The Hunter from the Woods

The

Wolf

and the

Eagle

One

“Buckle up, Major.”

The major was already buckled up.

“Short flight today, sir.”

“If you say so,” said Michael Gallatin, who occupied the rear seat of the RAF Westland Lysander aircraft. He was wearing his khaki British Western Desert Force uniform, sun-bleached and dusty, consisting of a sweat-damp short-sleeved shirt, shorts, gray knee-socks and tan-colored ankle boots. Around his neck and into his collar was tucked a dark blue scarf. It was meant to keep out the chafing grit that could lead to not only great mental distress but to serious infection, particularly if the flies got their diggers in the wound. His officer’s cap was the same color as the Libyan wasteland, the hue of the endless sand and the countless stones. Crammed into the space under his boots was his kitbag. It held a change of clothes, his canteen, his shaving accoutrements and his dependable American Colt .45 automatic. He wore his insignia of rank at a slight angle, which did him no good with superior officers but earned the silent approval of those below; in any case, the superior officers had been informed to leave him alone by the letter he carried from a very important man in London.

“Weather’s fine for flyin’ this mornin’, sir,” said the young Cockney pilot, whose sidelong grin displayed his crooked front teeth. He was enjoying an obvious moment of mirth concerning his rather nervous passenger. “No reason to worry.”

“Who’s worried?” Michael fired back, a little too quickly. In the North African desert in mid-August a clear sky could never be called upon to lift the spirits. It might be cloudless but it was often a pale milky color more white than blue, as if that cruel sun had burned all the beauty even out of Heaven. “You just tend to the flying,” Michael said, and told himself to relax. Easier told than done. He didn’t relish flying very much; it was a combination of his distrust—one should not call it fear, of course—of confinement and heights, and the whole idea of sitting in a sputtering machine many thousands of feet above the earth seemed even more unnatural to him than a sea voyage.

But it was the aircraft that really bothered him. This thing, with its stubby nose and thick-waisted bulk and clumsy-looking fixed landing gear, seemed to Michael a relic more suited to the last world war than the one in the unfortunate present. As Michael understood, the Lysander had been an antique even on its maiden flight in 1936. This was the year 1941, and what in the world was this thing even doing on a landing strip, much less about to take to the air as soon as the three Spitfire fighters went up. Michael shifted his bottom in the hard leather seat, whose rips were oozing cotton, and mused upon the fact that the Lysander was named after a Spartan general.

He knew what Spartan soldiers said about their shields: With this, or upon this.

Somehow, it was not comforting.

The airfield at the Bir Al Kabir oasis was a slapdash construction of tents and prefabricated buildings brought in by cargo planes from Cairo, two hundred and twenty-four miles to the east. The scraggly palm trees around the waterhole were not pretty and the water was not sweet, but even water that smelled and tasted of rotten eggs was life in this climate of a hundred and twenty-two degree days. A hot wind sometimes blew in, nagging at the tents and hissing through the aircraft engines to find their weak places, as more spinning sheets of dust painted machines and men alike the blanched shade of misery.

There was a war going on, and it was not always necessarily Churchill’s British versus Hitler’s Germans and Mussolini’s Italians; sometimes it was the Brit versus the invasion of a hundred thousand biting flies, or the Brit versus the month of burning days so stunning saliva dried within seconds to white crust on the cracked lips, or the Brit versus the empty horizon upon which heatwaves threw mirages of huge lakes that shimmered like molten vats of white glass.

The first of the Spitfire fighter planes was taking off. Woe to the other pilots behind him, including the Cockney kid at the Lysander’s controls, due to the amount of dust the takeoff stirred up. “You must be an important chap, sir,” came the next comment. “Three Spit escort and all, beggin’ your pardon.”

“I have my uses,” Michael answered. The way the Lysander’s engine made the plane vibrate did not make him talkative. The pilot would be throttling up and rolling out onto the runway when the third Spit took to the air, any minute now.

“Roger that. We’re waitin’. Over,” said the pilot through his headset microphone.

The second Spitfire roared off into the sky. The third was taxiing into takeoff position.

Michael checked his Rolex wristwatch. He figured he’d be in Cairo in time for a debriefing meeting at HQ and then on to lunch on the shaded veranda of the Piper’s Club. He hadn’t realized how much he missed their small filets, a platter of orange rolls and a fine cold beer. Two beers would be doubly fine. Then on to sleep for about twelve hours, on sheets of Egyptian cotton.

The third Spit took off, trailing dust. “Here we go, sir,” said the pilot cheerfully, and Michael thought he must be a budding sadist, for the kid gave the plane a little jerk as it rolled forward onto the strip, as if it wanted to leap into the air without benefit of a proper sprint. The noise of the engine was like hammers beating hollow metal drums to a madman’s rhythm, and over that unholy racket Michael could hear what sounded to him like loose bolts jumping in the wings.

