Islands in the Net (50 page)

“She doesn't need more bullets, she needs surgery. Is there a doctor we can reach?”

He shook his head. “There's an Azanian relief camp, three days from here. But we're not going there—we need to regroup at our local supply dump. We have our own survival to look after—we can't make chivalrous gestures.”

Laura reached forward and grabbed the thick robe at Gresham's shoulder. “She's a dying woman!”

“You're in Africa now. Dying women aren't rare here.”

Laura took a deep breath.

She had reached bedrock.

She tried hard to think. She looked around herself, trying to clear her head. Her mind was all rags and tatters. The desert around her seemed to be evaporating her. All the complexities were going—it was stark and simple and elemental. “I want you to save her life, Jonathan Gresham.”

“It's bad tactics,” Gresham said. He kept his eyes from her, watching the road. “They don't know she's mortally wounded. If she's an important hostage, they'll expect us to head for that camp. And we haven't lived this long by doing what FACT expects.”

She backed away from him. Switched gears. “If they touch that camp the Azanian Air Force will stomp all over what's left of their capital.”

He looked at her as if she'd gone mad.

“It's true. Four days ago the Azanians hit Bamako, hard. Fuel dumps, commandos, everything. From their aircraft carrier.”

“Well, I'll be damned.” Gresham grinned suddenly. No reassurance there—it was feral. “Tell me more, Laura Webster.”

“That's why they were taking us to the atom-bomb test site. To make a propaganda statement, frighten the Azanians. I've seen their nuclear submarine. I even lived aboard it. For weeks.”

“Jesus Christ,” Gresham said. “You saw all that? An eyewitness?”

“Yes. I did.”

He believed her. She could see it was hard for him, that it was news that was changing the basic assumptions of his life. Or at least the basic assumptions of his war, if there was any difference between his living and his warring. But he recognized that she was telling him the truth. It was coming across between them, something basic and human.

“We gotta do an interview,” he muttered.

An interview. He had a camera, didn't he? She felt confused, relieved, obscurely ashamed. She looked back for that moral bedrock. It was still there. “Save my friend's life.”

“We can try it.” He stood up in the saddle and yanked something from his belt—a white folding fan. He flicked it open and held it over his head, waved it, sharp semaphore motions. For the first time Laura realized that there was another Tuareg in sight—a buglike profile, almost lost in heat haze, a mile to the north. A dotlike answering flicker.

Katje groaned in the back, a raw animal sound. “Don't let her drink too much,” Gresham warned. “Mop her down instead.”

Laura moved into the back.

Katje was awake, conscious. There was something vast and elemental, terrifying, about her ordeal. There was so little that talking or thinking could do about it—no way to debate with death. Her face was like a skull and she was fighting alone.

As hours passed Laura did what she could. A word or two with Gresham and she found what little he had that could help. Padding for Katje's head and shoulders. Leather bags of water that tasted flat and distilled. Some skin grease that smelled like animal fat. Black smudge on cheekbones to cut the glare.

The exit wound in the back was worst. It was ragged and Laura feared it would soon turn septic. The scab broke open twice during the worst jolts and a little rill of blood ran across Katje's spine.

They stopped once when they hit a boulder and the right front wheel began complaining. Then again when Gresham spotted what he thought were patrol planes—it was a pair of vultures.

As the sun set Katje began muttering aloud. Bits and pieces of a life. Her brother the lawyer. Mother's letters on flowered stationery. Tea parties. Charm school. Her mind groped in delirium for some vision, miles and years away. A tiny center of human order in a circle of desolate horizon.

Gresham drove until well after twilight. He seemed to know the country. She never saw him look at a map.

Finally he stopped in the channeled depth of an arroyo—a “wadi,” he called it. The sandy depths of the dry river were crowded with waist-high bushes that stank of creosote and were full of tiny irritating burrs.

Gresham dismounted, shouldering a duffel bag. He pulled his curved machete and began chopping bushes. “The planes are worst after dark,” he said. “They use infrareds. If they hit us at all, they'll probably take out the scoot.” He began placing bushes over the buggy, camouflaging it. “So we'll sleep away from it. With the baggage.”

