by Ralph Peters
"Please give me something to drink."
Taylor could feel the ants working at his own ankles again.
"Just a drink."
"Ben… for God's sake… if I…"
"I know…" the gunner said. Tears were seeping out of his swollen eyes now. "It doesn't matter. I want to drink."
Taylor hastened to fetch the double canteen.
"Ben…"
The gunner closed his eyes. "Can't talk…'' he said. He seemed to be clenching himself against an unimaginable pain.
As gently as he could, Taylor put the canteen to the man's lips. But the mouth was already dead. He carefully tipped the water as ants began crawling up over his own hands.
With a jerk, the gunner gagged. His head lolled forward, throat gurgling, unable to accept the water.
Taylor almost dropped the canteen. But the self-preservation instinct in him was still too strong. He pulled back, spilling only a little of the water. With ants chewing fire into his hands and forearms, he carefully screwed the cap tight. Then he drew his pistol and shot his weapons officer through the forehead.
* * *
The map was useless at first, since the landscape was all the same, and he simply followed the compass. North. Flying above the earth, it had been easy to find beauty in the rugged grasslands and bush, but now, on foot, the country was a monotonous nightmare of heat, thorns, vermin, and snakes. It took him a full day of steady, pained walking before the waste hills of the mining complex swelled up in the distance. Then his water ran out. Maddeningly, the waste hills refused to grow larger, and the bush clutched at him, as if determined to hold him back. His flight suit shredded away from his arms, and sweat burned down over his opened flesh. In panic, he fired his pistol at a rearing snake that appeared immediately in front of him. He began to shake, and to dream. In his lucid moments he was uncertain whether he was suffering from fear or dehydration. He forced himself to focus on his goal, to remain focused, and he refused to consider the possibility that he might finally reach his squadron's field site only to find it evacuated. He thought about water and about safe rest in a place where nature's wretchedness would not crawl over him as he slept.
As he finally approached the bivouac site in the twilight, he scanned desperately for signs of life. He had not seen a single helicopter in flight. No vehicles stirred the dust along the portage roads. Crazily, he walked faster, almost running, staggering, his damaged back stiff, as though the spine had been fused into a single piece.
Surely, they would not have left him behind.
Water.
Rest.
He trotted dizzily around the spur of waste that shielded the field site from view.
And he staggered as though punched hard in the chest. Then he sat down in the dirt, staring.
The support site had been turned into a blackened scrapyard. Wrecked helicopters and vehicles sat in jagged repose amid shredded tentage and camouflage netting.
They had not heard his broadcast warnings. Or they had not reacted in time. Or they had been caught out by the same technological imbalance that had swept his troop from the sky.
Eventually he picked himself up, dizzy, and wandered about the ruins of his army. Not everything had been destroyed. Vehicles, a field kitchen, miscellaneous field gear, even a precious water buffalo had simply been left behind. No bodies, though. In the American tradition, the survivors who had pulled out had taken their wounded and their dead. But precious little else. Atop the two-story administration building, a red and white cavalry pennant hung limply from its pole, forgotten.
Taylor realized that it must have been very bad. But he could not quite feel sympathy for them, or outrage. He simply felt sick, with all the self-focus illness brings. He drank water too quickly from the tap of the water buffalo, then let the liquid stream over his head. He could tell from the pain the coolness produced that he was badly sunburned. But it seemed so minor a problem that he wasted no further thought on it. He wanted to rest.
The African darkness fell with the swiftness of a heavy curtain released from above, and Taylor stumbled through the litter of the administrative building up onto the flat roof where the cavalry guidon hung. He hoped that no creatures would pester him there. He had degenerated into a childish terror of all small crawling things, even of flies. He felt as though he had been overloaded with nature's horrors, and he wanted only to be left in peace for a little while.
The sun woke him. He jerked up from the concrete bed of the roof. Helicopters. He heard helicopters. But, even as he struggled to his feet to search the sky, he realized that the sound was only the buzzing of flies.
