Arabesk (71 page)

“Approaching,” said a voice in his ear.

“Yeah, the gun’s already told me,” Ka said crossly. It wasn’t exactly news: the Colonel had first warned him an hour ago that troops were due. He’d also informed Ka that he must stop the troops in their tracks. Those were the Colonel’s words… Looking at the converted 4 × 4s and purpose-built half-tracks coming down the road towards him, Ka decided that was meant to be some kind of joke.

“You know what you have to do?”

Yeah, he knew. First he had to fit a
feldlafetten
to the HK21e, which was its tripod, and then fit a Zeiss scope, after that he had to lift the safety gate or whatever it was called and slot in a new belt of 7.62/51. (What Colonel Abad always called .38.)

The HK21e took either a 20-round mag, which was plain stupid, or a 110-round belt box. Only Ka wasn’t planning to use either of those. He had been busy knitting together a couple of belts at a time, until he had a mountain of brass all ready for the HK21e’s roller-locked bolt.

They skinned people alive, the enemy. Ate them alive too, if Bec was to be believed. Raped the youngest prisoners to ward off wasting sickness. Mind you, that happened everywhere. But eating human flesh, that was part of a fire ritual: brain for intelligence, heart for courage, liver for cunning. Bec had told them all about it, one night months back round the campfire.

“Establish…”

Yeah, right. Establish a position. Ka shifted the heavy gun across to a gap between two rocks, then crawled back for the long, snaking belts. To win he had to keep under the protection of the thermoflage nets, Colonel Abad was very definite about that. After the belts, Ka unwrapped an HK/cw. This was really two weapons in one and could be broken into an upper section that fired airburst munitions, colour-coded for convenience, and a lower pull-away section that functioned as a basic light machine gun.

“Distance,” Ka demanded.

Reading this off from the HK21e would have been easy enough, but Colonel Abad judged distances better. Besides, Ka liked to make the Colonel work.

“Half a klick,” said the voice in his ear. “You should be fitting the belts now.”

With trembling fingers, Ka fed the first of the bullets into the HK21e, checking again that the belt could feed in smoothly. A single kink might jam the machine gun and bring the ambush to an early end. The Colonel would hate that.

Then Ka reached for the HK/cw and slid a mag’s worth of 5.56 kinetic into a narrow slot on its underside, following this with a fat clip of bursters. Except, the first burster he fed to the upper slot wasn’t a blue meanie, it was orange with a red tip, whizbang rather than airburst.

“Take out the…”

He knew, God knows. The Colonel had already been over this more times than Ka could stand. “I know. All right?” Ka said flatly.

Absence whispered down the static. A silence as impossibly distant as it was brief. And then Colonel Abad was back, sounding concerned. “You’ll be all right,” he promised. “You’ll come out of this a hero.”

Ka didn’t want to be a hero and anyway… For a moment Ka considered pointing out that he’d rather be alive. Instead he shrugged and raised the heavy HK/cw.

“Hold it…”

He held. And kept holding as ants became beetles and his spectacles adjusted for focus. There were three half-tracks and two converted Seraphim followed by a solid mass that moved across the gravel like a stain. Ka had taken a while to work out that the half-tracks growled along in second gear because the officers inside were afraid, rather than kind. Afraid to be separated from the children who followed after them.

Ka knew which truck to take out first because it was suddenly circled in green. Fat neon hairs bisecting the circle. He pulled the trigger when circle and crosshairs flipped from green to red, like they always did.

The first truck disintegrated in a crunch of fire as flame punched its way through broken windows, and every single one of the remaining trucks ignored standing orders and slammed to a halt.

Idiots.

Doors swung open and uniforms tumbled out, guns unslung. Instinct made Ka duck as bees began to spit above his head but it was not necessary. The enemy’s return fire was both sporadic and random, raking into scrub, rocks and trees alike and lifting a flock of parakeets into hysterical green protest.

The officers were mostly reloading when Ka slammed off four rounds of airburst in quick succession, exploding each directly above a vehicle. Flesh shredded from bone and suddenly dying uniforms found themselves forced to their knees. The fifth and final airburst Ka expended on a lieutenant too broken to realize she couldn’t swim away to safety across the pockmarked dirt.