“All right.” Laura crawled from the back of the buggy, battered, filthy, bone-weary. “What can I do to help?”

“You can dress yourself for the desert. Try the knapsack.”

She took the knapsack around the far side of the truck and fumbled it open. Shirts. Spare sandals. A long, coarse tunic of washed-out blue, wrinkled and wadded and stained. She shrugged out of her prison blouse.

God, she was so thin. She could see every rib. Thin and old and exhausted, like something that ought to be killed. She tunneled into the tunic—its shoulder seams came halfway down her biceps and the sleeves hung to her knuckles. It was thick though, and beaten soft with long wear. It reeked of Gresham, as if he had embraced her.

Strange thought, dizzying. She was embarrassed. She was a spectacle, pathetic. Gresham couldn't want a madwoman.…

The ground rose up and struck her. She lay in a heap of her own arms and legs, wondering. A muddle of time passed, vague pain and rushing waves of dizziness.

Gresham was gripping her arms.

She looked at him blankly. He gave her water. The water revived her enough to feel her own distress. “You passed out,” he said. She nodded, understanding for the first time. Gresham picked her up. He carried her like a bundle of balloons; she felt light, hollow, bird-boned.

There was a lean-to pegged to the wall of the arroyo. A windbreak with a short arching tent roof of desert camo-cloth. Under the roof a dark figure crouched over the white-striped prison form of Katje—another of the Tuareg raiders, a long sniper's rifle strapped to his back. Gresham set Laura down, exchanged words with the Tuareg, who nodded somberly. Laura crawled into the tent, felt rough wool beneath her fingers—a carpet.

She curled up on it. The Tuareg was humming tonelessly to himself, under a ramp of blazing stars.

She was woken by the steaming smell of tea. It was barely dawn, a red auroral brightening in the east. Someone had thrown a warm rug over her during the night. She had a pillow too, a burlap bag stenciled in weird angular script. She sat up, aching.

The Tuareg handed her a cup, gently, courteously, as if it were something precious. The hot tea was dark brown and frothy and sweet, with a sharp minty reek. Laura sipped it. It had been boiled, not brewed, and it hit her like a hard narcotic, astringent and strong. It was foul, but she could feel it toughening her throat like tanned leather, bracing her for another day's survival.

The Tuareg half turned away, shyly, and discreetly lifted his veil. He slurped noisily, appreciatively. Then he opened a drawstring bag and offered it to her. Little brown pellets of something—like peanuts. Some kind of dried scop. It tasted like sugared sawdust. Breakfast. She ate two handfuls.

Gresham emerged from the lightening gloom, an enormous figure wrapped to the eyes, yet another bag slung over his shoulder. He was tossing handfuls of something over the dirt, with swift, ritual gestures. Tracer dust, maybe? She had no idea.

“She made it through the night,” Gresham told her, dusting his hands. “Even spoke a little this morning. Stubborn, those Boers.”

Laura stood up, painfully. She felt ashamed, “I'm not much use, am I?”

“It's not your world, is it.” Gresham helped the Tuareg unpeg and fold the tent. “Not much pursuit, this time.… We planted some heat flares, maybe that sidetracked the planes. Or they may think we were Azanian commandos.… I hope so. We might provoke something interesting.”

His relish terrified her. “But if FACT has the Bomb.… You can't provoke people who can destroy whole cities!”

He was unimpressed. “The world's full of cities.” Gresham glanced at a wristwatch on a braided leather bracelet. “Got a long day ahead, let's move.”

He'd repacked the buggy—shifted some of his cargo to another truck. Katje lay in a nest of carpet, shaded by the tarp, her eyes open.

“Good morning,” she whispered.

Laura sat beside her, bracing her back and legs. Gresham kicked the buggy into motion. It whined reluctantly as it picked up speed—battery draining, she thought.

She took Katje's wrist. Light, fluttery pulse. “We're gonna get you back to your own people, Katje.”

Katje blinked, her lids veiny and pale. She forced the words. “He is a savage, an anarchist.…”

“Try to rest. You and I, we're gonna live through this. Live to tell about it.” The sun peered over the horizon, a vivid yellow blister of heat.

