“Sir!” Gutzman’s voice was so loud, it hurt Baranyk’s ears. “Sir! What did we hit?”
“Keep your eyes on your instruments, Gutzman,” Baranyk said quietly. ‘‘We will be feinting toward the enemy to draw artillery fire.”
A groan from the headset Gutzman’s this time.
Out in the open, mine-dotted field, Baranyk reviewed his mental map of their path. He wound the speed to 80 KPH and angled toward the road. In his ear, a crackle of static, then the enraged voice of Jastrun, “Who the hell is in Hammer 8?”
“Tell him,” Baranyk said.
Gutzman’s voice was high-pitched with panic. “General Baranyk, Lieutenant Gutzman, Sergeant Zgursky.”
The tank mounted the road, and Baranyk accelerated, watching the kilometers flick by on the display. He set the stud on the steering T to telescopic vision and saw guideposts: the stand of pines, the shattered, burned farmhouse.
Three kilometers, three and a half, he counted.
After a long silence, Jastrun asked, “Who is this on the radio?”
“Lieutenant Gutzman.”
“You are tank commander?” Jastrun barked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then turn that tank around immediately!”
“But sir,” Gutzman said miserably. “General Baranyk is driving.”
“Fuck General Baranyk!” Jastrun screamed, his fury apparently overcoming his religious awe of rank. “Doesn’t he know there are mines out there? And four hundred thousand Arabs? I will call General Czajowski! Tell him that! I will call General Czajowski! My hand is on the phone now, General Baranyk! Do you hear me? I am making the call right now!”
They went over a crater in the road, the suspension easing them through it as gently as a farm girl carrying eggs.
“Lieutenant?” Baranyk said. “Sergeant?”
“Sir?” they answered in nervous tandem.
“It is not too late. If you want to go back, tell me now.”
“Sir,” Zgursky said, his voice shaking. “I trust you, sir.” A pause. Then Gutzman’s hesitant, “No, sir.”
“Then, Gutzman! Tell that bugger of farm animals, that lazy Pole, to pay more attention to his radar screens than to his telephone. At ten kilometers in, we’ll open fire. I suspect the Arabs are no more than sixteen kilometers from the perimeter. He should begin preparing to orchestrate response.”
“Firing in ...” Gutzman began and stopped, evidently consulting his own readouts. “Oh, my God!” he screamed. “Firing in two minutes! Colonel Jastrun! Prepare to conduct response!”
They barreled up a hillock, the Hammer going airborne for a moment before coming down with a buttocks-bruising slam that even the suspension couldn’t cushion. Before them extended a grassy plain dotted here and there with islands of birch and pine.
Holy Father, Baranyk thought in horror. He was lost.
He checked his display again nervously, imagining mines ahead, imagining all sorts of things. Perhaps the Arabs didn’t have the old artillery standbys: 2S5s and 2S3s. If they had the longer range BM-27s, the emplacements would be too far away to hurt. If 2S1 s, Baranyk would be right on top of them.
“Gunner. Prepare to fire,” the general said.
“But—where, sir?” Zgursky blurted.
Baranyk steered the tank off the asphalt and ran parallel to the yet unseen Arab artillery. Was this the way or not? “Fire now! Six kilometers due east!”
Baranyk heard the turret turn on its well-oiled gears. It took a moment for the tank’s computers to calculate wind direction and speed, then the 120mm cannon boomed, rocking the tank. The sound nearly brought Baranyk out of his seat. A mine, he thought, then realized what the noise had been.
“Fire!” Baranyk shouted. “Keep firing, Zgursky!”
The recoil momentarily tore the steering from the general’s hands. The eastern horizon began to twinkle.
“Response! Six-point-five kilometers!” Gutzman shouted.
A shell hit so close that Baranyk gasped. Instantly he was sober. Mother of God, he thought. My drunken stupidity will kill us all. He pulled the steering T into a desperate right turn and angled for the town, heedless of the mines. Directly in front of them a train station burst open, spilling guts of smoke.
