Ralph Peters (32 page)

"
Perhaps,
"
the intelligence officer said,
"
it's another object lesson. Maybe the Japanese are making a point about absolute dominance.
"

Taylor considered it. He himself could not come up with a better answer. But it did not ring true for him. With all of the capabilities of Japanese technology, the chemicals were merely a crude display of barbarism. It was hard to imagine a payoff commensurate with the growing level of international revulsion.

"
Colonel Taylor, sir,
"
Heifetz said,
"
suppose that it is not the Japanese. Suppose that the Arabs and the Iranians are using the chemical weapons on their own. Perhaps this man cannot control them. They are, you know, unpredictable, unreasonable. And they have used such weapons before.
"

Taylor turned to consider Heifetz, turning his thoughts as well. That certainly would be one possible answer. He looked at this homeless soldier, who had lost so much. Heifetz's face sought to project a toughness beyond emotion: detachment, strength. And. to most men, Heifetz s efforts were successful. But, looking at the graying Israeli, Taylor saw only a man who had lost his family, his nation, his past, and his future. Of course Lucky Dave would blame it on the Arabs. He could not help himself. But. even if there was some logic to it, Taylor could not accept the proposition. There was simply no way the Japanese would have allowed their surrogates to run so far out of control so early in the game. The Japanese were not that stupid.

David Heifetz had all but lost his sense of wonder. Only the inconstancy of time still held the occasional power to make him marvel at life's possibilities, even if, for him. those possibilities lay buried in bygone years, in a country
passed into history. The creation of calendars and clocks seemed to him a desperate, frightened attempt to make time behave, to disguise the unreasonable, unpredictable accelerations and periods of slow drift, the instants of wild inarticulate revelation, and the eternities of dusty routine. At times, he struck himself as the most cowardly sort imaginable, hiding from time's unmanageable currents on his little military island, forcing his slowly deteriorating body through the rituals of schedules so abundant in any army, bound by the excuse of duty to retreat at the approach of his black early morning dreams, to shock himself awake, to bind himself tightly into polished boots, and to plunge into the endless, numbing work that made an army go. And time would seem to grow docile as he deadened himself with late nights at the office, evaluating, planning, writing, correcting, laboring over range schedules, training ammunition allocations, school quotas, exercise plans and orders, SOPs, post police responsibilities, efficiency reports, natural disaster evacuation plans, mobilization plans, countless briefings, inspection programs—he was only sorry that there was not more, that the moment would inevitably come when he would have to extinguish the last light in the building and lock the door behind him, to return to his nearly bare quarters and the utter vacancy that passed for his personal life. He rarely neglected the ceremonies and self-denials required of a Jew, in hope that there might finally be some comfort there, but the words and gestures, each strict abstinence, remained futile. His God was no longer the remarkably human God of Israel, but a fierce, malevolent, relentless, and unforgiving God, not a God for the suffering, but a God from whom suffering flowed, a God who laughed at agony, then set his face in stone. His God was the primitive deity of the savage barely elevated from the beast, of dark ancient armies marching to bum the cities of light and hope, to massacre their inhabitants, to scour away all life.

Then time would swallow him up into one of its unseen cataracts, and in the artificially measured brevity of a second he would relive the past with gorgeous intensity, not merely remembering, but inhabiting it all again,
there.
Mira by an olive tree, seated with her arms around her
knees, smiling up at the warm blue sky with her eyes closed. And he could feel it all with her, the air still and pungent with thyme. The sun. He could feel the warmth deepening in her cheeks, as though there were no difference between them at all. The spilled dregs of wine, the spoiling ruins of a picnic on a stony hillside overlooking their rich, ripe world.
How can it be so beautiful?
she said, without opening her eyes, and he knew exactly what she meant. These were the words he felt but could not form. Their world was so beautiful that physical sight was almost inconsequential.
How can it be so beautiful
,
David?
He closed his eyes too. Settling for the coursing of flies and the distant sounds of automobiles on a road that sacred feet had marked with blood. In that instant of memory, there was also time to remember the feel of a cotton skirt under his hand, and the warmth beneath the cloth, and the intoxicating feel as he moved the cloth higher to let the sun touch more of her.

