Islands in the Net (48 page)

Selous leaned back, nodding. “It's their policy. It must be true, I think. That the leader of FACT is a woman.”

Laura felt stunned. “A woman.”

Selous smiled sourly. “Yes … we of the weaker sex do tend to get around these days.”

“What kind of woman would …”

“Rumor says she's a right-wing American billionaire. Or a British aristocrat. Maybe both, eh—why not?” Selous tried to spread her hands skeptically; her cuffs rattled. “For years FACT was nothing much … mercenaries. Then quite suddenly … very organized. A new leader, someone smart and determined—with a vision. One of us modern girls.” She chuckled lightly.

There didn't seem to be more to say on that topic. It was probably a lie anyway. “Where do you think they're taking us?”

“North, into the desert—I know that much.” Selous thought it over. “Why did they keep you locked away from the rest of us? We never saw you. We used to see your maid, that's all.”

“My what?”

“Your cellmate, the little Bambara informer from downstairs.” Selous shrugged. “Sorry. You know how it is in a cell block. People get crazy. We used to call you the Princess. Rapunzel, eh.”

“People get crazy,” Laura said. “I thought I saw my Optimal Persona. But it was
you
, wasn't it, doctor. You and I look a lot alike. You came in and treated me after I was beaten, didn't you.”

Selous blinked doubtfully. “‘Optimal Persona.' That's very American.… Are you from California?”

“Texas.”

“It certainly wasn't me, Laura.… I've never seen you before in my life.”

Long, strange pause.

“You really think we look alike?”

“Sure,” Laura said.

“But I'm a Boer, an Afrikaaner. And you have that hybrid American look.”

They had reached an impasse. The conversation hung there as heat and dust boiled over the empty end of the truck. She was dealing with an alien. They had missed a connection somehow. Laura felt thirsty already and they were not even out of the city.

She struggled to pick up the thread.

“They kept me in solitary because they said I had atomic secrets.”

Selous sat upright, startled. “Have you seen a Bomb?”

“What?”

“There are rumors of a test site in the Malian desert. Where the F.A.C.T. tried to build a Bomb.”

“First I've ever heard of that,” Laura said. “I saw their submarine, though. They said it had atomic warheads onboard. The sub did have some missiles. I know that much, because they hit and sank a ship I was on.”

“Exocets?” Selous said gravely.

“Yes, that's right, exactly.”

“But there could have been other missiles with a longer range, eh? Long enough to hit Pretoria?”

“I guess so. But it doesn't prove they were nuclear bombs.”

“But if they take us to this test site, and we find a huge crater of sand melted into glass, that would prove something, wouldn't it?”

Laura said nothing.

“It ties in with something the warden told me once,” Selous said. “That they didn't really need me as a hostage—that our cities were hostage if we only knew.”

“God, why do people talk like that?” Laura said. “Grenada, Singapore …” It made her feel very tired.

“You know what I think, Laura? I think they are taking us to their test site. To make a statement, yes? Me, because I am Azanian, and we Azanians are the people they need to impress at the moment. You, because you have witnessed their weapon ship. Their delivery system.”

“Could be, I guess.” Laura thought it over. “What then? Do they free us?”

Selous's greenish eyes went remote and distant. “I'm a hostage. They will not let Azania attack them without a price.”

Laura could not accept it. “That's not much of a price, is it? Killing two helpless prisoners?”

“They'll probably kill us on camera. And send the tape to Azanian Army Intelligence,” Selous said.

“But you Azanians would tell everyone, anyway, wouldn't you?”

“We've been telling people about FACT from the beginning,” Selous scoffed. “No one would trust us if we said Mali had the bomb. No one believes what we say. They only sneer at us and call us an ‘aggressive imperialist state.'”

“Oh,” Laura hedged.

“We
are
an empire,” Selous said firmly. “President Umtali is a great warrior. All Zulus are great warriors.”

Laura nodded. “Yeah, we Americans, uh, we had a black president ourselves.”