He raced around a pre-Revolutionary building to hide, to let Zgursky fire again. There was no need. In the air above the artillery bombardment there was a flash. From the exploding Allied shell, submunitions arced out, making a weeping-willow pattern of fire. A heartbeat later, the bomblets went off, their downward blasts as sudden and hard as pile drivers.
All along the sparkling perimeter, Allied shells exploded, a border of incandescent flowers. From the ground, flames blossomed, meeting the glow from the sky. Baranyk’s pulse began to slow. The tightness in his chest eased. He smiled. Not bad for an old Communist who finds his courage in a bottle of vodka.
The barrage from the east dwindled to sporadic mortar fire. Still grinning, Baranyk turned the tank west and, carefully following his own tread marks, hurried back to Warsaw.
By the time he rolled over the barricades and brought the tank to a halt, both barrages had ended. Jastrun, hands on hips, was standing outside the bunker, his officers and men around him. Pulling the goggles off, Baranyk fought his way out of the driver’s compartment and up the deck. The eastern horizon was dark with smoke.
He whooped. “See there!” he cried, pointing. “And they call the American general crazy!”
Gutzman and Zgursky joined him. Zgursky’ s eyes were swollen as though he had been crying, and a wet spot covered the front of Gutzman’s pants.
Baranyk felt his smile falter.
“General Baranyk?” Jastrun said. Baranyk looked down at him.
“Commander Czajowski is on the phone. And he wants to talk with you now.”
IN THE LIGHT
Jerry was not happy to see the soldier come back. It was plain as day that his Pa loved that soldier; and Jerry could imagine a time when his Pa’s love would drift from him like a distracted gaze.
They sat on the grass watching the stars come out in the bruised sky. Next to Jerry’s hip, his Pa shifted weight and laid a moist, calming hand on his arm.
“Debts, Jerry,” his Pa said in an Andy Griffith voice.
“Yes, sir.”
The hand squeezed his, the soft fingers molding themselves around his flesh. “No one should ever forget debts.”
The soldier was sitting next to the kid named Mike, and he was staring off into the clattering reeds. He never said much, the soldier. Never said hello, never said goodbye.
Jerry didn’t like the pilot. Didn’t like the way he thought about war. But it struck Jerry that the pilot must be right. The soldier was a gomer. A second-rate target in a kill box.
“Look,” Mike said.
One of the blue lights was coming over the lake, a rising cerulean moon.
Mike pointed his boneless finger. “See there, Gordon?”
“Yes,” the soldier said.
“I live in the light,” Mike told him. In the dim glow of the pier Jerry could see Mike’s eyes bulge with fierce hunger. “We all do. We make it come. We make it go.” He waved his hand. The blue globe of light bobbed back and forth, as if it were a kite and Mike were holding the string.
“It is our eyes,” Mike said.
But that was a lie, Jerry thought. Mike’s eyes were oozing down his cheeks.
“From where the light is, I can see the other side of the lake. Do you understand?” Mike asked the soldier.
The gomer screwed his face up into a confused frown.
“We drive it.”
The soldier’s bewilderment smoothed out, was replaced by surprise.
“Would you like to drive one?” Mike was asking, leaning into
the soldier so that their bodies pressed together. Mike’s soft bones gave way. His chest swallowed the soldier’s right side. “Would you?”
“I would, Pa!” Jerry said quickly before the soldier could answer. “I’d like to see the other side of the lake in that thing.”
“Shhh,” Pa said.
“But I’d like to go, Pa. Please, can’t I go?”
“It’s not for you, Jerry,” his Pa said. “It’s for Gordon. We make this offer for Gordon.”
But it would be a fine ride, Jerry knew. Better than bumper cars. If his Pa gave him everything he ever wanted, he should let him drive one of those lights.
“I want to drive one, Pa,” he said.
Pa wrapped him in his arm, and for the first time Jerry realized how heavy that arm could be. With an angry tug, Jerry freed himself from his Pa and glanced around.
Mike was regarding the blue light thoughtfully. The soldier was gone.
WARSAW, POLAND
Taking a deep breath, Baranyk walked into the office.
Czajowski was sitting behind his desk, a drowsy-eyed spider. “Shut the door, will you?” he said.