How
can it be
so
beautiful, David?

The startling sight of bloodstains at the small of her back as the two of them rose to return, finally, to the car. During their lovemaking, a sharp rock had
been
cutting into her spine, through her sweat-soaked cotton blouse. But it had not mattered, and he understood that too. He said nothing, but simply put his hand on the stain, as if his touch might heal her.

In the same instant, he watched as his brown-eyed son ran through their apartment, his face a masculine interpretation of his mother's beauty. Dovik. Perhaps his failures had begun there. In his memory, there were only the times when he had been too busy for the boy, when he had bellowed at Mira that the noise was intolerable when he had offered the boy only obtuse adult excuses for his unwillingness to take the child's requests seriously. Brown eyes, a striped shirt, and turned-up jeans.
Mira, for God s sake, could you
please
....

Mira, the lawyer who had been working for laughable wages in an organization engaged in defending Palestinian rights. When an impatient warrior charged into her unready life. Who could ever say why humans loved?

Mira who had made him human, formidable in her
beauty, but whose kisses spoke urgency at unexpected times. Looking back, it was almost as if she had known that they had little time, as if she had sensed all that was coming. He could not think her name without voicing it inwardly as a cry, as if calling out to her disappearing back across a growing distance.
Mira.

He had been sitting loose-legged on the turret of his tank, drained by a successful battle, when the single code word came down over the radio net, irrevocable, reaching out to a spent tank company commander in the Bekka Valley, to infantrymen on the Jordan, to pilots guiding on the great canal.

Armageddon.

There had been no immediate details, and he had been able to hope as he continued to fight. But, already, a part of him had known. When the order came to maneuver all vehicles into the most complete available defilade, to remove antennas, to cover all sights and seal the hatches, he had known with certainty. There would be no more warm flesh under shifting cloth.

He had failed. He had failed to defend his family, his nation. But that was only his most obvious guilt. In retrospect, he knew his failure had been far greater. He had never been the man he should have been, that Mira and his son had deserved. He had never been a man at all. Merely a selfish shell in the armor of a uniform.

How can it be so beautiful?

He had read that epileptics experience a rare elation on the verge of a seizure, that their worst sufferings were preceded by a fleeting joy that some described as approaching holiness. And that was what time did to David Heifetz. In an unguarded instant, his memory filled with the fullness of his life with Mira, with blue seas and orange groves and a passionate woman's smell, only to kill her again and again and again. And he was convinced that each time she died anew in his memory, she suffered again. Time was far from a straight line. Mira was always vulnerable, her agony was endless. His God was the merciless god of eternal simultaneity.

Armageddon.

In his wallet, Lieutenant Colonel David Heifetz, of the
United States Army, had buried a trimmed-down snapshot of his wife and child. He was constantly aware of its presence and he knew each shadow and tone, he knew the exact thoughts behind the four eyes considering the camera, the faint weariness of the boy at the end of a long afternoon, Mira's needless anxiety about dinner, the history behind her necklace, and the slight blemish that had temporarily made her beauty human.

He had not looked at the photograph for seven years.

"
Lucky Dave looks tired,
"
Merry Meredith whispered. He had just plopped back down in the field chair beside Manny Martinez, his closest friend. He felt drained by the intelligence briefing he had just delivered, troubled by its inadequacies, yet relieved, as always, that it was over. He did not fear Taylor. He only feared failing the old man. Now he sat, loose, and grateful that the honor of briefing had passed on to Heifetz. Meredith watched the S-3 as the man punched in the codes that filled the briefing screen with the exact map coverage he wanted. It seemed to Meredith that Heifetz was a bit off his usual crisp precision. Nothing the average observer would necessarily notice. But just the sort of thing an intelligence officer who had earned his spurs in the Los Angeles operation would pick up A minor human failing, perhaps the beginning of a vulnerability.
"
He really looks tired,
"
Meredith repeated.

