Gantt felt the bandages. “Nice work,” he commented. He looked at the sky. “Oh…it’s getting light.”
“Hot day coming,” said Michael.
“Is there any other…in the desert?” Gantt smiled at him, and then pain made the smile crimp and vanish. “Scheisse, die verletzt! Ah… I’m all right now.” He breathed shallowly, taking sips of air. “Michael,” he said after another moment.
“Yes?”
“I want to…apologize. For the…destruction…of your aircraft. I would not have wished…to have shot down…an unarmed plane. It was not…chivalrous.”
“I think chivalry has nothing to do with war.”
“True…but…there is…the ideal.” He had to stop speaking for awhile, to deal with the pain. Michael wondered if he should knock Gantt out…but what would be the point?
The boy’s dice were rolling once more. “In any case…sir… I apologize.”
“It was your duty,” Michael said.
“Yes. That.” Gantt winced and closed his eyes. For an instant he resembled a mummy, the cracks in his gray face full of dust, his mouth a grim pain-drawn line.
His eyes opened again, but Michael saw that they had dimmed. Their color was no longer amber, but a pale sun-bleached yellow. “I have always…loved…the dawn,” Gantt said, with an effort. “The cleanest air, you see. The aircraft performs…best…at the dawn. Oh, Michael!” He gave another tight smile. “You should have been with me…up there.”
“With you or against you?”
“With me. Oh…you wouldn’t have lasted…an instant…against me. Did I tell you…my count is now…” He was silent, figuring the numbers. “Forty-six. No. That’s not right. Fifty. I think. Yes, fifty.”
“An impressive number,” said Michael, who saw the boy leaning over the freshly-thrown dice to read the pips.
“Did we ever find…water?” Gantt asked, his eyes narrowed against the rising sun.
“Yes, we did.”
“Sehr gut.”
Gantt’s eyes slid shut again. Michael and the boy waited.
Perhaps ten minutes later, Gantt looked into Michael’s face and said, “You English. Playing at war. With your…tea breaks. Your…what was that? Aftershave lotion? Oh, my! Well…you…shall go down to defeat…smelling like gentlemen. For that… I salute you.”
“Many thanks,” said Michael, who didn’t think he could look into Gantt’s face much longer, for the man was fading away minute by minute.
And as time was of the essence, suddenly the essence became time.
Gantt held up his arm and began to remove his wristwatch.
“What are you doing?” Michael asked.
“This.” Gantt got the Breitling off. He regarded not the timepiece itself, but the plain leather band. “I want…you…to have it,” he said, and he offered it to Michael.
“I can’t take that.”
“If you don’t…they will.”
True enough. Eventually the Dahlasiffa would come back, Devil or not.
Michael accepted the watch. “I will take care of—”
“You’d better,” Gantt interrupted. “It’s come…such a long way.”
The dice were rolling, back and forth.
The sun was coming up. A hot, clear dawn. Flying weather, Gantt might have said.
“Michael?” Gantt whispered, his voice nearly gone.
“Yes?”
“We…men…of action,” he said, and then he smiled. “Must never…stop…trying. Eh?”
“Never,” Michael agreed.
“Good man,” said Gantt, and then he watched the sun as it rose higher.
Sometime during the next few minutes, he left this world.
Michael felt it, and saw the empty stare in the man’s eyes, and when he checked the pulse and heartbeat he verified what he already knew. The boy stopped rolling his dice and he sat looking at the body of Rolfe Gantt, the famous Messerschmitt ace, the shining example to German youth, the celebrity, the great lover, the man of action, the hero.
After a while the boy crawled forward. He put the pair of dice in Gantt’s right hand, possibly for luck in the afterlife, and then he closed the fingers and he stood up and stretched as if awakening from a long sleep.
Michael put the Breitling in his pocket. There was no need to bury Gantt; the Dahlasiffa would just dig up the body. But it was only a suit of flesh, and the bird had flown.
It was time to find another two or three canteens, fill them up and find a way back home.
The boy motioned him to the camel corral.
Michael had no idea how to handle one of those creatures. How to saddle them up and get the bridles set. But fortunately the boy did, and he was very efficient about it.
They wet cloths and wrapped them around their heads and faces. They hung the canteens by leather cords from the saddles. They headed off in the direction they’d come, the boy leading the way on his camel and Michael just along for the ride. His camel seemed to hate him, and spat and fumed like a vindictive old man. Probably something in the way he smelled, Michael thought. But the camel moved onward, and so did the day.
On the second morning, with a hard hot wind blowing from the southwest, the two riders came across a platoon of soldiers escorted by a pair of tanks. The soldiers wore British khaki, and the tanks were Matildas. When Michael had made the platoon’s lieutenant understand who he was and where he’d come from, he and the boy were placed on one of the tanks and driven to a small air base called Al Massir, about twenty kilometers to the east.
The base had a hospital. It wasn’t much, but they had soft beds and cooling palm-frond fans that turned at the ceiling. Michael’s broken shoulder was set and put into a cast and his cuts swabbed with iodine. He decided not to look into any mirrors for a while, because he’d seen the expression on the face of the young and attractive brunette nurse. Then Michael and the boy both slept more than twelve hours, and when they awakened they were given glasses of orange juice and plates of scrambled eggs, figs, and olives. An apple-cheeked, serious red-haired captain named Findley-Hughes came in with a clipboard to ask Michael questions and take notes, and this went on interminably until Michael asked the young man if he’d had his eighteenth birthday yet.
After that they were pretty much left on their own.
Except for the attractive brunette nurse. She came in quite often to see him, and to fuss over him, and to smooth his hair and once even to sit by his bed and sing to him.
She just couldn’t seem to leave that boy alone.
She brought him some jacks and a ball. Michael watched him shaking the jacks in his hand, and he saw the boy cast them on the floor and bounce the ball. And as he scooped up the jacks in the hand that used to hold a pair of dead man’s dice the boy smiled, and from then on the brunette nurse had him running errands around the hospital and the base. The doctor gave him a nickname: Jacky. Then one afternoon Michael heard the brunette nurse call him Jack, and the boy looked at her as if all his life he’d been waiting to hear that name spoken by a voice just like hers.
Michael learned that the nurse’s husband had been a Spitfire pilot who’d lost his life over Dunkirk. Her infant son had been killed in a German bomb raid in London in 1940. He didn’t ask her what the boy’s name had been. He didn’t think he had to.
Even the roughest road led somewhere, he thought.
On the morning of the fifth day, two officers in clean uniforms with polished buttons arrived at the base in a Douglas Dakota transport plane. Michael knew one of them as the man sometimes called ‘Mallory’, who wore a Colonel’s insignia. It was explained to him, as they sat under a striped awning facing the airstrip and drank Guinness Stout brought in a keg with the Dakota, that it was imperative he return to Cairo and, as Mallory put it, “get back on the horse”.