GPS (29 page)

Jeff was supposed to be aiming at a Saguaro cactus jutting from an outcropping at the base of the valley. For now, the cactus was perfectly safe, its arms absurdly upturned like a suspect in the distance. Simmons had agreed to leave him for a few minutes and go back down the path after telling him for what seemed like the thousandth time, “Don’t worry about how far away it is, just aim and shoot.” Simmons told him he’d be listening for progress.

Jeff just couldn’t stop shaking. The irony of it was that, despite knowing how dangerous a drink would be out here, especially the way he was feeling, he knew that one swig of whiskey would have instantly solved his shaking problems.

He lowered the rifle and sat up, hoping to hear the steps of Simmons coming back up the path and thinking for a second that he did. He didn’t, just the wind. He looked around and had one of those sobering moments when people are reminded that their immediate surroundings are completely different from their usual surroundings, that a major change has occurred, and that it’s real.

He wanted to get over the initial shock of what he had done and where he was. The reality of it was sinking in, but slowly. He wanted to be able to fathom the fact that he had come back and chosen not to ignore the badgering GPS. Yesterday at this time, he was speeding toward Utah half-asleep, and today, he was in some sort of military training in a time that apparently hadn’t happened on earth yet. Paulo had failed to answer the question of what year it was, had acted like he hadn’t heard it. Was this the future? Did people here even know what year it was? Were any of these guys keeping track?

Where the hell was Simmons? Jeff hadn’t fired the gun in well over 20 minutes now. Surely Simmons had taken notice of this fact, hadn’t he? As he began to consider just hoofing it back down the trail to find the man who still acted quite frightened of Jeff, he suddenly recalled the map on the wall at the stadium, and that every one of those thousands of little pins stood for troops or battles or trouble of some sort. He hadn’t thought to ask Paulo which pin on the map was them, which one marked the general area in which he was now sitting. How close were they to that sea of black?

With that on his mind, Jeff began to wonder in a much less irritated and much more panicked way about where Simmons had gone. Had Jeff been abandoned up here as some sort of initiation? He picked up the rifle again and immediately wondered if it would ever feel light in his hands. He doubted it would.

Still in a sitting position, still shaking but not as bad as before, Jeff lifted the gun and gazed through the scope, trying to forget about his hands, breathe evenly and concentrate solely on seeing things in detail. He steered the gun back down toward the giant cactus momentarily, but then pulled up and began scanning the desert plain that stretched out beyond the city. He began singing The Who in his head as he contemplated just how many miles and miles he could see for up here.

It was working. His hands had almost completely stopped shaking for the moment. He was seeing in remarkable detail now, surprised such an outdated gun had such a clear scope. He aimed back down at the cactus again, and knew he was getting his first true look at it since he’d been dragged up here. He steadied the gun and rested his finger on the trigger. But as he was about to try to blast the massive, bristled organ pipe cactus to smithereens like he’d already pictured himself doing hundreds of times, he stopped.

It must have been a half hour since he’d fired a shot now, and since he’d last seen Simmons. Where was he? If they really needed men in this army, it probably wasn’t good business to abandon them on their first day was it? Jeff realized now that he didn’t know when you were allowed to fire shots at actual people out here, when you weren’t, and most importantly, who to fire them at if you did. How would anyone out here know not to shoot him?

Jeff pulled the gun up again and scanned the empty desert. As he did, he recalled Paulo saying the deserts here had history imprinted on their sand grains and soaked into the earth beneath. He said that for one reason or another, men had been compelled to travel these expanses of endless sand since the beginning of time. For all that history, there didn’t seem to be anything at all going on in this desert on this afternoon.

Jeff held that thought until the scope of the Springfield rifle — the gun he’d adopted that day when he unwittingly became a member of the sniper division in the revolucion’s transient army — went scanning past a dark figure sitting perfectly still atop a black horse in the open desert. The man’s arms were raised and he appeared to be looking through binoculars, facing the edge of the old city.

