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"Yeah," Laura said. She lifted two fingers. "But we have solidarity, and they're busy killing each other."
Selous laughed.
"We're going to win, too."
They began talking about the others. Laura had long since memorized the list. Maria
They had tortured the three agents of Vie
Steven Lawrence had been taken from an Oxfam camp.
The camps were often raided-they were dumping grounds for scop, the primary source of food for millions of Saharans.
The black market for single-cell protein was the major econ- omy of the region-the "government" of Mauritania, for instance, was little more than a scop cartel. Foreign handouts, a few potash mines, and an army-that was Mauritania.
Chad was a malignant welfare bureaucracy, a tiny fraction of aristocrats whose thugs periodically emptied automatic weapons into starving crowds. The Sudan was run by a radical Muslim lunatic who consulted dervishes while facto- ries washed away and airports cracked and burst. Algeria and
Libya were one-party states, more or less organized in the coastal provinces but roiling tribalist anarchy in their Saharan outback. Ethiopia's government was preserved by Vie
All of them drawing venom from the lethal inheritance of the last century, a staggering to
From America to Pakistan to mujahideen to a Somalian splin- ter group with nothing to recommend it but a holy desperation for martyrdom. From Russia to a cadre of bug-eyed Marxist strongmen shooting anything that even looked like a bourgeois intellectual.... Billions in aid had been poured into the sub-Sahara, permanently warping governments into bizarre fu
and "national security," the outside world heaved a cynical sigh of relief as its lethal junk was disposed of to people still desperate to kill each other....
At noon the convoy stopped. A soldier gave them water and gruel. They were in the Sahara now-they'd been driving all day. The driver unchained their legs. There was no place to run, not now.
Laura jumped out under the hammer blow of sun. A haze of heat distorted the horizons, marooning the convoy in a shimmering plaza of cracked red rock. The convoy had three trucks: the first carried soldiers, the second radio equipment, the third was theirs. And the two armored half-tracks in the rear. No one came out of the half-tracks or offered any food to their crews. Laura began to suspect that they had no crews.
They were robots, big carnivorous versions of a common taxi-bus.
The desert shimmer was seductive. She felt a hypnotic urge to run out into it, into the silver horizon. As if she would dissolve painlessly into the infinite landscape, vanish like dry ice and leave only pure thought and a voice from the whirlwind.
Too long inside a cell. The horizon was strange, it was pulling at her, as if it were trying too tug her soul out through the pupils of her eyes. Her head filled with strange pounding pulses of incipient heatstroke. She relieved herself quickly and climbed back into the canvas shade of the truck.
They drove all afternoon, all evening. There was no sand, it was various kinds of bedrock, blasted and Martian-looking.
Miles of heat-baked flints for hours and hours, then sandstone ridges in a million shades of dun and beige, each more tedious than the last. They passed another military convoy in the afternoon, and once a distant airplane flew across the south- ern horizon.
At night they left the road, drew the trucks in a circle. The soldiers set metal stakes, pitons, into the rock all around the camp. Monitors, Laura thought. They ate again and the sun fell, an eerie desert sunset that lit the horizon with roseate fire. The soldiers gave them each a cotton army blanket and they slept in the truck, on the benches, one foot cuffed to prevent them from sneaking up on a soldier in the dark and tearing him apart with their fingernails.
The heat fled out of the rocks as soon as the sun was gone.
It was bitterly cold all night, dry and arctic. In the first light of morning she could hear rocks cracking like gunshots as the sunlight hit.
The soldiers gassed up the trucks from jerry cans of fuel, which was too bad, because it occurred to her for the first time that a jerry can of fuel might be poured over the trucks and set alight, if she could get loose, and if she was strong enough to carry one, and if she had a match.
They had more gruel, with lentils in it this time. Then they were off again, the usual thirty miles an hour, jouncing hard, bruised and sucking dust from the two trucks ahead.
They had told each other everything by now. How Katje had grown up in a reeducation camp, because her parents were verkrampte, reactionaries, rather than verligte, liberals.
It was not bad as such camps went, she said. The Boers were used to camps. The British had invented them during the Boer
War, and in fact the very term "concentration camp" was invented by the British as a term for the place where they concentrated kidnapped Boer civilians. Katje's father had actually kept up his banking job in the city while rival black factions were busy "necklacing" one another, cramming tires full of petrol over the heads of victims and publicly roasting them alive... .
Azania had always been a series of camps, of migrant laborers crammed into barracks, or black townships kept in isolation by cops with rhino-hide whips and passcards, or intellectuals kept for years under "the ban," in which they were forbidden by law to join any group of human beings numbering more than three, and thus forming a kind of independent tribal homeland consisting of one person in a legal bell jar... .
Laura heard her say all this, this blond woman who looked so much like herself, and in return she could only say... well
... sure, I have problems too ... for instance my mother and
I don't get along all that well. I know it doesn't sound like much but I guess if you'd been me you'd think more of it....
The trucks slowed. They were winding downhill.
"I think we're getting somewhere," Laura said, stirring.
"Let me look," Katje said casually, and got up and shuf- fled to the back of the truck and peered outside around the back of the canvas, bracing herself. "I was right," she said.
"I see some concrete bunkers. There are jeeps and... oh, dear, it's a crater, Laura, a crater as big as a valley."
Then the half-track behind them blew up. It simply flew to pieces like a china figurine, instantly, gracefully. Katje looked at it with an expression of childish delight and Laura suddenly found herself down .on the floor of the truck, where she'd flung herself, some reflex hitting her faster than she could think. Roaring filled the air and the maddened stammer of automatic weapons, bullets piercing the canvas in a smooth line of stitching that left glowing holes of daylight and crossed the figure of Katje where she stood. Katje jumped just a bit as the line of stitching crossed her and turned and looked at
Laura with an expression of puzzlement and fell to her knees.
And the second half-track tumbled hard as something hit it in the forward axle and it went over smoldering, and the air was full of the whine of bullets. Laura slithered to where