Gorgeous East (27 page)

“If I don’t make it . . . ,” Iian whispered now.

“Don’t worry. I won’t either.”

“You’re a slippery bastard, you’ll make it.”

“Thanks.”

“You’ll find m’ dad, right? You’ll tell him—”

“I will,” Smith said, cutting him off. But he wouldn’t.

The colonel tossed aside his cigarette. His pale, haunted face gleamed with sweat like a block of ice in the sun.

“
Voilà un joli petit coup de main
”—a nice little battle—“before the end. Fire at my signal.”

“Wha’ about our guys?” Iian gestured.

“I place their souls in the hands of the Almighty.” Colonel de Noyer brought the stumpy FAMAS to his shoulder and began to fire in long, ropy automatic bursts.

“Poor miserable fucks!” Smith murmured, but he didn’t like Grabner or Pelletier at all and was really thinking only about himself. He leveled his own weapon and fired until his clip ran dry. Iian fired, tears streaming down his cheeks. Velázquez fired. The wounded Greeks huddled together down behind the sandbags, whimpering for mercy like dogs and calling on the Virgin. Enemy rounds found them there as they cowered and they died like that. Bullets splashed into the walls of the latrine, into the bloody dirt. Velázquez collapsed, without so much as a grunt—though no visible entry wound could be seen—inscrutable in death as he had been in life, the sound of the Chinese chimes perhaps ringing his entry into the long, vaulted corridors of death. A moment later a round slammed into Iian’s forehead, which exploded like a red flower blossoming and he dropped, arms flailing; he too was dead.

Smith tossed down his own empty FAMAS and grabbed the kid’s rifle from the dirt and kept firing. He didn’t spare a moment’s remorse for his dead
copain
because he knew they would drink together soon again in hell. But, impossibly, he wasn’t hit. The bullets just seemed to break away from him for reasons that had everything to do with wind shear and trajectory and nothing with the will of God—or maybe this was wrong, maybe wind shear and trajectory were the will of God made manifest. Or maybe God just loves a good tenor. Then Smith’s ammunition ran dry. He and the colonel, invisible for the moment, stood safely enveloped in a billowing cloud of dust and propellant gas. They were now the last survivors of the garrison.

“You breathe still,
mon brave
Milquetoast.” Phillipe nodded in his direction.

“I guess I’m hard to kill,” Smith said, trying not to sound afraid.

“A good quality in a soldier.”

“Where are they?”

“Patience. They’re coming.”

Vague shapes began to emerge, groping through the dusty atmosphere. The colonel seized an assault rifle and pulled the trigger to an empty clicking sound. Nothing left. Not a single round.

“
Merde, c’est fini.
” He heaved his spent FAMAS in the general direction of the enemy and turned to Smith with his final command. Not the expected, fix bayonets! Rather, casually: “Why don’t you sing something, Milquetoast.”

“You mean ‘Le Boudin’?” Smith said, surprised—then, he wasn’t. This is why he’d been recruited into the Legion in the first place. For this last moment, for a final song.

“No.” The colonel shuddered. “Not that.”

“O.K.,” Smith said. “What about ‘Sous le Soleil Brûlant d’Afrique’? Or ‘Eugénie’?” Two more venerable Legion standards.

The colonel shook his head. “I don’t want to die with the sound of that military claptrap in my ears. You’ll be the first to hear the news—I now officially resign my commission in the Legion with the intention of abandoning the craft of war altogether and returning to my wife in France. Something I should have done many years ago.” He smiled distantly. “What a fine woman she is, my Louise! So sweet and so clever! And so beautiful, let me tell you. I thought absence would keep our love fresh. I am a fool. The truth is simpler, absence is just absence. All those hours we could have spent together. All the children we never had.”

Smith kept his eyes on the armed cloud, boiling, about to burst, just ahead.

“So what do you want me to sing?”

“Why not something from the American musical stage.” The colonel put his hands in his pockets and slouched elegantly against the blood-spattered wall of the latrine. “Something perhaps a bit melancholy as befits the occasion of our death. This is your final performance, Milquetoast. Put the ego aside. Find some
duende
, disappear into the song.”

“O.K.,” Smith said. “
Duende
.” He took a slug of water from his canteen, rinsed the taste of grit and blood around his mouth, and spat it out again. The Marabouts inched forward through the cordite haze, pale dust settling on their robes, on the breech of their cheap Indonesian rifles. Smith switched his internal playlist to shuffle and sang out in a clear, bright voice the first thing that came to him.

“There may be trouble ahead, but while there’s moonlight and music and love and romance, let’s face the music and dance . . .

“Before the fiddlers have fled, before they ask us to pay the bill, and while we still have the chance, let’s face the music and dance . . .”

And through the force of his imagination, disappearing into the song, he was back in summer stock years ago doing an Irving Berlin tribute at the Morris Amphitheater in the heat of an August night in Storrs, singing his heart out, a talented fresh-faced kid full of ambition and the optimism of youth, singing as moths fluttered to their deaths against the bright globes of the footlights, his voice ringing out perfectly pitched and full of emotion, the best damn tenor they’d ever heard way out there in the wilds of Connecticut, the best they would ever hear.

8

THE LOST PATROL

1.