His legs were very weak, and he had to go down the stairs carefully. He drank more water, tasting it now, sour and warm. Stacks of ration cartons had been knocked about by the kitchen trailer. But the thought of food sickened him. Still, the day seemed hopeful. He was alive. And he could take his choice from a number of vehicles in operative condition. He could take a truck if he wanted. Or a lighter utility vehicle. It struck him that he might just survive after all.
He moved slowly, but he tried to move methodically. He loaded a light, all-purpose truck with boxes of rations, I with ten-gallon fuel cans, with water cans. He worked through the wreckage of the helicopters, searching out forgotten emergency kits. Ammunition, matches, first-aid kits, flare guns. It was possible to salvage something from even the worst wrecks. But he could not find a working radio. The late-model sets that had been left behind had been cleared, deprogrammed. Someone had been thinking about operations security.
There were civilian phone lines in the administrative building, but they were dead. Still, he was able to lift a decent set of maps from the abandoned stock, some outdated, others with broad expanses where there was no detail, yet far better than the single local flight map disintegrating in his pocket. He made a plan. No point heading for Kolwezi without adequate knowledge of the combat situation. Better to head north, roughly along the Lualaba, as the backcountry roads and trails allowed. In the wreckage of the tents, he sifted through the burned duffel bags and kits. His own oversize aviator's bag had burned, but he found stray uniform pieces of the necessary sizes where the enlisted tents had stood. He could even have taken a supply of pornographic magazines, but he settled for loading a sleeping bag onto the truck.
He was ready to go. He still felt weak, but he was convinced that he was going to make it. He could almost feel a spark of his old fire, thinking: George Taylor versus Africa, round two. He folded the local map sheet and tucked it in by the gears. He had loaded himself down with pistols and knives like a cartoon cowboy. He started the engine. But a last glimpse of the abandoned cavalry banner on the roof stopped him.
Laboriously, he reclimbed the stairs. He grabbed the fabric in one hand and cut it free from the pole with a sheath knife, noticing with his first smile in days that some young soldier had inked into the fabric, in small block letters, the informal cavalryman's motto:
IF YOU AIN'T CAV, YOU AIN'T SHIT.
Taylor folded up the guidon and slipped it into one of his oversize uniform pockets. Moments later he had left the scene of defeat behind, on his way to conquer a continent.
His journey took four months. He had hoped to link up with U.S. forces at a corps support command site at Lubudi, but he found only a dump of pallets and blivets, repair tents, and a plundered medical support site, all abandoned by the U.S. military and now inhabited by local squatters. The native dead lay casually about the compound, victims of RD that no one else would touch, let alone bury. Taylor sped off, trying to bathe away any contagion in the rush of air moving over the vehicle, unwilling to risk the contact questions would have required.
He followed the river. His fellow Americans were somewhere to the west or northwest, but he had no way of knowing how far back the war had carried them. The river, with its necklace of remote, fetid towns, was his only hope. Bukama, too, was dying, but the remnants of government and a few Belgian missionaries were fighting back, burn
ing the corpses. Taylor had smelled the stench miles before he reached the straggling edge of the town, but nothing in his experience had allowed him to identify it. At a ferry crossing, a Lebanese wanted to purchase anything Taylor would be willing to sell from the stock aboard the vehicle, but Taylor was determined to husband his riches, rationing himself on the long progress toward Kinshasa. In response to Taylor's pidgin questions about Americans, the Lebanese responded angrily in French overgrown with localisms, so that all Taylor could make out was that the Lebanese did not know where there were any Americans and did not care where there were any Americans. Beyond that, Taylor could only catch the word death, which came up repeatedly. Shortly thereafter, just as the landscape was going bad, Taylor's vehicle stopped in the middle of a dirt track. Nothing he could do would make it start again, and he had no choice but to abandon the riches the Lebanese had so badly wanted to buy.
He continued on foot, bartering for occasional rides on ancient trucks, on ferries and riverboats seeping with plague. He had diarrhea, but it passed over him in cycles, hitting him hard, then weakening, then punishing him again. Each new surge of pain teased him with the thought that he was coming down with Runciman's disease. But he never sickened beyond stomach cramps and the breakdown of his bowels as his belly filled with parasites. Far from his dreams of military glory, he killed his first enemy in a filthy cafe, shooting the bandit in the instant before he would have been shot himself, then shooting the bartender-accomplice a moment later, watching an old hunting rifle slip from the man's hands. One more trap for travelers in a dying land.