Time passed, and the heat mounted sullenly as the miles passed. They were leaving the deep Sahara and crossing country with something more akin to soil. This had been grazing land once—they passed the mummies of dead cattle, ancient bone stick-puppets in cracked rags of leather.

She had never realized the scale of the African disaster. It was continental, planetary. They had traveled hundreds of miles without glimpsing another human being, without seeing anything but a few wheeling birds and the tracks of lizards. She'd thought Gresham was being cavalier, deliberately brutal, but she understood now how truly little he must care for FACT and its weaponry. They lived here, it was their home. Atomic bombardment could scarcely have made it worse. It would only make more of it.

At midafternoon a FACT pursuit plane found one of the Tuareg buggies and torched it. Laura never even saw the plane, no sign of the deadly encounter except a distant column of smoke. They stopped and sought cover for half an hour, until the drone had exhausted its fuel or ammo.

Flies found them immediately as they waited. Huge, bold Saharan flies that settled on Katje's blood-stained clothes like magnets. They had to be knocked loose, slapped away, before they would leave. Even then they moved only in short buzzing arcs and lit again. Laura fought them grimly, wincing as they landed on her goggles, tried to sip moisture from her nose and lips.

At last the scattered caravan passed signals by their semaphore. The driver had survived unwounded; a companion had picked him up and packed out the usable wreckage.

“Well, that's torn it,” Gresham told her as they drove on. From somewhere he had dug up a battered pair of mirrored sunglasses. “They know where we're heading now, if they didn't before. If we had any sense we'd lie low, rest up, work on the vehicles.”

“But she'll die.”

“The odds say she won't even make it through the night.”

“If she can make it, then we can, too.”

“Not a bad bet,” he said.

They stopped after dusk in a dead farming village of roofless, wind-carved adobe walls. There were thornbushes in the ruins of a corral and a long, creeping gully had split the village threshing ground. The soil in the rudimentary irrigation ditches was so heavily salinized that it gleamed with a salted crust. The deep stone well was dry. People had lived here once—generation after generation, a thousand tribal years.

They left the buggy hidden in one of the ruined houses and set up camp in the depths of a gully, under the stars. Laura had more strength this time—she was no longer giddy and beaten. The desert had sand-blasted her down to some reflexive layer of vitality. She had given up worrying. It was an animal's asceticism.

Gresham set up the tent and heated a bowl of soup with an electric coil. Then he vanished, off on foot to check on some outflung post of his caravan. Laura sipped the oily protein broth gratefully. The smell of it woke Katje where she lay.

“Hungry,” she whispered.

“No, you shouldn't eat.”

“Please, I must. I must, just a little. I don't want to die hungry.”

Laura thought it over. Soup. It wasn't much worse than water, surely.

“You've been eating,” Katje accused her, her eyes glazed and ghostly. “You had so much. And I had nothing.”

“All right, but not too much.”

“You can spare it.”

“I'm trying to think of what's best for you.…” No answer, just pain-brimming eyes full of suspicion and feverish hope. Laura tilted the bowl and Katje gulped desperately.

“God, that's so much better.” She smiled, an act of heartbreaking courage. “I feel better.… Thank you so much.” She curled away, breathing harshly.

Laura leaned back in her sweat-stiff djellaba and dozed off. She woke when she sensed Gresham climbing into the lean-to. It was bitterly cold again, that lunar Saharan cold, and she could feel heat radiating off the bulk of him, large and male and carnivorous. She sat up and helped him kick his way under the carpet.

“We made good time today,” he murmured. The soft voice of the desert, a bare disturbance of the silence. “If she lives, we can make it to her camp by midmorning. I hope the place isn't full of Azanian commandos. The long arm of imperialist law and order.”

“‘Imperialist.' That word doesn't mean anything to me.”

“You gotta hand it to 'em,” Gresham said. He was looking down at Katje, who lay heavily, unconscious. “Once it looked like their little anthill was sure to go, but they pulled through somehow.… The rest of Africa has fallen apart, and every year they move a little farther north, them and their fucking cops and rule books.”

“They're better than FACT! At least they help.”