Dead of Night Page 16

  ‘So why are you here? To make amends?’

  I squeezed Miriam’s bare shoulder. ‘Maybe a pop psychologist would say so. I don’t know. All I know is that I felt I had to come here, to make a contribution, to do more than just write stories about the latest club opening, or the wives of the Blue Jays raising money for American refugees. That’s all, and that’s why.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Mom ... well, she left my dad a few years back, when I was in college. She’s living in Florida, I think, at some seaside community. Finding herself after all these years. Pretty safe—the strike last spring didn’t affect her or her friends that much.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Miriam said, her breathing slowing down some.

  I held her like that for a while, and said, ‘Miriam?’

  ‘Mmm?’ came the questioning tone.

  ‘I need to tell you something,’ I said. ‘About Peter. I think he’s working for somebody else, somebody else besides the UN. I caught him this morning, talking to someone over a concealed radio. He didn’t see me but I saw him. Do you know anything about that?’

  No answer.

  ‘Miriam?’

  Her breathing was regular and slow so I decided to let her sleep. I closed my eyes, shifted her weight some, and kissed the top of her head. I squeezed her tight. She murmured something and we stayed like that, all the night through.

  ~ * ~

  When morning came Miriam had rolled away from me and was sleeping deeply. I crawled out of the tent, carrying my clothes, coat and shoes in my hand, and in the dew-wet cold morning I got dressed, shivering. It was still and quiet in this early part of the day. The dirty Land Cruisers were streaked with dew, as were the tents. There was a cough and Charlie approached, weapon slung over his shoulder.

  ‘Nice show,’ he said.

  ‘Glad I could help.’

  He rubbed his hands together and said, ‘A long night.’

  ‘Anything going on?’

  Charlie turned his head up to the gray sky. ‘Jets overhead, twice during the night. Some ordnance was dropped, up to the north.’

  ‘Think the cease-fire’s over?’

  He said, ‘What we saw yesterday, sure as hell looks like somebody’s decided to toss away the agreement. Damn, it’s cold!’

  I said, ‘Why don’t I get coffee going?’

  Charlie said, ‘Don’t tempt me, Samuel. You know I don’t want an unshielded flame. Some of these militias, they have thermal-imaging devices they’ve stolen from the Reserves or National Guard.’

  I motioned to a trail that led past the oak tree we were parked under. ‘Down there, there’s a little rocky hollow. Saw it when I went on a bathroom break before hitting the sack. I could get the gas stove there, heat up a bucket of water. Won’t take long and I’m sure you and everybody else could use something hot.’

  Charlie smiled. ‘OK, against my better judgment. Just don’t take too long.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ~ * ~

  Charlie helped me get the stove and some water out of the cluttered rear of one of the Land Cruisers and I walked the short distance away from the campsite. As I walked away, Miriam emerged, yawning, and blew a kiss in my direction. I waved and felt warm and tingly inside. A damn good feeling.

  Along the narrow trail there was a rock outcropping, behind which was a little hollow. I set up the stove and lit it. It hissed into life quickly. I put an empty metal coffee pot over the stove, filled it with water from a plastic jug, and sat down to wait. I drew my knees up to my chin and wrapped my arms around my legs, shivered, and watched the stove do its work. I closed my eyes and was delightfully rocked again by the memory of last night, recalling the sounds and tastes and sensations of Miriam, dear Miriam. I kept my eyes closed, imagining us getting out to the highway in an hour or so, getting picked up by a UN convoy, and maybe, just maybe, getting back in time to take Miriam out to a real dinner at a real restaurant. No more cold meals, no more reconstituted stew or mystery meat. A real meal, complete with tablecloth and silverware.

  I opened my eyes, heard the rustle of creatures in the leaves and the harsh call of a blue jay. Steam was rising from the top of the coffee pot, the lid rattling softly in the stillness of the rocky area. I turned the stove off and picked up the coffee pot with a folded-over handkerchief. It felt hot through the cloth, and I knew that in a couple of minutes our little group would have coffee with our meager breakfast. A nice thought, and I would make sure Miriam got the first cup.

