The Crisis (40 page)

Today they'd hit six hundred meters. Of course the depth of the upper lens was only a guess. It could happen tomorrow, or this morning. She stood by the rig, blotting sweat and sunblock off her forehead.

“We're ready, if it happens,” Fletcher said behind her.

She turned, fingering the claddagh. He was smelly, hard hat shoved back, cheek smeared with mud. He looked absolutely cunning and she wanted to take him in her arms there and then.

But she didn't. A woman in a blond ponytail was greasing threads on the next section of pipe. So she just murmured, “When it does, let's take a shower together. I'll take you to the Cosmopolite. It's on the Champs Nationale, the best hotel in Ashaara City.”

She got a grin, but he said nothing, neither yes nor that he couldn't, or that the Navy would probably send him somewhere else; just looked away.
A blade twisted in her stomach. Don't do this to me, she thought. Not today.

“Do what?” he said, gaze back on her.

She must have spoken aloud. “Nothing,” she said, feeling herself flush. Get a grip, O'Shea. You're not sixteen anymore. She rubbed at a burning where sunblock had run into her eyes. “I'm going to lie down in my tent. Call me if anything happens.”

 

THEY didn't hit anything that day, though, and she sat up late trying to write a letter to her mother. They hadn't had e-mail contact for weeks, and her mother would be worried. Efrain had said that if she posted a letter with the fleet post office system, it'd get to Ireland eventually. He'd put his return address on it, so it'd go free. But everything she wrote sounded trivial.

She woke to the blond-ponytail trooper shaking her. “Water” was all she said.

All she needed to say. Gráinne squirmed out of her sleeping bag—it got cool in the evenings—and shook out her boots, shook out her smelly bush trousers, which she'd meant to wash but hadn't yet. She'd been stung by a scorpion in the Sudan, and ever after had inspected every item of clothing before putting it on. Her heart was beating faster than usual.

When she ducked out dawn was breaking. They were all standing around the rig. When she looked down the floodlights gleamed on a smooth jet of clear fluid, leaping from the drill collar to weep down into the sand. The dirt around it was dark with moisture.

She examined their faces as they handed her a plastic cup. Her hand shook. She brought the cup to her nose and sniffed, alert for the telltale stink of sulfur dioxide, the bite of dissolved CO
₂
. She didn't smell either. She held it to the floodlights, looking for turbidity or foaming. There was a bit, particulate too, but that could be from the drilling.

She took a sip delicately as a oenophile at a wine tasting. Tasted with the front of her palate, then tongued it back into the corners of her mouth. No salt, her biggest worry. Hints of calcium or magnesium compounds, but they wouldn't make the water undrinkable. In fact, just the opposite.

She'd have to test it, of course. But it tasted good. Rainwater from thirty thousand years ago, held down there in trust all this time.

“You have to keep drilling,” she told them.

“Isn't it good? Tastes fine to me,” Fletcher said, frowning. “All we need to do's the sanitary seal.”

“It's excellent water. But I need data. How thick this sandstone is. How thick the aquifer is. So we can . . . so I know if it can support additional
wells.” She let herself smile, let excitement show. “It's wonderful water. You've done a fantastic job.”

Efrain's hand was on her shoulder. “You led us here, Doc. It's your water more than mine.”

Since everyone else was hugging her, she didn't think it would hurt if she let him kiss her cheek.

 

THE sandstone was soft. The bit went through it much faster than it had the harder strata above. She tested at each string of pipe. They got to seven hundred meters before the lens ended.

There was a lot of water down there. A
lot
of water.

And the artesian seeps she'd mapped told her it ran west, and north, for nearly a hundred miles.

She tucked a little Skoal against her gum and held it while she wrote her report in longhand. There was no Ministry of Interior Resources anymore. No Dr. Isdheeb to report to. She was wary about telling the Americans, too. Fletch she trusted, but Ahearn and those above him she did not. She addressed it to her funders at the Hydrological Programme. They'd know what to do.

She told Efrain she was going to the city overnight; did he want to go? Take that shower at the Cosmopolite? He said he couldn't leave his people. She understood that, and the tone of his voice, too. He'd be moving on to the next job. Building a school. Repairing a road. Their time was over. She allowed herself a short cry on the dirt track down to the coast road, then cleaned her face with a desiccated wet wipe and concentrated on not blowing a tire.

