Cold Allies (13 page)

Ahead of
them birds burst from a tree and flew, a shower of black sparks, “Beautiful,” he said in awe.

“What, sir?” Gutzman asked.

“It is so beautiful.”

Turret-to-turret they flashed past a burned-out farmhouse, past an intact but crumbling barn. Then a small town, the houses beaded up along the dirt road as if they had condensed there: Lubertnów. How had they got there so quickly? Baranyk wondered if Reiter realized how far they had come or if he was simply caught up in the excitement of the demonstration.

“Angle left,” Zgursky said, obeying his own command and skirting the southernmost building.

Baranyk glanced around. Reiter had turned right.

“Left! Left!” Zgursky snapped.

“Ja,”
came the abashed voice in Baranyk’s ear. Reiter had obviously mistranslated. By the time they passed the last house, the Ukrainian tank was well in the lead.

“Shit!” he heard Zgursky shout.

In the field beyond Lubertnów squatted a hornet-shaped Hind, its rotors motionless and sagging. The helicopter’ crew nearby leaped up from their lunch, panic in their eyes.

Baranyk’s own eyes widened. The approach of the tanks must have been so quiet that the Arabs had failed to hear. He watched as the men sprinted for their chopper.

God. Where were the controls again? He thrust his hand forward and found the stick.

“Fire!” Zgursky was screaming, “Fire, sir! Sight in the kill box and depress the stud!”

Now was no time for instructions, Baranyk thought. The pilot was wrenching open the chopper door. The general fumbled at the lever. Red lines sprang up before his eyes.

“Achtung,”
the woman’s pleasant voice warned him.
“Achtung!”

At the corner of his vision he saw the German’s tank move forward, the cannon coming to bear. An instant later, before Baranyk could find his own firing stud, the second tank’s muzzle belched flame. The shell whizzed past him and hit the helicopter broadside.

There were two quick explosions, one after the other. Pieces of the Hind spouted upward to rain down like black hail.

“Achtung,”
the woman said. What did she want this time?

Der
something
ist ge-
something. From Baranyk’s one year of German language in school, a class he had failed, it sounded as if she was telling him that the hat was on the roof.

“Vehicles ten degrees,” Gutzman said, his voice tight with fear.

Baranyk turned his head. Holy Father. There were four Arab AFV s rolling out of the cover of some birches. The first let loose a round from its 73mm gun. The shell hit a few meters away, kicking up clods of thick dirt.

“Achtung,”
the woman was calmly saying.

Baranyk wished she would shut up. His hand was sweating, his fingers sliding nervously around the stick. The display was confusing. Did he have the AFV centered or not?

Still unsure, he pressed the firing stud. The Hammer’s engines might have been quiet, but its self-loading cannon was not. The boom of the 120mm gun made Baranyk’s ears ring. A quick jolt passed through the tank. Reflexively he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw he had annihilated an outhouse.

The German tank advanced and fired. An AFV received a round that went straight through it, right side to left. The vehicle shuddered and burst into flame.

To his right, Baranyk saw a white plume from one of the AFVs and knew what it meant. A Sagger missile was headed straight at them. With the unrestricted view, he felt that he was standing alone and helpless in the field, his pants around his ankles, watching Death ride up.

“Brace for impact!” he screamed.

The explosion rang the tank like a gong. The Hammer rocked back on its treads and then steadied.

“Radar out!” Gutzman was shouting. “Hydraulic controls normal! Reactor normal!”

Baranyk opened his eyes in astonishment. He hadn’t realized he’d shut them. What he saw nearly made him close his eyes again. An AFV was a mere twenty meters away. He aimed his head at it, put the dot of the kill box right on the cupola, and depressed the stud. The Hammer recoiled as the shell left the muzzle. The AFV was suddenly wrapped in orange flame.

“Hit the smoke! Hit the fucking smoke!” Zgursky wailed. Baranyk wondered frantically if he had the smoke controls and, if he did, where the hell they were.

“Vorsicht pass auf,
Hammer One!” Reiter barked.

“Ja, ja, gewiss,
Hammer Two,” Gutzman replied, then added dryly in Ukrainian, “Christ, what a time to tell us to be careful.”

Careful? But we’re on fire!
Baranyk thought in alarm, then realized that the white smoke had come from the Hammer’s own grenades.

The Mercedes tanks drove faster, saw better, and produced more smoke than any tank he’d ever seen. They were in a fog now, Zgursky rumbling through the grass slowly, as though feeling his way.

To Baranyk’s right the mist flashed red. The ground shuddered as a shell hit home.

Reiter or the AFV?
Baranyk wondered. Then Reiter’s voice in his ear solved the mystery.
“Du musst heraus,
Hammer One!
Raus!”

