Gorgeous East (29 page)

Over the years of his career as a peacetime Legionnaire, Pinard had participated in many military exercises all over France. He had scaled rocky outcroppings in Brittany via knotted ropes without using his feet; orienteered his way shoeless and without food or compass through chestnut forests populated with truffle-snuffling pigs in the Dordogne. From the vantage of various sun-warmed mountaintops in Provence, he had surveyed placid vine-covered slopes for the best potential placement of imaginary snipers’ nests. Once he had infiltrated a nudist’s colony near Cap d’Antibes, where the crude and brutal images tattooed across much of his flesh somehow made him feel the most naked of all.

None of these experiences mattered to him now, at dusk, overlooking the empty expanse of the Sebhket Zemmur, which he knew would be his tomb.

4.

N
ight came on quickly, deep black and filled with pitiless stars. A nameless wind whispered down from the Gueltas, their sharp peaks black silhouettes against a blacker sky. The blackness seemed absolute, the silence complete. In the hours after dark, the temperature dropped precipitously, reaching a nadir nearly sixty degrees less than the high at midday. The stranded Legionnaires, shivering, made a fire of paper scraps and debris and huddled around it to warm their freezing hands.

“
Pourquoi les abeilles?
” Sous-Lieutenant Pinard wondered aloud. “What’s the meaning of bees? There are no bees out here in the desert.”

“That’s exactly why,” the Mongolian said. “Because there are no bees. Because the Marabouts always turn up where you don’t expect them. That and the obvious, of course.”

“Which is?”

“Bees.” Caporal Keh grinned. “They sting you know.”

Pinard considered this bit of logic. The Mongolian wasn’t an idiot.

“I’ve been over every centimeter,” Pinard said after a moment. “And I only count twenty-one.”

They’d assembled the severed heads into a pile, a grisly pyramid of gaping mouths, congealed blood.

“You?”

“Didn’t count them,” the Mongolian said. “But looking like they do, they might be anyone.”

“There were twenty-three men in this garrison, including the colonel,” Pinard continued. “If my count is correct that means two heads missing.”

“Maybe two hostages,” the Mongolian suggested.

“Can you imagine being a prisoner of those ghouls?”

This question hung between them, unanswered. Saharoui Polisario Front Fighters—no match for the Marabouts in sheer perverse bloodthirstiness—during their generations-long war with Morocco had kept a couple hundred Moroccan prisoners locked in tight wooden cages for more than twenty years. A few of those miserable wretches had managed to survive, though their limbs, atrophied from disuse, blackened and fell off.

“They probably took the colonel alive,” the Mongolian said. “That’s what I would do.”

“Him and someone else,” Pinard agreed. “But who?”

“I was an astronomer once.” Szbeszdogy’s voice seemed to come out of nowhere. He looked up, turning his gaze away from the blue heart of the flames. It was the first time he’d spoken since his embarrassing histrionics that afternoon. “I mean at the university at Dunáujváros, in Hungary. I never took my degree, but I still follow the science as a hobby.”

“Your problem, Szbeszdogy, is you talk too much,” the Mongolian joked.

“I make a point of fixing the stars in my mind wherever I happen to be”—Szbeszdogy waved a hand toward the black sky—“I know what the stars look like in Dahkla, I know what they look like here. By comparing the two pictures in my head, maybe I could navigate—”

“
Putain de merde!
” Keh cut him off, snorting. “What have I got here? A fucking flutist and a stargazer!”

“The flute is an inferior instrument!” Pinard said. “Mine is the noble oboe.”

“And you, Mongolian shit!” Szbeszdogy retorted. “You’re some kind of hero?”

“I’m a soldier, me,” Keh said. “Ten years in the Mongolian People’s Army before this band of fucking incompetents. Fucking Legion sketch! At least I know when to die and when to sleep.” He rolled over and was asleep in an instant, his snores rattling off the walls of the old fort.

“How does he do that?” Pinard said, envy in his voice.

“A clear conscience,” Szbeszdogy said. “The man’s a saint.”

Now, the cold, west-blowing night wind, the nourmoom, gusted through the gate, crackling the embers of the dying fire. The two men sat in silence for a while, wrapped in their own thoughts.

“This is May twenty-eighth,” Szbeszdogy said at last.

“So?”

“At about midnight tonight there will be a lunar eclipse that should be clearly visible from this latitude. The moon will rise full and, given current atmospheric conditions, probably red as if stained with blood—appropriate, I would say, considering our circumstances. More than enough light to start our way east, the shortest route to the Berm. From there, we might make Laayoune. There are bars in Laayoune. Hotels, a soccer stadium. Maybe we’ll find a Moroccan patrol.”