  I went around the rock outcropping, out onto the trail -and damn near slammed into the back of a line of armed men.

  ~ * ~

  Their uniforms were torn and muddy and had no UN crests on the shoulders or sleeves, and I noticed right away that everybody was carrying a different kind of weapon. Militia, I thought, about a dozen of them, heading up to our campsite. Just then the guy at the rear of the line noticed me. He started turning towards me, ready to yell out a warning to his comrades, his rifle swinging round with him.

  I tossed the hot water in his face, dropped the coffee pot and ran like hell into the woods.

  He screamed. There was the harsh crack of a rifleshot, then another and then a whole fucking chorus of gunfire as I ran into the woods, hunched down, my back suddenly feeling exposed and extremely itchy as I cursed myself for leaving my flak vest and helmet back at the tent. I swung to the right, past the trunks of some pine trees. There were snapping sounds and thunking noises as the fatal pieces of metal traveling towards me at thousands of feet per second struck branches or tree trunks instead.

  I ran and ran, thinking I should head up to the left to warn the others. But then there was more gunfire, and the flat, heavy sound of an explosion. Charlie. Charlie was fighting back.

  I stopped, leaned back against a birch tree, breathing hard. More gunfire. Another explosion. Distant yells. A gunshot or two. And then ...

  Car engines. Starting up. Revving up. Now moving off, now fading away, now quiet.

  I clenched my fists, waiting. More quiet.

  I was alone.

  ~ * ~

  For an hour or so I stayed in a hidey-hole where a tangle of tree trunks had fallen together near a swampy area. I crawled in and waited, trying to calm my harsh breathing, trying to quiet the thumping in my chest. I closed my eyes for a moment, just a second, really, trying to remember last night and Miriam. But all I saw was that line of armed militiamen, heading up to our campsite. I crouched as low as I could, trying to stop moving, trying to stop the rustling of leaves and branches. I waited, my throat dry and my chest tight. I looked up overhead at a tiny patch of gray, where the clouds still blocked the sky. I blinked and waited some more.

  Some more gunshots, up on the hill where we had just been.

  I waited some more. I coughed and rubbed my face.

  The wind rose, rattling some branches, making me think that people were out there, waiting for me. I kept watch on the faint patch of gray.

  I checked my coat. The pockets were empty. No hat. No gloves. No food. No water.

  I eased back out of the hidey-hole, looked around. Poplars, bare blueberry bushes, dead swamp grass. Nothing else. I stood up, still breathing hard. I rubbed at cramps in my legs, tried to gauge where the sun was, up there beyond the clouds. The smart thing would be to start moving, moving real slowly, taking my time, heading out to the highway. Hide there by the roadway, wait for a UN convoy to come by. That would be the smart thing.

  I rubbed my face again, looked at where I had come through, and gauged something else: where our campsite had been.

  I didn’t feel very smart.

  But I did feel right.

  I moved in that direction.

  ~ * ~

  It was slow going, pausing and waiting. I remembered a time when I was twelve or thirteen, going on a disastrous deer hunt with my father. One of those father-son bonding rituals that are supposed to bring one closer to one’s dad or son, and which usually did exactly the opposite with us. I l
earned a lot of things back then—how I hated being cold and wet, how I hated getting up early and standing among the dark trees, and how I hated seeing an innocent deer being blown away by riflefire—but I also learned how to move through the woods. I learned to move as quietly as possible, pausing every now and then to look at the trees and brush and openings. I learned to look for shapes that didn’t belong, that marred the background, because usually it meant that Man or his works were nearby. And the particular examples of Man and his works crawling around here this fine day were bent on slaughtering me and my workmates.

  In any event, my caution meant that a fifteen-minute stroll back to our campsite took almost two hours, and that was no problem at all.

