“I can’t.” The other man’s voice was almost gone. “I can’t.”
“If you won’t stand up, I’ll stand you up.”
“Please…let me lie here. I can’t…dear God… I can’t—”
Gantt was interrupted by the hand that reached down and grasped the back of his collar, pulling his face out of the sand.
“You hear me,” Michael said. “Loud and clear.” His eyes gleamed bright green in the dawning light. The sun was a red semicircle rising over shadowed mountains to the east. “You can handle a gun. So can I. The guns can get us some water. That means we live, at least for another day, unless the Dahlasiffa kill us first. But I’m thinking they’re not going to be expecting two men with guns. I told you to stand up.”
“I’m done,” Gantt gasped through his bloodied lips, his eyes swollen from the horror of what he’d just seen. “You go.”
“The odds are not good for one man. Not much better for two, but they are better. Now…you’re a soldier and so am I. We go out fighting. Do you hear me?”
“I can’t make it. Please. I’m done.”
“I’ll tell you when you’re done or not.” Michael gritted his teeth and tried to haul the man up but for all his best effort he didn’t have the strength. “Rolfe,” he said, “don’t die on your belly.” And he decided to add, “Your father didn’t.”
Gantt didn’t respond for a few seconds. Then he reached back and roughly pushed Michael’s hand away. He slowly rolled over and sat up. He pressed his hands to his face once more and rocked back and forth.
Michael heard the noise of the dice. He saw that the boy was throwing them onto the ground and then leaning forward to read the pips before they were collected and the process repeated.
“We have to try,” Michael said, though he himself was unsure they could even get close enough to the Dahlasiffa village to try. “We can think of something.”
“I’m too weak. I can barely walk.”
“Can you crawl?” Michael asked.
Gantt lowered his hands and looked up at Michael Gallatin. His eyes were deep sunken, dull and lifeless. It was a bad sign, Michael thought. A sign of giving up. He reached into the parachute pack, got the Walther P38 and offered the weapon to its owner. “Take it,” he said when Gantt hesitated. “Go ahead and blow your brains out, if you want to. I’ll bury you out here or you can join Hartler for a long bath.”
Gantt stared fixedly at the pistol. He frowned, searching for solid ground in this desert hell. The sun was rising quickly now, and the air was already hot. No breeze stirred a particle of dust.
At last Gantt spoke. “Why would I want to commit suicide?”
“It would be faster than dying of thirst. You still have some strength left. The village may be only a few miles away. Their well will be clean.” Something Michael had read suddenly came to him. “If I have to die today, I want to die fighting to live.”
“That makes not a bit of sense,” said the pilot.
“I know. It’s one of your quotes from your last article in Signal.”
In spite of his raging thirst and deadening fatigue, Gantt summoned a weak smile. “You’re a strange bastard.”
“Save your insults for tomorrow. For today, take this pistol and stand up. I’m thirsty enough to kill for a drink. Are you?”
Gantt gingerly rubbed his raw mouth. Then he reached out and took the pistol. “Yes, I am,” he said, and with the greatest effort he got himself to his feet.
They aimed themselves along the camel tracks, with Michael leading the way, the boy next and then Gantt. As the sun steadily rose and the heat intensified the Englisher and German stopped to put on their face and head coverings, and then they continued southward.
They passed into a surrealistic landscape. The hard-packed crust of sand was brown with streaks of yellow. Emerging from the earth were huge ridges of wind-sculpted sandstone rocks standing twenty and thirty meters tall. Michael kept to the camel tracks, which led them through winding passages in the rocks.
It was difficult for even Michael to keep moving as the heat grew, so he knew Gantt was struggling. Every so often Michael looked back at the others; the boy was all right, though moving slowly, but Gantt was losing ground. The scorpion’s venom was surely still affecting him. Couple that with the shock of seeing Hartler, and it amazed Michael that the ace could put one foot in front of the other. They were helped by the find of some spindly cactus plants, which when cut open by the razor afforded a small amount of liquid squeezed from the stalks. Still, the need for water began to take over every thought for Michael, to push everything else aside, and he was fully aware that both Gantt and the boy were kindred sufferers. They did not possess the animal drive that kept Michael directed on his path to survival.
Water. One might imagine it in the mouth. One might imagine its cool flow streaming over the head and face and chest. One might imagine lying in a chill pool of it, regaining the strength that the sun had stripped away. Water. At this moment of heavy silence and scorching fire, the dream of drinking it, of getting one swallow through the cracked lips into the dry mouth, was the only thing that could possibly lead them on for endless mile after mile. Water.
At last, as the sun began to sink down again toward the blue world of another night, as the jackals that followed them came sniffing in close for the smell of impending death but did not find it yet and so retreated to wait a few hours more, the three figures crouched on a ridge of rock and surveyed what lay ahead. Michael had seen it first, and cautioned the others to be careful in their approach.
He didn’t want the watchman atop the wooden tower to see them. The man, wearing the traditional robes and a keffiyeh, held a pair of binoculars. The man stood beneath an awning of tan-colored cloth that might have been the shirts of several dead soldiers stitched together, and hanging on a rope behind him was a horn he could blow into to alert the inhabitants of the village at his back. The horn, Michael noted, was a brass cornet probably once owned by some poor dead Commonwealth trooper whose commander valued the stirring music of a military march.
But for the camel trail that passed alongside the watchman’s tower, the village was encircled by a waist-high barbed wire fence. It was a village of many tents, many camels in a corral and many goats wandering about. Michael had already counted thirty-five people, most of them men but a few women and children. At the center of the village a dozen palm trees stood around a waterhole the size of a small swimming pool, which was obviously very jealously guarded. On the far side of the village was a second watchman’s tower. A nice secure setup, Michael thought. Especially since he knew one of those tents down there surely held an arsenal of weapons and ammunition stripped from dead soldiers.
“How the hell do we get into that?” Gantt asked.
Michael had already considered that question.
“After nightfall,” he said, “one of us walks in. He allows himself to be captured. He causes some kind of disturbance while his mission team gets through the wire. It’s up to them to find the tent where the guns and ammo are stored. If there are grenades, the place can be blown. Then everyone’s on their own to get their water.”