The roadblock was set up on the reverse slope of a gravel ridge. The men had black headwraps over their faces. They were armed, of course. She slammed on the brakes, remembering suddenly, with a cold sweat, how Abdiwali had died.

How could she have driven out alone? Cursing her stupidity, she clutched the wheel as a dark man with a beard tapped on the glass. Politely, or it might have seemed polite, if he hadn't been tapping with the muzzle of a rifle.

She rolled the window down and held out the paper. “This is very important,” she told him, and repeated it in French. “
Tres importante. C'est l'eau
. Water for everybody, for all Ashaara, for many years. Please let me pass. You have to let me pass.”

The paper fluttered to the sand, torn into bits. Too late, as they pulled her out of the Rover, she realized she spoke no language they would recognize.

T
HEY spend the night in an abandoned bakery filled with wrecked machinery. Every scrap of copper's been looted and the walls daubed with intertwined clan symbols, ADA slogans, obscenities from the Assad forces. Hasheer throws out several squatter families and posts guards before he waves Ghedi's driver in. And even then, has armed men running alongside, shielding him.

There are still those who say Hasheer's not loyal. But Ghedi's never seen any evidence of it.

This morning they eat lamb and rice from the common dish, drinking chai so thick with powdered milk and sugar it's almost pudding. Ghedi chews painfully, trying not to tear the roughly stitched flesh where the bullet tore apart his gums. Each man scoops and eats, wiping his lips after each rolled ball, left hand swathed in his robe or tucked under his haunch. Their weapons lie to hand. A buzzing echoes in the hot air. When he looks up Ghedi sees hornets' nests. The insects drift toward bullet holes in the metal roofing, clamber clumsily through them, then disappear on their errands.

The men around him are silent with anger. They lost many at Uri'yah, but were victorious. Juulheed's charge broke the enemy. They not only captured hundreds of prisoners, they gained hundreds of recruits among the soldiers. The captured officers, though, he did not welcome. He shot General Michel and all his staff, officers from the old army. Some begged for mercy, saying they sympathized with the Waleeli, or had sent information to Ikrane before the battle. These too he shot. Who can trust traitors not to turn again?

He says, “I'll go alone. As the sheekh asks.”

“They stopped us after the victory. Why?”

They speculate quietly. Finally his deputy voices what's on all their minds. “What's to prevent them killing you?”

Juulheed may have a point. Ghedi rolls another bite and chews thoughtfully. “You think they'd kill me?”

“They founded the Waleeli, but you lead the great army. Can they let you live?”

Could God have spared him in battle, to have him die at the hands of assassins? It seems unlikely. Could his old teacher turn against him? Someone ordered him to stop fighting, on the verge of triumph. What can that be but treachery?

He holds out his cup for more chai as his bodyguards watch each other. He flicks glances at Hasheer, at the mumbling Juulheed. At Ini Fiammetta, who stopped his bleeding and sewed his mouth, a scarred intense nomad who despite his Italian name is Issa, who seems to carry in his throat a coiled snake he's forever swallowing.

“God will prevent them.” Ghedi swallows the last of the tepid chai and rises, brushing off his camouflage trousers. American, taken from one of the officers he shot. A light fabric with many pockets. He likes them better than any other he's ever worn.

“God carries us only so far,” Hasheer murmurs. “Then we must act for ourselves.”

The others ignore him, too pointedly. Ghedi slaps his shoulder, then hugs him. He looks at his new watch, also a battlefield prize. He checks his AK and slings it. The others get up.

“We'll find out what is in their minds,” he says. “And I will not go alone. Come, then. We will meet with the sheekh.”

 

THROUGH the alleys and cobbled streets of the Old City, one technical a block ahead and three more full of his men behind, he smells the difference. In the way shadows fall. How empty clotheslines hang where no woman tends them. The technicals lurch and whine. Dented with fragment scars, shocks and springs broken, they show hard use and the scars of battle. But the guns on their beds are greased and loaded, the breeches wrapped with black plastic against sand. The gunners swing from side to side, searching rooftops and cross streets as they pass. Women duck away, or stare from curtained balconies. The bright hot sky's visible between buildings, and now and then the black cross of a foreign helicopter passes to an echoing drumbeat. Pulled-up cobblestones are piled in barricades, reinforced with wrecked cars, staircases, shattered masonry, cannibalized machinery. He notes the clan markings on the walls, erased and defaced from block to block.

