"The roof," the South African said to Noburu.
"Yes," Noburu said. "The helipad. The best vantage point."
He entered the elevator. When Akiro tried to follow, Noburu barred the aide's way with a forearm.
"Go down to the operations center," Noburu commanded. "Gather information." He looked at the younger man. The perfect staff officer was out of his depth now. Akiro did not look frightened. He merely looked mortally confused. An orderly man from an orderly world, waking barefoot in a hissing jungle. "And get yourself a rifle," Noburu added.
The doors kissed shut. During the brief ascent, the muted sounds of battle surrounded them, yet the combat remained unreal, almost irrelevant. Voices bubbling down into an aquarium.
"Truck bomb," Kloete said casually. He boosted the machine gun until he had a sounder grip on it. "Fuckers took out the main gate."
The doors parted. Noburu went first, stepping gingerly through the short dark tunnel that led out onto the helipad.
"Bloody fuck-all," one of the South African NCOs spat, stumbling against something audibly metallic.
As the little group emerged from the concrete shelter of the passageway, the night wind off the sea splashed in through Noburu's unbuttoned tunic like ice water and rinsed back through his hair. Brassy flares dripped from the heavens, lighting the compound and the nearby quarter of the city. Lower down, tracer rounds wove in and out of the darkness, while the block of buildings just beyond the barracks complex burned skyward. Apparently, the first assault had been beaten off. There was little human movement in evidence at the moment. Noburu strode briskly across the helipad to gain a better look. The South Africans trotted on ahead, booted feet heavy under the burden of their weaponry.
"Machine gun," Kloete cried, "action." His voice carried the legacy of old British enemies, insinuated into Boer blood and transported now to the shore of the Caspian Sea. Kloete spoke in unmistakably British phrases, muddied by an Afrikaans accent.
The South African's long-barreled weapon began to peck at targets Noburu's aging eyes could not even begin to distinguish.
The body softened, the eyes failed. While the mind remembered youth too well.
As Noburu hunkered down behind the low wall along the edge of the roof, blossoms of flame spread out from under one of the guard towers, a construction that housed sentinels in a bulb atop a long, narrow stalk. Now the tulip came to life. Its base uprooted by the blast, the tower shivered, then seemed to hop, struggling to keep its balance. Finally, the construction's last equilibrium failed and the tower fell over hard, slamming its high concrete compartment down onto the parade ground.
The shouting came before the sound of the guns. Screaming unintelligibly, the Azeris rushed back in through the wreckage of the main gate. The big steel doors had been blown completely off their hinges, and the masonry of the wall looked as jagged as broken bone. Black figures dashed forward, silhouetted by flames. Other shapes dropped over the wall where long stretches of wire had been tom away. The lead figures opened fire with automatic weapons as they ran.
Fresh flares arced. Inside the compound, a crossfire of machine guns opened up. A few of the remaining guard towers laid down a base of fire on the far side of the wall, but other sentry perches remained silent and dark.
Screaming. Falling.
Surely, Noburu thought, these dark men were shouting about their god. No other words would have the power to propel men into this.
The garrison's machine guns swept the invaders off their feet. As Noburu crouched forward to see, a shower of spent shell casings nipped against his cheek and chest, their temperature scalding in the night air.
"Crazy buggers," one of the South African NCOs said to his mate. The man swapped out magazines and leaned back over the low wall that ringed the roof.
"Action left," Kloete cried. His subordinates followed the swing of the machine gun with their own weapons.
Noburu peered into the darkness, trying to follow the red streaks from his companions' weapons, seeking a closer glimpse of this new enemy.
Down on the parade ground, the flares revealed tens of dozens of bodies. Some lay clustered, others sprawled apart. Here a man moved over the cobblestones like an agonized worm, while another twitched, then stilled. Snipers went to ground, then suddenly blasted at the headquarters building, drawing concentrated fire in response.
Noburu had believed that the assault was over, when a fresh wave poured screaming through the gate. Outlined by the inferno across the road, one figure carried a banner aloft. His head had the grossly swollen look of a turbaned man at night. All around him, his followers shrilled.
Noburu thought he heard the word distinctly: "Allah."
"Allah" and then a pair of ruptured syllables, repeated again and again. He knew that his hearing was not much better than his eyesight, and that he might only be imposing the word on their voices. But it felt right. He watched as rivets of machine gun fire fixed the flag bearer to a wall, then let him drop.
Another shadow scooped up the banner.
Kloete cursed and called for another tin of ammunition.
Noburu briefly considered drawing his pistol. But he knew it would only be an empty gesture at this distance, like spitting at the enemy. And he was tired of empty gestures. This was a younger man's fight.
During his career, he had been acutely aware of being a part of history, and he had possessed the gift of casting the moment into the perspective of books yet to be written. But this. This was like being part of someone else's history. When madmen with flags and a god's name on their lips swarmed into the sharp teeth of civilization. This was the stuff of bygone centuries.
The machine guns methodically built up a barrier of corpses where once the steel gates had served. But the Azeris simply climbed over the corpses of their brethren at a run, continuing on to martyrdom.
A dark form raised a hand to hurl something, then toppled too soon. The grenade's explosion rearranged the pile of corpses into which the man had fallen.
"Terrebork," Kloete shouted without taking his cheek off the side of his weapon, "bring up more ammunition."
One of the NCOs mumbled a response and scuttled off toward the elevator.
"Crazy," Kloete said loudly, his voice half-wonder, half-accusation. "They're crazy."
But the automatic weapons made in Honshu or on the
Cape of Good Hope did good work. The assault again dwindled into a sniping between a few riflemen amid the landscape of dead and wounded and the defenders of the compound's interior.
Kloete unlocked the housing of his machine gun to let the weapon cool. He rolled over against the wall. "Shit," he said. Then he noticed Noburu. The South African snorted loudly. "Long way to travel just to shoot your colored," he said. He grinned, teeth white against his powder-grimed face. "Funny, I don't remember this part in any of the briefings." He looked at Noburu with the impolite stare of someone who knew exactly how far things had gone awry, as well as who was to blame.
Noburu said nothing. He simply looked at the hard angles of the man's face. Kloete's skin was burnished by the ambient light of the fires, and he resembled a hardcase private as much as he did a colonel.
"They're all gone, you know," Kloete continued. He tapped along his tunic pockets, then drew out a crushed pack of cigarettes. In the background, desultory gunfire continued. "Your local nationals," he said, settling a bent cigarette between his lips. "All of our little security force allies. Save for a pair of shit-scared officers, who're bloody worthless anyway. Gone over to those crazy buggers." He tossed a spent match over the wall in the direction of the mob. "Took their bloody weapons and jumped. Good thing we had Japs in some of the towers." He narrowed his eyes at Noburu. "Japanese, I mean."