S
ous-lieutenant Evariste Pinard of the Foreign Legion, commanding the relief column from Dahkla, rode shotgun in the lead truck. He caught a close-up of the severed head through the lenses of his high-powered Épervier
jumelles
and a sweet panic gripped his guts: Morning sun, rising from behind the distant peaks of the Guelta Mountains, suddenly illuminated the vacant eye sockets; they blazed for a moment with a kind of supernatural fire. Fifteen years in the Legion band had taught Pinard much about the oboe (how to play it while marching the crawl, how to shave a good reed, how to blow the lowest low notes without excess vibrato); his duties in dingy Legion recruiting offices across Metropolitan France had taught him much about the cardboard despair of drunken young men, and a hardscrabble childhood had taught him much about violence and loneliness. But nothing had prepared him exactly for this. Death. Well, here it was!

By damping the filter of his Éperviers against the glare, Pinard was able to make out two more heads, these impaled on sharp bits of rubbish behind the smashed gates deep inside the exercise yard.

“
Tabarnak ostie!
” he swore. “
C’est un vrai bordel!
”

The driver, a strong-smelling, bass-voiced Mongolian corporal named Hehu Keh, glanced over at Pinard apprehensively from behind the wheel.

“
Mais, t’as vu quelque chose, le chef?
” he said in French flattened by the accent of Ulan Bator. Their convoy consisted of six French army-surplus Peugeot P4 LVRAs, lightly armored and painted UN blue, an excellent target for anyone who wanted to shoot at them. Caporal Keh was on loan from the 2e REP, the Foreign Legion’s lone parachute regiment, based out of Calvi, in Corsica. He’d had a soft life on that rocky island, a barmaid girlfriend, not too bad-looking, Sundays at the beach. Now this bastard of a desert, the smell of massacre in the air.

“
Arrêtez le camion!
” Sous-lieutenant Pinard ordered. The Mongolian stomped the brakes with such force, Pinard went flying against the dash. “
Putain de merde, taboire!
” he swore. “
Keh, t’es un crétin d’un wanker!
” He dropped the binoculars and grabbed his walkie-talkie. “
Attention les camions! Arrêtez!
” he called urgently. “
Arrêtez immédiatement!
”

When nobody else stopped—the multilingual UN troops under Pinard’s command didn’t understand French, had only a smattering of Dutch in common, and probably had their walkies tuned to the wrong frequency anyway—Pinard stuck himself half out the window and began to wave his arms.

At this signal, the second Peugeot (containing two British Pakistanis, a Latvian medic, a Catalan, a Hungarian Legionnaire named Stefan Szbeszdogy, all-weather equipment, two crates of RCIR reheatable meals, and eighteen hundred liters of water) veered wildly into the dunes. The third and fourth trucks, packed with arms and ammunition, and the remainder of the fifteen-man force (a Brazilian explosives expert, two Turkish naval ensigns, and five diminutive Dyak militiamen from Borneo, their tea-colored skin covered with intricate tattoos), stampeded after the second like a couple of scrapies-maddened cows. And it was only with much swearing over the walkie in several languages and the use of more frantic arm-waving that Sous-lieutenant Pinard managed to get this rolling Babel under control again.

The convoy regrouped, engines idling, behind the cover of a sheltering dune two clicks to the southeast of the block house. The Peugeots drew into a circle like covered wagons huddled against Indian attack and the men dismounted and assembled in the lee of the dune as Pinard crawled to the top. Visibility is excellent in the desert. Rock formations six or seven kilometers off can seem just a few hundred meters away. The half-destroyed walls of Blockhouse 9 could be seen clearly from here, heat-haze dancing above the ragged battlements. Shattered sandbag redoubts showed the effect of shoulder-fired rockets. The watchtower was gone, the gates blown apart.

Pinard felt a kind of déjà vu as he examined the ruined old fort through his binoculars. He’d seen dim, black-and-white photographs of similar outposts in the campaign histories he’d been forced to study during his officer training at Saint-Cyr. Too many Legion grunts had died building and defending Block house 9 and many others like it during the brutal Moroccan campaigns of a century ago. In those days it was the Legion, vastly outnumbered, holding a chain of forts strung across the Sahara against the wild surge of the desert tribes. All that was gone, ancient history; now the Legion had returned to Africa in the name of peace. And yet the horrors of bygone wars—full of massacres, torture, merciless reprisals, and counterreprisals—still haunted their regimental subconscious like a battalion of ghosts.

Pinard slid back down the dune. Marabout insurgent fighters favored hit-and-run tactics, usually at night, and there was a good chance they’d find the fort abandoned. But the sneaky cunts just might be dug in behind the rocket-blasted walls.

“Many dead inside, maybe some wounded,” he announced, waving in the direction of the block house. “So we must—” He stopped himself. The blank look on the faces of his subordinates corresponded with their lack of French. His hold over them was slim: only the sous-lieutenant’s single bar, gold on black and newly issued, pinned to his epaulets.

The sun continued to climb, searing the plain. The simoom blew from the south as if from the wide-open vents of a blast furnace. Pinard stood there for a long minute, panting—even his tongue was sweating. In such heat it was not possible to think. Then he turned to Legionnaire Szbeszdogy. The Hungarian, also detached from the Musique Principale by Colonel de Noyer, played the French horn.

“
Stefan, on a besoin des volontaires. Dites en hollandais.
”

“
Oui, le chef.
”

Szbeszdogy spoke Hungarian and Spanish and Dutch; but Dutch only if he thought it through in Hungarian first, translated into Spanish in his head, then translated from Spanish into Dutch. (He’d once lived with a Spanish student nurse for six raucous months in Amsterdam; he’d learned his Spanish from her and his Dutch from the hash bars of the Leidseplein, was good with drug lingo and sex talk and bad at everything else.) The orders emerged slowly, half Dutch, half sign language: They would uncrate the FAMAS 5.56 rifles and the big Browning Douze-Septs. They would establish a defensive perimeter. A party of volunteers would advance on the fort.