On a Clear Day (22 page)

He wiped the beads of sweat away from his upper lip with his hand as he went on.

“He was straight up with me, as I fully expected him to be. And he pointed out something that we can all take home with us today. Which is that anybody can say that they don’t want people going hungry in their country, but it’s another thing to actually implement a plan to end hunger throughout the world. Natural Farming is a very well-respected American company. An American company that proposed, merely proposed, holding a demonstration in North Africa. In six months, the company would turn what had been a country on the brink of starvation into a food exporter. That’s quite a turnaround, if you ask me. In the wake of this offer—one that has been tentatively accepted by the Moroccan government, by the way—several groups have claimed that they, and not Natural Farming, first came up with the idea.

“In a way, I guess that a terrorist group taking credit
for something a democratic company is doing is a compliment. Natural Farming won’t and can’t partner with any group or organization that has terrorist ties or even a shaky reputation. I only hope and pray, for the sake of the people of Morocco, that this group has the decency to distance itself from Natural Farming and allow the people of the African region they claim to represent a path to the kind of living they truly deserve. The good people of Florida have nothing to fear from this group and certainly nothing to fear from Natural Farming. My office will issue a press release later giving more details. Thank you.”

Rogers turned quickly away from the camera, and the two men who had been standing behind him began handing out a written statement. He didn’t take questions.

“He’s sealed it!” Anja said. “He’s publicly denied the connection between Natural Farming and terrorists but established the connection between Natural Farming and the North Africans! No one is going to believe that load of crap.”

“You thinking we can pack it in?” Michael asked. “If people are making the connection between Natural Farming and Sayeed—and they are—I don’t think C-8 will have the balls to think they can sneak a takeover past the public.”

“They’ll just wait a few weeks and try something else,” Tristan said. “Maybe run a game about how much they’re helping the Moroccans.”

“Then we’ll go after them again,” Michael said. “But the important thing is that we don’t have to get into a street battle and end up killing a lot of people.”

“Yo, Michael, how the hell do you think Sayeed is going to react?” Drego asked. “You’re looking at what Natural Farming is thinking and what you’re thinking, but what about Sayeed? Us pushing Natural Farming to back down leaves Sayeed high and dry. If he just folds his tents and walks away, Natural Farming doesn’t have to give him nothing, and maybe they’ll even get some local police to mess with him. He’s got nothing to gain by walking away. They just forced him to make a move—what did Mei-Mei call it?”

“Zugzwang,” Mei-Mei chimed in. “He’s got to make a move. If he’s cut off from Natural Farming and has to go home empty-handed, he’s going to lose face in Morocco. If he acts on his own, he’s taking a big risk of being ineffective, but he’s got to do something.”

“I don’t think so.” Javier. “What’s he got to gain?”

“He’s been promised three-dimensional printers,” I said. “And he needs to maintain his reputation as a badass. Right now, all he sees out there is Natural Farming walking away from him. He doesn’t just want the alliance, he
needs
it.”

Silence.

The van door opened and a blond boy stuck his head out and said that there was some movement along the upper park line, about a mile and a half away.

“Call Sayeed’s phone and see what you get.” Javier took a quick glance at Michael. “If his phone is on at all, it will react by connecting with a tower, maybe even two or three towers. We can trace that within a few hundred yards.”

“There’s lot of interference …,” the blond boy started.

“Do it!” The veins in Javier’s neck began to throb.

There had been interference all afternoon, and we were sure that C-8 was messing with the radio signals for the Internet. Javier sent out the strong signal and watched his monitors.

“You think he’s actually going to attack?” Michael.

“You betting that he won’t?” Drego shot back.

I could see the doubt on Michael’s face. I felt it too. It would have been easier to believe that the problem had been solved.

Tristan told us to grab some cover just as Blond Boy returned. He said that there were two groups on the move. One was coming toward our position, and the other was moving left.

I was feeling sick. An armored vehicle pulled up. Its camouflage was light and medium brown. Desert disguise, but we were in Miami. The vehicle stopped, and the gun mounted on its rear moved menacingly from left to right. It looked like some huge robot animal. I thought of a praying mantis.

My stomach turned, and things seemed to slow down around me. Javier beckoned me over, and I watched as he powered his wheelchair into the back of the vehicle.

I didn’t want to go in, but I didn’t want to stay outside either.

The combat command van was dark except for the orange light that bathed the interior sides. The dials were all weird green. Javier lit up a computer screen, and I saw the layout of the area. It was fantastic, a combination of a map projection and photographic images.

“I can direct things from in here,” Javier said. “You can help if you want.”

“How do you feel?” I asked as the driver pulled a lever and closed the rear hatch.

“As if I want to do something about Ellen,” Javier said. “Something personal. Something with a lot of violence.”

“I don’t think I should be in here,” I said. I was thinking again. Nervous, but thinking again. “It doesn’t seem real. I don’t want to confuse the reality of this scene with a computer projection. This isn’t a game.”

“In a way …” Javier’s voice trailed off. I thought he was going to say that in a way it was a computer game. I was feeling that too, and I didn’t like the feeling.

“Kevin.” Javier touched the driver’s shoulder. “Get the door. Dahlia’s leaving.”

