Cold Allies (5 page)

The American’s lips tightened. “I thought that’s what we were trying to do.”

A short, introverted silence in the room. The Pole took another sip of coffee. The German stared off into middle distance. Lauterbach regarded the table.

“I have feelings for the victims of famine,” Baranyk said when the silence grew unbearable. “The Chinese have suffered, for example, but they do not start wars.”

“No, they die very quietly, the Chinese,” Czajowski murmured.

From the end of the table, Lauterbach spoke, his voice barely above a tired whisper. “One thousand Americans die of starvation every day.”

Baranyk caught the wince in the German’s face, in the Pole’s. The Americans had their famine, but Europe had its war. To Baranyk, one debt canceled another. The Americans had no heart for battle, even though they had sent their best commanders, their soldiers, their magical weapons. It was not America that was being invaded. And if worse came to worst, they could pull out and go home.

“God. Don’t you see how sad it is?” the American asked, spreading his arms. “These aliens have traveled across space to find us starving, to find us killing each other. Yes, there are mutilations. I don’t deny that. Perhaps they lack a concept of death. Or perhaps they have a higher notion of it.” His weary eyes settled on each of the men at the table. “Sometimes I wonder if they might be appalled that we hold life so cheap.”

NEAR CALHAN, COLORADO

They’d started from Texas, were turned back at Missouri, and need had driven them west. Just past Topeka, his Pa died, and he buried him on the side of the highway, scooping up the hard earth with a crowbar, burning his hands on the sun-scorched rocks.

Only when the state troopers stopped him outside Colorado Springs did Jerry realize he’d run out of traveling room.

To Jerry’s right was a makeshift refugee camp, a hardscrabble nightmare of a place, all tin and canvas and plywood. It squatted on the beige desert floor, nearly all a color with the sand and stinking of heat and shit and death. Behind the Colorado State policeman with the bermuda shorts and the mirror sunglasses stretched a broad expanse of desert. In the bright distance blue-purple clouds were sitting on the ground.

“It gonna rain?” he asked the trooper with awe.

The man stopped reading aloud from Colorado Injunction 236 to look back over his shoulder. “Huh?”

“Rain. See them clouds?”

“Shit. Those aren’t clouds,” the trooper laughed. ‘Those are mountains.”

Jerry didn’t hear the rest of what the trooper was reading.

He was busy looking at the mountains. It was like looking into the face of God.

“Hey! Hey!” the trooper finally said, waving a hand in Jerry’s face. “You with me here, or what?”

“Yes, sir.” It was hot, just as hot as it had been in Texas, a long way to drive, Jerry thought, not to escape the heat. He kept trying not to stare at the mountains or stare at the cop’s bare legs, either. He’d never seen a trooper in shorts before.

‘This truck outfitted for propane?”

Jerry stared into the trooper’s face, trying to read the expression behind the mirror sunglasses. “Yes, sir.”

“How the hell old are you, anyway?”

“Eighteen,” Jerry replied quickly, upping his age by three years.

“You got a license?”

“Huh?”

“A license to drive this thing. Are you paying attention, son?”

“Wasn’t no place to get one in Texas,” Jerry replied, this time truthfully. He looked out over the desert again to the blue mountains. They were cool and pretty and distant, like the faces of women in magazines. “Cain’t I get through?” he asked all of a sudden, which brought a cautious frown to the trooper’s face. “I drove a long ways.”

The trooper finished writing the ticket and stuffed it into Jerry’s sweaty hand. “We don’t have any facilities for you here. Go on home.”

“Cain’t do that,” Jerry said firmly.

“You’ll die here, son.”

“I’ll die the fuck back in Texas, too,” Jerry said.

At Jerry’s tone, the trooper looked up. “All right. Then put your goddamned iron-heap truck in the camp and set your tent along with the rest of the Texas trash. See if I give a shit.” With that he walked off to his solar-powered van. Jerry watched him go, wondering if there was air conditioning inside. Probably. The trooper’s shirt hadn’t stuck to his skin the way Jerry’s sweated tee shirt did.

Licking his lips, Jerry walked back to his truck and, after a few tries, started the engine. He found a spot about fifty yards from the other refugees and struck camp alone.

Funny how lonely he felt, his old man dead and buried in a shallow grave four hundred miles back. Jerry’s Pa hadn’t been much of a man; hadn’t even been much company; but his absence felt strange, like the emptiness left in the jaw from a rotted-out tooth.