  I came to a point where the trail emerged into the tiny clearing and I waited, kneeling behind a tree trunk, fists clenched on my thighs. One of the Land Cruisers was there, resting on flattened tires, windshield glass blown out and its white sides peppered with shrapnel and bullet holes. A couple of collapsed tents were strewn around, along with bits of clothing and other belongings.

  But that wasn’t what was bothering me.

  The body beyond the Land Cruiser was bothering me.

  I looked around, trying to see if anybody could be there, watching the scene. I knew I was balancing a couple of possibilities: possibility one was that a couple of the militiamen were hanging back, to see if I or any other UN worker was returning. Possibility two—the one I was gambling on — was that having completed their ambush they were now on the move, on the chance that a UN rapid-response force was riding to a belated rescue.

  The body was still there.

  I got up again and walked into the campsite, right up to the body near the shot-up Land Cruiser. I felt terribly exposed, like a naked Christian dumped in the middle of the Colosseum, and I wasn’t sure if any lions or gladiators were around. But still, there was that body.

  I got closer, looked down.

  Sanjay Prith stared up at me, his eyes open and sightless.

  I knelt down, automatically touched his throat, though the torn-up condition of his abdomen and lower legs told the story. Blood had caked and pooled around him. I hoped he had died quickly. His skin was dry and cold to the touch.

  ‘Sorry, Sanjay,’ I said. ‘Sorry you had to end up here, so far from home.’

  I closed his eyes with my hand, tears starting to form in my own eyes. I moved closer to him, whispering, ‘If I’m ever contacted by anybody from New Delhi I’ll tell them you were a hero, a true gentleman who did everything by the book. And I’ll mean every word of that.’

  ~ * ~

  I stayed only a few minutes longer. A thought came to me that I should dig a grave for Sanjay, or at least cover him up, but a colder part of me took over. No, it could not be done. I didn’t want to leave any evidence that I had been here.

  The Land Cruiser was a charred hulk. The upholstery had burned away and the exposed bare springs of the seats looked odd. Among the debris of the campsite, I could see that our tents had been shot through and sliced by bayonets, as had the sleeping bags. I sniffed, and became nauseous as I saw that the attackers had relieved themselves on the scraps of the tents and sleeping bags, shitting and pissing everywhere. There was no food, no water, nothing I could take away with me. Just the soiled cloth and empty brass casings of cartridges, their dull brass color looking icy.

  I also saw some blood trails leading back into the woods, and that colder part of me came back. I hoped that Charlie had charged a hefty toll before leaving.

  I went back to my own tent, saw that my gear had been trashed as well. My Heinlein book was soaked through and its pages had been torn, but the Orwell book had survived. I stuffed it in an inside coat pocket—and then I saw some-thing else that made my hands start shaking again.

  A green flannel nightgown, tom and bloody.

  Miriam.

  I brought it up to my face. Then I let the cloth drop, and walked away from the campsite, not looking back once.

  ~ * ~

  It was a long afternoon. I headed away from the campsite, staying away from the road, moving at my own pace through the woods. I kept going at a constant rate, taking the time to scan around me as I tried to head toward the highway. As I moved I strained my ears to pick up any sound from the forest around me, waiting to hear a faint voice, a branch snapping or the sound of a rifle bolt being slammed home. And as I moved my thoughts whirled around in two separate vortices: anger and fear at the ambush I had survived, and anger and fear at having been abandoned. I knew the latter emotions made no sense at all. What could I have expected? That Charlie and the others would stay there, hoping I would make a triumphant return? Hell, no, they made the right decision, hard as it was. Leave me and the body of Sanjay behind. No doubt Charlie had taken control, and had made the tough and right decisions.

  Still, I didn’t like the feeling.

  As the light started to fade I smelled something familiar, the stink of something that had burned. Then I saw spaces among the trees opening up and I noticed that a whole swath of birch and pine had burned away. Another battle site? I came closer, intrigued despite myself, and saw that large areas of earth had been churned up by chunks of metal. I stopped, looked around and up and saw how branches and trunks had been ripped down.