There was a heavy metal clunk. The tank quivered.

“Did we hit something?” Baranyk cried. “I can’t see a thing!”

“Just me,” Gutzman said, embarrassed. “I was trying to fix the radar, and I deployed the mine sweep.”

“Raus
where?” Zgursky wanted to know. “Where is the AFV and where is Hammer Two?”

Gutzman’s reply was testy. “How should I know? The radar is out.”

The radar was out, and they were inching through the mist like a ship lost in a fog with icebergs.

“Advise, please, Hammer Two,” Gutzman said quietly.

“Which way do we turn?”

“LEFT!” Reiter screamed, his voice losing the last shreds of its composure. “Turn left immediately!”

The tank slewed left. Zgursky punched up the power.
“HEIN!”
Reiter let loose a flood of German that ended with,
“RIGHT! I MEAN RIGHT!”

Something loomed in the fog. Big and green and metallic.

The Hammer slammed into the armored backside of the last AFV. The collision threw Baranyk out of his seat.

Zgursky backed away, and Baranyk could see the damage they had done to the AFV. The mine sweep had gutted its engine. A small electrical fire had started. The Arab soldiers were hurriedly dismounting from the vehicle and running across the field to the birches.

“Now we leave,” Reiter said wearily, finding his misplaced Polish.

“Understood,” Gutzman said. “Leaving the field.”

They returned to Michów. Gutzman was fretting about the damage sustained by the Sagger hit, although Reiter’s tank drew alongside and said the damage was minimal.

The tank didn’t seem to mind. It rolled happily across the moist meadow as if no battle, no Sagger strike, had ever occurred.

Watching the fields whisk by, Baranyk found himself smiling.

“What is it, sir?” Gutzman asked, seeing the general’s expression.

With two tanks there had been four AFV kills.
And
a helicopter. He mustn’t forget the helicopter. “I am thinking how nice it is,” Baranyk said wistfully, “to be on the winning side for a change.”

IN THE LIGHT

Helping his mother take the clothes from the line, Justin buried his face in a towel and breathed the flowery smell of fabric softener.

What was it he was supposed to tell her? he wondered. Oh, yes. He remembered now.

His mother was opposite him, her right hand on the corner of a sheet, her left plucking at a wooden clothespin.

“I fly an old plane,” he said.

“And where do you fly?” she asked, her voice sliding the scale from soprano to pulsating alto.

“From the carrier in the Gulf to the oil fields.” He gazed up at the heavens to see an eagle skimming the clouds. “What used to be Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Kuwait. I fly reconnaissance, mostly. Sometimes I fly CAP for the bombers. The bombs go off like fireworks. The wells burn like orange stars. In a lot of ways it’s pretty.”

“Is it?” she asked, her voice sinking to a man’s bass.

He was afraid to look at her, afraid to see what might be happening to his mother.

Keeping his eyes on the circling eagle, he said, “This scares me.”

“War?” she asked in a voice like an oboe.

“Yes. No. This. This scares me, too.” He reached out and grabbed the towel, pressed it tightly to his cheek.

And now he was seated across from his mother at the kitchen table, Harding and the bus driver bracketing him. The towel was gone.

“I’m scared every time I go up,” Justin admitted, with a sidelong glance at the Lt. Commander.

Harding was smiling. But his lips, like worn rubber bands, had trouble holding their shape.

“I’m scared over the target when the bomber goes in for its run. I’m scared of the AAA, and I’m scared of landing. God. Landing on that carrier in the dark.”

“Tell me,” his mother said.

“I didn’t use to be scared,” Justin whispered.

The three were sitting as still as rag dolls. “I don’t know what happened to me. Sometimes I think—I think—I’m expendable, just a lieutenant j.g. They give me shit with wings to fly. I’ll never come back. That’s what’ll happen. I’ll go down like Peterson and Cucullo and the others. And then it’s over, and landing, somehow, is worse. Landing is the worst thing of all.”

He looked at his folded hands and wondered if the eagle was in the sky outside, and, if it was, what it was hunting.

“If you’re afraid, why do you do it?” his mother asked, taking a bite of cake. The hand clutching the fork was wrong, as if it contained one too many fingers.

The palms were tapping at the window. Justin turned and saw that the trees had moved closer. They were crowding the hibiscus outside.

“If you’re afraid, why do you do it?” his mother asked again, her voice now a foghorn moan.

His own voice rose giddily high. “I don’t want to. I
have
to.”

“Why do you have to?”

His mother’s interrogation reminded him of Pastor Gilbreath’s questions when Justin had thought to join the ministry. Back then the pastor’s inquiries were as sharp as the arrows that pierced St. Sebastian. His mother’s questions clattered against his bones.