The city's changing, dividing. Families wheel carts piled with bedding. Neighborhood militia stand scowling at intersections. Juulheed calls
greetings, his men wave the black-and-green pennant enthusiastically, but the sentries stand their ground, allowing passage to such a heavily armed column but not welcoming it. They glimpse an American vehicle, antenna bobbing as it jolts over the road. They slow until it passes from sight, turn left, then right again.

At last they pass a black-and-green banner, then another. The faces at the balconies turn friendly. Plastic flowers rain down. People come out, the street grows not thronged exactly, but not empty, either. Here the women wear burkas, though some still favor African cloth with loud patterns. With a screech the technicals halt at the shabby compound Ghedi knows so well.

He finds himself trembling. Remembering how he came here to learn, at the feet of the man who seemed to see more with no eyes than a hundred with perfect vision.

Armed men step forward to object, but Fiammetta and Hasheer ignore them. They jump out and set guards at overwatch points. The few men Sheekh Nassir keeps contemplate the bores of the technicals' machine guns and make no objection. For blocks in every direction boys with cheap radios are climbing roofs, watching for the helicopters. The technicals' crews angle muzzles skyward and arrange feed belts. A vehicle pulls around back, should the foreigners or their hired militia stage a raid.

The Orcharder swings his boots down to plant them on the cracked pavement of the capital. If they hadn't stopped him, he'd be here as a conqueror. The knowledge smolders. Why stop short of victory, when it was so close?

“Want me to come with you?” Juulheed, beside him. Ghedi considers, then tells him, only to the inner court. But he protests. Talking as if to his devils, Juulheed mumbles, “I won't let him go in alone, he won't go in alone.” Ghedi gives up and says he can come.

 

IN the inner court the air tastes more of danger than it did before Uri'yah. Chickens peck at a scorpion in the dust. Two men demand his rifle. They accompany him and Juulheed up the stair.

The old man sits in the darkened room before a bowl of fruit. The smells trigger Ghedi's memory, as if he exists in two times at once. Cinnamon and cumin, peppermint and incense. Nassir Irrir Zumali wears a black robe and a velvet cap like a Jew's. His beard glows against desiccated skin. He sits motionless as Ghedi pauses, surveying those who sit at either hand. The old man works his fingers at his gums.

“Greetings, honored master. Ghedi returns at your summons from our victory over the idolators at Uri'yah.”

“I hear many things of my young son,” the sheekh murmurs. “He is called Tiger of the Desert. Whip of God. Pruner of Dead Branches. Give him one of these mangoes, my brothers. Was he not born where they grew?”

Ghedi bows, though the eyes behind the dark lenses cannot see him. “We are faithful to you and the Holy Word, honored Sheekh.”

The withered fingers beckon in a familiar gesture. Ghedi leans close, closing his eyes as they explore his cheeks, his eye sockets. He winces as they trace his swollen mouth, his truncated beard. “So,” the old man mutters. “No longer our most beautiful son.”

“He's wounded. Bring chai for our brothers,” says Mahdube, at the master's right hand. He looks even thinner than before in a Western-style suit, black shoes, even a black tie. Ghedi blinks. Has he returned to teaching? On Nassir's other hand Ikrane sits motionless as stone, save for an inclination of his head as Ghedi greets him too. The Waleeli spymaster's not a man to be ignored.

He introduces Juulheed. For once his garrulous deputy's silent. “What is your clan, my brother?” Nassir asks.

“He's of the Berdaale,” Ghedi answers for him, then wonders why, if there's no clan in the Waleeli, the old man asks.

The tea's served by a nervous-looking young boy in student's garments. Ghedi regards its dark surface. Then gathers his courage and takes a sip. Unable to resist their smell, he takes one of the mangoes. It's unutterably delicious, wet and rich and sweet. Its slick flesh and the scent of its juice take him back to being a child, far away, in a village that is no more.