The Second Saladin - Страница 7

“A day, if it comes to a desert crossing. You’ve got a day. Your body can take no more.” They told him stories of Mexican illegals who’d been led into the desert by unscrupulous smugglers and abandoned and how they’d died in horrible agony in just hours at the hottest time of the day.

He pushed ahead, feeling the blood pulsing in his temples. The shirt off and wrapped about his head in the fashion of a turban gave some relief from the heat; he wore only an undershirt over his body. But at each rise he prayed the mountains had moved closer and at each rise he was disappointed.

Kurdistan ya naman.

The pack had become hugely heavy, yet he clung to it.

He pushed ahead.

In the early afternoon, there was a helicopter, low off the horizon.

Always helicopters, he thought, always helicopters.

He ducked quickly into a ravine, opening his wrist on the knifelike leaves of some grotesque plant. The blood spurted. He listened to the roar of the machine, an almost liquid sloshing, the rising pulse.

He crouched into the side of the ravine as the noise grew. He reached inside the pack and touched the Skorpion.

But the noise died.

He climbed and faced the same bright frozen sea of sand and spiny vegetation. His head now ached and the wrist would not stop stinging. In all directions it was the same — the crests of sand, the cacti, the cruel scrub under a broad sky and a fierce sun. In the distance, the mountains. Ulu Beg rose and headed on, facing death.

By midafternoon he began to get groggy. He fell once and didn’t remember falling, only finding himself on his knees at the bottom of a slope. He stood, his knees buckled, he went down again. He got up slowly, breathing hard, stopping to rest with his hands on his knees. He thought he saw that bus, that crazy bus pulling toward him, full of blond Americans, rich and well-fed, their children riding before them on bicycles.

He blinked and it was all gone.

Or was it? Caught in his mind was a memory of the vehicle, the awkwardness of a thing so huge. In its tentativeness, its absurdity — but also its determination — there’d been a memory.

He called it up before him.

They had marched for days down through the mountains to the foothills near Rawāndūz, and set the ambush well, with great patience and cunning. Jardi was with them. No, Jardi was one of them.

There had been thirty of them altogether, with Ulu Beg’s own son Apo along because he’d begged to go. They had the new AKs that Jardi had brought and the RPG rockets that he’d shown them how to use, and a light machine gun; and Jardi had his dynamite, which he’d planted in the road.

They caught the Iraqi convoy in a narrow enfilade in the foothills, men of the 11th Mechanized Brigade who had not a week before razed a Kurdish village, killing everybody. Jardi exploded his dynamite on the lead truck and they’d all fired and thirty seconds later the road was jammed with broken, burning vehicles, mostly trucks.

“Keep firing,” Jardi yelled, for the shooting had trailed off after the initial frenzy.

“But—”

“Keep firing!”

Jardi was a fierce man, crazy in action, a driven man. The Kurds had a phrase: a fool for war. He stood behind them, his eyes dark and angry, gesturing madly, screaming, exhorting them in a language only Ulu Beg could understand, communicating nevertheless out of sheer intensity. Standing now, striding up and down the line, howling like a dog, his turban pushed off so that his short American hair showed, oblivious totally to the bullets that had begun to fly up from the dying convoy at them.

He was in some ways more Kurdish than any of them, a Saladin himself, who could inspire them to heroic deeds by nothing greater than his own ruthless passion. He loved to destroy his enemies.

“Pour it on. Keep pouring it on,” he yelled.

Ulu Beg, firing clip after clip of his AK-47 into the burning trucks and the huddled or fleeing figures, watched as the Kurdish fire devastated the convoy. He could see glass shattering, the canvas of the trucks shredding, the tires deflating. Now and then a smaller explosion and a puff of flame rolled up as one or another of the petrol tanks detonated. And soon no fire came from the trucks.

“Cut,” Jardi yelled.

The Kurdish fire died down.

“Let’s get ’em out of here,” Jardi yelled to Ulu Beg.

“But, Jardi,” Ulu Beg called, “there’s weapons and booty down there.”

“Not enough time,” said Jardi. “Look, that scout car.” He pointed to a Russian vehicle on its side at the head of the convoy. “Look at the aerial on that baby. The jets’ll be here in a few minutes.”

