Peacekeepers (1988) (2 page)

"If it's the money you are concerned about . . ."

Alexander raised one hand. "No, I'm sure we could come to satisfactory terms. It's just not the kind of operation we do."

Castanada turned and took a few paces away from Alexander, his chubby hands clasped behind his back. As if speaking to the empty air, he said, "You know that Jabal Shamar is with them now, up in those mountains."

Alexander muttered, "Shamar."

Turning back to face the norteamericano, Castanada added, "According to our intelligence, he has taken charge of their military operations."

"What about the nuclear bombs?"

"It is not certain, but I greatly fear that he has brought them to our soil."

"Shamar," Alexander repeated in a barely audible whisper.

Si, Señor Yanqui, Castanada said to himself. I do indeed fish in these mountain streams. I know very well how to bait my hook, and how to reel in even the most cunning and elusive fish. He kept his face carefully bland and inexpressive, but he laughed inwardly.

Cole Alexander's smile had disappeared.

Yet even that thread of a beginning had its

own beginning, on the final day of what has

come to be called (optimistically) the Final War

THE sky was unnaturally black. Not even the high desert sun could bum through the sooty clouds. The streets of the city were empty. Not a car, not a bus, not even a dog moved as the hot winds seared alike the ancient stones of the Western Wall, the domes and minarets of medieval churches and mosques, the steel and glass towers of the modem city.

In the middle of the dark afternoon a limousine, a Rolls-Royce at that, careened through the city's bare streets like a black mouse racing through a maze, losing its way and doubling back again, searching, searching, searching.

Finally the limo sniffed out the American embassy and stopped at its barricaded gate.

A man got out: Cole Alexander—dressed in a summer-weight pearl-gray business suit stained dark with sweat and wrinkled as only thirty-six hours of travel can do. His necktie was pulled loose, several shirt buttons undone. His hair was dark brown, almost black, his face set in a breathless expression of anxiety.

He leaned on the buzzer at the gate, ducked back into the limo and took the keys from the ignition, then banged on the buzzer again. He squinted up at the dark sky, then pressed his thumb against the buzzer and left it there until an adenoidal voice finally scratched from the intercom speaker above the buzzer. Alexander spoke loudly and firmly. Within two minutes a Marine guard, his own olive-green uniform almost as sweaty and rumpled as Alexander's suit, dashed out of the building and unlocked the personnel gate.

Alexander and the young Marine sprinted up the driveway and through the main entrance to the building. At a desk set up just inside the entryway, an additional pair of Marines, one of them a sergeant, examined his passport while Alexander explained:

"My parents are here. I've got a private plane at the airport, waiting to evacuate them."

"A private plane?" The sergeant, a tough-looking black, gave Alexander an incredulous stare.

"Money talks. Sergeant," said Alexander. "Even in the middle of a war."

"He's driving a Rolls, Sarge," said the Marine who had opened the gate, with awe in his voice.

The sergeant shook his head. The expression on his face said. You're crazy, man. But he told the other private to escort Alexander to his mother, who was among the civilians being sheltered in the embassy's basement.

Alexander got as far as the metal detector built into the doorway at the end of the lobby. It screeched angrily.

"Oh." Apologetically Alexander hauled a compact .38 automatic from the waistband of his trousers. "Bought it in New York just before I bought the jet. It's registered, all nice and legal."

The sergeant hefted the shiny pistol in his big hand. "You ever fired it?" he asked Alexander.

"Haven't had the time."

"I'll hold it for you here." He placed the gun carefully in a drawer of his desk.

The basement was big and dimly lit; only a few of the overhead fluorescent lights were on, casting almost ghastly bluish light on the people crowded together there. They were mostly women and small children, Alexander saw.

Some old men. Cramped together. Sitting on a weird assortment of chairs scavenged from the floors above, huddled on cots, makeshift curtains draped here and there for privacy, staring at the ceiling, whispering to one another, babies crying, old men coughing, worried faces looking blankly at nothing. The basement was jammed with people.