"
Oh man,
"
Martinez said in a low tone of dismissal,
"
Lucky Dave always looks tired. The guy was born tired.

He eats that shit up.
"

"
Yeah,
"
Meredith said.
"
I know. But
there's
something off. He almost looks sick.
"

"
Lucky Dave?
"
Martinez said.
"
Lucky Dave never gets
sick.
"

"
Look at him. He's as white as if he'd just seen a ghost.
"

The two men looked at the operations officer. A compactly built man, with graying hair and shoulders a bit too big for the rest of his bodily proportions. Heifetz was about to begin his briefing.

"
I just wonder if he feels okay,
"
Meredith whispered to his friend.

"
Come on,
"
Martinez answered.
"
Old Lucky Dave doesn't
feel
anything. The guy's made of stone.
"

Heifetz surveyed the collection of officers before him, giving himself a last moment to catch his mental breath before he began sentencing them with his words. His instructions would send them to their particular fates, and he sensed that few of them really grasped the seriousness of the actions they would take in the coming hours. There was so much lightheartedness and swagger left in the Americans. No sense of how very dark a thing fate was. For many of the junior officers, this was a great adventure. And even those who were afraid feared the wrong things. These were men . . . who did not understand how much a man could ultimately lose.

But it was better so. Best to go into battle with a lightness of spirit, so long as it did not manifest itself in sloppiness. Best to go with a good heart into the darkness. With confidence that shone like polished armor. He remembered that feeling.

Perhaps a better god hovered over these bright-faced Americans sitting so uncomfortably in their Soviet greatcoats in the cold. After all their nation had suffered in recent years, the Americans still struck Heifetz as innocents. And perhaps they would be spared the sight of the black-winged god, whose jaws had slimed with the gore of Israel.

All of them except Taylor. Taylor had seen the burning eyes, smelled the poisoned breath. Taylor knew.

Taylor had insisted on this last face-to-face meeting with his subordinates. The purpose of the orders brief was to ensure that each man clearly understood his role, that there would be no
avoidable
confusion added to that which would be unavoidable. Technically, the briefing could have been conducted electronically, with all of the officers comfortably seated in their environmentally controlled fighting systems and mobile-support shelters. But Taylor had insisted on gathering his officers together in this sour, freezing cavern, unable to risk the comfort of an unmasked heat source that might be detected by enemy reconnaissance systems, but unwilling to forgo a last opportunity for each man to see his commander and his comrades in the flesh. Taylor knew. Even more important than the clarity of each last coordination measure was the basic need felt by men in danger to know that their brothers were truly beside them.

Heifetz knew about his nickname. He understood the soldierly black humor behind it and felt no resentment. And he knew that, in at least one sense, he truly was a lucky man. There were few men under whom he could have served without reservation, without resentment. Serving under Taylor was . . . like serving under a better, wiser, far more decent version of himself. There was only one fundamental difference between them. Taylor's sufferings had made him a better man. Heifetz would never have claimed the same for himself.

"
Good afternoon, Colonel Taylor, gentlemen,
"
Heifetz began.
"
I should almost say 'Good evening.' But we will go quickly now.
"
Heifetz scanned the earnest faces.
"
Everyone has a hard copy of the order? Yes? Good. The flow copies and all of the supporting data are being loaded into your on-board control systems at this time. Each of you will run a standard up-load check immediately upon the termination of this meeting.
"

Heifetz touched a button on his remote control, and a bright map filled the briefing screen, covering the area of the Soviet Union from Novosibirsk in the northeast to Dushanbe in the southeast, then west as far as Yerevan and back north to Perm. A second button filled the map with colored symbols and lines, green denoting the positions of the enemy, red for the Soviets, and a tiny spot of blue marking the assembly area of the Seventh Cavalry. The little blue island was separated from the green enemy sea by only a thin, broken reef of red symbols.