“The Arabs attacked us, didn’t they? They attacked us.”

“Why did they attack you?”

He threw his head back. The ceiling rose to blue, cloudless infinity. “Damn it! Because they were hungry!”

His mother and the bus driver and Harding were staring at him, their loose faces puddled in confusion.

“If they were hungry,” his mother said, taking a sip from her glass of milk, “why didn’t you feed them?”

Justin pushed himself away from the table and stood, his chair toppling. He fled to the living room and halted, breathing hard. There was the floral sofa he remembered. There was the table made from a cross section of oak. Atop the TV sat the model he’d made in middle school: the gray plastic model of the Nimitz.

He walked over and picked it up. The hull was slick and smooth; the square elevators delineated. The deck was no larger than his two hands. The planes were tiny as midges.

Putting the model down, he walked outside. In the front yard the mango tree was heavy with orange fruit, and the postman was making his way up the walk.

“If they were hungry,” the postman asked, “why didn’t you feed them?”

Lightheaded, Justin swayed on his feet. The front yard was filled with a pattering-rain sound. The air was cool and dry.

“Here,” the postman said, handing him a letter.

When the postman walked away, Justin tore the blank envelope open.

FROM: Pastor Gilbreath

TO: Justin Searles

MEMO: Why didn’t you feed my sheep?

Justin balled the letter furiously in his hands.

It
was
raining. Warm drops slid down his cheeks. His legs gave way, and he sat hard on the grass. A few minutes later, Harding came out and sat beside him.

“There isn’t any God,” Justin told him. Then he whispered, “There wasn’t any food.”

He looked into Harding’s eyes. They were dark bubbles now, swelling from forehead to chin.

Justin swiped angrily at his cheeks. He wouldn’t cry. The grief was over, years ago buried, and he’d cried enough then. It was raining, that was all. He could hear the tap-tap-tap on the pavement, the clink of the drops on the palms.

“My own mother died of hunger,” Justin told him, but when he looked up, Harding was gone.

NEAR LERIDA

Rita opened her eyes to find she was squeezed into a dark, grave-shaped place that smelled of earth. She sat up. In the rectangular slit above her head an eerie dawn was breaking.

The side of the pit was an acidic, artificial pink. Close by, someone was whispering, the voice airy.

I’m in a foxhole,
she thought.
That’s right. I’m sleeping in a foxhole.

She got to her feet and peered over the lip of the trench.

Pink stars were drifting, ghostly and serene, across the night sky.

“Get down, captain!” a man’s voice hissed.

The stars painted the valley Day-Glo bright. Through the orderly rows of trees to Rita’s left something huge stalked the inky shadows.

A tug at the back of her pants. “Get your head down, sugar,” Dix whispered.

Rita looked into the pit and saw the bulge of Dix’ s helmet, a quarter-moon in the slanted light.

Like an itchy, vague prescience of danger, the bomber came. It tickled the pit of Rita’s stomach; it tingled down the back of her neck. With a turbined howl, the plane burst into being. The orchard bloomed yellow, and kept blooming, a showy, apocalyptic spring.

Dix grabbed her waist and pulled her down. “Sssh,” she whispered.

The light at the mouth of the trench turned throbbing orange. The hurricane roar of burning trees made a tempest of the night. Something massive barked. The earth quailed, shaking dust into Rita’s face.

Gasping, she clawed her way out of Dix’ s arms and lurched to her feet. Scrambling up the lip of the trench, she tore her fingernails to the bloody, stinging quick. Someone grabbed her belt.

Caught in a battle of dragons, the ground quaked. A monster peered over the rim of the western knoll and belched blue-and-yellow flame.

The flares drifted off, dying pink suns on the wind. All except for one, the monsters retreated. The last turned and came through the burning trees toward them.

“Down!” Dix hissed.

Rita couldn’t tear her eyes away. It was closer, moving fast. Coming straight for them, a huge creature of basso profundo rumbles and absurd tenor squeaks.

Dix tackled her. They toppled onto someone else.

The noise was deafening. Rita wondered what would happen when the tank fell into the hole. She imagined her skin giving way like the tender flesh of a strawberry; imagined the crack her bones would make as they splintered. She reached out and clutched Dix, burrowing her helmeted head into the lieutenant’s chest. On her back she could feel the dull knife-points of blunt fingernails.

Rita smelled sweat, tasted the salt bite of her own tears.

Who was shaking so hard? Oh, Christ. Which one of them was sobbing?

Grinding, pounding clamor. Rita raised her head and saw something immense blot out the sky. Suddenly Dix squirmed on top of her, between her and the oncoming treads.

