Casca 20: Soldier of Gideon (2 page)

The Israeli embassy was set in the low rent district and lacked frills of any sort. To Casca's eye the small, starkly functional building lacked almost everything except submachine guns. And these were in abundant supply everywhere he looked Russian made Kalashnikov assault rifles and Israel's copy, the
Galil, and Israel's own development, the Uzi.

On the sidewalk in front of the building two New Zealand policemen, one white, one black, stood guard, armed only with short wooden batons. But just inside the high steel fence stood half a dozen Israeli army men, Uzi submachine guns at the ready. The pretty receptionist had a revolver on her belt and an Uzi lying handy by her desk. The two ushers who conducted them to the office of the cultural liaison officer carried Uzis slung over their shoulders. The cultural liaison officer's secretary had her
Galil in a clip on the wall behind her desk.

Her office was liberally decorated with Maori wood carvings, spears, clubs, weavings, polished
paua shells, and a huge greenstone tiki. The warrior god held an ornate club over his right shoulder, his tongue lolling greedily from his wide open mouth as if he had been interrupted in the middle of a cannibal feast and was happily looking forward to the next course.

There were also paintings of the two unique New Zealand native birds. Neither the huge moa nor the small kiwi could fly and had been easy prey for anybody who had cared to hunt them. The beautiful giant
moas had been completely consumed for their meat by the Moriori, the red haired, green eyed, brown skinned aboriginals of the New Zealand islands.

In their turn, the
Moriori had been massacred and eaten by the more warlike Maoris, for whom they had been no match. Hunting birds had not equipped them for war with maneaters. The Maoris had been pushed south to these cold islands from their own tropical paradise of Raratonga by the even more warlike Samoans, who, lacking any edible birds or any meat other than fish, had developed an appetite for the flesh of Maoris.

Whereas the gigantic moa bird had perished, the small, shy,
noctunral kiwi had survived to become the national symbol of the new race that was evolving near the South Pole of the planet from the stock of mainly Scots farmers and Norse seamen who had taken the islands from the Maoris during the nineteenth century, by dint of gunpowder, lead, and steel. The Maoris held them at bay for generations, but eventually their clubs of wood and jade had proven a woefully inadequate defense against the arrayed might of the armed troops of the British Empire.

The cultural liaison officer was young, brusque, and aggressive. Casca took an instant disliking to him but was not put off his enlistment. He was not about to complain if he found that he was going into a war alongside people of this sort of combative personality. He could stand a little neurotic intensity, so long as it was on his side and working for him.

The Israeli army doctor was even more aggressive and opened his interview with the naked Casca by pointing to the great vertical scar on his chest. "That's the clumsiest piece of suturing I've ever seen. You had an open heart job or what? We're not looking to recruit invalids you know."

Screw you
, Casca thought, momentarily contemplating that he might demonstrate for this jerk just how far he was from being an invalid. A short reach with his left arm would do it, finger and thumb closing on either side of the Adam's apple as he shifted the about to die body across the floor and rammed the head back against the brick wall. In his mind's eye he saw with satisfaction the doctor's startled eyes popping as he heard his skull crack against the bricks. But, for sure, neither the Uzi toting Israelis nor the Kiwi police would appreciate that he was only demonstrating his state of health and martial capacity, and, almost reluctantly, he abandoned the idea. Instead he explained, "I lost control of my motorcycle and had a rough meeting with a bulldozer," Casca lied. "Looks worse than it, was. Everything on the inside is original issue."

"And I suppose your face went through your windshield?"

"No." Casca luxuriated in telling almost the whole truth. "I short-changed a whore and she took to me with a knife." He didn't mention that the hooker's knife had marked him roughly two thousand years earlier.

The doctor almost sneered. "And what about this scar that runs right around your wrist? Looks like a full hand transplant."

"We both know that's not possible," Casca said evenly, flexing his powerful fingers and thinking afresh of a telling demonstration. "This hand works better than any surgeon could pray to fix it."

"I can see that," the doctor snapped, so uncomfortably it almost seemed he had caught Casca's thought.

"Cambodian torture," Casca lied some more. "You ever seen a glove made of human skin? Fortunately my buddies arrived before they got that far."

The doctor produced a stethoscope, not bothering to disguise his disbelief. But his eyes widened as he listened to the steady
lub-dub, lub-dub of the heart that had been thumping away in Casca's chest since about the year A.D. one. The doctor's puzzled young eyes searched into Casca's calm gray ones, but then looked away uncomfortably.

"How old are you anyway?" he snapped.

For an answer Casca pointed one blunt finger at the form lying on the desk. The doctor glanced down, looked up again, his eyes flickering over the network of healed surgical scars, sword cuts, bullet holes, bites, scratches, and claw marks that crisscrossed Casca's body.

Irritably the doctor flicked through the papers on his desk. X
-ray reports; stool, urine, and blood samples; eyesight and hearing tests. They all tallied with what Casca said, but none of it jelled with the battered hide or the eyes that seemed older than sin.

He pressed a button of his intercom console and spoke in Hebrew. "I've got a guy here, some sort of freak. Looks young enough, but I'm sure he's way past age limit. But it doesn't show up on any of the tests. What do you want me to do with him? He sure looks like he can fight. "

Casca couldn't hear the reply, but a few minutes later he was in the office of the embassy's public information officer.

She sat behind a severely
businesslike chrome and glass desk. A low table held some promotional magazines and brochures produced by the Israel Institute of Engineering, Israel Air Industries, and other Israel enterprises. On the walls were posters promoting Israel's manufactured products. And, within easy reach, an Uzi. She motioned Casca to a chair.

"
Dr. Nir says you're older than you claim to be." She stared hard into Casca's eyes, seeking to detect the lie.

