Ian Slater: Darpa Alpha

Although warming, Melissa still felt desperately cold. It was as if the cogs in a wheel in her brain had slowed with the precipitous drop in her temperature. For a moment she was confused by him mentioning “our pickup.” She thought he’d mentioned a plane, not a pickup truck.

It was a pickup truck the general had heard, and it was being driven by a sallow-skinned man in the navy blue padded uniform of Chinese and Russian workers and peasants along the border between the two countries, the map line separating the two running across the top quarter of the lake, about forty miles north of the tunnel exit.

Next to the man in the small Jinlin pickup, whose motor sounded like nothing much more than a two-stroke lawn mower, sat a blue-eyed boy of about twelve, his skin so fair that he was often thought by the others in Wadi El-Hage’s cell to be a European. On missions, he and El-Hage never spoke Arabic, only English, the world’s language of business, El-Hage pronouncing it in a halting, schoolboylike fashion, the blue-eyed boy with the fluency and colloquialisms of an educated American schoolboy, a youngster who, at Hamas’s expense, had spent five of his years in a tightly controlled madrassa in the U.S. There the boy had grown up in a North American cultural sea, his task, as he was reminded daily, to immerse himself, to learn as much as he could about the infidel nation.

“You must be happy,” said El-Hage, “to be so soon in Paradise.”

“Yes,” said the boy. “I am ready.”

“Think of Azzah,” El-Hage told him, recalling the woman he’d used to help indoctrinate the blue-eyed boy. “She taught you the pleasure a woman can give a young man. In Paradise there will be seventy-two virgins like her, yes, all waiting to pleasure you. Most men much older than to you—”

“Older than you,” said the boy dispassionately. “Not older to you.” El-Hage always made such elementary grammatical mistakes.

“What? Oh yes. I am sorry, Jamal. Older than you. Well, you see, not even those older than you obtain such pleasuring.” El-Hage saw yet another parachute canister, this one poking out from a clump of bushes that were barely visible amid the encroaching reeds. He and the boy had seen several of the milk-pail-sized canisters which, attached to small parachutes, had floated down from the infidels’ giant helicopters before they all left, the pilots and crew unable to see any more survivors in the thick smoke that had spewed out from the tunnel explosion and soon filled the evening sky. El-Hage had already stopped several times on the narrow, raised roadway through the low-lying marshes, and had waded in knee-high water to retrieve one of the canisters and thrown it into the back of the Jinlin, though even the boy could not tell El-Hage what to make of “STAR” in the canister’s written directions. But whatever it was, the phrase “pickup,” he told El-Hage, meant just that, and indicated that this infidel general and some soldier called Thomas were still missing. If they saw an infidel cross spread out, no doubt a signal for the infidel’s rescue, it would also locate Freeman for El-Hage and the boy.

“There it is!” said the boy, sitting abruptly forward, pointing to a spot almost a quarter of a mile to his left. The light was fading, and while neither he nor El-Hage could see a parachute, the white cross could be seen atop a reed island.

“Yes, yes, now remember—” El-Hage, though he had switched to English, was speaking more quickly than he normally did when giving his Hamas cell its instructions. “—you are looking for help for your poor father, a pond fisherman who is ill, and—”

“I know,” said the boy sharply, also in English. “I know. Our engine has broken down. Could he please help us?”

“Yes, and I will stand by the engine’s hood and look into the engine and I will appear—” El-Hage now allowed himself a small laugh. “I will — I will appear how ? The word you taught me.”

“Mystified,” the boy told him.

“Yes, very mystified.”

The boy laughed, and El-Hage saw the imperturbable courage, the cool determination in the boy’s eyes. This time the boy, unlike other martyrs of Islam, would not be wearing a bomb belt. The Americans, the British, and other degenerates had grown wise to the dynamite-belted bombers since the infidels’ occupation of Iraq. “Do not speak English very well,” advised El-Hage for the umpteenth time. “Otherwise they will—”

“ Too well,” the boy corrected him. “I know, I must sound like a peasant. I am begging the American for help.” He adopted a forlorn look, his pleading, snuffling manner in keeping with the rumpled Russian garb, selected and dirtied for the mission by El-Hage himself. “‘Please, you help my father. His car. No go. It no good. You help, please.’”

“Good,” said El-Hage. “But remember, if they ask how it is you know a little English?”

“At school. Yes,” said the boy in the exasperated tone of a much older, more mature boy who had learned not only of the pleasures of the beautiful Azzah, but English as well.

“Who’s that?” Melissa asked Freeman. The voice coming down the exit shaft from above was that of a child. It wasn’t loud, but its “Hello!” was persistent, and Melissa whispered to the general that it sounded as if whoever it was must be very near the spot where they put the cross. Melissa felt resentful, then ashamed. The marine in her wanted to help anyone in trouble, especially a child, but the woman in her wanted more warmth and the safe, protected feeling she had while being held by the general, telling her she was alive, coming back from the brink of hypothermia to the present, the insect bites that had saved her now starting to itch so badly that all she wanted to do was rip off the clothes and scratch till there was no tomorrow.

“Quiet, dammit!” said Freeman, his ill temper surprising him almost as much as it did Melissa, but he had a soldier’s sixth sense of danger. For an instant much of his earlier life, the times of maximum danger, flashed through his mind with a vividness he’d not experienced before but which other soldiers had spoken to him about moments before their death. For all his self-confidence, Douglas Freeman was not a man who had lived with the belief that things always work out for the best. For him, that was demonstrably false in the utterance of one word: Holocaust. And he knew someday would be his day to die. The best anyone could do was try to avoid it, but if you couldn’t, then for him there was only one way to deal with it: bravely.

Extracting himself from the layers of now-warm clothing, and picking up his weapon, trigger finger on the guard, he walked up through the malodorous tunnel, up into the pale square of evening. He heard two things: A boy’s voice calling, “Help, please?” and Melissa Thomas coming out behind him.

When Freeman saw the Jinlin with its hood up, apparently conked out, about a hundred yards away, he was surprised to see a peasant in the ubiquitous quilted blue jacket, pants, and thick fur cap — either Chinese or Russian, it was difficult to tell — staring into the motor as if he didn’t know what to make of it all. Only now did Freeman notice the boy, probably Russian, Freeman thought, off to his left. The boy, who must have walked around the large, marshy depression nearby, was now waving at the general and asking, “Please, you help my father. He sick and truck no go. It no good. You help, please. My English not good but you, you understand?”

“I understand,” said Freeman, trying to quickly assay the situation. “But you just stay where you are for a jiff.”

“Jiff?” asked the blue-eyed boy. “What does this ‘jiff’ mean?”