Officers down, Ka burned out a mag’s worth of kinetic on a red-circled movement off to his right, then rolled across to the waiting machine gun. All he was required to do then was pull the trigger and keep it pulled while the HK21e ate up the snake belt in three-bullet bursts.

Green.

Red.

Fire.

He kept the stutter going for as long as the coloured circles kept blossoming, which seemed forever. Maybe the enemy were just crazed by the heat, or maybe the green foothills behind him exerted too strong a pull after the bleakness through which they’d marched. There were no officers left to make anyone advance and yet, every time Ka cleared a gap it filled instantly, until the mass marching towards him grew smaller and the gaps began to grow.

Soon there was more gap than mass and finally there was only gap. Not silence, because what had become one with the ground kept quivering and moaning until Ka emptied all of his fat clips of airburst over its head…

24th October

“And then?” Raf asked, glancing at a low coffee table.
A small police-issue recorder sat in the middle, green light lit and numbers counting down what time was left. They were seated in an elegant club room usually reserved for senior officers. The club room was on the third floor of Champollion Precinct, next door to the general canteen. It had a fountain, leather chairs and bombproof windows.

The General, of course, would have put Hamzah in the cells. Raf had decided to do things differently.

“Then?” Hamzah thought about it. “I walked down the slope towards the first half-track.”

“You were looking for survivors?”

“No,” Hamzah shook his head, “I was after water. And then.”

“Then what…?”

Hamzah let himself remember. “The Red Cross came…” He nodded towards Hakim, who stood at Raf’s shoulder. “Any chance of someone finding a drink?”

“Check the evidence cupboards,” Raf told his bodyguard. “Whisky if we’ve got any.”

What Hakim found was Spanish brandy, confiscated from an illegal club at Maritime Station, and Raf let Hamzah pour himself a drink, a heavy slug of the Carlos V mixed with Canada Dry.

Instead of drinking it straight down, Hamzah sat in his chair and stared into the glass, watching bubbles break for the surface. He looked, despite his age, exactly like Hani when she watched static on her screen. Intent on imposing meaning onto chaos. Maybe, thought Raf, everyone is trying to find a world behind the world. As if that world might somehow make more sense or, at the very least, be more real…

“Tell me about when the Red Cross arrived…”

“I was searching among the bodies for Sarah.”

Raf looked at him.

“We changed sides now and then,” Hamzah explained. “We all knew soldiers who’d been raped or mutilated after a battle, but if you could get through that…” He picked up his glass and drank from it. “If you could do that. If you were one of the ones left alive at the end… Colonel Abad said the field hospital where I left Sarah had been overrun. So I thought…”

“Did you find her?”

“No. Though I thought I had. You know, her skin was…” Hamzah opened the collar of his shirt to reveal skin the colour of old leather. “Darker than this… Purple like the night. Bitter like chocolate. It shone.”

He was crying, slow tears that trickled down jowly cheeks and vanished into stubble. There was no self-pity in his eyes and precious little guilt or fear of what might come next, just grief.

“I thought I would recognize her,” said Hamzah. “But I didn’t, I couldn’t. Some of the bodies were faceless and broken, but it wasn’t that. In the end there were just too many for me to search. When the Red Cross landed their first helicopter I was pulling a Dinka girl from under a pile.”

“What did they say?”

“To me? They said nothing. But then, they didn’t know I spoke their language. To each other…? A thin woman turned to a small man and said,
At least one of them survived
.”

Hamzah finished his drink in a single gulp and banged down his glass.

“They gave me vitamins, an injection against retrovirus and water in a silver pouch with a thin straw that stopped me drinking it too fast. After that, they photographed me, took my fingerprints, swabbed my mouth for a DNA sample and airlifted me to an American aircraft carrier off Massaua. They gave me a Gap T-shirt, black Levi’s and a pair of silver Nikes. All donations from a charity appeal. They offered to replace my radio and cracked dark glasses, but I said I still liked them. Maybe I should have given them up…”

Hamzah shrugged.

“Only, I didn’t, because that wasn’t what Colonel Abad wanted.”