Casca calmly returned her gaze. A faint smile flickered into his eyes. "I'm old enough."

"You're an experienced soldier?"

Casca couldn't tell if she had played with the word experienced or perhaps it was just her accent. He took in the wide, intelligent eyes, the firmly muscled shoulders, small breasts. He tried to restrain the smile he felt spreading on his face.

As if reading the lewd thoughts that were tumbling through his mind, she added: "Combat experienced?"

Damn, he still couldn't tell if she was playing.
"Uh. Oh, yeah."

"You've held some rank?"

No, she wasn't playing. Rank? Damn all these questions. What to answer? Legionnaire, centurion, count, baron, king, god? Aloud he said: "I've never made general yet."

She smiled.
A good-humored grin. "Our army prides itself that it promotes early and often, and entirely on merit. We don't award medals you know."

"No, I didn't know, but it suits me fine. I'd rathe
r have a raise in pay than a bit of tin on a rag any day." He thought of something he could say in safety. "I made sergeant in Vietnam for a while."

"Well, that's the sort of experience we need." She smiled again. "You could wind up an officer. But there's one disadvantage our officers lead all attacks."

"The system I grew up with." He shrugged.

"In the U.S. Army?"

"In my bunch," Casca answered, but his mind had been in another time when the first man on the beach, as the Romans stormed ashore in Britannia, had been Julius, first and greatest of the Caesars.

"Suppose you tell me why you want to fight for Israel?"

Casca smiled. Ah, the luxury of being able to tell the simple truth. Devout Jews believed that before the End of Days their Messiah would come and lead them back into their promised land of milk and honey. The Zionists believed that they could hurry God along by getting there early under their own steam and by building a Jewish sovereign state that they could have all ready and waiting to welcome the Messiah when, at last, he arrived. And Christians believed there would be a second coming of the failed guru he had speared to death on Golgotha. Somewhere in all the prophecies there might be some spark of the truth.

The Jew on the cross had said to him: "Soldier, you are content with what you are. Then that you shall remain until we meet again."

Well he was weary of waiting. Often he felt the crush of the endless years, craved the easy peace of his long denied death. If only he could close his weary eyes and allow the countless years to take their toll, or if he could fall in battle and not survive to die again. Well, maybe it could happen in Palestine, where it started. Like the Zionists, he was prepared to try to hurry the process, although he wouldn't mind too much a few nights of waiting with this woman for company.

"Armageddon," he said into the lovely wide eyes. "I'm a professional warrior. If this is it, I'd sure hate to miss it."

"Such superstitious nonsense and you seem an intelligent man. We modern Israelis are not interested in any fantasies such as Armageddon, Promised Lands, or mythical Messiahs. Israel is our homeland and we intend to hold on to it. It's the only one we have. That's what this war is about." She stood up and held out her hand. "Welcome to the Israeli Army, ex Sergeant Lonnergan. We'll start you as a private. Maybe this time you'll make it to general if your superstitions don't get in your way."

Outside her office Casca wanted to kick himself.
Dammit, the bitch dismissed me. Just when I thought I might have been getting to her. Damn.

The cultural liaison officer issued the new recruits chits against their first month's pay so that they could clear their bills before they left the country.

In exchange they handed over their passports. Normal practice. Mercenaries are always in debt when they join up. Under any other circumstances recruitment could be a real problem.

Moynihan's bar tab astounded the Israeli. He could scarcely believe.
a man could drink so much. He was even more astonished when he inquired about Tommy's other debts.

"What else would I owe money for?" Tommy asked in genuine puzzlement. "Girls don't give credit."

They had to report back by six P.M. to the safe house, an old, private guesthouse in the hills on the edge of the city.

Monynihan
had no business to attend to other than his bar tab, and spent the whole afternoon at the House of Glee. He was raucously drunk when he made it to the safe house and became much more raucous when the woman guard frisked him and impounded his bottle of whiskey. He was not at all mollified by her assurances that it would be waiting for him when he returned from the war.

The half heard trill of a whistle penetrated Casca's dream of beautiful wide eyes.
"Well, I've had worse awakenings," he mumbled to Harry Russell in the next bunk. "Or am I still dreaming?"

Harry followed his gaze to the doorway, where a uniformed figure stood dimly lit by the almost risen sun. "No," he said, "I think this corporal is real."

The corporal left them in no further doubt as she blew a second blast on her whistle. "On your feet fellows," her cheerful voice filled the hut. "This is the Israeli Army. We start the day with P.T., then ablutions, then breakfast. Parade in ten. Roll out." She was gone. The whistle shrilled in another doorway.

"I knew it would come to this," Moynihan groaned as his feet hit the floor. "My ole
mither always told me never to take money from strangers. P.T. she says, and not so much as a noggin of brandy to get the heart started."

The P.T. parade wasn't all that bad. Five push ups, five deep squats, five sit ups, five chin ups, a hundred steps running on the spot, five lifts on the parallel bars, five backbends, five touch toes. It went on and on. None of it too tough or too difficult, but all of it just a little more demanding than anyone had expected to encounter before they were even in uniform.

Only Harry Russell enjoyed it. "Just about what I needed," he panted when the interminable series came to an end. I've been considering getting around to a bit of exercise for a while now."

"So have I," grunted Moynihan from where he lay exhausted on the grass. "And with any luck, I'll get a bit more time to think on it."

"Don't count on it," the cheerful corporal interrupted his lament. "After breakfast we double the dose. This afternoon we treble it. Tomorrow–"

"Don't tell me," Moynihan groaned, "I'd like to enjoy the suspense."

"And what's the idea of women PTIs anyway?" Moynihan demanded as she walked away.