Free The Crisis by David Poyer Page A

back and forth, looking into his eyes. He says something that sounds like a question. Nabil can’t answer. There’s nothing in his head to answer with.
    The man dips a brush into the can. With one quick motion he paints something sticky on Nabil’s head. His hands rise, but the man slaps them down. He says something angry. Then reaches behind him, and shoves a plastic bowl into his hands.
    Nabil sits up. He sniffs the yellow mush. The man says things fast, as if he’s got to do this over and over. Nabil tastes it. Then he eats it.
    He’s in a tent. The blue billowing above him is plastic, so thin the sun shines right through it. Boys fill the length of the tent. They lie with spindly legs and arms and knobby elbows and knees. Their eyes are gigantic. On their skulls are painted large Os in pink paint. It looks funny to Nabil, but for some reason he can’t remember, he can’t seem to laugh.
    The man smiles. He leans so close Nabil smells his breath. His fingers move over his legs, then touch him where they shouldn’t. Nabil doesn’t move. At last the man grunts and leaves.
    After a while he tries to get up. His legs don’t work, though, and he falls down again. The other boys stare at him unblinking. They don’t look like his people.
    Where are we? he asks, but they don’t move or answer. Flies buzz through the tent. They crawl on one of the boys who doesn’t move or brush them away. After a time Nabil realizes that boy’s dead.
    He rolls over and starts crawling toward the light at the end of the tent. He pushes feet aside. He smells shit and a sweet smell. Some boys kick at him. Others lie shuddering, eyes rolled up in their heads.
    He pushes the flap aside and looks out.
    The blue tents stretch as far as he can see. A gaunt woman crouches before a fire. An old man staggers under a tin water can. A naked child runs from one tent to another.
    Beyond the farthest tent are fine thin somehow spiky threads that lead across the ground. He squinches his eyes to see better in the glare. Far away someone’s singing. Someone else is weeping. Something goes
put, put, put,
like the water pumps in their village. He suddenly remembers all the things that weren’t in his head a moment ago. They feel jagged, and he wishes they weren’t there. His head felt better empty.
    He sees what the threads are now, and feels something cold fall down inside his throat, bouncing from side to side as it goes down, like a rock tossed into a well.
    The thin black spiky threads, running left and right as far as he can see, are wire.

4
Doraleh, Djibouti
    T HE sun was like the drying lights in a body shop, so bright Dan’s lips were burning. His eyeballs felt like bearings being annealed with a torch. The scorching air smelled like the inside of an old toaster. Fat black flies kept landing on his face, no matter how often he brushed them off. Sweat kept running down his neck, and the fine gritty powder so familiar from his previous time in the Mideast rubbed like steel wool against his skin, slacks, his very teeth, as the taxi’s wheels jolted over potholes. Dust that smelled like dried vomit rose from the seat and carpet and blew out the window, replaced with no-sweeter-smelling dust from outside.
    The Mideast Shuttle flew every other Tuesday. They’d been lucky to get the last seats. After which it had been twenty-six straight hours either fidgeting aboard the 767 or eating plastic-packaged buns and drinking reconstituted coffee from vending machines during layovers in the rubber-matted boxes of passenger lounges. Norfolk to Lajes, the Azores; Sigonella, Sicily; Suda Bay, Crete; Bahrain; and at last and finally, Djibouti International. He’d brought along the read-ins, studies, and position papers Dr. Fauss had sent to TAG, and he and Henrickson and Lieutenant Commander Kimberley McCall had translated them into something resembling a transformation plan for the squadron that