Whump.
The soil above compacted under terrible weight.

Rocks clattered down the sides of the trench, pinged against helmets and clutched weapons.

Deep in Dix’s tiny body Rita could feel the tick-tick-tick of a frightened heart, swift as the pulse of a bird.

The tank’s engines screamed, the treads clawed dirt. Suddenly the air in the trench was filled with dust and diesel exhaust. In the slit above shone quiet stars, a waning orange light. The rumble moved away, was smothered by distance.

A man laughed. “You all right, lieutenant? Captain?”

Dix climbed off Rita. “Go on back, Garza,” she said, her voice calm. “Go on back and get some sleep.”

“You see what that tank did, ma’am? Goddamn. It rolled right over our foxhole.”

“Go on back to your sleeping bag,” she told him. “Go on, now. You hear what I said?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he whispered, and crawled away.

Down the hill the burning trees crackled soft and low.

Rita’s teeth were chattering. Shivers worked their way from her chest down into her stomach, her legs.

“First time’s the worst,” Dix told Rita. “First time’s the hard one. But you got to suck it up, girl, all right? You’re a captain, all right? You may be National Guard, and you may be just a doctor and all, but you can’t fall apart on me, okay?”

After a hesitation Dix picked up her handset. “Forward OPs? You okay?” Dix whispered. “Hoover?” she prompted.

A voice from the speaker replied, “All here, lieutenant.”

“Sergeant Dunbarton? You still with us?”

The handset spat static. “Yeah, lieutenant. Ruined my sleep. How about yours?”

“Keep down and keep quiet,” she replied. Putting away the handset, she turned back to Rita. “It’ll be all right, sugar. It’ll be all right now.”

Rita didn’t reply. She was too exhausted, and there was nothing really to say. Somewhere in the distance the battle continued. Artillery rumbled like remote thunder. The earth twitched in its bed.

THE PYRENEES, NEAR THE SPANISH-FRENCH BORDER

The laser tractor was tucked safely in the mountain tunnel like a spider in its hole. Wasef stared at it in amazement, his mind fuzzy from lack of sleep.

They’d actually made it. For a while, the night before, he didn’t think they would.

His soldiers had slept and eaten, grumbling because Wasef had refused them cook fires. The colonel himself hadn’t napped, and now he was paying the price of that poor decision. His arm muscles were jumpy, and there was an annoying tic under one eye.

Sunrise had turned the lichened rocks around him to peach. Blue shadows pooled in the crevasses. He shivered in the brittle air and walked farther out into the sunlight, hoping to find warmth. Around him peaks rose like mosques into the lavender sky.

A sound drew his attention. He looked down to see a jeep making its way up the Spanish slope.

“Captain Mustafa?” he called.

Instantly, as though the captain had congealed from the shadows, he was at the colonel’s side.

“Get five men with rifles and hide them in those rocks.”

Yussif glanced at the approaching jeep and nodded. Wasef drew back against the tunnel wall and watched the men scatter into position.

As the jeep neared, the colonel saw the insignia on the side and motioned for the squad to lower their weapons.

One man. A captain without a driver.
The jeep rolled into the tunnel and stopped, engine idling loudly in the confines of the granite.

As Wasef made his way over, the captain killed the motor and got out. “Colonel?” he asked with a smart salute.

Wasef returned the salute and noticed that his hands were trembling, perhaps from cold, perhaps from exhaustion. Quickly he put his arm to his side.

“I hope this is no imposition,” the man said. “But I have asked to be assigned to you.” The captain was curly-headed and swarthy, thin as a sapling and eager-eyed. Wasef’s gaze dropped to the stenciled nametag.

RASHID, it said.

He looked up and in the man’s face saw a suggestion of a familiar, indolent smile. “You’re General Rashid Sabry’s son, Gamal,” Wasef said in surprise. “You look just like him.”

The young man’s grin widened. “Thinner.”

“Yes,” Wasef laughed. “Thinner.” He held out his hand in welcome.

Gamal clasped it.

“I understand you studied astrophysics at Cal Tech,” Wasef said.

A flicker of emotion in Gamal’s face. Wasef could feel the hand stiffen in his own.
Guilt?
he wondered.
And does he feel guilty because he lived with the enemy, or because he
is
now murdering friends?

“I myself studied in the U.S. for a while,” Wasef told him and instantly felt Gamal’s grip relax. “It was a pleasant country once,” he added softly.

Gamal’s own voice was cautiously formal. “Yes, it was, colonel. A pleasant country.”

Yussif wandered up, curiosity no doubt spurring him. Wasef made short shrift of the introduction and leveled a curious glance at Gamal.