“Oh, that fellow of yours didn't amount to anything,” Selous said. “You Yankees don't even
have
a real government—just capitalist cartels, eh. But President Umtali fought in our civil war. He brought order, where there was savagery. A brilliant general. A true statesman.”

“Glad to hear it's working out,” Laura said.

“Azanian black people are the finest black people in the world!”

They sat there sweating. Laura could not let it pass. “Look, I'm no big Yankee nationalist, but what about … you know … jazz, blues, Martin Luther King?”

Selous shifted on her bench. “Martin King. He had a dinner party, compared to our Nelson Mandela.”

“Yeah but …”

“Your Yankee black people aren't even real black people, are they? They're all Coloureds, actually. They look like Europeans.”

“Wait a minute …”

“You've never seen
my
black people, but I've certainly seen yours. Your American blacks crowd all our best restaurants and gamble their global hard currency in Sun City and so on.… They're rich, and soft.”

“Yeah, I come from a tourist town, myself.”

“We have a wartime economy, we need the exchange money.… Fighting the chaos … the endless nightmare that is Africa.… We Africans know what it means to sacrifice.” She paused. “It seems harsh, eh? I'm sorry. But you outsiders don't understand.”

Laura looked out the back of the truck. “That's true.”

“It seems to be the duty of my generation to pay for history's mistakes.”

“You're really convinced they'll kill us, aren't you?”

She looked remote. “I'm sorry you should be involved.”

“They killed a man in my house,” Laura said. “That's where it all started for me. I know it doesn't seem like much, one death compared to what's happened in Africa. But I couldn't let it pass. I couldn't shrug off my responsibility for what happened on my own home ground. Believe me, I've had a long time to think about it. And I still think I was right, even if it costs me everything.”

Selous smiled.

They had picked up a convoy. Two armored half-tracks had swung into action behind them, jouncing over the rutted road, the long, ridged wands of machine guns swaying in the turrets.

“They think they have an answer,” Selous said, looking at the halftracks. “It was worse in Mali before they came.”

“I can't imagine anything worse.”

“It's not something you can
imagine
—you have to see it.”

“Do
you
have an answer?”

“We hold on and wait for a miracle—save whoever we can.… We were getting somewhere in the camp, I think, before the F.A.C.T. seized it. They captured me, but the rest of our Corps escaped. We're used to raids—the desert is full of scorpions.”

“Were you stationed in Mali?”

“Niger actually, but that's a formality only. No central authority. It's tribal warlords mostly, in the outback. Fulani Tribal Front, the Sonrai Fraternal Forces, all kinds of bandit armies, thieves, militias. The desert crawls with them. And FACT's machineries, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“That's how they prefer to work. By remote control. When they locate the bandits, they attack them with robot planes. They pounce on them in the desert. Like steel hyenas killing rats.”

“Jesus.”

“They're specialists, technicians. They learned things, in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Namibia. How to fight Third Worlders without letting them touch you. They don't even look at them, except through computer screens.”

Laura felt a thrill of recognition. “That's them all right.… I saw all that happen in Grenada.”

Selous nodded. “The president of Mali thought they did fine work. He made them his palace guard. He's a puppet now. I think they keep him drugged.”

“I've seen the guy who runs Grenada—I bet this Mali president doesn't even
exist
. He's probably nothing but an image on a screen and some prerecorded speeches.”

“Can they
do
that?” Selous said.

“Grenada can—I saw their prime minister disappear into thin air.”

Selous thought it over. Laura could see it working in her face—wondering if Laura was insane, or she herself was insane, or whether the bright television world was brewing something dark and awful in its deepest voodoo corners. “It's as if they're magicians,” she said at last. “And we're just people.”

“Yeah,” Laura said. She lifted two fingers. “But we have solidarity, and they're busy killing each other.”

Selous laughed.

“We're going to win, too.”

They began talking about the others. Laura had long since memorized the list. Marianne Meredith, the television correspondent, had been the ringleader. It was she who had invented—or already knew, maybe—the best methods of smuggling messages. Lacoste, the French diplomat, was their interpreter—his parents had been African emigrés, and he knew two of Mali's tribal languages.