For a few seconds, as Jeff held his breath, everything stood perfectly still, including the gun in his hands. The figure in the distance now appeared in chilling detail. It made Jeff realize suddenly how detailed he might look right now to someone out there in the distance spying on him through the scope of a gun. His heart sank. His hands started shaking in uncontrollable jolts. He dropped the gun, hopped to his feet and scurried down the path with his head ducked, no idea where Simmons was or what he was doing.

It was Simmons who found Jeff, however, about 60 yards down the incline toward the city. Jeff trudged clumsily past him as Simmons clutched a high, sword-shaped shard of rock on a ridge about 10 yards off the path. Josh was studying the desert in the distance with his free hand across his brow, but seemingly looking much farther to the right of where Jeff had been spying minutes before.

“Delaney, what are you doing? Get over here!” Simmons hissed at him as he passed.

“There’s a guy out there on a horse —”

“Shut the fuck up man!” Simmons interrupted in an exaggerated whisper, shooting a nervous glance away from Jeff and back out toward the open desert below. “Where’s the rifle?”

“Man, I told you, there’s a guy out there, a guy on a horse out in the desert —”

“Where’s the fucking Springfield?” Simmons cut in again, his voice breaking into a squeal as he tried to make his frustration known as quietly as possible. After a frantic stare between the two men, both went scrambling back up the incline toward Jeff’s former training site. Simmons went chugging past him without saying a word. By the time Jeff made it, shaking and gasping, into the small clearing at the top, he saw Simmons standing with the sniper rifle raised, aimed out into the open desert.

“Don’t say a word, Delaney,” Simmons said over his shoulder in a low voice. “Just get down and be quiet.” Jeff dropped immediately to the ground, unwrapping the shirt from his head and sliding it back on, remembering the pained expression Simmons had given Jeff’s chest moments before on the trail. He didn’t get much time to ponder the magnitude of his sunburn, but it already felt bad.

“You know how to ride a horse, Delaney?” Simmons murmured, voice barely above the sound of the wind, and without taking his eye off the scope of the rifle.

“Do I know how —”

The Springfield let out a blast, the echoes of which Jeff hadn’t noticed when it was on his own shoulder, but which traveled from one side of the cliffs to the other before he could even consider what had happened. His mouth was still hanging open, his heart still thudding when Simmons coolly turned around and handed the rifle back to him before brushing past.

“Let’s go. That horse won’t last through the afternoon if we don’t go get it now,” Simmons said as he went by, backward baseball cap making him look more like a pro skateboarder than a soldier.

Although Jeff’s heart took a giant leap when Simmons fired the rifle, he found himself far more awake and alert now than he’d been since he arrived the previous night. Before again descending the path to catch Josh, he turned, raised the gun once more and scanned it across the desert. Almost at once, the scope locked on the black horse, which stood still, tail twitching, unmanned and facing the open desert. About 25 yards to the right was a lifeless heap on the desert floor.

Simmons had put another body in the sand.

- 35 -

Riley learned quickly that the only way to get used to seeing human skeletons was to see dozens of them in succession, to keep on seeing them until they became just a part of the landscape. In Darfur, they were an undeniable part of the landscape. It never actually got easy, especially seeing all the tiny ones, or the ones with gaping holes in the skulls.

She marveled at the way the people inside the camps spoke so openly about dying in a place where death was already everywhere around them, and she spent a good deal of her early days there wondering just how much torment it took to make a person so accepting of impending death.

The first skeleton Jeff Delaney ever saw that wasn’t inside a glass case of some sort was the one he saw while hiding behind a giant cactus in the desert. He was breathing in gasps when he noticed first the skull and then the entire set of bones lying across an outcropping of rocks about 15 feet in front of him. He knelt at the base of a Saguaro that rose like a tower from beneath the cliffs and cast its shadow onto the fringe of scrub between the city and the open plain.

Hair was still growing on the skull and quivered calmly in the breeze. It made Jeff consider, especially given his immediate circumstances, at what point a dead person becomes just a skeleton. The hair suggested this one was still a person not so long ago.