“What the Colonel wanted?” Raf raised his eyebrows. “What happened to Colonel Abad…?”

“Koenig Pasha stole him.”

That was the point Raf turned off the police-issue recorder, thought about his options for all of thirty seconds and hit
DELETE
/
ALL
/
CONFIRM
.

It took another brandy and the rest of that Sunday morning for Raf to get from Hamzah a collection of facts that the drink-sodden industrialist thought obvious. Chief among them was that the Arab-speaking, Ottoman-appointed liaison officer aboard the USS
Richmond
had been a certain Major Koenig Bey.

So impressed was he by the boy’s tragedy that he insisted on finding a children’s home for the boy and personally escorting him to El Iskandryia, cracked radio, spectacles and all.

“And Sarah,” asked Raf, “you ever find out what happened to her?”

“Oh yes,” said Hamzah. “She died.”

“You eventually traced her records then?”

“No,” said Hamzah. “But her daughter found me…” he added bleakly. “Avatar’s mother.”

“I thought Avatar was your son?” Raf said, sounding genuinely puzzled.

Hamzah nodded. “That too.”

25th October

Hamzah Effendi came down the precinct steps into a
storm of flashguns. Behind him walked Raf with one hand heavy on the industrialist’s shoulder. In that gesture was ownership and authority. That was what the cameras were meant to catch and that was what they reported, streaming the Monday evening press conference live to newsfeeds around the world.

Behind Raf came his bodyguards. And to one side of the front steps, watching them intently, stood Zara, her face a mask of misery.

“Excellency…”

Raf spotted the questioner in the middle of the scrum and nodded. “In the red, blonde hair…”

“Claire duBois, Television 5. Is Hamzah Effendi under arrest?”

“He has put himself into police custody.”

“Yes, but…” The rest of her reply got drowned beneath a wave of competing questions. So Raf waited for the storm to still and pointed to a man from C3N.

“Nick Richardson, C3N. Do you expect to allow Hamzah’s extradition?”

“As you unquestionably know,” said Raf, looking round at the cameras, “PaxForce has issued a warrant for Hamzah Effendi’s arrest on the charge of crimes against humanity…” Out of the corner of his eye, Raf spotted the limousine used by Senator Liz slide itself into a parking bay reserved for the Minister of Police.

“Excellency?”

“Wait.”
One by one the Ishies and journalists turned to see what His Excellency was watching. Which was why most of the newsfeeds ended up featuring the face of Senator Liz Elsing when the first bomb exploded.

It was nothing spectacular, just a rattling crump and a burst of static that drizzled snow across a dozen different camera screens.

“What was that?” The accent was English, the speaker a crookbacked little man with bad hair and worse dress sense.

Raf shrugged. “Sword of God, I imagine.” His gaze as it took in the journalists was cool, almost amused. He smiled sourly and flicked blond hair back from the shades he wore to keep flashguns at bay. “This is Iskandryia, bombs happen…”

“What about the extradition?” The man from C3N refused to let go of his question.

“What about it…?”

Raf was being watched by the Senator, who was being watched by about a third of the press corps, mostly those from American channels. All of them looked anxious, torn between chasing down the distant bomb and sticking with the news happening in front of them.

“You accept the need for a trial?”

“If a Grand Jury so decides,” said Raf.

“And where would this trial be,
if the Grand Jury so decides
…” The speaker was Austrian, the humour heavy.

“Iskandryia,” said Raf. “However, I will not be a judge.” He paused to let them consider that. “And the rules of evidence will be those used by The Hague.”

“And the judges?”

“Three,” Raf said. “French, German, and American…” He was selecting the nationalities as he went along. Raf wondered if any of them realized that. And if the Grand Jury did decide Hamzah had a case to answer, then they’d automatically become his judges. Though Raf didn’t think he’d mention that fact just then.

“Excuse me…” Raf touched his earbead and took a call, nodding rapidly. “I have to go,” he told the crowd. “My men have found a second bomb outside a children’s home in Karmous.” Pushing Hamzah slightly, Raf steered the industrialist towards the waiting Bentley and saw the man from C3N materialize beside him, persistent as a shadow.