He raised his eyes to see the little girl watching them, wide-eyed and openmouthed.
He was no kink, no perverter of children. He wrenched himself free and grabbed the blanket.
“God damn you!” the woman gasped. “God damn you to hell!” She followed his gaze. “Who cares? The world has ended! It’s over! Yet you, you chunk of dog-meat, you care about that. About bourgeois morality?” She rapped out a command in Hebrew and made an angry gesture. The child ignored her.
The waterfall cut off her words and also his view of her furious, contorted features.
He awoke to the rumble of the engine and the clatter of treads chewing on a rutted roadbed. He had no recollection of where he was or how he had come there. His chest was spattered with black oil.
He must have been half asleep while helping one of Major Berger’s tankers refuel! The Izzies said the Baalbek War would soon be over; then maybe he could lie down. They had taken Damascus in a storm of blood and fire, and the Syrians were in full retreat north toward Aleppo. Berger told Copley that they’d take that, too, by the end of the week. Then they’d go see about Iraq and Iran and some other places that had been thorns in the Jewish state’s iron-plated sides. The Izzies had had a century of Arabs; now they were determined to end the problem for all time: the “Final Solution.”
He was surprised to find that his Israeli driver wore no uniform — and very little else. Her attire consisted of a skimpy bra, panties, and boots, although a sweat-stained, red top and black, leather pants were draped over the seal beside her. She was skinny, sharp-faced, and dark, and her hair was cut as short as a boy’s. God, Izzie women were tough!
“Awake?” She shoved a chunk of dry bread at him, and the kid passed him a can of something lemony and sweet from the rear compartment. The woman — he kept forgetting her name — said, “You’re pogging fungled, as Sol would say! Look, we’re coming up on some suburbs. Gel back and handle that mounted machinegun we picked up last night.”
He didn’t remember any such weapon and was bemused to find a shiny-bright Hiram bolted in the brackets made for it above the driver’s cab. God, he must really have been asleep! Memory would answer for this!
The blue-and-white Israeli flag still flew over Aleppo’s medieval citadel, but the sun-scoured streets outside were silent. Riva — that was his driver’s name — thought she heard engines and possibly gunfire inside the city and refused to go in. She kept to the back roads. After staying lost for most of the day, they found their way around to the highway that led north to the Turkish border.
He studied the blank-faced buildings through binoculars but saw only death and emptiness. As before, the roads were packed with stalled trucks, cars, carts, and even baby buggies. Horses, camels, and mules lay sprawled amidst human corpses and litter. He shook his head and summoned the waterfall again to drown any recognition of sorrow.
“But why?” the driver-lady asked. “Why? Who did this? Who has committed this crime… this horror?” Warm tears spattered onto the back of his hand, and he looked around to find the native child behind him. He knew neither Hebrew nor Arabic and could only offer a comforting smile. She misunderstood and drew back apprehensively.
“Bastards!” his driver went on. “Monsters! They have killed half the world! They deserve to die! They are criminals… worse even than the Nazis!”
That struck a chord. What? Why? Memory must be having a drink with the off-duty watch, and did not answer his call. He would have to court-martial the sonuvabitch if this kept up!
He forced himself out of the waterfall, sucked in air, and tried to think. Who had employed Pacov? And why? Why? What did they— whoever “they” were — gain?
Memory came hustling up onto the bridge, late as usual, and panted, “Loot, sir, loot! Land, resources, factories, industries, farms, the wealth of hundreds of millions of slaughtered people… all empty, ready for the taking!” Memory sounded smug. “Pacov is neat, tidy, and almost impossible to stop. It’s the perfect weapon.”
The Russians had responded with their Starak too late to save themselves. At least Starak must have put a crimp in the plans of those who had expected a clean sweep from Pacov!
Memory produced a tinny, static-filled recording: a man’s voice saying, “It must’ve been the Izzies who started this Pacov thing. They’ve always been terrified of the Soviet Union, and America’s grown too weak to help them any more. A quick, surgical strike.” He asked for a face to go with that voice, and Memory obediently produced a faded photograph of a bald, elderly man, who looked like a petulant baby. Mueller? Molders? Something like that.
He tried to tell the woman that it wasn’t the Nazis who had slain her country — that it was probably the Israelis. Words were still beyond him, however. Just as welclass="underline" he never liked discussing politics with Major Berger either, the Izzies were so sensitive!
He dozed again. Beverly Rowntrce certainly did have magnificently bovine udders! Adrift amongst white billows, the great, American wet dream!
They halted that night well away from Aleppo. His woman driver showed him her maps and said that they must take the new Izzie military highway cast to al-Mawsil in what had once been Iraq. From there another recent road led up to Yerevan in the Soviet Union. Somebody had given Tbilisi a dose of cleansing, prophylactic Pacov, and now much of the southwestern Soviet Union, eastern Turkey, northern Iran, and Iraq were a big, empty playground for the Izzie “relief” forces. The Turks, the driver-lady said, were only just beginning to push east again to recover their lost property. With Israel a graveyard, the Turks could now drive south, too, and re-establish the Ottoman Empire! What fun!
They travelled on in the morning. The landscape became a blur of sere, yellow-brown mountains and grey-green vegetation. There were people at first, mostly lying down or slumped against the stained, dun-hued walls. Memory declared disdainfully that most of these Third-Worlders were lazy poggers, but scattered here and there amongst them were the still forms of Israeli soldiers. The Izzies had a reputation for industriousness. What were they doing here?
Some lime later — days? months? — the people disappeared and were replaced by white skeletons in dark-stained rags. He wasn’t sure when this happened, but he liked the skeletons better.
Each night he slept next to his driver-lady, often with the little girl curled against his back for warmth, as sexless as three baby angels in Heaven. This was how it ought to be, his mother’s voice told him, not the wicked harlot’s way of Emily Pietrick, nor even a nice, marriage-minded girl like Beverly Rowntree! His mother didn’t know sweet Beverly the way he did. Sweet? Yes, and also hypocritical, greedy, marry-a-prick-and-a-pocketbook, and other endearing qualities. His father understood, but then he never said anything to anybody. Too bad Mavis Larson had moved away before they had entered high school and pubescence! She was a bitch, too, and mean as a rattler’s grin. But she did have the sleekest bod of the lot of them!
Once they spotted an armored column heading east, the red banner of Turkey snapping on the lead halftrack’s radio mast. Later they were almost thumbed by a similar force travelling west; this one displayed a green flag with a white sidebar and a white crescent and star: Pakistan, the driver-lady said. With the Soviets out of commission, it now behooved Pakistan’s Red Mullah to don Islamic green and embark upon a jihad against the unbelievers of the lands to Pakistan’s northwest. (No matter that said unbelievers were Muslims too— and mostly deceased. “Dead-y or not, here we come!”) India, the woman said, was no longer a problem: it had dissolved into a hornets’ nest of warring statelets, but lately wily, old Ramanujan had got his act together, and the Indians were now advancing eastward through Burma and Thailand to offer “aid” to the stricken Chinese. Why fight Pakistan, plus what was left of Free Iran, Afghanistan, and Soviet Central Asia, when all of lush Southeast Asia was open for the taking? You go east and we’ll go west, and never the twain shall meet… or some such half-remembered quotation.