They had tortured the three agents of Vienna. One of them had turned, the other two had been released or, probably, shot.

Steven Lawrence had been taken from an Oxfam camp. The camps were often raided—they were dumping grounds for scop, the primary source of food for millions of Saharans. The black market for single-cell protein was the major economy of the region—the “government” of Mauritania, for instance, was little more than a scop cartel. Foreign handouts, a few potash mines, and an army—that was Mauritania.

Chad was a malignant welfare bureaucracy, a tiny fraction of aristocrats whose thugs periodically emptied automatic weapons into starving crowds. The Sudan was run by a radical Muslim lunatic who consulted dervishes while factories washed away and airports cracked and burst. Algeria and Libya were one-party states, more or less organized in the coastal provinces but roiling tribalist anarchy in their Saharan outback. Ethiopia's government was preserved by Vienna's fiat; it was as frail as a pressed bouquet, and under siege by a dozen rural “action fronts.”

All of them drawing venom from the lethal inheritance of the last century, a staggering tonnage of outdated armaments, passed from government to government at knock-down prices. From America to Pakistan to mujahideen to a Somalian splinter group with nothing to recommend it but a holy desperation for martyrdom.… From Russia to a cadre of bug-eyed Marxist strongmen shooting anything that even looked like a bourgeois intellectual.… Billions in aid had been poured into the sub-Sahara, permanently warping governments into bizarre funnels of debt and greed, and as the situation worsened more and more arms were necessary for “order” and “stability” and “national security,” the outside world heaved a cynical sigh of relief as its lethal junk was disposed of to people still desperate to kill each other.…

At noon the convoy stopped. A soldier gave them water and gruel. They were in the Sahara now—they'd been driving all day. The driver unchained their legs. There was no place to run, not now.

Laura jumped out under the hammer blow of sun. A haze of heat distorted the horizons, marooning the convoy in a shimmering plaza of cracked red rock. The convoy had three trucks: the first carried soldiers, the second radio equipment, the third was theirs. And the two armored half-tracks in the rear. No one came out of the halftracks or offered any food to their crews. Laura began to suspect that they had no crews. They were robots, big carnivorous versions of a common taxi-bus.

The desert shimmer was seductive. She felt a hypnotic urge to run out into it, into the silver horizon. As if she would dissolve painlessly into the infinite landscape, vanish like dry ice and leave only pure thought and a voice from the whirlwind.

Too long inside a cell. The horizon was strange, it was pulling at her, as if it were trying to tug her soul out through the pupils of her eyes. Her head filled with strange pounding pulses of incipient heatstroke. She relieved herself quickly and climbed back into the canvas shade of the truck.

They drove all afternoon, all evening. There was no sand, it was various kinds of bedrock, blasted and Martian-looking. Miles of heat-baked flints for hours and hours, then sandstone ridges in a million shades of dun and beige, each more tedious than the last. They passed another military convoy in the afternoon, and once a distant airplane flew across the southern horizon.

At night they left the road, drew the trucks in a circle. The soldiers set metal stakes, pitons, into the rock all around the camp. Monitors, Laura thought. They ate again and the sun fell, an eerie desert sunset that lit the horizon with roseate fire. The soldiers gave them each a cotton army blanket and they slept in the truck, on the benches, one foot cuffed to prevent them from sneaking up on a soldier in the dark and tearing him apart with their fingernails.

The heat fled out of the rocks as soon as the sun was gone. It was bitterly cold all night, dry and arctic. In the first light of morning she could hear rocks cracking like gunshots as the sunlight hit.

The soldiers gassed up the trucks from jerry cans of fuel, which was too bad, because it occurred to her for the first time that a jerry can of fuel might be poured over the trucks and set alight, if she could get loose, and if she was strong enough to carry one, and if she had a match.

They had more gruel, with lentils in it this time. Then they were off again, the usual thirty miles an hour, jouncing hard, bruised and sucking dust from the two trucks ahead.