Free Archangel by Paul Watkins Page A

whispers. Arguing. Then a voice called to Gabriel in Arabic. But it was bad Arabic, as if someone who didn’tknow how to speak the language were reading it off a phonetically spelled flash card.
    Gabriel breathed in slowly, the first threads of hope returning cool into his lungs. “Hello,” he said. His voice was thin and he barely recognized it.
    “Identify yourself!” shouted a voice in the corridor. It was a nervous voice. Jumpy.
    Now Gabriel was more afraid than he had been before. To be killed now. By my own people. By this man behind the jumpy voice. He told them who he was. “I was shot down on the other side of the oil fields. I think two days ago. I can’t even remember anymore.”
    The head appeared again. It didn’t disappear immediately. Instead, the body followed it, hunchbacked under ammunition belts and an assault pack. “What base are you off?”
    “A carrier. The
Pendleton
.”
    “Are you hurt?”
    “I’m hungry.”
    The man started walking toward him. He was carrying an assault rifle with a huge infrared scope attached. “You’re fucking lucky, Mister. I don’t know how the hell I missed you with that first shot.”
    Gabriel kept his hands in the air. “Who are you guys? What’s going on? How come there’s only you?”
    The man was close to him now. He wore an American flag around his neck. The red and white bars twisted like Christmas candy canes under the desert camouflage. The man raised and lowered his hand to show Gabriel he did not need to keep his arms in the air any longer.
    “So who are you guys?” Gabriel asked again.
    “We’re kind of an advance unit. That’s about all we can tell you.” The man stepped closer. He sniffed. “Did you get burned or something? You smell like gasoline.”
    “Oil,” Gabriel said. He smelled Juicy Fruit gum on the man’s breath.
    They led him outside to where three other men were waiting. They crouched in doorways and peered around through their infrared scopes. Parked in the street was a vehicle that looked to Gabriel like a dune buggy. It was all pipes and fat-treaded tires. Gear hung in string bags from the frame. The engine was hooded to muffle the sound. Hethought these men must be Delta Force. Or Seals. He knew there was no point in asking.
    They put him in the buggy and drove him out of the city, keeping clear of the highways, until they reached a radio post set up in a drained swimming pool on the property of a grand house that had been burned and blown up. Its roof had caved in and the protruding metal beams of the roof structure reminded Gabriel of the dead man’s ribs sticking from the cavern of his wound. A Hessian net had been strung over the swimming pool and the radio satellite dish was hidden in the landscaped bushes nearby. A generator puttered next to it.
    None of the men wore any insignia. They seemed only half-aware of his presence. Some were American and some were Arab. Stacks of guns lay in the basin-smooth corners of the room they had created. Lantern light glimmered off the turquoise-blue walls.
    A man threw him some camouflage clothes. They were the American pattern, browns and yellows in irregular splotches. The men watched him as he changed, snorting as the paleness of his skin revealed itself against his painted hands and face.
    “You look like you took a bath in the stuff, bubba.” The man had sat down at his field desk. He had a flat, midwestern voice. When Gabriel didn’t answer, the man pointed to a canvas-backed chair on the other side of the desk. “Why don’t you tell us exactly what happened to you?”

    Gabriel quit the Air Force soon after returning to America. The work it had taken him to become a pilot and the ambition and the pride he had felt in it seemed suddenly to belong to someone else. It wasn’t even something he could understand anymore. In its place was all the horror of the oil fields. The wreckage it made of the land. He began to see the same destruction everywhere, in the forests and