“You forgot to tape over your pin thingy,” he said.
“What are you, IDF quality control? I ran out of fucking tape.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t even know what it means.” Not quite true; the paratroopers’ wings told Arkady he was dealing with commandos from one of Israel’s legendary Sayerets, or special units. But which unit this was he couldn’t have begun to say.
“It means I Love Mom,” the soldier quipped. “Now turn around and spread your legs, schlemiel.”
Arkady turned around obediently—and finally caught sight of Li.
There was something about her, even standing in the street doing nothing, that made the Israelis look like toy soldiers. She was dressed much as Osnat usually dressed: in nondescript standard-issue desert-drab gear that looked like it could have come out of any of the army surplus shops Arkady had passed while running Korchow’s little errands the other week. But somehow the mismatched odds and ends hung on her short stocky frame in a configuration that looked anything but haphazard.
Her short hair was pushed back under a pair of sniper’s goggles that must cover her entire face when she pulled them down. The elastic band that held the goggles to her head had once had white lettering on it, perhaps a manufacturer’s logo; it had been scribbled over with a laundry pen so that it was just a dull purple-brown overlay on the black elastic. Her trousers were stained and bagged out at the knees and a knee pad floated around one ankle. Her already-stocky body was encased in a ceramic vest. In addition to the handgun still strapped to her thigh where he’d seen it during that first meeting at the airport, she’d made two new additions to her armory: a long, black, viciously sleek sniper’s rifle and a brutal-looking sawed-off assault weapon with a flashlight duct-taped beneath its trigger guard.
Another person—most other people—would have looked ridiculous in this getup. Li didn’t. And when Arkady asked himself why, he couldn’t come up with a clear answer. Was it the well-worn, hard-used quality of the clothes and weapons? Was it the sense that every strap and buckle and piece of tape had been adjusted with cool precision by hands that had done the job of killing often enough to make it a matter of craft, rather than reflection? Or was it the bulldog set of her jaw and the glint of defiant enjoyment in her dark eyes?
“He’s clean,” the soldier told Li over Arkady’s shoulder as he finished searching him.
“Take him inside then.”
Arkady looked around for Cohen, but the AI was gone. He had a vague idea that he’d seen him fade back into one of the neighboring houses just after the troops had arrived on the scene. And he must have taken Osnat with him because she was nowhere to be seen either.
“Where did Cohen and Osnat go?” he asked Li. It was the first time he’d ever worked up the courage to speak directly to the woman.
She looked at him as if she’d just become aware of his existence and wasn’t particularly pleased by the discovery. “Cohen had to go take care of some things.”
Arkady jerked his head toward the empty houses and the no-man’s-land that he knew must lie just beyond them. “Is he…are we going out there?”
“Probably.”
“Are we going to be out there after dark?” Arkady asked, looking at her flashlight-equipped weapon.
She gave him a lazy smile. “You better hope not.”
Inside the building that seemed to be the unit’s impromptu headquarters, Arkady saw a dozen more soldiers, a tangle of wires and equipment, assorted ominous olive drab cases and boxes—and off in a corner together, bent over a monitor, Cohen and Osnat and a young man whose collar tabs said he was a captain.
Osnat had somehow acquired a ceramic-plated vest and helmet and one of the same snubbed-off flashlight-equipped weapons that Li and the others were all carrying.
“What about him?” Li flicked a thumb at Arkady. “You’re not going to send him in naked as a shelled oyster, are you?”
An awkward silence fell.
“Oh for God’s sake. Don’t tell me no one thought of it?”
“Well…uh…Avi’s about his size,” said a young woman with a first lieutenant’s bar on her collar. “Someone go get Avi.”
“Avi! Get the fuck over here!”
“I said go get him, not scream in my ear. God, kids these days!”
A tall slim soldier materialized from somewhere over Arkady’s left shoulder. Rough hands pushed him against the wall next to Arkady and squared them up next to each other. A brief argument ensued—no surprise in a country where argument appeared to be the national sport. Nonetheless, it was obvious that the willowy Avi was closer to Arkady’s space-born physique than anyone else in the unit.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Avi said when he figured out what was in the cards. “Not my vest! Take someone else’s vest! This isn’t some factory-issue piece of shit. My mother resewed all the inside pockets and—”
“Well,” Li pointed out in a deceptively mild voice, “if you’re really concerned, you could always come along with us and make sure nothing happens to it.”
“—and, uh, I’m sure she’d be overjoyed for Arkady here to have it. Really. Be my guest. My shit is your shit.”
The boy emptied the pockets of his vest into a bag someone held out for the purpose, removed various pieces of detachable gear and equipment, unfastened what seemed like an inconveniently large number of buckles and snaps and Velcro strips, and finally pulled the vest over his head and lowered it over Arkady’s head in one smooth and almost anticlimactic movement.
The vest dropped onto Arkady’s shoulders with a soft thud, giving off a smell that was a combination of its normal owner’s masculine, and thankfully relatively clean, odor, and the sharp smells of dirt and machine oil and the khamsin.“It’s so light,” he said wonderingly.
“We’ll see if you still think that in five hours.”
And indeed, as the straps were fastened and tugged tight around his body he could already feel the ceramic plates digging and chafing around the edges.
When the thing had been strapped tight enough to feel thoroughly uncomfortable, the lieutenant stepped back and gave him a measuring once-over. “Well, that ought to protect everything but your balls,” she said in a satisfied tone. “And I hear you guys don’t use those anyway, so what do you care? Move around for me, will you?”
Arkady moved. “It’s too tight,” he complained.
“Too tight is just right. As the general said to the whore.”
Arkady had no idea what that meant, but everyone else seemed to think it was hysterically funny.
A noncom snaked through the crowded room with what looked like a roll of lilac purple tape. “Line up, ladies. Color of the day.”
“God! Purple again? Who picks these colors, a vengeful homosexual field-training-school washout?”
“Hey it’s better than the hot pink. Remember the pink? Took me a month to peel that shit off.”
“Hey, guys,” drawled the next guy over, “didn’t your mother ever tell you not to look a gift Mat’Kal in the mouth?”
“And the real tragedy is that he thinks he’s funny!”
As Arkady watched, people began ripping off strips of the brightly colored tape and wrapping it around the grips of their assault rifles or sticking strips of it onto their vests and helmets.
“What’s the tape for?” he asked Osnat, who had reappeared beside him in full combat gear.
“Idiot-proofing.” She’d ripped a section off the roll when it passed them by and was taping her own weapon and vest. She eyeballed him for a minute, stuck a strip of tape across his vested chest and pressed it briskly into place. “The tactical AIs are programmed not to fire on anyone with the right color tape on.”
“But couldn’t someone just copy the tape? Or steal it?”
“Not that easy. It’s interactive, talks back and forth with the AIs’ sensors, and they change the colors every few patrols, mix them up between zones and so forth to try to stay ahead of infiltrators. Anyway, it’s not an absolute interdiction. It just kicks the AI into a different decision tree or something. It can still waste you if it wants to. And don’t forget that.” She gave him her fiercest look. “’Cause if you get yourself shot out there, I’m going to personally kick your ass!”