  I looked back at the pieces of metal, saw the remains of an airplane engine.

  Aircraft-debris field, a rational part of me observed. A jet had crashed here.

  I walked around the crash site, sniffing again the old odor of fuel and plastic and metal, burned and crumpled and destroyed. Movies and television shows always depicted aircraft crash sites as being neat, with fuselage and other parts readily identifiable. But everything here was so charred and mixed up that it was hard to tell what the hell each item had once been. And just when I was ready to give up I came across a piece of wing. It had been charred along most of one side but I made out a national emblem: a black Maltese cross.

  German, then, I realized as I looked down on the wing fragment. And I remembered that overpass, how it had been dropped and how the freeway on-ramps had been chewed up. A German Tornado, on a NATO mission to bomb that overpass — a mission that hadn’t ended well.

  I kept on moving, heading toward where I hoped the highway was.

  ~ * ~

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  About an hour after I found the crash site I stopped at the bank of a river, the water rushing past, rapids spewing up sprays of foam. I knelt down and took a swig of water, using both hands to form a cup, and then sat back against a moss-covered boulder. I took a deep breath, wiped my cold wet hands against my coat. It was getting dark and I had no idea where I was. I guessed that the highway was on the other side of the river, but with the light fading I didn’t want to try to cross that surging torrent without a better idea of the surroundings. One misstep and a month or so later my father would get an interesting letter from the UN.

  ‘Well, Boy Scout Samuel,’ I said out loud. ‘Time to find some shelter.’

  I went deeper into the woods so that the sounds of the river faded away some. I knew I was going to have a hard time sleeping tonight; I didn’t want the noise of the rushing water back there to keep me even more awake. As I moved, I kept to the same pace that had kept me alive during the afternoon, pausing and looking about me, listening again to any sounds out there.

  But so far everything had been fairly quiet, with just the chattering of the birds and the sounds of tree limbs knocking against each other every time the breeze came up. I walked for another ten minutes or so until I found a place where an evergreen was growing out of the side of a small rise. Earth had fallen away from around some of the roots, and by carefully digging a hole into the base of the root system I made a tiny cave. Working slowly and diligently -I didn’t want to leave freshly disturbed piles of leaves or dirt lying about — I filled the little cave with leaves and boughs from another evergreen tree. It started to get even darker and I crawled into my little shelter, my head
hitting the rough surface of its ceiling. Some earth trickled down the back of my neck. I coughed and managed to pull in a few additional boughs to block the narrow entrance. I lay back, pulled my collar up and put my hands inside the coat pockets. I listened, but all I could hear was my own breathing, labored and still frightened.

  I shifted in the darkness, the leaves that I was lying on sounding very loud as I moved. My stomach rumbled with hunger and I licked my dry lips, wishing that I had drunk more back at the river. Of course, who knew what the hell was in the water I had just drunk, but I didn’t care. I shivered some, crossed my legs, and stared up into the darkness.

  I remembered being eight. I remembered my mother sitting with displeasure in the den, my father grabbing my hand and saying that he was going to break me of my fear of the dark, right then and there. I remembered being sent out into the rear yard, carrying blankets and a pillow. It had been a warm night. There was a quarter-moon up. It hadn’t made a difference. I remembered this eight-year-old boy going from the front door to the rear one, trying to open them but finding both doors locked. I remembered the eight-year-old boy crying for his daddy, crying for his mommy, refusing to believe they weren’t coming to get him. I remembered the eight-year-old boy being terrified at seeing all the lights in the house out, nothing there but a dark house, knowing that his mommy and daddy were asleep, ignoring their boy outside. I remembered the eight-year-old boy, huddled by the cellar door, blankets wrapped around him, shivering all night long, hearing the night noises, waiting and waiting for the sun to rise.