Free Cold Allies by Patricia Anthony Page A

PYRENEES, ABOVE BAGNERES-DE-LUCHON

    Colonel Wasef stared down into the streambed at the destruction his men had wrought. The action of the water, he noticed, had already smoothed the sharp edges of the crater, so that the mistake seemed to have been made years before, and the earth had nearly forgotten.
    “Qasim,” his captain and childhood friend began in apology. “My brother—”
    Wasef waved the apology away tiredly. “I’ll assure General Sabry that there was no way for you to know. Are you sure you hit it?”
    “The helicopter pilot is positive. He saw nothing get away.”
    Wasef looked at the small tread marks leading downstream. “Something did,” he grunted.
    He turned and saw Yussif pressing his lips together in chagrin. Yussif was such a pudgy-cheeked man that the gesture made him look like a scolded child. “Don’t do that,” Wasef told him.
    The captain’s expression altered to one of bewilderment, and Wasef laughingly explained, “Don’t make such a face. It is like when you were in school and the teacher called on you for the lesson.”
    Captain Mustafa grinned. A positive sign. It was hard, Wasef knew, to keep up the men’s morale. In Egypt, women and children were dying. Wasef had lost his own wife, Zahra, on the dusty march from the plagues in Sinnüris. But Yussif’s family had been in Cairo, he remembered. Surely they were safe.
    He thought to ask the captain about them, but didn’t have the heart. Soon, Wasef thought, soon they would make another move into France. The Eastern army would push through Poland and then through Germany. The two fronts would meet, hammer and anvil. And, even though it was too late for him, the other men could bring their families out of that sandy hell.
    “I’ve sent a platoon downstream,” Yussif said, motioning with his hand. “The helicopter has searched, but there is so much leaf canopy, the pilot could not see anything. I ordered the T-72 to the Garonne River. The stream comes out there.”
    Wasef nodded. “A good plan. Very good,” he said, seeing the pleasure in Yussif’s face, an unimportant backdrop to the disturbing memories of Zahra.
    “We-will get the robot, colonel.”
    “Yes. Of course you will.”
    Before they left, Wasef glanced down at the streambed again and suppressed a shudder. There wasn’t much that Colonel Qasim Wasef feared. But this. This scared him to death. There was the crater, tangible and real as the stones, with no signs of a kill around it. Yet something other than the robot had gone into the ravine and not come out.
    Allah must be punishing them for abandoning the desert, he decided. For leaving the women, the old men, the children to their prolonged deaths. Wasef had the cold thought that perhaps General Sabry was wrong. Perhaps the blue lights were not UFOs but some sort of avenging angels.

    IN THE LIGHT

    A calm voice said, “Go ahead. Call your mother.”
    It was suddenly quiet. Lieutenant Justin Searles dropped his hand from his eyes and saw that he was standing in one of those bus rest stops. To his right was a pay phone. Before him, a long bar where silent passengers, motionless as stuffed animals, hunched over their coffee. The place smelled of onions and grease.
    “Call your mother,” Ann said.
    Justin turned to the pay phone and realized there was a quarter between his forefinger and thumb. He put the coin in the slot and dialed the old number.
    “Hello, Justin,” a voice in the receiver said. The voice was female; it wasn’t his mother’s.
    “Mom,” he said anyway. He wasn’t feeling much like a fighter jock anymore. He was so scared that his voice cracked like a little kid’s. “Mom. Where am I?”
    “You’re close. Just picture home in your mind. Picture it very, very hard.”
    He thought of Florida, the squat, blocky pink house, the mango tree in the front yard, the lemon tree in the back. The thick, sweet, green grass and the gray thunderheads in the humid sky.
    But Florida wasn’t like