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. Vienna read it too-didn't seem to do them much good, though. "
"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 grinned suddenly. No reassurance there-it was feral. "Tell me more, Laura
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 channeled depth of an arroyo-a
"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.
Gresham dismounted, shouldering a duffel bag. He pulled his curved machete and began chopping bushes. "The planes are worst after dark," he said. "They use infrareds. If they hit us at all, they'll probably take out the scoot." He began placing bushes over the buggy, camouflaging it. "So we'll sleep away from it. With the baggage."
"All right." Laura crawled from the back of the buggy, battered, filthy, bone-weary. "What can I do to help?"
"You can dress yourself for the desert. Try the knapsack."
She took the knapsack around the far side of the truck and fumbled it open. Shirts. Spare sandals.' A long, coarse tunic of washed-out blue, wrinkled and wadded and stained. She shrugged out of her prison blouse.
God, she was so thin. She could see every rib. Thin and old and exhausted, like something that ought to be killed. She tunneled into the tunic-its shoulder seams came halfway down her biceps and the sleeves hung to her knuckles. It was thick though, and beaten soft with long wear. It reeked of
Gresham, as if he had embraced her.
Strange thought, dizzying. She was embarrassed. She was a spectacle, pathetic. Gresham couldn't want a madwoman....
The ground rose up and struck her. She lay in a heap of her own arms and legs, wondering. A muddle of time passed, vague pain and rushing waves of dizziness.
Gresham was gripping her arms.
She looked at him blankly. He gave her water. The water revived her enough to feel her own distress. "You passed out," he said. She nodded, understanding for the first time.
Gresham picked her up. He carried her like a bundle of balloons; she felt light, hollow, bird-boned.
There was a lean-to pegged to the wall of the arroyo.' A
windbreak with a short arching tent roof of desert camo-cloth.
Under the roof a dark figure crouched over the white-striped prison form of Katje-another of the Tuareg raiders, a long sniper's rifle strapped to his back. Gresham set Laura down, exchanged words with the Tuareg, who nodded somberly.
Laura crawled into the tent, felt rough wool beneath her fingers-a carpet.
She curled up on it. The Tuareg was humming tonelessly to himself, under a ramp of blazing stars.
She was woken by the steaming smell of tea. It was barely dawn, a red auroral brightening in the east. Someone had thrown a warm rug over her during the night. She had a pillow too, a burlap bag stenciled in weird angular script. She sat up, aching.