That was Jardi too: in the middle of battle, with bullets flying about, he was coolly noting which vehicles had radios — and estimating what their range was and how soon MiGs would respond to the ambush.

Ulu Beg stood.

“It’s time to flee,” Ulu Beg yelled.

But it was too late. Far down the line he saw three men break cover and begin to gallop toward the crippled vehicles, their weapons high over their heads in exultation.

“No,” commanded Ulu Beg, “stop—”

But two more broke from the line and others turned back toward him, frozen in indecision.

“Back,” he shouted.

“We must leave the others,” Jardi said. “The jets’ll be here in seconds.”

But one of the men was Kamran Beg, a cousin, who had been bodyguard to the boy Apo.

Ulu Beg saw his own child rise from the gully and begin to run down the hill.

“What the hell,” said Jardi. “Why the hell did you—”

“I did nothing. I—”

Then they saw the tank. It was a Russian T-54, huge as a dragon. It swung into the enfilade. Tanks had never come this high before. Ulu Beg watched as the creature swung along on its tracks, its turret cranking. It moved with awkwardness, tentative even, despite its weight.

“Down!” Jardi yelled, in the second before the tank fired.

The shell exploded under the first three running men. They were gone in the blast. Others raced up the hill. The machine gun in the turret cut them down.

The small boy lay still on the ground.

Ulu Beg rose to run to him, but something pressed him to the earth.

“No,” somebody hissed in his ear.

Jardi vaulted free and raced down the slope. He had abandoned his rifle and held only a rocket-propelled grenade. He ran crazily, not bothering to veer or dodge. He ran right at the tank.

Its turret swung to him. Machine-gun bullets cut at the earth and Ulu Beg could see them reaching for Jardi, who seemed to slide in a shower of dust as the bullets kicked by him.

He lay still.

The tank began to heave up the ridge toward them.

Ulu Beg saw that they were finished. They couldn’t get back up the slope; the tank would shoot them down. A tank. Where had it come from?

He tried to clear his brain. He could think only of his son, dead on the slope, the brave American, dead on the slope, his men, his tribe, dead on the slope.

But Jardi rose. He was not hit at all. He rose, sheathed in the dust he’d fallen through, and stood, one leg cocked insolently on a stone. A wind came and his jacket billowed. From down the slope they could hear Jardi cursing loudly, almost — the man was crazy — laughing.

The tank turret swung to him again. But Ulu Beg saw that Jardi was close enough now and that the big gun would never reach him in time, and as its barrel swung on to him Jardi fired the RPG one-handed, like a pistol.

The rocket left in a fury of flame, spitting fire as it flew, and struck the tank on the flat part of the hull, just beneath the turret.

The tank began to burn. It fell back on its treads and flames began to pour from its hatch and from its engines. Smoke rose and blew in the breeze.

Jardi threw away his spent launching tube and ran quickly to the boy. He hoisted him and climbed up to them, but he had no smile.

“Come on, get these guys out of here,” he said. “Come on,” he turned to shout at them, “get going, Jesus, you guys, get going!”

The boy was crying.

Ulu Beg was crying.

“You have given my son his life back.”

“Come on, get going,” Jardi urged.

They climbed to the mountains and were over the crest when the first jets arrived.

Ulu Beg smiled in the memory of that day.

Ahead, the mountains loomed.

He reached them at twilight. Toward the end he’d crossed a road and ahead he could see another road, one that crawled up the side of the mountain, but he did not go near it. Cars moved along it. In the falling dark he climbed cold rocks. He found a trickle of water. He tracked it to a pool, and then found the spring. He drank deeply. He sat back. He ate a piece of his dry bread, and drank again. He was in the chill of a shadow but could look out and see the desert, still white and flat and dangerous.

He climbed up. At the top, the city of Tucson lay before him. He saw a city built on sand, on a plain, cupped on all sides by other mountains. A few tall buildings stood in its center but it was mostly a kind of ramshackle newness. It was nothing like Baghdad, which was very, very old, and on a huge river.

God willed it, he thought, and I have made it.

He thought of Jardi and the tank and his son and why he had come to America and he began to weep.

In the morning he rose with the sun. He opened his pack, pushed the machine pistol out of the way, and found his other shirt, a white thing with snap buttons. He pulled the shirt on.