His were the teeth whose kicking earned that vital penalty.
“We need a smokescreen,” argued Amr, whose teeth had a gap suited to pulling grenade pins or imprisoning small birds. “Without smoke we can’t get past the snipers to approach the cruiser. The Beirut II is non–military. The passengers won’t resist.”
“The Beirutis will be here for their passengers very soon. And from your reports, I would guess there is only one sniper.”
The commander snatched the beads up into his palm. He drained the dregs of his coffee and stood up as if to leave.
“One sniper? It is an insult to suggest that is all they would send against our elite forces. Listen. Ordinary agents and canisters cannot obscure the area around the turbines where the skycruiser has crashed. The wind in the mountains is strong and constant. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. It is why we built them there!”
The others watched in silence. The military men mocked the president for his inexperience in combat and the religious leaders mocked him for his so–called spinelessness; he had once bowed to his European sponsors, who wanted him clean–shaven. But he knew something, now, that they didn’t, and he paused to enjoy it.
“You don’t need a wildfire. To counter this sniper, you need another female sniper.”
“You heap insult upon insult.”
Everyone has her signature shot, his father’s sister had told him. Not only because she has pride in her work. But she must be paid, also, yes? Getting paid is very important.
“Look at the images again. They are all shot in the left side of the chest.”
“Respected President. Remind me when you served.”
The president had avoided conscription. He had flown on the wings of a sports scholarship into the distant arms of elite coaches, but he knew patterns when he saw them, and now that he had seen this one, his thoughts raced. Was she still alive? What if she was living from the land, in the abandoned wilds? Would he have time to find her?
“We are all taught to aim for the larger target, sir,” the crisply turned–out subcommander said from the commander’s right side.
“Why don’t we do that, then?”
“Sir?”
“Why don’t we all aim for the larger target? Use artillery to shoot down the wind turbines, like whacking the heads off wildflowers?”
Nobody answered. It was too high a price to pay. Better to swallow the humiliation of allowing the Beirutis to trespass across their borders at will.
The president had played unwinnable games before. He did not think this was one.
“If, by sunrise tomorrow morning, I have not solved your sniper problem,” he said, “you can set fire to the oldest forest in the world.”
“What are you going to do?” the commander asked incredulously. “Walk up there and offer to sign autographs?”
“I won’t be walking,” the president smiled. “My bodyguards and I will be taking the underground train. Oh, and I require every man here to give up his gold. Place your cufflinks and everything else into this ashtray, please. I have no time for budgetary wrangling.”
§
The mountain railway tunnels and the limestone caves that they intersected were closed at various junctions by criminal gangs; by religious cults; by the homeless, dying to the sound of dripping stalactites, out of reach of sunlight.
Every time the train was stopped and armed boys came aboard, the president faced them calmly. They were overjoyed to recognise him.
“Goal for Liban!” they cried happily, and, sometimes, “The scent of a modern man!” which was one of several foreign product endorsements routinely mistaken for a nationalistic jingo. His hosts offered pine bark tea, pistachios, and cigars. The president patiently endured their hospitality, trying not to check his watch. After a final cheek–slap from an angry sheik who told him to grow a beard, the train was permitted to complete its journey. He ascended the wet, slippery stair to the surface.
“To the Ain,” he told a farmer at the station entrance, and with the press of a gold earring into a wrinkled palm, the president and his two bodyguards secured three saddled, skinny horses that put their royal Arabian bloodstock to shame. However, the roads were fallen into such neglect that, in the absence of functional helicopters, only horses would do.
It was late evening. He had only one hope of finding Aunty Khadija. She would have no electronic devices on her person, no phone: nothing to hack and no way to track her.
The horses knew the way even without the eerie glow of the chemical lamps carried by the bodyguards through the desolate winterscape. They passed the Ain, the archway that sheltered a freshwater spring.
The forest will not burn, the president told himself, and also the fans who had waved the flags.
She stood outside her square stone farmhouse, letting blood from a goat whose throat she’d recently cut.
“Hajji!” he cried, instantly ashamed by his boyish relief at what he saw as his rescue from an impossible situation. The smell of blood made his horse shy and he almost lost control of it.