Baranyk pulled the door to. Czajowski stood. “Valentin, Valentin,” he said, shaking his head. “There was a mine field out there. And four hundred thousand Arabs.”
“Yes, Andrzej. And none of them killed me.”
“Not for lack of your trying.”
“Someone should try something, I think.”
The Pole looked either sick or exhausted. He limped over to a plush armchair and fell into it. He massaged his leg. “My arthritis bothers me again.”
“I am sorry to hear it.”
“You bother me,” Czajowski said, concentrating on his knee.
Baranyk looked at the ornate cross hung above the Pole’s desk, and the statue of the Virgin in blue and white beside it. The Mother of God had her face lowered, her hands outspread, as if welcoming to her bosom a child or a pet dog.
“We must save our ammunition,” Czajowski said.
“Yes. We can make rings out of it. Bracelets, the like.”
At Baranyk’s acid tone, the Pole glanced up. “I could strip you of your command. Do you know that?”
“If we obey you, Andrzej, we will let all of Warsaw become rubble. Have you forgotten what happened during the Patriotic War?”
Czajowski’s face flushed. He jumped to his feet, nearly toppled again, grasped his thigh. “Goddamn,” he growled. “Shit. May my leg be fucked. Yes, Valentin, goddamn you. I realize the Red Army sat back and let the Germans level Warsaw.” Breathing heavily—more from pain, Baranyk suspected, than from fury—the Pole dropped into the chair again. “General Lauterbach is sending a division. When he arrives with the Germans, we will need every shell we have.”
Baranyk studied the commander. The Pole’s cheeks were pale, his jaw taut with pain. A man so weary of battle, it seemed he was ready to fall into the Virgin’s porcelain, unfeeling arms. It was a dangerous faith that Czajowski had. A deadly one.
“God, Andrzej,” Baranyk whispered. “Don’t you see? Lauterbach is lying to us.”
“He will come,” Czajowski said. “The Germans will come. Warsaw is too important to fall.”
“The Germans hope the Arabs will be satisfied with Poland, and they are probably right. They will write a peace on our corpses.”
When Czajowski did not respond, Baranyk went to the opposite chair and sat. The office was smaller than Pankov’s, but in its way just as opulent.
“Look at me,” Baranyk said. “Won’t you look?”
The Pole kept his eyes on his offending knee. “I am angry. If I look at you, I will be angrier still.”
“Then don’t look. Listen. Lauterbach has no fuel. How can he move a division so far? And if he got here, what good would a division be? Four hundred thousand Arabs surround us and Arab planes own the skies.”
Czajowski’s hair was flaxen and silver. At the very top of his cranium, pink scalp shone through the sparse strands.
“I know Lauterbach,” Baranyk said. “I understand his mind. He is devious, and no fool. It is easier to lie. A lie gains him time. He lets us think help is coming and—oh, Andrzej, Don’t you see?” The small office was filled with the hush of resignation, the sour stench of defeat. “Lauterbach dangles the carrot.”
Baranyk glanced up at the bronze figure of Christ on the Cross. The statue’s muscles and tendons were delineated, its face sagging, like Czajowski’s, with pain. Christ, Baranyk thought bitterly. Christ had dangled the carrot, too.
The Pole massaged his knee. His voice was the soft, acquiescent voice of a saint facing martyrdom. “Lauterbach will come,” he said.
CRAV COMMAND, TRÁS-OS-MONTES, PORTUGAL
“I came to say goodbye,” Toshio said.
Hunched in a chair in his pajamas, Gordon let his gaze rest on Toshio’s face. This was obviously near the end of the movie, the sad part. But Gordon couldn’t remember the rest of the film and didn’t know why he should be unhappy.
“You’re being transferred home,” Toshio told him. “Colonel Pelham brought the papers over this morning.”
Someone died. That was what happened in the sad parts of movies. Who, though? Then Gordon realized that the dead man was himself.
Toshio looked away, because people never look at the dead for very long. “He’ll be in to see you in a few moments.”
