This was the scene set through the scratchy megaphones in the sandy black night under the clearest sky the French ambassador said he had ever seen. Gray forms climbed up the sides of the rocks, ropes lowered, men grunted. The general explained through the megaphone that the exercise problem was to get the Jews before they destroyed Mecca with their atomic rifle. A surprise attack.
"But, Colonel," said the French ambassador, sipping an overly sweet almost almond-tasting soft drink because alcohol was outlawed in Lobynia, "if you had the Israeli cabinet trapped in the caves, wouldn't your war of extermination be complete? Why would you have to pursue them?"
"I don't want to exterminate the Jews or even eliminate Israel, if you must know the truth. The best thing we've ever had has been Israel and the best thing they've ever had has been us."
"I don't understand. With all due respect, Colonel, why does Israel need the Arabs?"
"Because without us, they would have a civil war within five minutes. There would be factions within factions within factions, and rabbis would stone socialists who would shoot at generals who would shoot everybody else. Mark me, the Jews are a contentious people and the only thing that holds them together is the threat of extermination. This is true."
Seeing the stunned look on the ambassador's face and not knowing whether it was because of the simulated screams from the caves, Baraka continued, "Hitler created the state of Israel and we keep it going. Without Israel, the word Arab would hardly be used. It would be Egyptian, Kuwaiti, Hashemite, Sunni, Lobynian. But not Arab. That is why, while we still have Israel as our unifying force, I want to merge countries. If peace with Israel should break out tomorrow, you could kiss the Arab cause good-bye. We would never advance technologically or socially. Never. All of us as peoples are doomed without Israel to fight."
The ambassador smiled broadly. "You are very wise, Colonel."
"To be wise, Mr. Ambassador, is merely not to be as stupid as everyone else. That was what our king said to us, but he was a fool and now we have no king."
"That's not a Lobynian statement, you know," said the French ambassador, "and it's surprising that the saying should reach here. According to some French royalty, there was a house of assassins who ..."
Suddenly a pitiful shriek came from one of the illuminated caves. The colonel and the ambassador were seated on the back of a flatbed truck with other dignitaries, holding their almond-flavored drinks. Their talking ceased, making the scream sound even more piercing in the abruptly silent night that smelled of the fumes of parked trucks and newly oiled weapons of war.
The caves were less than seventy-five yards away and they could see clearly a commando, his arms apparently tied behind his back, spin into the entrance of the cave. His shriek became a loud moan and then the moan became a pitiful little sob which did not stop. No one moved and everyone saw why it appeared from the front as if his hands were tied behind him. Spinning around in delirium, he showed all of them that this hands weren't in the back either. Someone had cut his arms off.
There was silence and then Colonel Baraka ordered doctors up to the man and a hundred voices were shouting orders.
"Aargh." Another moan filled the night as another commando crawled to the entrance of the cave and stopped. Then there was a groan, and nothing. A head came rolling out of the cave like a leather-bound melon and bounced down the Lobynian basalt and it was then that everyone realized that the second man who had crawled out of the supposedly empty caves had no legs.
"Attack, attack," yelled the commander of the Islamic commandoes before he ducked behind a searchlight. Everyone else took cover, until someone started firing at the cave and then the desert opened up in an explosion of automatic and semiautomatic weapons that whined into the cave and plastered the rocky rise, killing another half-dozen of their own commandoes.
When it was over, when the last pistol plinked away in the night, when the colonel had smacked enough soldiers in the back of the head and kicked enough behinds to stop them from making asses of themselves in front of foreigners by dissipating their ammunition like unseasoned troops, it was discovered that fifteen of their number had been killed by mutilation. And not by a knife, because a knife sharp enough to sever joints did not leave stringy strands of flesh.
Quickly, the mutilated were loaded into the ambulance that had accompanied the exercises for effect, presumably to take the bullet-riddled bodies of Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and General Sharon to the nearest garbage dump. But now the ambulance, which contained no medical equipment because someone had forgotten to load it, was to carry real Arab commandoes to the hospital.
"Like a bird with swiftness, oh driver, carry our brave fallen comrades to glory and to Dapoli," cried the commander. Seeing that the lazy driver had fallen asleep again, he ran-his feet sinking into the soft white sand-to the macadam road where he found the driver was not sleeping after all.
His head was tilted over his chest; his neck had been snapped. Pinned to his shirt was a note in an envelope.
The envelope said: "To be opened only by Colonel Baraka."
The note was delivered to Baraka, who did not open the envelope but had a jeep driver take him back to the capital alone. Everyone else stayed in a large group, their weapons drawn. They did not leave until dawn, and then only in a long convoy that started off slowly but ended with vehicles racing in a disorganized string on the road to the capital that cut a black line through the arid wasteland.
Back in the old king's palace, Colonel Baraka read the note many times. Then he took off his military uniform and, wearing the burnoose of his father and his father's father, got into a British land rover and headed out into the desert.
Out deep into the desert, the colonel drove, past the giant oil depots far to the left, where all Lobynia's oil eventually wound up for distribution, and then south along an uninterrupted black macadam line, a road that was always soft from the flat hot sun of the day. The sand was uninterrupted by a farm, by a home, by a factory. Not even a tree interrupted this land.
And yet the colonel knew that should one foreigner make this land fertile, plant one tree, drill and find water, plant and harvest a crop, there would be a national outcry, especially because the foreigner had done what Lobynians couldn't. Good, thought the colonel. If there were only some way he could plant another Israel closer to home. Work on his people's jealousy. Look what Israel had done for Egypt. It had goaded them into performing its first halfway competent military action since the defeat of the Hittites thousands of years before Christ. But if Egypt had erased Israel, Egypt would have returned to slumber.
From competence in military life would come competence in industry and in farming. It was Lobynia's only hope. And he, Colonel Baraka, was the only man who could bring it about. Without conceit or vanity he recognized this as simple truth. It was necessary, therefore, that he stay alive, and that was why he now drove into the desert.
So imperceptibly that one had to look far ahead and be on one of the many small rises to realize it, the road curved. It was really a constant curve, but such was the desert and the human eye that the road appeared straight with a curve at the very end.
It was still dark as Baraka's rover slowly changed direction around the curve. On his right were what his people called the Mountains of the Moon. Foreigners had given them a Latin name, and thus the world knew the mountains as it wished to know them. But Baraka knew them differently; he had been lost there once as a young officer.
He had stumbled into a mountain tribe and had given food in exchange for directions. Nothing was free in these mountains.
When he gave more food, the wise man of the tribe had insisted upon giving "an extra direction" for the extra food. A prophecy. But, said the wise man, the prophecy would take some time to deliver. Baraka must wait for it.