Khadija put stained fists on her apron–sheathed hips.
“My sins have been forgiven,” she scowled, blinking in the dimness, “and here you are to beg me to sin again. Get down from there, you ball–kicking fool. Let me see you. My eyes are not what they were.”
§
My eyes are not what they were, Khadija thought, but that is why Allah created 25X zoom, longer eye relief and a smaller exit pupil.
She would not think of the weapon she’d taken as a trophy, although she now hoped to turn against its arrogant manufacturers. It was the unknown, the unexpected, that must be brought to bear, if she had a hope of outwitting a younger, better–equipped opponent, if Trabelsi was to triumph over Beiruti.
Sophia.
She had seen the captured images. The president’s murky memory of the legend of Khadija’s protégé, the blonde actress’s daughter who wanted revenge on her mother’s cancer, had led him to her home, with wish and a deadline: daybreak.
In the blue–white light of her hand–held, rechargeable lantern, the posters in the stairwell were mouldy and torn. Black slush covered the marble floor and a half–bald dog snarled from a side room, hackles rising.
“This is the place,” Khadija said, smoothing one of the rips, reuniting half the ringmaster’s moustache with the other half.
Najib’s Travelling Tent of Wonders.
“Please,” the president told one of his bodyguards. “Go upstairs. Wake him up and bring him down.”
Once a wizard of the Trabelsi hologram theatre, Najib appeared in the bodyguard’s keeping with no flourishes and no defences. His neat, dark hair was brittle, his singlet worn, and his neck unshaven.
“Do not eat my dog,” he begged, before he saw who it was. “Sir! I am humbled. Why have you… How did you…”
“You sent my daughter one letter too many, Najib,” Khadija said. “Now you must help me save Tripoli, for her.”
“Is she here?” Najib stumbled in his eagerness.
“Of course not! Do you think I would let her, or any of her sisters, come back from the schools that I sent them to? Do you think I shot those poor boys at the border because I wanted a rifle of solid gold? She’s married to a French doctor, raising her family in a well–off country, far from here.”
Najib sagged.
“Then why—”
“I have dreamed that the children of my children’s children returned to stand beneath the ancient trees. The idiot commander of the Maghaweer says he will burn them at daybreak if we do not flush out the sniper on the wind turbine.”
“We?”
“You have your old recordings, I hope, Najib. And your laser projection boxes. Even though your license was taken away. The night club, the people that died from ozone poisoning? You should never have promised them a full–length feature in such a poorly ventilated space.”
“I am tired, old woman. Tell me what you want.”
“An
open–air screening. With as many holograms as you can. Tonight, in Ehden.”
“Are you mad? The recordings are degraded and there is no portable power source that can run even one such projection anymore.”
“There is a transformer underneath Ehden,” the president said softly. “The power cables from all the wind turbines pass through it. Our men can get access to it without exposing themselves to sniper fire.”
Najib licked his lips.
“It has been a long time since I saw my beauties,” he admitted at last. “Far too long.”
§
Khadija had no cloth to hide behind on the ridge.
She murmured a quick and blasphemous prayer to the God of Snow, whose temple had once stood where she stood. In 850 BC, the Aramean King raised a great statue of Baal Loubnan at Ehden.
A hundred and fifty years later, the Assyrian King had the temple torn down and the statue overturned.
They come and they go, she thought. Christianity had come to Ehden in the 6th century. Now the little churches and abandoned monasteries were deathly silent. So, too, the crashed skycruiser which gleamed at the foot of the towering, spotlit turbines. Was there even anyone alive inside? Was all this for nothing?
“It is done, Hajji,” said the Maghaweer subcommander. She had hand–picked him to accompany her and had already forgotten his name. He was polite, which could have been misread as insipidness, but Khadija recognised it as unflappability, which he would need if her plan failed and Sophia shot her through her left breast.
In the piercing cold and whistling darkness, her body heat should have shone out like a beacon to anyone with thermal sensors. Khadija was operating on the information, several years old, that infrared detection was not possible through light–bending cloth. If she was wrong, if improvements had been made to the technology, even the tiny peephole in the wall of snow that the Subcommander had constructed for them would be instantly obvious to the enemy.
War Stories Page 13