As the sun sank below the western mountains, Jerry started a dinner of beans and jerky. Above his head the bowl of sky darkened to a fragile violet. By the time the stars were out, a girl wandered over from her tent and sat down.

She was his age, Jerry guessed, or a little older, and she sat with her legs spraddled. He kept trying to look away, but the sight of her bare legs drew him as the mountains had. A night wind picked up, carrying from the camp faint tatters of voices and the dense, earthy smell of sewage.

“Where you from?” she asked after a while.

‘‘Texas.’’

“Huh,” she huffed. “Sure wasn’t smart of you to come here. Bury people every day here.”

Jerry’s hand froze on the spoon. “They die?” he asked.

“Course they die. Otherwise you wouldn’t bury ’em, stupid.”

“Oh.” Her tongue was so sharp, he was afraid to ask what they died of.

The girl was watching him. Her legs were skinny and her eyes too big, like the eyes of an owl or some other night predator. “I’ll do you for a plate of beans,” she told him.

The wind lashed the flames this way and that, sending firefly sparks into the dark.

“I’ll do you good.”

She pulled her skirt up to her hips, and between those skinny legs were shadows secret as evening. He looked away quickly, down into the snapping fire.

Jerry dreamed of women, of course, but he dreamed of eyes as blue as lakes, hair dark as rain, skin cool and water-smooth. This girl looked like something the desert had coughed up. She frightened him a little.

“I like to do it,” she said.

In the fire, black embers crawled with red. The smoke smelled clean and pungent, as if it had come from an evergreen. “I’ll give you some beans, anyways.”

“I really like to,” she whispered.

When the beans were done, Jerry fed the girl just to send her away, then lay for a while alone under the dusty tarp.

The camp was quiet, all the cook fires out, when Jerry got up from his blanket. Shivering a little in the desert cold, he walked out into the sand and stared west.

I could walk there,
he thought. Maybe be in the mountains by morning. There would be pine trees and the clear streams he had seen in magazine ads.

If he went to a place where it rained, Jerry figured, he could live off the land easy. You could see the fish in those rivers, he knew, down in the transparent water, like under plate glass. Moss would grow there, and ferns fine as a lady’s hand.

To the south, a single thunderhead sailed its bulk over the desert, yellow lightning warring in its belly. He’d watched schooner-shaped clouds move across the Llano the same way, bearing their load of moisture to other, greener places. As Jerry stood staring at the thunderhead, he thought he saw a flash of cold, neon-blue. Deep in his mind he heard the nearly forgotten tap-tap of chill rain falling.

Memories of coolness and moisture drew him. He took a few dreamy steps south and the tap-tap-tapping hushed.

He stopped and the magic vanished.
Rain,
he thought.

Somewhere it’s raining.

Maybe tomorrow or the next day, he thought, he’d walk to Colorado Springs.

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA

An official knock at the front door jolted Linda Parisi awake. In the darkness she felt Lacy flinch and jump from the warm spot he had made for himself on the covers. By the time the second determined rap came, the dog was fully awake and barking.

With a groan, Linda pulled her stiff body out of bed and shuffled to the door, turning on the living-room light as she went. Through the fisheye lens of the peephole she saw two men in dark suits waiting in the hall.

“Mrs. Parisi?” one of them shouted.

“Silly, stupid ass me,” she whispered to the yapping poodle. The men had probably seen her light come on.

Could Tad be right for once? Was a man who saw spies under the bed capable of seeing more than his own imagination?

“Mrs. Parisi? We know you’re in there.”

The man’s voice sounded reasonable, even friendly.

Scooping up Lacy with her good arm, she fumbled with the keys and opened the door as far as the chain would permit.

“It’s very late,” she pointed out, keeping her voice pleasant but chiding, the same tone she used on the IRS.

All she could see of the first man was a brown eye and part of a dark suit. “We’re from Army Intelligence,” he said quietly, pressing his ID to the gap in the door. “We’d like to talk to you. May we come in?”

“Perhaps if you had called first—”

“Talk to us now or talk to us later, ma’am,” said the other man. “We’ll stand out here all night if we have to.”

“All right,” she told them. “Hold your itty horses. Just let me get decent.”

She padded into her bedroom, retrieved her old terry-cloth robe from the still-unpacked suitcase, and on the way out shut the door firmly in Lacy’s face.