It was harder to breathe outside than it was in the van. The air was heavy with humidity. In the distance, the morning sun played along the edges of the squat buildings, bending the rays so that the outlines of the decrepit housing lost their shape. I saw Drego surrounded by a bunch of lean black guys. Some wore brown-and-yellow armbands. These were the local dudes Drego had already said we couldn’t trust.

Anja listening to her phone. She was nodding. Then she reached out and touched my arm. I looked at her and saw sadness in her smile. She said she was going into the van with Javier. We were both out of our element.

With the first sound of gunfire, the guys around Drego quickly parted, creating space between them. This was
how you handled a drive-by shooting, I thought. No use letting one bullet hit two guys. Mei-Mei was with them, in the middle, wearing a short skirt that covered the top half of her fat thighs. She saw me looking at her, and for a moment we tried to make contact. Then I turned away.

Tristan was dragging barriers across the wide street using a jeep. It was all so crude. Translation: It was no longer a matter of board meetings or prostaglandin levels. It was about wood and metal to hide behind, steel vehicles and men with death and dying on their minds. I was scared out of my mind.

T
he battle. Down the street, less than a quarter mile away, they were coming. Young men, boys, wannabes with assault rifles, scrambling like dark insects past the parked cars, the streetlamps, the Dumpsters, toward us. They saw the barriers and stopped. Then they spread out across the street. Two of them were setting something up on the sidewalk that rimmed the park. A shot came from my left, and one of the boys near the park stood and tried to run. He was limping badly and soon fell. I hoped he’d been hit only in the leg. I hoped he wasn’t going to die. My mouth went dry.

The raiders were retreating, scattering with the first wounded warrior. Then, suddenly, there was a roar that
grew quickly. From where I crouched, kneeling on one knee, I saw a cloud of smoke headed toward us. It was twenty feet high, then thirty and still rising. It was a smoke screen that loomed like a friggin’ nightmare in the distance, and it was growing. It became a moving cloud of black smoke that rose up a hundred or so feet, maybe more. At the base of the smoke, there were lights and grills.

They were driving cars toward us, shooting from the windows and from improvised holes in the tops of the vehicles. It was insane, until I heard the first bullets hit the steel barriers that Tristan had put up. The bullets rattled loudly against the barriers. The ones that missed the barriers, that whined and buzzed over our heads, were scarier.

The cars were zooming toward us. I thought they wanted to crash into the barriers, and I wondered if they were being driven automatically. The cars seemed too old, and I saw black hands firing from the windows. No one was firing back at them, and I didn’t know what was going on.

Then all hell broke loose. From both sides there were
somethings
being shot across the road like the old pictures of snakes striking that I had seen in
National Geographic Classics
. They shot across, the ones from the park side going all the way over the wide road, the ones from the street side going three-quarters of the way. The
somethings
were black and weird-looking. And then they began to expand, and I saw that they were huge coils of barbed wire that expanded, and tangled, and bucked as if they were alive. When the first car hit the wire, it pushed the wire
forward, then stopped, shuddered, and slowly was being pushed back. A dark figure jumped out of the car, then turned and ran as he realized that the wire, stretched by the car, was now recoiling toward him.

The wire hit the kid, lifted him off the street, and held him jerking spasmodically some fifteen feet above the tarred street.

There were more shots from the cars. They had all stopped and were shooting through the barbed wire. A few shots from our side had a deeper, more ominous sound. There were people running for cover. The smoke was clearing; they were trying to back the cars away. A few bodies lay on the ground just beyond the wire; a few more were caught in the wire. I was crying and I couldn’t stop myself. Nothing made this right. The numbers could add up to what they needed to be and this would not be right. No, God, this would not be right!

There was nothing sure in this world. Drego could search for his soul all he wanted, but he couldn’t erase the shadows of those bodies lying in this heat. Nothing could.

Silence. From time to time a cry for help. Was someone calling for his mother?

T
he gunfire had stopped. The overcast day had become suddenly brilliant. The barbed wire that had been shot across the road was dark and jagged against the lighter sky. There were still two bodies caught up in it. One of them was obviously young. He was thin, from a distance as black as the barbed wire, his body arched across the strands that cut into his flesh. There was a feeble effort by some of the people on his side of the wire to free him. From where we watched, we could hear his screams as the razors embedded in the wire cut more deeply into his flesh.

This was nothing like I had imagined. The neat dots on my computer screen were being translated into flesh and blood and the stink of gunfire.

Through the wire, I could see the other attackers begin to drift away. Some of them were crouching low as they hurried from the scene; others stood as they walked, in a futile display of bravado. They knew they were defeated. They hoped that they wouldn’t be shot.

I saw Drego and went to him to ask if they would regroup and come back.

“No,” he said. There was a catch in his voice. He was a hard shell of a man barely holding back the tears. “They’re defeated. They’ll slink away and look for something to get high on. That’s what they’re used to doing.”

Minutes before—was it an hour?—Drego had been ready to do battle, and now he was saddened by what he had seen, pained. No matter what, they were his people. And he was right: slinking away was what they were used to, what we were all doing more and more.