If he had full control over his limbs, this scenario would have been finished to his satisfaction hours ago. But no, no…it was pointless to moan over a broken shoulder. He had to try something. He slowed a step.
“Don’t slow down,” said Gantt, indicating his level of awareness even with sand in his eyes.
“I need some water.”
“So do I, but we don’t get any. Not yet.”
Michael continued to slow his pace and put a small stumble in it for effect. “Water,” he said, calculating inches. If he could manage to knock that gun from Gantt’s hand…but there was the Colt automatic in the man’s waistband. Whatever happened in the next few seconds, it was going to be a dirty, close-run…
Gantt aimed the pistol at the ground between them and fired. The bullet ricocheted off a stone and screamed away. Then the Walther took steady aim at Michael again.
“Don’t try what you’re thinking,” said the flyer, his voice unnervingly calm. “You would be much too clumsy. So just keep walking, like a good obedient—”
He suddenly spun to the right and held the pistol out before him.
Michael looked in that direction.
A figure stood up on a slight hill at the edge of the curtains of blowing sand.
It was a small figure, dressed in dirty clothes that may have once been white. They were really not much more than rags that flapped in the wind. The figure wore a brown keffiyeh and on top of that sat a khaki-colored Scottish Tam O’Shanter cap, which Michael knew was a common headdress among Commonwealth soldiers.
“Come down here!” Gantt ordered.
The figure did not move.
Gantt glanced quickly at Michael. “Do you know the language?”
“A little.” He was limited, but he did know a bit from dealing with tribal scouts.
“Tell him to come down here.”
Michael spoke the command—Come here—in first Tamazight and then Tuareg Berber. The figure turned and ran and in a few seconds was gone from sight.
Gantt kept the Walther aimed into the swirling sand for awhile longer before he lowered it. “What do you make of that?” he asked, probably directing the question to himself. When Michael had no reply, the pistol found him once more. “Keep moving. And no more playacting, please. You’re no stumbler.”
Michael walked forward, with Gantt a few careful paces behind. The lycanthrope had decided to again bide his time, because surely an opportunity was coming. If not, he would find a way to create one before they reached the shadow of an Afrika Korps flag. Behind him, the flyer scanned left and right for more figures in the wind but none emerged.
Michael figured Gantt must have been spooked by the strange encounter, because a few minutes after the incident the ace said, “Entertain me. Tell me about yourself.”
“I wouldn’t care to waste my breath.”
“Fair enough. I’ll tell you about myself, then. Did you know that I’ve shot down…well, it would be fifty planes including the ones today. Fifty. Do you know how many pilots have never shot down even one plane? And here I have fifty chalked up! What do you say about that?”
“I say you’re walking through the desert, the same as me.”
“Yes, but there’s a very big difference between our futures. You’ll be a prisoner of war and I’ll be up there again. I belong up there, Michael. It’s where I truly live. Is there a place you truly live?”
Michael grunted quietly. The hunter from the woods is a very long way from home, he thought. “No particular place,” he replied.
“I’m sorry for you, then. All men need a place where they truly live. Where their souls and spirits are free. The sky is my place. I find it beautiful, even on a stormy day when the planes are grounded. It is a woman with a thousand faces, all of them exquisite. Are you married, Michael?”
“No.”
“Me neither.” He gave a short laugh. “As if I should ever wear such a chain! The first thing a wife would say to me is, don’t fly so high or so fast. And listening to her, and wanting to please her, would kill me as it has killed so many other pilots with…” Gantt searched for the right word. “Attachments,” he finished. He laughed again, only this time Michael thought it sounded a little forced. “Men like us don’t need attachments, do we?”
“Men like us?”
“The risk-takers. The men who must be on the battlefront. Take you, for one. Your reconnaissance work. That puts you at great risk, doesn’t it? And you’re out front, blazing a trail through the mines and tank traps? Don’t tell me you’re simply a desk jockey, because I won’t believe it.”
“I’m not simply that,” Michael said.
“A man of action can recognize a man of action,” Gantt told him. “It’s in the way you move. And you’re confident, even now, even with your broken shoulder, that I’ll never get you to that outpost, aren’t you? Even with a pistol at your back, you’re confident. You think I’ll make a mistake you can take advantage of. Yes? And I’m confident that I will not make a mistake. So what does that make us?”
“Two confident fools in the desert with a couple of swallows of water in a shot-up canteen,” Michael answered.
“No! It makes us comrades of sorts! Like chess players, you see? Two men of action, reduced to the barest minimum to survive! A challenge, to be overcome.”
“I think you need some more covering for your head.”
“Maybe I do, Englisher, but I’ll tell you… I find your confidence in this situation to be very interesting. And entertaining. I’m just waiting to see what you’re going to do to keep yourself out of a POW camp. Because I know you are going to try.”
“You would,” Michael said.
“Of course I would! I’d never give up trying. And that’s why we’re comrades of sorts, isn’t it?”
“If you say so.” A movement to the right caught Michael’s attention. When he looked, he saw across the white plain the small figure in the dirty rags and the khaki tam about a hundred meters away, keeping their pace.
“Ah, there he is again,” said Gantt. “Now…he’s not a Dahlasiffa scout, or he’d be on a camel. In fact, why isn’t he on a camel? I make him out to be…about four feet six? A small boy, I’m thinking? All alone out here? And why might that be?”
“If you want to find out,” Michael said, “offer him water.”
“And use up even a swallow of what we have? Now who needs his head covered a little better?”
“If he’s a native, he might know where a well is. In fact, he may be on his way there. So…one swallow of water for him could wind up filling the canteen. Once we get a decent plug in the hole,” Michael added.
They walked on in silence, but Michael could tell that Rolfe Gantt was thinking.
The wind had died and the sand had spun down but the sun had grown hotter. Michael’s mouth was parched. He figured the air temperature had to be at least a hundred and ten, and then the sun’s heat was intensified off the desert’s surface. Still, he was sweating and that was a good sign. When the sweat stopped…not good.
“All right,” Gantt said at last. “Tell him we have water.”
Michael abruptly stopped and Gantt pulled himself up short, then backed away a couple of steps. Out across the plain, the small boy also stopped and stared in their direction.
Michael made the declaration in, again, both Tamazight and then Tuareg Berber.
There was no response. “Hold up the canteen,” Michael said, and Gantt obeyed. Then Michael called out once more. His voice rolled through the silence, and the silence closed up in its wake.