Sentimental Journey (3 page)

“These bloody gauges are unreadable.” Skip moved the JU forward. He looked at the short strip of road ahead, the only level spot before the road humped up and down the dunes too deeply for a takeoff. He didn’t have time to think. He just powered up and went for it.

“Goddammit, Inskip!” Red was leaning out the window. “Shitfire and hell! There’s Cassidy! He’s running just behind us!” He pulled his head back inside and glared at Skip. “Look for yourself!”

The engine noise was so loud Skip could barely hear him.

“Look, Inskip! It’s Cassidy!” Red turned back. “Run, Colonel! Run!”

“If I stop now, we won’t make it!” Skip saw Red turn. His gaze flicked to the gauges, then up at the road ahead. He was a pilot. He could see the short length of level road.

Swearing, Red unbuckled, crawled out of his seat, and slid down into the belly of the plane.

A second later Skip heard the belly door drop open and a blast of air hit the back of his head.

J.R
. jumped the fence,
picked up an MP40, and fired. He had seen
Walker
hanging out the cockpit of the bomber, shouting, but he kept firing until there was nothing to fire at. Inskip had to be behind the controls of that plane.

Damn . . . He was late. Those two should have left already.

J.R. spun around. Smoke and fire were everywhere. He turned eastward, weapon poised and ready. But there were no enemy troops, just the British Desert Rats who were hanging on to their seats, guns firing as they sped away and disappeared over the dunes as if they had been a mirage.

He turned again.

No one was coming at him. Hell, he might just make it. He looked back. The bomber was moving down the blacktop road, its Jumo engines roaring to life. J.R. took off for the road.

Running . . . running . . . running.

He was close, then closer.

He pumped his arms and legs.

“Run, Colonel! Run!”
Walker
was hanging out the plane door. He gripped the side of the plane and extended his hand.

He was still a few feet away.

Faster! Faster! Faster! I can make it! I can!

Bullets suddenly ate the ground behind him.

Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

The bullets sounded like popcorn. Firecrackers. Cap guns. They never sounded real. They never sounded like they could kill you.

PART TWO

RABAT
,
MOROCCO

1941

“I WONDER WHAT’S BECOME OF SALLY”

Someone was following her. She’d been listening to those footsteps for a while, a cadence that was resolute and determined—the way men walked. Along the restless edges of the market district, the streets were a terrain of silent sandals, soft-soled babouches and dusty bare feet. His hard leather boots sounded heavy and bellicose.

To test him, she shifted left.

He shifted left.

She sped up, so did he.

She passed a vendor’s booth where the air was filled with the acrid scent of tannin. A leather seller with newly dyed goods from
Fez
.

She stopped suddenly, turned back as if something had caught her eye.

His footsteps stopped, too, a silent echo of her motion that was a mere second off. She turned and stepped out of the cool morning shadows of the buildings along the Rue Souika. She forced herself to walk casually while still weaving in and out of the growing crowd.

Under the shadow of a mosque, a wall fountain at the Attarine spilled into a copper basin that made a deep tonal sound like water spilling into a sea cave. About a hundred feet away the newer dirt street changed to old flat stone paving, and once there, she moved between people, walking faster than anyone around her, moving farther into the center of the crowd.

The moment the man stepped from the dirt street to the stone paving, she heard him. His feet slipped; the sound was gritty, a scraping, chalkboard noise, the kind you felt in the back of your teeth.

She couldn’t seem to shake him. She sped up, but from behind her came the sharp, angry voices of those he shoved aside. Her fear grew cold and chilly, a live thing. It did more than scare her silly. It did more than send eerie sensations down her arms and spine. Fear made her suddenly aware that she had done a stupid thing.

Fool . . . fool . . . fool . . . You weren’t free until the plane was in the air. Until the boat was on the sea. Until the train crossed the border. You weren’t home until you walked through the door.

She did not look back. It would do no good. At the corner she turned onto a narrow street. Slatted awnings hung protectively over the fruit-and-vegetable sellers and cast shade down on her head. With each breath she took she could smell the ripe casaba melons displayed on wooden tables made of old crates. It was like running through a sweet, invisible fog.

The crowd moved in the same direction, toward an open area where the harsh tropical sun once again beat down from overhead. Within moments she was hot and sweaty and running past the fragrant strawberry trees, into the zenana of the henna souk: the women’s domain, where they chattered like desert larks. Here, antimony sulfide from eye kohl filled the hot, dry air, along with the stench of ghassoul from bath soap made of clay.

From nearby came the nasal voice of a woman singing a song about a lost nightingale. A goat brayed. She wanted to cry out for help herself. But the women here were worse than the men. No one in the women’s souk would help the foolish American who was not wearing the anonymity of a haik.