“Or the Moroccans will find us,” Pinard said grimly. Then: “Yes—why not? What else is there? We just might make it.”

Though it was impossible. A death march over burning sands. And what if they found some Moroccans? The Moroccans still hated the Legion for the reprisals of the desert wars a hundred years ago—those people never forget!—and were just as likely to shoot them as anyone else.

5.

T
he moon rose as Legionnaire Szbeszdogy had predicted, fat and round and red, hovering like a rotten
pamplemousse
over the southwest wall. The Mongolian slept on.

By the sinister light of this red moon, which was like the light of a blaze far away, like the faint reflection of burning, firebombed cities, Sous-lieutenant Pinard and the Hungarian moved around the fort gathering anything that might be of use—canteens, a rucksack, an empty five-gallon jug, and, unexpectedly, the regimental colors of the 1e RE, folded neatly in a clear plastic case, somehow overlooked in the rampage. Its wide bands covered with gold laurel wreaths and the names of forgotten battles spoke of campaigns in far-flung, exotic corners of the world—some marking French colonialism’s first vigorous wave (Mogador, Constantine, Madagascar); others (Dien Bien Phu, Algiers) the inexorably receding tide.

Pinard siphoned rusty water from the tank above the regimental shower, filling six canteens and the plastic jug, which he then fitted into the rucksack on Szbeszdogy’s back, along with a single half-eaten package of protein biscuits—their only rations.

And he found, leaning in a corner, casually left behind, one of the Marabouts’ shoulder-fired rocket launchers, a Russian-made 89mm Oblomov, one of the thousands obtained by the insurgents from the shadowy underworld of international arms traders. The Marabout bee symbol had been scratched into the wooden stock; one high-powered rocket shell, half-propellant, half-explosive charge, sausage-shaped like the boudin of the Legion anthem—had already been loaded into the chamber. A second remained clipped upright in the loading canister, like a tube of lipstick on display at the makeup counter at Au Printemps in Paris.

“
Voilà, ma belle.
” Pinard smiled to himself, examining the weapon. “Two chances more than we had ten minutes ago.”

Gear assembled, he woke Caporal Keh with a well-placed kick.

“Enjoy your nap, Keh?” The Mongolian stumbled to his feet, swearing, and Pinard shoved the rocket launcher into his hands. “Know how to use one of these?”

Keh hefted the weapon to his shoulder, adjusting the sight, squinting through it with his hooded eyes. Then he tossed it into the air and caught it again with one hand like a cowboy, released the canvas webbing with a slick snapping sound, and strapped it across his back.

“
Oui, le chef.
” He grinned. “We used these back in the MPA. A very nice weapon.”

Then, Pinard turned to the pile of heads, stacked like so much rotten produce in the red shadows of the yard.

“Let’s do this like soldiers,” he called. “
Garde-à-vous!
”

Szbeszdogy and Keh drew themselves to attention sharply.

“
Legionnaires, répétez avec moi—Code d’Honneur du Legion!
”

And they said together: “A Legion mission is sacred. As a soldier in the Legion, I will carry out my duty to the end, to the last drop of blood. I will under all circumstances act without passion and without hate. I will never abandon my dead and wounded. I will never surrender my arms!
Legio Patria Nostra
—the Legion Is My Country!”

“
Camarades!
” Sous-Lieutenant Pinard called, addressing the pile of heads. “We will return for you. We will know your names!”

But the heads, tongueless, earless and yet distracted by the restless whisper of the unknown wind, did not answer back.

“
En avant! Marche!
”

“Where are we going,
le chef
?” Keh said as they marched single file out the main gate.

“To engage the enemy,” Pinard said. “Where else?”

At this, the men laughed.

“Let’s have a song, Keh!” Szbeszdogy called. And the Mongolian, the star of his regimental chorale—he possessed one of the deepest bass voices in the entire Legion—obliged.

“
Dans le ciel brille les étoiles
. . . ,” he croaked, “
. . . adieu mon pays, jamais je ne t’oublierai!
”

“
En Afrique, malgré le vent, la pluie . . .
,” Szbeszdogy joined in the refrain with his warbly alto. In Africa, beneath these brilliant stars, despite the wind and the rain, we march . . .

And soon, all three men were singing, a strangely jolly sound echoing against the dunes.

6.

