Smoke said, “I can’t.”
“Sometimes I see a man who’s broken, or bent by torture, and I know he’ll never change. Never heal. When I saw you with that crow,” he smiled ruefully, “I knew you would heal. That meant the other possibilities I saw in you could become real. Now you have something to think about.”
Steinfeld nodded, once, to say good-bye and went away. Leaving Smoke to just lie there, staring at the ceiling.
Hard-Eyes and Jenkins were walking through the Parc Monceau. It was the flaccid end of late afternoon; the trees stood leafless and stark as nude crones. The forest looked dead, and misty wet, all grays and blue shadows and browns leached of life. But the smell of moldering leaves was good. Hard-Eyes inhaled it in hungry breaths and the cold air bit at his sore nostrils; pins and needles danced in his cheeks.
The HK-21 assault rifle in his hands was cold as a stone crucifix and felt nearly as heavy. He was tired; he was hungry. One meal a day was not enough.
“Steinfeld promised us more to eat,” Jenkins complained.
Hard-Eyes had been thinking the same thing, but he said, “We’re lucky to get what they give us. You get a look at that refugee camp outside town?”
Jenkins grunted. “You got a point.” His hands were red from cold on the blue steel and plastic stock of his assault rifle. They’d traded in the Weatherby and the .22 for more practical weapons.
Hard-Eyes glanced over his shoulder, wondering why the instructors were hanging back so far. And then he stopped.
He couldn’t see them at all now.
“They’re fucking with us, Jenkins,” Hard-Eyes said.
Jenkins stopped and they watched the trail behind them, expecting to see their guerrilla-warfare instructors strolling around the bend, through the attenuated bristle of bluish underbrush. Nothing.
There were no bird sounds. There had been, a few minutes before.
Hard-Eyes swallowed.
“Those guys don’t like us,” Jenkins said, his voice hushed. “What’d they say about ‘robber packs’?”
“Said we hadda be careful because the noise of the gunfire might attract robber packs. Guys that live on the other side of the park, in the shack slum over there.”
“Shit!—you think they set us up?”
“Steinfeld wouldn’t risk men like that.”
“But I’m telling you these guys don’t like us. They’ve decided that Americans suck. They think we’re CIA or some shit. And Steinfeld ain’t around.”
“They don’t like us but they wouldn’t—” He broke off, staring through the mist. There were men coming out of the woods.
The trees to the right of the trail were not thickly dispersed. The well-spaced trunks came together in the compression of distance, becoming a corrugated wall of gray about fifty yards away. From here it looked liked a solid wall of trees. So when the men came out of that solid-seeming wall it looked as if they were squeezed out, like man-shaped drops of liquid. They looked as gray as the tree trunks, except there were smears of orange-pink for faces and pencil-thin strokes of blue-black and brown in their hands. Rifles.
Hard-Eyes counted eight and after that stopped counting. And looked for a place to run to. To his left was a broad, cracked parking lot. The French government scarcely existed now, and the skeleton of it that remained had no resources for park maintenance, so the parking lot was choked with blown branches and leaves; here and there were the rusty humps of stripped and abandoned cars. But the cars were too far away to be used for cover. He and Jenkins would be shot in the back if they ran across the parking lot.
The trail up ahead looked safer, but the instructors had told them, “When pressed, ask yourself if this is a situation when we must disperse—or regroup? The answer depends on the nature of the enemy and their position with relation to your own unit’s command.”
If Hard-Eyes ran ahead, the enemy would become a wedge between Hard-Eyes’ unit and the unit’s command, the instructors. The command would be threatened, hemmed in by the enemy and when possible he was to regroup to protect command.
So Hard-Eyes said, “Back down the trail.”
Jenkins said, “Shit, man—”
“Come on!”
The pack was close enough so that Hard-Eyes could make out the features in the orange-pink smudges. He turned and ran.
Hard-Eyes thought, This isn’t the enemy, this is a bunch of half-starved Parisians hoping we’ll be carrying something valuable or edible.
And he thought, The instructors have set us up so the robber pack becomes “the enemy.” Like this is a war game where the other side doesn’t know it’s playing a game.
And then he thought, The fucking instructors are hoping we’ll get our asses blown away. Or maybe we’ll burn down a few of these problem thugs for them.
…As he heard the first popping sounds, and the echoes like a sheet of aluminum shaken to simulate thunder. A piece of turf threw itself in the air near his feet. Irrationally, he leapt back, as if the bit of jumping ground itself were the threat.
Hard-Eyes ran on, Jenkins a little behind and falling farther behind. The trees danced crazily past; the sky made a jerky windshield wiper movement. He ran past a tree and it spat bark at him; a piece of yellow wood-flesh showed where the bullet had scored away bark.
He heard Jenkins returning fire behind him, a thudding rattle, probably no hope of hitting anyone, trying to suppress them.
Thirty feet ahead the trail sank into thickets of blue bushes. There was not much cover at the opening of the trail between the bushes. If the pack got directly behind them, they would simply stop and shoot down the line of the trail, and cut them down.
If they reached that first bend, cutting left into the bushes, they might make it.
But just then Jenkins stumbled and gave a strangely high-pitched cry as he went down, skidding over the iron-hard, iron-cold earth, his rifle clattering. Hard-Eyes wanted to run on, part of his mind already making up excuses.
But he stopped. Huffing and cursing, he turned, going upstream against his own impulse to get the fuck out, fighting the current in himself. He heard a scornful humming, and he knew that a bullet had missed his head by an inch or two. Jenkins was getting to his knees, puffing. How could they miss him? He was such a big target! Hard-Eyes bent and tried to help him up, but Jenkins shook his arm off—both of them annoyed—and said, “Just cover me,” as he reached for his rifle.
Hard-Eyes turned and opened up without aiming, the automatic rifle jumping in his hand; he felt like a fool when he saw that he’d shot six holes in the bole of a tree between him and the pack. Then he saw one of them coming at him from the right. The man paused about forty feet away and raised the rifle to his shoulder, aiming, like a man shooting at rabbits. He had a big nose, weak chin, gaunt cheeks. He wore a tagged brown cap. He fired. The bullet cut the air overhead. The man struggled to reload his rifle…
Hard-Eyes swiveled the HK-21 and fired another burst from the hip. He had ludicrous mental images of himself as a boy taking turns with his big brother cutting the lawn because when you started the lawn-mower it made a noise like the assault rifle. He saw himself spraying a water hose at his brother—shooting an automatic weapon sometimes felt like shooting a high-pressure water hose at someone; when you were close enough to the enemy with no time to aim, you pointed the hose, raking back and forth, and hoped for the best. The man in the brown cap spun half around and staggered, dropped his rifle, but didn’t fall. He looked confused, then he turned and ran, holding his side. Wounded. Others were coming on through the trees, spread out. Hard-Eyes emptied the magazine at them, firing in little bursts. They dodged behind trees for cover—and then Hard-Eyes realized that Jenkins was up and running for the brush.