The sand was hard-packed right here, though, and felt solid as a rock. Somebody had put down a paved runway and a little bit away was Camp Liberty.
It looked like something out of an old desert movie combined with a cheap war picture. Lots of large tents all over, interspersed here and there with old-type quonset huts, buildings of tin that looked like the upper half of buried tubes.
There were lots of people about, all wearing either the military fatigues and boots of the sergeant and flight crew or olive tee-shirts and shorts. Some wore armbands of one sort or another, and all wore incongruous-looking hard khaki-colored Jungle Jim hats. Men and women were about equal in number.
They headed first for a large tent nearest the plane, directed by a few uniformed people. They didn’t enter, though. Instead they were broken up into groups of ten, equally male and female, and made to stand there a bit more. The sorting was by number.
There were eight groups, he counted. Eighty old revolutionaries on that plane.
Now a big man and a husky woman in uniform emerged from the tent. They went to the first group, and the man, in a Slavic-sounding accent, said, “You will follow us, please.”
As soon as the first group was away, the second was met by another man-woman team, and then it was his turn.
An Oriental-looking man and a tiny black woman were his group’s caretakers, and both had soft but definite accents as well.
“You will follow us,” the woman commanded in an accent that was somewhat African-English with traces of French. They followed, all feeling like they would drop any second.
Several hundred meters later they reached another large tent.
“As I call your number,” the Oriental man said, “you will enter, disrobe completely, then enter the shower and rinse completely. When you emerge, you will give your number to the person there and they will give you a box with your number on it. Go out the back, dry off with the towels there as necessary, unpack the box and put on the top set of garments in the box. We will be there to take you farther.”
There was a big bin inside into which they shed clothes, then walked to a set of a dozen or so showers fed by large tanks plainly in view. They were not on; water was to be conserved here. You went in, turned one on, and bathed in the cool liquid using a little bit of gummy-looking soap, rinsed, turned off the shower, and walked out the back.
There was some grumbling from a couple of the people at being pushed around, but all realized that they were there by choice, and they had no other option.
Sam took the box marked 2025 and walked back outside, still nude. He felt slightly embarrassed and uncomfortable standing nude like that, although he was in exceptional condition and almost nobody paid him any mind. Old conditioning dies hard, he thought in self-reproach.
The top clothing proved to be one of the hard hats with his number stencilled on it, the tee-shirt and shorts, some short matching socks that seemed to cling, and a pair of low military-style boots. To his surprise, they all fit perfectly.
Finished, they lined up in front of their boxes.
“I am Sergeant Eight Eighty-One,” the Oriental man told them. “This is Sergeant Seven Sixty-Four. We are your training instructors. We will be living with you for the duration of your stay here, and we will chart your progress and go with you to classes and drills. Please feel free at any time not in class or drill to ask us any questions you like or to register complaints, make comments, et cetera, et cetera.”
A woman about thirty-five, small, plain, with short-cropped reddish-brown hair, spoke up. “Sergeant, will we get to eat and rest?”
The Oriental nodded almost imperceptibly. “Yes, yes. First we will go to our living quarters, your new home, and store your boxes. Then we will eat, then sleep. Tomorrow you will awaken before dawn to start. Most of our physical program will be done very early, very late, or at night. Midday, as you can imagine, is rather too hot for this, and that time you will spend inside at classes. Any other questions?”
One thin, tall, lanky man raised his hand and was recognized with a nod.
“Where are we, and how long will we be here?” he asked.
“You are in Africa. As to exactly where, that you will never know. You will be here as long as it takes. If you all progress at the correct rate, a few weeks at best. Remember, though, that you are older than many of our recruits, and unused to our ways. Also, you are, on the whole, in less than the best shape. This program is designed to help you survive when you go back into action. Once back into action, you will be in small groups, on your own, as you used to be, the difference being that you will be part of a larger and well-coordinated infrastructure. Together, we will accomplish the impossible, and we will do it quickly and effectively. Together, we will accomplish the collapse of the fascist corporate state of the United States of America, and when it tumbles the world will quake so much from its fall that those of us who survive will truly see the revolution for which we’ve prayed so long.”
The food was typical field kitchen stuff. What it was and how it had gotten into that condition were total mysteries. They were starved, though, and it tasted just fine.
Sam had a bad night of it. His own inner fears combined with his personal demons. He did not cry out—some subliminal self-preservation brake kept that from happening—but he saw it all once again: the plane, the launcher, Suzanne Martine’s ecstasy as the great airliner exploded…
He awoke several times in his hammock, staring. By the time the two sergeants came to get them up at 4:30 A.M. he guessed he’d slept less than three hours.
Breakfast wasn’t great, either—powdered eggs, some tough sort of meat, and a vitamin-fortified juice that tasted like rotten tomatoes. It filled, though, and then they went to work.
In the gloom and through sunrise they did basic calisthentics right out of gym class, running, jumping jacks, pushups and situps, the whole routine, until their bodies ached from it. Sam alone had no real problems; he was in superb physical condition and found the exercises refreshing and effortless. The two sergeants were duly impressed.
Another shower, some coordination drills to instill teamwork, and then it was time for class.
The indoctrination lecturer was a matronly woman of late middle years with a Russian accent, although she made it clear that they were not working for the U.S.S.R.
“Camp Liberty was not established by any of the major powers,” she told them. “Instead, it is a project of a number of radical revolutionary third-world nations working in concert, financed in part by the patriotic work of brigades around the capitalist world and by some excess revenue from some of those states better endowed with natural resources. We look upon the U.S.S.R. and the People’s Republic of China as stalled regimes, continually reactionary once the elite assumed power. They are better than the U.S.A, of course, but only in degree, and we shall attend to them in due course. However, it is the U.S.A. that has only a sixteenth of the world’s population yet consumes a fourth of its resources. It is the principal cancer holding back the attainment of basic human rights to food, shelter, and protection throughout the less fortunate nations of the world. Remove it, and you excise eighty percent of the cancer.
“However,” she continued, “we wish to remove it without placing the entire world in the center of a war it has avoided for decades. Atomic rain benefits no one, for there would be no one left. As a result, this project was established by progressive theorists. To the capitalists of America, the enemy remains totally mysterious. They cannot attack or threaten or pressure or cajole when they do not know whom to do it to. In the meantime they are being shown up as impotent fools, and already America is taking its first steps toward becoming a fascist state in day-to-day practice. We will let it continue, while the people chafe under true dictatorship for the first time.