Their voices made a constant background murmur of anxiety and tension. The place was hot and stank of sweat and cigarette smoke and cooking oil. And fear.

The waiting room to hell, Cole Alexander thought.

Amanda Alexander was small, a slim little girl with a sweet smile who had grown to a petite white-haired woman who could always charm any man she met. Seeing her in that crowded basement shelter, with the stench of hundreds of bodies pressed too close together. Cole realized with a shock that his mother was old: her face was webbed with tiny wrinkles, there were dark lines under her eyes, she seemed haggard and worn-out.

"Don't look so shocked," she said after he had kissed her cheek. "You haven't seen me without makeup for years."

Then she smiled and he felt all right again.

"I've come to take you and Dad out of here," Cole said.

"That's not necessary. I'm fine right here."

"I've got a jet sitting at the airport . . ."

His mother seemed genuinely surprised. "How did you do that?"

He shrugged. "Sold the business to Palmerson; he's been after it for a year now. Spent a chunk of it on the plane. Couldn't find a pilot on such short notice so I flew it myself. Now, come on, before somebody steals it."

"Your father's not here," she said. "They sent him to Tel Aviv."

"Goddamned State Department," Cole muttered.

"Okay. We'll fly to Tel Aviv and pick him up there. Phone him from here first."

"He can't just go, " his mother said, "simply because his impetuous son wants him to. He's got a job to do. He's got responsibilities."

"They're throwing nuclear bombs around. Mom! You and Dad have got to get out of here, to where it's safe!"

"They won't bomb Jerusalem. General Shamar has given his word. The Moslems revere the city just as much as the Israelis do."

Alexander forced down his temper. This was his mother he was dealing with. "Mom, they've already nuked Haifa and Damascus. The fallout ..."

"I'm not leaving. Cole. Your father can't leave, and I won't go without him."

That was when the black Marine sergeant picked his way through the overcrowded basement toward them.

"Mrs. Alexander," he said, so softly that Cole could barely hear him against the background murmurs. " 'Fraid I got very bad news, ma'am. We just got word, Tel Aviv got hit."

Amanda Alexander stared at the sergeant as if she could not understand his words.

"A nuclear strike?" Cole asked, his voice choking.

"Yeah." The sergeant nodded.

"Oh, my Christ."

His mother reached out and touched the Marine sergeant's arm. "That . . . that doesn't mean that everyone . . . everyone in the city's been . . . killed, does it?"

"No," the black man admitted. "We don't know how bad the damage is or how many casualties. Bound to be plenty, though. Thousands. Tens of thousands, at least."

Cole grasped his mother's wrist. "We're getting out. Now."

"No!" She pulled her arm free with surprising strength.

"Your father may be all right. Or he may be hurt. I'm not leaving. Not until I know."

"But that's . . ."

"I'm not leaving. Cole."

So he stayed with her in the basement of the U.S. embassy building in Jerusalem.

It had started as another round of the eternal Middle East wars between Israel and its neighbors. In three days it escalated into a nuclear exchange. By the time four ancient cities had been blown into mushroom clouds, the two great superpowers decided to intervene. For the first time in more than fifty years, the Soviet Union and the United States acted in harmony to end the brief, brutal conflagration that is now called the Final War.

The Americans and Soviets imposed a cease-fire and ringed Syria, Israel and Lebanon with enough troops, ships and planes to make it clear they would brook no resistance.

The U.S. Navy moved in force into the Persian Gulf while Russian divisions massed on Iran's northern border. With Damascus and Tehran both reduced to radioactive rubble, with Haifa and Tel Aviv similarly demolished, the fighting stopped.

That was when General Jabal Shamar, supreme commander of the Pan-Arab Armed Forces, sent a special squadron of cargo planes to Jerusalem. The lumbering four-engined aircraft circled over the city at an altitude of some three thousand meters, cruising lazily through a sky just starting to turn blue again after three days of darkness.

Men and women cautiously came out into the streets, blinking at the brightening sky and the glinting silvery planes circling gently above. They were obviously not warplanes, not the sleek angry falcons painted in camouflage grays and browns that hurled deadly eggs at the ground. These were fat clumsy cargo carriers, their unpainted aluminum gleaming cheerfully against the clearing sky.