He traveled over a thousand winding miles to the great falls and the ghostly city of Kisangani, its population first thinned by AIDS, now slaughtered by Runciman's disease. There was no help for him there, but the whores desperately trying to make a living along the enfeebled trade route told him that, yes, there was a very big war.
"Kinshasa. No one talk."
Americans?
A gold-toothed smile.
South Africans?
The wasting prostitutes so wanted to please, yet Taylor was utterly unable to make them understand with his shreds of high-school French. For two years, he had sat inattentively, his only thoughts concerning the wiry blond girl who sat in front of him, dreaming over her grammar. Now, at an incalculable remove, the precious words would not come. A whore raised her arm toward him, its long bone wrapped thinly in burned cork.
There was no escaping any of it. The mails did not function, phones were a memory. All that was left were the basic essentials: grim food — unnameable, slithering through the bowels — the nightmare whores who imagined that the pockets of his tattered uniform held wealth, and the incredibly resilient traders, who worked their way along the rivers on unscheduled steamers. Taylor passed through mourning towns and through villages where no sign of human life remained. Survivors of Runciman's disease wandered the bush and jungles, waiting for another death, many begging, some gone mad. The most amazing thing to Taylor was the speed with which he learned not to see, not to care.
Fragmentary details of the war filtered up the great river lines, jumbled out of chronology. On a river bank, between skewers of smoked monkey and displays of bright cotton, a merchant told him that the Americans had made a great fire, but he could supply no further details. Great fire, great fire. It wasn't until he reached Kabalo that a world-band radio shocked him with an offhanded reminder that the United States had struck the South African government center of Pretoria with a small-yield nuclear weapon weeks before. A last surviving relief worker let Taylor look through the stack of outdated newspapers awaiting service in the water closet. Taylor hurried through them, in a mental panic. Uncomprehending, he slowed, and began again, sifting the reports into the order of the calendar.
The South African military had set a trap, launching a broad, coordinated attack on the U.S. forces in Shaba Province, on those deploying downcountry, and on those remaining in Kinshasa. The same morning that Taylor's troop had been blasted out of the sky, South African commandos and rebel forces from within the Zairean military had destroyed the sixteen unnecessarily deployed B-2 bombers on the ground back in the capital. The planes had cost the United States well over one billion dollars each. The South Africans destroyed them with hand grenades, satchel explosives, and small-arms ammunition that a private could have bought with a month's pay. In the fighting downcountry the South African military's Japanese-built gunships with on-board battle lasers and a revolutionary arsenal of combat electronics had introduced a qualitatively new dimension into warfare. In the nineties the U.S. had built-down in concert with the Soviets, and even as the military force shrank, the only new weapons introduced to keep pace with the times were enormously expensive Air Force and Navy systems that had never proved to be of any practical utility. The only program that worked, even though underfunded, was strategic space defense, while the only service that saw significant action in the wake of Operation Desert Shield was the bare-bones Army, committed to a series of antinarcotic interventions in South America. But even that action was hampered by the Air Force's cutbacks in airlift capability, made in order to continue to fund the more glamorous manned bomber program. While carrier battle groups paid port calls around the world and stealth bombers flew patrols over Nevada, infantrymen cut their way through the jungles of Latin America with machetes and fought bitterly and successfully against the better-armed bands of the drug billionaires. When the Army had been ordered to Zaire, its tactical equipment proved to be, at best, a generation behind that developed by the Japanese — much of which had been based on technology initially developed in the United States in support of strategic space defenses.
The XVIII Airborne Corps fought hard, but the South Africans never dropped the initiative. The Japanese battle electronics proved impenetrable to the U.S. systems, while the lack of well-trained intelligence analysts left the Military Intelligence elements with nothing but useless equipment. The South Africans, however, always seemed to know where the U.S. forces were located and what their weaknesses were. The Japanese suite of electronic countermeasures and countercountermeasures would keep the U.S. forces deaf and blind, then the Toshiba gunships would sweep in, followed by strikes employing more conventional aircraft and fuel-air explosives.
