“Goddamn it! This is gonna be ground combat, blue-collar combat, in your face and personal, not playin’ computer games in an airplane.”
“It’ll be all right. It might even be fun.”
Dare knew when to quit. Some kinds of ignorance were flat-out invincible.
The next morning, almost hallucinating from fatigue, his tongue swollen from thirst, his feet blistered, and every bone and joint aching, he called upon his sleep-deprived brain to produce one good reason for doing what he’d done. The brain offered a multiple choice: (a) Loyalty to fellow aviators being one of his pillars of wisdom, he’d decided to play the role of the experienced noncom to Douglas’s young, impetuous officer; (b) corollary of (a) he’d realized he wouldn’t be able to live with himself if, for lack of a restraining influence, his partner did something stupid and got himself killed; or (c) the boredom of hanging around camp was so colossal that anything was preferable to it. He chose (d), none of the above, because there was no good reason for subjecting himself to the ordeal of a forced march. He must have acted on blind impulse at three this morning, when, awakened by the sounds of the troops moving out, he saw Douglas shouldering the camera and said, “I’d best go with you.” The younger man grinned and replied, “Knew you would.” Nimrod saw them off with a face that said, “I hope to see you again.”
Dare had almost collapsed, stumbling for hours down a stony track in darkness, his arthritic knees crackling like an echo of the boots, rubber sandals, and plastic slippers crunching the gravel underfoot. Doug had provisioned himself with a canteen of filtered water. It was empty before the march was half through. The troops didn’t carry any water—apparently they didn’t need it.
Now, as Dare lay on a hilltop overlooking the garrison about a kilometer away, his thoughts, hopes, and desires had reduced themselves to one: water. Water in all its tastes and textures. The satiny water of a woodland pond, the icy water of a glacial lake, the crisp water of a mountain stream; tap water with its hint of chlorine, well water with its hint of iron. He pictured fountains, fishtanks, swimming pools, bottles of Evian racked in a convenience-store fridge.
Doug lay on one side of him, cradling the camera in his elbows; Michael was on his right, with Suleiman and the radio operator, his radio wired to a car battery he’d carried on his head the whole way. Four heavy machine guns guarded by a platoon of riflemen were arrayed along the rim of the hill. Mortar crews stood behind them, the tubes elevated on the bipods, the shells laid side by side. Crouched low, barely more than moving silhouettes in the gray light, the assault troops picked their way down the hillside toward the dry riverbed from which they would launch the attack. A couple of hundred yards beyond, across broken ground strewn with boulders and picketed by thorn trees, was the government garrison: brown tents and grass-roofed huts clustered near a stone building, all of it surrounded by a dirt berm, with a bunker at each corner and a wide break in one side. A road led away from the opening and out across the savannah. A look through Michael’s binoculars showed Dare a bulldozer, parked under a tree at the far end of the encampment. Beside it were the prizes—the Land Rover and three trucks.
He licked his parched lips, hoping for a swift victory—the garrison was bound to have a supply of water on hand. The radio crackled: Major Kasli reported that the assault force was in position. Michael called out, “Machine guns! Five hundred rounds each! Guns one and two, fire on the left bunker! Three and four, the right bunker! Mortars! Number one to fire smoke to mark the target! Two, three, four will fire for effect on my command!” The mortar squad leader gave the range and elevation to the first tube’s crew, and the loader stood, poised to drop the marking round into the barrel. “Blast away!” Michael shouted, then looked through his field glasses, the deep, measured dum-dum-dum of the 12.7-millimeter machine guns and the crack of the mortar, sharp and definite, shredding the morning’s peace.
With the target nearly a thousand yards away, the machine-gunners fired with more enthusiasm than accuracy. The bullets spattered into the berm and below it but nowhere near