T
hey marched on for three days, mostly at night, catching a little fitful sleep during the infernal hours, with the sun blazing down from the center of the sky; allowing themselves no more than two swallows of water every eight hours, at dawn, at noon, at midnight. But navigating by the stars is not a matter of precision: In the great era of sail, using similar means, entire flotillas found themselves wrecked upon well-charted rocks in moonlight by following unlucky stars to the wrong ends. Thus, late-afternoon day three found Sous-lieutenant Pinard, Caporal Hehu Keh, and Legionnaire Szbeszdogy utterly lost and nowhere near the Moroccan Berm.

The steep wall of sand that marked the Berm’s east-facing defense rose up nearly sixty feet, easily visible for twenty-five kilometers in any direction; Sous-lieutenant Pinard’s excellent Épervier binoculars extended this visibility by another ten or fifteen kilometers. But perched on Keh’s shoulders atop the tallest dune they could find, he scanned the horizon and saw nothing, only more dunes rolling like the waves into an infinite ocean of sand.

Dusk coming on now, a deep, amber light leaning over the blistered landscape; night and cold seeping into it like a dark mist from the other side of the world.

“
Mauvaise nouvelles
,” Pinard said, clambering down, his lips so cracked, his mouth so dry and swollen he could hardly speak above a whisper. “I’m afraid we’re lost.”

“Ridiculous,” the Mongolian said. “The Legion doesn’t get lost in the desert. Right, Szbeszdogy?”

Szbeszdogy made an exhausted gesture. “I did my best,” he managed weakly. “The stars don’t always comply . . .” His voice trailed off. He couldn’t continue.

“You’re an idiot,” the Mongolian said. “That much is clear.” Then, turning to Pinard, “What now?”

Pinard shrugged. “We keep going, that’s all.”

They paused here at the top of the dune in the dying light to share their evening meal: two sips of foul-tasting water each, and a single protein cracker, divided three ways.

“And when the water’s finished?” Szbeszdogy hissed.

“That’s easy,” the Mongolian said. “We drink piss. And when the piss is gone, blood. When that’s gone—” He shrugged.

“We’ll be dead before then,” Szbeszdogy said weakly. But he was stating the obvious.

They lay back in the rapidly cooling sand as the sun faded out and the stars rose. Pinard raised his Éperviers to the sky; Alderbaran hung red and low above the horizon. Sirius, the Pole Star of the ancient Egyptians, the celestial beacon that glittered enticingly—so the pharaohs once believed—above the Eternal Field of Reeds, shone faintly blue with little flecks of yellow in the corona like sparks from a tin windup toy. They dozed as the nourmoom blew over them gently—only to awake, startled and nearly frozen, two hours after midnight.

“
Tabarnak ostie!
” Pinard swore, staring into the blackness.

They had lost hours of good marching time—it wasn’t possible to make much progress during the full heat of the day—and now they picked themselves up, cursing, and stumbled over the lip of the dune and onward, in an easterly direction, Szbeszdogy plotting a shaky course, using thumb and forefinger like a sextant, toward what stars he knew looked down on the window of his barracks room in the mission compound at Dahkla. They passed down a ravine cut like a gash between the dunes, the bed of an ancient river. Their Rangers made crunching noises on the ground, surfaced here with a thin crust of salt and vaguely phosphorescent.

Shortly before 4:00 A.M. Caporal Keh stopped and cocked an ear to the wind.

“Do you hear something?” he whispered.

“Nothing,” Pinard said. Or only the ceaseless hush of blood though his veins.

“There it is!” Szbeszdogy said brightly, eyes mad. “I hear it!”

“What?”

“An engine, I think. And voices!”

“
Non, les mecs
,” Pinard said, shaking his head. “You’re both hallucinating. I don’t hear a thing.”

“This way!” the Mongolian shouted, and he cut toward the south and jumped the ravine and disappeared over the hump of the nearest dune.

“Hey! Stop!” Pinard shouted. “
Arrêtez!
”

But the Mongolian didn’t stop. Szbeszdogy dashed after him and Pinard followed, flailing over rocks and dunes, scrambling up the inclines and rolling down the opposite side, until they caught up with Caporal Keh, who now lay on the ground, peering over the edge of a stony elevation into a wide depression below, a kind of circular salt pan perhaps a kilometer two or around. A narrow track, silver in the moonlight, led into the
guelb
; another led out of it toward the north. Down there, not fifty meters distant, sat two of the four Peugeot P4 LVRAs from Pinard’s own relief column. One of them was in trouble, its hood raised. Marabout fighters, blue-robed and veiled, swarmed over the engine of this stalled vehicle, as if trying to conjure from its mechanical innards the magical spirits of internal combustion that made it run. The second truck, idling to one side, shone its headlights on this confusing work. More blue-robed veiled men and several women crouched or slept on the ground around the second truck. They had clearly been waiting a long time.