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"Californian." He tugged his veil down, showing her his face. It was an elaborate tribal veil, yards of fabric, wrapping his face and skull in a tall, ridged turban, the ends of it draping his shoulders. Crude vegetable dye had stained his cheeks and mouth, streaking his creased Anglo face with indigo.
He had about two weeks of reddish beard stubble, shot with gray. He smiled briefly, showing a rack of impossibly white
American teeth.
He looked like a TV journalist gone horribly and perma- nently wrong. She assumed at once that he was a mercenary, some kind of military adviser. "Who are you people?"
"We're the Inadin Cultural Revolution. You?"
"Rizome Industries Group. Laura Webster."
"Yeah? You must have some story to tell, Laura Web- ster." He looked at her with sudden intense interest, like a sleepy cat spotting prey.
Without warning, she felt a sudden powerful flash of deja vu. She remembered traveling out to an exotic game park as a child, with her grandmother. They'd pulled up in the car to watch a huge male lion gnawing a carcass at the side of the road. The memory struck her: those great white teeth, tawny fur, the muzzle flecked with blood up to the eyes. The lion had looked up calmly at her through the window glass, with a look just like the one the stranger was giving her now.
"What's an Inadin?" Laura said.
"You know the Tuaregs? A Saharan tribe? No, huh?" He pulled the brow of his turban lower, shading his bare eyes.
"Well, no matter. They call themselves the 'Kel Tamashek.'
`Tuareg' is what the Arabs call them-it means `the godforsaken.'
" He was picking up speed again, weaving expertly around the worst of the boulders. The suspension soaked up shock-good design, she thought through reflex. The broad wire wheels barely left a track.
"I'm a journalist," he told her. "Freelance. I cover their activities. "
"What's your name?"
"Gresham. "
"Jonathan Gresham?"
Gresham looked at her for a long moment. Surprised, thinking it over. He was judging her again. He always seemed to be judging her. "So much for deep cover," he said at last.
"What's the deal? Am I famous now?"
"You're Colonel Jonathan Gresham, author of The Lawrence Doctrine and Postindustrial Insurgency?"
Gresham looked embarrassed. "Look, I was all wrong in that book. I didn't know anything back then, it's theory, half-ass bullshit mostly. You didn't read it, did you?"
"No, but I know people who really thought the world of that book."
"Amateurs."
She looked at Gresham. He looked like he'd been born in limbo and raised on the floor of hell. "Yeah, I guess so."
Gresham mulled it over. "You heard about me from your jailers, huh? I know they've read my stuff. Vie
"It must mean something! Your bunch of guys on little bicycles just wiped out a whole convoy!"
Gresham winced a little, like an avant-garde artist praised by a philistine. "If I'd had better intelligence.... Sorry about your friend. Fortunes of war, Laura. "
"It could have just as easily been me."
"Yeah, you learn that after a while."
"Do you think she'll make it?"
"No, I don't. If one of us took a wound that bad, we'd have just put a bullet in him." He glanced at Laura. "I could do it,"
he, said. He was being genuinely generous, she could see that.
"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 ele- mental. "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 gri
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 recog- nized 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 con- fused, 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 cha
"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.