The reason Jeff was breathing in frightened huffs was because he’d encountered his first-ever skeleton about 30 seconds after he’d been shot at with a live bullet for the first time. Lots of bullets, in fact. Jeff felt the power and ferocity of one of them that whizzed right past his head and ricocheted off the rocks behind him. As the black horse he was supposed to come out here and steal took flight toward the waterless cauldron of desert on the horizon over Jeff’s right shoulder, the black SUV Simmons had apparently spotted from the cliffs above came into view over his left. Jeff peeked around the huge base of the cactus, trying not to lean into its needles, squinting out toward the approaching truck. Josh was again shouldering the Springfield and was now lying behind a low rock pile diagonally to the left of Jeff’s giant cactus.

As the SUV approached at about 30 miles per hour, Jeff had visions of being run down like the people he’d seen that first morning here. The three-day training camp had, at least for him, been trimmed down to a single afternoon of shooting at and missing a cactus. Now, live rounds were being sent at him, and for the moment, he was unarmed. Or was he?

No, he was not unarmed actually. He could hear Paulo’s voice ringing in his ears now, telling him, sure, take whatever guns he could carry without either shooting himself or getting shot. With that in mind, Jeff now remembered the loaded Ruger — which he spent much of the day’s hike wishing he’d left behind — lodged in the rear waistband of the khakis he’d cut off at the knees, the gun’s safety still on. He now slid the gun back out and wondered if his constant handling of the thing the last couple of weeks would make it easier to shoot. Probably not.

He looked over at Simmons, only to find the man scowling back at him and his gun, which Josh undoubtedly regarded as pointless in the hands of Jeff. Simmons was a sniper by trade, and apparently a damn good one. The look on the Josh’s face made Jeff consider sliding the Blackhawk right back into his pants. But then his eyes shifted back to the skeleton on the rocks.

Somewhere farther off to the right out there was a brand new dead person waiting to slowly erode down to its framework, thanks to Josh’s aim and steady hand with the rifle. Jeff did not want to be the next man in the sand. Whether he looked silly to Josh or not, he kept his grip on the one thing that might get him through the day alive. He released the safety.

The SUV was still aimed in their general direction when one of its occupants again opened fire toward the edge of the city. How many people died on their first days out here, Jeff wondered as he braced for a bullet to come plowing through the flesh of the cactus and into his. The skeleton in front of him continued to offer little comfort.

The machine gun shots pinging off seemingly every rock and piece of earth around him suddenly steered off to the right and stopped when the Springfield in Josh’s hands erupted again. The SUV bearing down on the two men had been hit, but the man behind the wheel, wounded or not, still had his foot on the gas, much heavier now by the sounds of it, and the Range Rover was barreling toward the big Saguaro.

“Get out of the way, Delaney! Move!” Simmons shouted, standing up.

Jeff stumbled forward, leapt over the skeleton and ran in exaggerated lunges toward the rocks where Simmons again crouched. About the time he went sprawling past the man who looked unhappy to see him, the Range Rover plowed into the cactus, spun into the skeleton-draped rocks beyond, rolled over top of them and onto its roof. The top half of the ancient cactus fell slowly to the ground with a massive thud and a puff of dust. When it cleared, the only thing moving was the driver’s side front wheel of the Rover, still spinning to a stop.

Without speaking a word to one another, Jeff and Josh both advanced on the vehicle, guns raised. As they approached, the passenger door swung open, and a husky man in a long black coat over a powder-blue dress shirt and jeans tumbled out, bleeding profusely from the head and chest and clinging to a pistol. The man fell to the ground and dropped the gun in the sand.

His own gun raised, Jeff stole a glance to his right and saw Simmons in a sudden panic, looking down at the Springfield and fumbling it in his hands. Jeff looked back at the man from the SUV, wondering how many more men were inside. “Put the gun down, man!” Jeff started walking toward the man on the ground now, scared to death that these words were actually coming out of his own mouth. “Leave the gun in the sand! Do it!”

If he’d stopped and thought for even a second, things would have surely happened differently, but he continued to advance on the man until the business end of the Ruger was about a foot away from his temple. Though the blue-shirted man had gotten to his knees and gotten the fingers of his left hand around the handle of his pistol by then, he’d stopped right there when Jeff’s gun was within killing distance.