"Can you walk?" he said.
"Yes, but my friend's hurt."
"Come on out then." He yanked down the back of the truck, one-handed. It screeched-bullets had bent it out of shape. Laura crawled out quickly.
The cameraman looked at Katje. "She's bad. We'll have to leave her."
"She's a hostage. Azanian. She's important."
"The Malians will stitch her up, then."
"No, they won't, they'll kill her! You can't let her die here! She's a doctor, she works in the camps!"
The first marauder returned at a trot, bearing the belt of the dead driver, with rows of bullets and a ring of keys. He studied Laura's handcuffs alertly, picked the correct key at once, and clicked them loose. He gave her the cuffs and keys with a little half-bow and an elegant hand to his heart.
Other desert raiders-about two dozen-were looting the broken trucks. They were riding thin, skeletal dune buggies the size of jeeps, all tubes, spokes, and wire. The cars bounded along, agilely, quiet as bicycles, with a wiry scrunching of metal-mesh wheels and faint creak of springs. Their drivers were wrapped in cloaks and veils. They looked puffy, huge, and ghostlike. They steered from saddles over heaps of cargo lashed down under canvas.
"We don't have time." The big raider with the camera waved at the others and shouted in their language. They whooped in return and the men on foot began mounting up and stowing loot: ammo, guns, jerry cans.
"I want her to live!" Laura shouted.
He stared down at her. The tall marauder in his goggles, his masked and turbanned face, body cinched with belts and weaponry. Laura met his eyes without flinching.
"Okay," he told her. "It's your decision." She felt the weight of his words. He was telling her she was free again.
Out of prison, in the world of decisions and consequences. A
fierce sense of elation seized her.
"Take my camera. Don't touch its triggers." The stranger took Katje in his arms and carried her to his own buggy, parked five yards from the truck.
Laura followed him, lugging the camera. The bulldozed roadbed scorched her bare feet and she hopped and lurched to the shade of the buggy. She looked down the slope.
The iron stump of a vaporized tower marked Ground Zero.
The atomic crater was not as deep as she'd expected. It was shallow and broad, marked with eerie streaks, puddles of glassy slag broken like cracked mud. It looked mundane, wretched, forgotten, like an old toxic-waste excavation.
Jeeps were peeling away from the bunker, roaring upslope.
They had soldiers in back, the test site's garrison, manning swivel-mounted machine guns.
From half a mile away they opened fire. Laura saw impact dust puffing twenty yards below them, and following that, languidly, the distant chatter of the shots.
The stranger was rearranging his cargo. Carefully, thought- fully. He glanced briefly at the approaching enemy jeeps, the way a man would glance at a wristwatch. He turned to Laura.
"You ride in back and hold her."
"All right."
"Okay, help me with her." They set Katje into the vacated cargo space, on her side. Katje's eyes were open again but they looked glassy, stunned.
Machine-gun fire clattered off the wreckage of one of the half-tracks.
The lead jeep. suddenly lurched clumsily into the air. It came down hard, pancaking, men and wreckage flying. Then the sounds. of the exploding land mine reached them. The two other jeeps pulled up short, fishtailing in the shoulder of the road. Laura climbed on, throwing her arm over Katje.
"Keep your head down." The stranger saddled up, threw the buggy into motion. They whirred away. Off the track, into wasteland.
In moments they were out of sight. It was low, rolling desert, studded with red, cracked rubble and heat-varnished boulders. The occasional waist-high thornbush, tinsel-thin wisps of dry grass. The afternoon heat was deadly, blasting up from the surface like X-rays.
A slug had hit Katje about two inches left of the navel and exited her back, nicking the floating rib. In the fierce dry heat both wounds had clotted quickly, dark shiny wads of con- gealed blood on her back and stomach. She had a bad cut on her shin, splinter damage, Laura thought.
Laura herself was untouched. She had barked a knuckle a little, flopping down for cover in the back of the truck. That was all. She felt amazed at her luck-until she considered the luck of a woman who had been machine-gunned twice in her life without even joining a goddamned army.
They covered about three miles, careening and weaving.
The marauder slowed. "They'll be after us," he shouted back at her. "Not the jeeps-aircraft. I've got to keep moving, and we'll spend some time in the sun. Get her under the tarp. And cover your head. "
"With what?"
"Look in the kit bag there. No, not that one! Those are land mines."
Laura loosened the tarp and pulled a flap over Katje, then tugged the kit bag loose. Clothes-she found a grimy military shirt. She draped it over her head and neck like a burnoose, and turbanned it around her forehead with both sleeves.
With much jarring and fumbling she managed to get Katje's handcuffs off. Then she flung both sets of them off the back of the truck, flung away the keys. Evil things. Like metal parasites.
She climbed up onto the cargo heap, behind her rescuer.
He passed her his goggles. "Try these." His eyes were bright blue.
She put them on. Their rubber rims touched her face, chilled with his sweat. The torturing glare faded at once. She was grateful. "You're American, aren't you?"
"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?"