When she undid the chain, one of the men said, “Sorry about the time.” They were both tall, young, and conspicuously well groomed, just the sort of spook clones Tad Ellis might have dreamed up.

They didn’t wait to be invited in. One man walked over to her bookshelves and began rudely scanning the titles. The other went to her coffee table, opened a briefcase, and sat, without permission, on her floral-print sofa.

“We want to know about these,” the man with the briefcase said as he spread photographs across the glass top.

Mrs. Parisi pulled her bathrobe tighter. She knew those photos better than she remembered the face of her long dead husband. They were the photos she had taken of the Eridani ships.

“Dear me,” she said, making her tone puzzled, less like the UFO researcher they had come to see and more like the old widow she resembled. Helplessness, she had learned early in life, could be used to devastating advantage. “I don’t suppose you’ve read my books?”

“We’ve studied them at length,” the man at the bookshelves said. “What we want to know is if you can talk to these aliens.”

“Well,” she said and paused, her mind working furiously. She bent to study the photos. “If I could, what would you like me to say?”

The man on the couch gathered the pictures and put them back in his briefcase. “The Supreme Allied Commander of Western Europe will tell you that when you get to Spain.”

Mrs. Parisi blinked. She looked at the man on the couch. “Spain?”

“Please get dressed. Pack your things. Don’t worry, the Army will see to the upkeep of your apartment.”

He stood, snapping the briefcase closed.
Don ‘t worry,
had the ridiculous man said? But they were fighting a war in Spain.

In the bedroom, Lacy’s barking was hysterical and shrill.

Lacy was an excitable animal, and Mrs. Parisi knew that if she walked into the room at that moment, she’d find her pet yapping in aimless, frenzied circles, circles that mimicked the frantic whirling of her thoughts.

“Oh, I don’t know if I can,” she demurred.

Just as the men from Army Intelligence wore the same type of suit, they shared the same type of eyes. Hard, level eyes. “Pursuant to the Martial Law Act, I am placing you under detainment,” the man by the bookshelves said. “Please pack your things now. If we have to do it for you, I’m sure we’ll miss something you’d want.”

Giving up the battle with a sigh, she nodded and walked to the bedroom, careful not to let Lacy escape. Well. Imagine that. Her fame had spread far and wide, so far that the Supreme Allied Commander of Western Europe wanted to talk to her. She wondered what he would say when he found out the photos were a hoax.

CENTRAL ANA COMMAND, BARCELONA, SPAIN

Colonel Qasim Abdel Wasef, nicknamed by his troops al Saiqah, was feeling decidedly unThunderboltish. Wearily, he drove his Fiat through the cobblestone streets, preferring to retain command of his own life, his own auto, than put them in the hands of some illiterate Algerian driver.

Despite his exhaustion, despite the grimness of the war, Wasef found himself smiling. On the Spanish side of the Pyrenees the sunlight had the familiar diamantine quality of Alexandria. Edges were sharper than on the rainy French slopes; and the warm breeze reminded him of home.

The road was crowded with new troops, men fresh off the battlefield and famished. He passed a vegetable market already stripped of its produce. On a street corner stood two Libyan noncoms, cutting into a melon with their bayonets. The thin flesh parted and juice poured out, staining the sidewalk like pale blood.

Wasef looked hurriedly away. There had been too many corpses lately. The French had stopped him at Gerona, exacting ten thousand casualties. And the American general, Lauterbach, nibbled at the heels of his infantry battalion.

Wasef made a right at the bombed ruins of the Museu Marítim and drove past the green swatch of grass at the Moll de Bosch. The flowers, he noticed with dismay, had been trampled. Tank tracks scored the lawn. In his rearview mirror he caught sight of the shattered spires of the cross-harbor cable car.

Too bad,
he thought wryly. The Gibraltar Dam had not only contained the rising Mediterranean; it had also kept the Allied navies out. Nothing had protected Southern Europe from the Arab advance. Nothing. And now war, not the ocean, had made its high-tide line in Barcelona, coming in on rolling breakers of metal.

He parked his car on the Passiq de Colom and walked into the Western Command Center through a press of loud, ill-dressed soldiers awaiting orders.

On his way up to General Rashid Aziz Sabry’s office, he shared an elevator with a young private with Moroccan insignia on his shoulders. The boy was eating a jar of Apricot Facial Scrub with crackers, probably thinking it was some sort of gourmet Western dip. Wasef considered enlightening him, but was stopped by the happy look on the boy’s face.