The powder that the planes spewed from their cargo hatches was so radioactive that every crewman in the squadron died within two weeks. So did most of the living creatures in Jerusalem: men, women, children, pets, rats, insects, even trees curled their brown leaves and died.

Moslem and Jew alike bled at the pores and died in convulsive agonies. Citizens of the city, refugees who had fled there for safety, tourists trapped by the war, news reporters camping in the hotels, foreigners on duty in Jerusalem—they all died. Two and a half million of them.

After the cease-fire had been declared.

The medical help rushed into the city by the Americans and Europeans saved a pitiful few. Cole Alexander was among those who survived. He was young enough and strong enough to pull through a terrible ordeal of radiation sickness, although it left his hair dead white and triggered a form of leukemia that the doctors said could be "controlled" but never cured. It also left him sterile.

His mother did not survive. Cole watched her die, inch by excruciating inch, over the next seven weeks. She finally gave up the fight when the news came that her husband.

Cole's father, had been vaporized in the nuclear bombing of Tel Aviv. The American consulate there had been practically at ground zero.

The Final War led to the Athens Peace

Conference, and that's where I suppose I'll

have to begin the official history of the

Peacekeepers. With the impressive figure of

Harold Red Eagle, of course.

HE was a very large man, very grave, and so respected in his own land that not even the ultraconservatives ever had the nerve to make jokes about his name.

Harold Red Eagle was considerably over two meters tall.

In his young manhood, when he had made a national reputation for himself as a lineman for the Los Angeles Raiders, he had weighed nearly 130 kilos. Even so, he could chase down the fleetest of running backs. And once Red Eagle got his hands on a ball carrier, the man went down. No one broke his tackles.

The Raiders had been known to be a hell-raising team of undisciplined egotists. Red Eagle changed that. He spoke barely a word, and he certainly gave no speeches. He neither exhorted his teammates to self-sacrifice nor berated them for their macho antics. He merely set an example, off the field and especially on it, that no man could ignore or resist. He made the Raiders not only into champions, but hallowed heroes.

Football was merely a means to an end for Harold Red Eagle. For an impoverished son of the proud Comanche people, college football was the key to an education.

Professional football paid for law school and provided the glory that established him in a lucrative practice in his native Oklahoma.

When he retired from his athletic career, the governor of the state appointed him to the bench. (A rather neat pun there, don't you think?) A few years later he became the youngest federal judge ever to serve that district. A canny President nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court, and during the Senate confirmation hearings not a word was spoken against this Amerind, whose massive dignity could strike even TV talk-show hosts into reverent awe.

Harold Red Eagle was appointed by the next President (a political opponent of the previous one) to be part of the American delegation to the Athens Peace Conference. It was there that the first step toward the International Peacekeeping Force was made.

The moment was dramatic. Representatives of Israel, Syria and Iran all demanded reparations for the damage to their nations. Other Moslem figures warned of the need to find a homeland for the Palestinian refugees. The Western Europeans and Americans, terrified of renewed nuclear war, demanded that the belligerent nations be disarmed and occupied for an indeterminate time by an international army that would enforce the peace. The Soviets and Chinese jointly suggested the conference be enlarged to consider dismantling every nation's nuclear arsenal.

Instead of patching together a peace in the Middle East, the Athens conference was threatening to tear itself asunder over the old Cold War issues separating East and West.

That was when Red Eagle rose to his feet.

All talk around the wide green-baize-covered circular table ceased. The Comanche loomed over the other delegates, his deep brown face solemn with the racial memories of innumerable wars and slaughters.

"It is time," he said slowly, "that we end this Cold War. Nothing of peace can be accomplished until we do."

It was as if he had trained a powerful gun on them all.

The delegates—politicians and diplomats, for the most part—sat in silent awe as Red Eagle calmly enunciated the plan that he had been shaping in his mind over the many weeks of the conference's fruitless wrangling.