A hush settled over the room, airy and light as the glow from the windows. Gordon closed his eyes. Mike was standing on the beach, ankle-deep in the waves.
“Are you ready?” Mike asked. He put out his hand, and Gordon grasped it. The small mouths of Mike’s nails sucked at his palm.
“No family,” Toshio said.
Gordon opened his eyes. The man was regarding him, his black eyes turned warm obsidian.
“You have a mother somewhere, but you were never close to your family. No girlfriend. I read your psychiatric file. There is no one who cares for you. I think the colonel makes a mistake by sending you home.”
Home. Gordon suddenly knew that Mike was coming to take him home. He sat up straighter, listened hard, stared out the window.
“Gordon?” Toshio asked curiously.
Everyone in this film was dead. That’s why it was sad. The world was full of mummies and vampires and zombies. The dead peered out of movie screens. Somewhere Bela Lugosi laughed, a lazy heroin chuckle. And the tall ghost of Christopher Lee strode.
“Gordon? What is it?”
Mike was coming.
Beside him Toshio was as hazy as a TV with bad reception.
Gordon leaped to his feet.
“What’s wrong?” Toshio asked, rising with him.
In the back of Gordon’s mind, he heard the clattering of sleet, whispered vows, the combined troth of the community. He felt a tug of longing as though his heart were being sucked from his chest. Mike was close, riding on eddies of air, on volumes of wind, drifting over the alien green fields.
Gordon ran to greet him, knocking over a table, shoving past a nurse. At the entrance to the clinic Pelham glanced up, startled.
Stumbling down the steps and across the gravel in the yard, Gordon soared like an untethered balloon, no family, no ties to hold him. An armed MP and his group of prisoners stopped to watch him pass.
“Damn it, Gordon!” he heard Pelham shout.
Gordon halted in the yard, taking in a ragged breath. Mike was there. The blue light was sailing into the compound. Arab prisoners scattered; the MP screamed for them to stop.
Strong, desperate arms grabbed his pajamas, clawed at his neck. “No!” the colonel shouted. “No, son! That thing will kill you!”
Then Pelham’s arms were wrenched away. Bewildered, Gordon turned and saw Toshio and the colonel wrestling in t
he gravel.
“Let him!” Toshio said. “Let him go! Gordon needs someone now. Let him go.”
Gordon whirled. Mike was right beside him, cool and wintry blue. Closing his eyes, he plunged into the azure Atlantic, the salt smell of the waves, the keen, clattering shrieks of the gulls.
WARSAW, POLAND
Baranyk awoke to the sound of sirens. It was black in the room, and the general, still half asleep, imagined that the rises and falls of sound were slow ocean waves bearing him into the dark.
He turned over in bed, the cheap army-issue frame creaking. He scrubbed his face and finally sat up, letting the warmth of the covers fall away. A shadow stood at the door.
“Sir,” Zgursky said. “Would you care to go to the basement?”
The AAA had not started up. A Scud, then; not bombers. He blinked at Zgursky, a man-shaped blot in the night
“No,” Baranyk said. Had he been dreaming again? he wondered. The bedclothes were in a sweated knot. From the open window flowed a cool breeze and the drumming sound of November rain.
Groping toward the top of the nightstand, he found his vodka bottle, screwed open the cap, took a swallow. The liquor laid a hot trail down his throat
“Your gas mask, sir?”
“No. You go ahead,” he told his aide. “Get your mask. Go to the basement. I’ll be there in a minute.”
The shadow in the doorway didn’t move. Zgursky probably knew he was lying. “One minute,” the aide said.
“I understand.” Zgursky was counting. They had three minutes from the first moan of the sirens to the strike; two minutes had already gone by. The aide lingered, a clock-watching death angel.
Other than the sirens and the slow rain, Warsaw was silent. No dogs barked. No cars passed in the rubble-choked streets.
Then the shadow moved. Zgursky raised his head, listening.
A belly-wrenching explosion—much too close. The floor shook. Dull red light sparked at the window. The blast rolled on, an incredible, ceaseless timpani. Baranyk’s small Tensor lamp jittered across the nightstand and fell over with a crash.
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