Because she was finally going home, because the papers she carried would finally give her freedom, she wore a smart felt hat over her black hair, a hat she hadn’t worn in months. A frivolous thing, wearing the hat, wearing her hair down. Just that morning she had finger-waved it, then rolled it under into a pageboy, a style that brushed her shoulders and made her feel feminine in a place where femininity was hidden away as if it were shameful to be a woman.

Her arrogant, self-important intention to prove a point for all of womankind seemed inconsequential to her now. Grandstanding for the female sex in a land where life had stayed the same for thousands of years? Kathryn Kincaid: some modern Joan of Arc, an icon to Middle Eastern womanhood, facing danger for the sake of an ideal in a place and time where only avarice or power changed the ways of men, and no amount of money changed anything for women.

She could disappear. Women often did. How utterly ironic that on the day she was to leave, she had forgotten the first thing she’d learned when she came here almost two years before. She could hear her friend Susan saying, “Kitty, you’re brain wise and street stupid.”

She kept moving, trying to hide from the man as she ran down one narrow street after another. Blood began to pound loudly in her ears; it made a hollow, beating sound that reminded her she was very much alive, but that soon she might not be.

The last remaining odors in the air were suddenly, inexplicably gone. It was as if that blazing sun overhead had just up and melted them away, leaving nothing behind but the scent of the chase.

She turned right and ran between two stone buildings, ran like crazy into another square. A wagon was coming through. She ducked down, grabbed hold of the side of the wagon and used it for cover. She reached up and unpinned her hat. She tossed it under the cart wheels, then jerked the thin, ivory chiffon scarf from her neck and wrapped it around and around her hair, frantically tucking in the ends as she moved alongside the wagon.

The market voices grew distant. The wagon picked up speed. She needed to half run to keep up.

A moment later the shadow of an alleyway cooled the right side of her face. She listened for a second, then quickly turned away from the wagon, still bent down as she ran down the alley, past a group of young boys playing a game of ball.

Their shouts and laughter were all around her. She heard the dull sounds of the ball bouncing against the sandstone walls, before it sped past her, rolling, rolling over the constant layer of sand that seemed to coat everything in this exotic land.

She stumbled. Her hand hit the warm stone bricks of the alley wall.

She couldn’t hear the man’s boots anymore.

Somewhere ahead of her dogs were barking, sharp, distant, but growing louder as she ran. Another animal brayed; for one instant it sounded like a scream.

She smelled lamb roasting over a fire pit. She knew the food sellers were on the western edge of Rue des Souks, where the city wall ran along one side. The booths were open there and staggered in a square surrounded by streets that were too wide to fill with people and were patrolled by the
Vichy
police.

And the police would not ignore her scream.

His soles clapped rapidly on the stone.

From behind her the children in the alley shouted again. Not at her this time, but at the man chasing her.

She stayed to the right side, dragging her hand along the sandy stones of the wall so she would not stumble again. The dry desert wind kept coming at her and was making a set of brass tent bells ring like wind chimes. A sweet sound, as if safety were right there.

He was running now, too. Closer.

Oh, God . . .

Before her was nothing but a blur. Tears of fear swelled in her eyes, spilled onto her cheeks, and streamed back into her hair. She felt them drip down behind her ears. She heard him gasp for breath. The sound was so close to her she wasn’t sure if it was the dry desert wind or his breath that brushed her ear. She tightened her fists and pumped her arms, picking up speed and running faster than she’d ever run in her life.

The dogs barked louder. Louder. Louder.

She stumbled again and fell down. For just a moment she was confused. Her sense of direction was gone, but she got up, afraid to stop running. But now she didn’t know if she was running away from him or toward him.

Ahead of her she heard the shift of heavy transmission gears. An armored car? A truck? She ran toward it.

Sunshine, sudden, hot, and intense, hit her face. She was outside the alley, in the open and running over dust and hard-packed dirt.

Someone called out,
“Vite, vite, I’Americaine. Depeche!”

She heard the truck suddenly bearing down on her. She heard the engine noise and the rattle of its axles as it bounced over the pocked dirt streets.

She couldn’t run any faster.

Beside her came the squealing scream of truck brakes. Inches away.

She stopped, afraid of running into its path.

Dust flew everywhere, into her nose, into her mouth. She stood in a cloud of it and waited for the impact, her eyes tightly shut . . . so ludicrous.

She would die on the day she was free.

Time stopped the way she’d always heard it did at moments like this.

She continued to stand there, waiting, shaking, unable to move, her chest burning for a real breath. Against her legs she could feel the undulating heat from the truck engine.