U.S. casualties mounted so quickly, with such apparent helplessness on the U.S. side, that the commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps, after long-range consultation with the President, requested a ceasefire.
The South Africans ignored him and continued their strikes on the U.S. columns attempting to make their way northward to an imagined safety.
Finally, the corps commander attempted to surrender all remaining U.S. Army elements in Shaba in order to prevent the further loss of life.
The South African response was to strike a fifty-mile- long U.S. Army column with improved napalm.
The President ordered the U.S.S. Reagan, the nation's newest ballistic missile submarine, to strike Pretoria from its station in the Indian Ocean.
Taylor finally raised the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa on shortwave from an upriver station, only to be told that his case did not rate special evacuation consideration, given the general conditions in the country. He would have to make his own way for another thousand miles down the Zaire River.
He rode on asthmatic steamers where the crew shoveled the dead over the side at oar's length, and whose captains continued to work the channels and currents only in the hope that the next river port would be the one where the epidemic had already burned itself out and passed on. On one dying boat Taylor opened the rickety latrine door to find a corpse resting over the open hole, pants down and pockets turned inside out. Another night, he had to sit awake through the darkness, pistol in hand, to ward off the sick who insisted on sharing the magic medicine that kept the white man alive. And it truly was as though he were possessed of some remarkable power, so easily did he pass among the dead and dying, untainted except by the smell of his own filth. He began to suspect
that he had some natural immunity, and, by the time he reached Kinshasa, that belief, along with a ragged uniform, dog tags, a half-empty pistol, and a folded-up, sweat-stained red and white cavalry guidon, was all he possessed.
Kinshasa, his goal, his city of dreams, proved to be the worst part of the entire journey. He had expected to be welcomed back into the safe, civilized, white fold, to be whisked away at last from this dying country. But as he approached the U.S. embassy compound, a bearded shambles of a man, the Marine guards in protective suits lowered their weapons in his direction. Stand back. Do not touch the gate. Taylor's rage eventually drew a Marine officer from the chancellery, but he only closed to shouting distance. He declared that, if Taylor truly was a U.S. serviceman, he should make his way to the U.S. armed forces liaison office at the military airfield. If everything was in order he would be evacuated to the quarantine station in the Azores. Almost all of the surviving U.S. personnel were gone now, withdrawn under the cover of the ceasefire that was the only positive result of the strike on Pretoria.
Taylor, hating the man, nonetheless craved information. About the war, about his world, about comrades and country. But the Marine officer was anxious to break off the discussion and go back inside.
Upriver the disease had created an atmosphere of resignation, a sense that the epidemic was the will of the gods, that there was nowhere to hide. For all the wails and songs of mourning, the dying out in the bush had a quiet about it. But in Kinshasa's motley attempt at civilization, the plague seemed to further distort and corrupt. Penniless, Taylor made his way across the urban landscape on foot, newly afraid now that he had come so close to rescue, forcing himself to go on. None of the few vehicles in the streets would pause to give a stranger a lift, and they drove with their windows sealed despite the torrid heat. Men and women came out into the streets to die, fleeing the premature darkness of their hovels or the broken elegance of colonial mansions. On the Zairean skin, the marks of the disease showed purple-black on the newly dead, but ashen as acid burns on those fortunate enough to live. And, despite the ravages of the epidemic, a fierce life persisted in the city. Howling children robbed the dead and dying, inventing new games in the alleys, and silken masks had come into fashion for those disfigured by the disease. Upriver, women waiting to die in way stations had made desultory overtures, but here, in the capital, brightly veiled prostitutes called out musically, playfully, threateningly. Shanty barrooms and cafes still did a noisy trade, and passing by their human froth, Taylor was glad that he looked so poor that he was hardly worth killing. After all he had seen, it struck him as all too logical that he might be killed now, at the end of his long journey. He felt that he was cheating his fate with each corner safely passed.