“Roger, on our way,” the pilot told his controller. “Over.” He throttled up and the Lysander began to roll.

The Lysander’s chief talent was that it didn’t need a very long runway. They were off the ground in about ten seconds, and Michael placed his hands on his knees and squeezed the blood out of them as the craft rose quickly to meet the three Spitfires circling above the field.

“Goin’ up to fifteen thousand today, sir,” the pilot told him. “Get yourself a good look at the desert from way up there.”

Another look at the desert was the last thing Michael Gallatin needed or wanted.

His entire four-day mission out here had involved looking at the desert. He knew what they’d called him at the airfield: Majorly Strange. That was because after every sundown he drove through the guards’ position in an open-topped Morris truck and drove back in an hour before sunup. They knew that he was a reconnaissance officer, but they were puzzled as to why he went out alone. What they didn’t know was that, once out in the desert at a distance of a couple of miles or more, the recon major stopped his truck, took off his uniform, folded it and put it away, and then Majorly Strange became a creature that the word ‘strange’ utterly failed to describe. Over the sand and fist-sized stones of the hammada he ran westward on four legs, and cloaked by the night he travelled mile upon mile to make note in his human mind of the brutal landscape: the soft pits of sand that could swallow a truck or a tank, the series of dunes that would turn a soldier’s legs and willpower to jelly, the vast flat plains stubbled with cactus that rose to mountains and fell off again into chasms of jagged red rock. He was searching also for the German mines that lay in their thousands under the sand or the stony crust, and these he could smell by the metallic tang of danger that thrust at him, snake-like, as he approached. So much metal, and so much high explosive. The air reeked.

He used his heightened sense of direction to place these minefields on the map he’d learned to carry in his head, and so on he went alert for German patrols or the movement of troops and armored vehicles or the almost imperceptible blue lamps of an enemy outpost whose machine guns were trained on a maze of barbed wire, tank traps and Bouncing Betty mines designed to burst up from the ground and explode red-hot shrapnel into a man’s groin.

His job was to find a path for the British Army to move westward and destroy the Afrika Korps’ seige of Tobruk, which had trapped over twenty-four thousand Commonwealth soldiers in a ring of steel since the tenth of April.

At the airfield on his return, Majorly Strange would retire to a radio room and send his findings to his contact in Cairo in a code based on British nursery rhymes. Therefore the future of the war in North Africa and the lives of many thousands of men hung on the likes of Old King Cole, Strutting Cock Robin and the hungry wolf at the door.

“Easy peasy,” said the pilot. “Lemon squeesy.”

They had taken up their position just behind and below two Spitfires with the third guarding their tail. They flew east. The Lysander’s engine noise became a dull rumble. Michael did not care to sightsee what his sight had already seen, so he closed his eyes and tried to rest.

Yesterday had happened one of those rare encounters that made life, to Michael, such an interesting mystery. Such things could not be written in books and be believed.

He’d been walking to his quarters after he’d sent the radio codes when someone had fallen into step beside him.

“Excuse me, sir. Major?”

“Yes?” Michael was tired and ready for sleep, his senses a bit dulled. He saw the young man in the dusty Western Desert Force uniform and the two-bar chevron of the corporal’s rank. The corporal saluted, Michael returned the salute and then smiled and offered his hand. The young man took it.

“I thought it was you, sir!” said the young man, with an equally dusty smile. He’d been wearing goggles and around his eyes was the only area the desert hadn’t gotten to.

“Our company pulled in for water awhile ago, sir. May I ask…what you’re doing here?”

“On duty,” said Michael.

“Oh…yes, of course. Well… I felt I had to do my duty too, sir. What with all this going on. She asked me if I wouldn’t rather have joined the Navy, but I told her I’d had enough of the sea.” He paused to make sure the major understood. “We were married last April, sir. Marielle and I. Three years to the day we met.”

“Billy,” Michael said, “that’s wonderful to hear.”

“Thank you, sir. I think she’s pretty wonderful, myself.”

“I have no doubt. Your company’s heading east?” Michael saw some of the trucks around Bir Al Kabir’s pool, and he noted the direction they were facing. “Yes sir, we’re being pulled back. Last night we ran into some pretty stiff opposition. A few Jerry tanks out looking for trouble.”

Michael nodded. Whatever had happened, Billy’s story was an understatement. When he was on his recon runs, Michael never failed to see the flash of artillery on the horizon, and sometimes he heard gunfire and the hollow whump of grenades going off as close as two hundred meters. There might be a lull between official Army battle operations, but there was never a lull in the small battles that went on between companies and platoons out on the raw edge of reckoning.

The major and the corporal talked for a few minutes and then it was time for Billy to return to his men. “Goodbye, sir,” he said, and Michael wished Billy Bowers and his bride all the good fortune in the world. They saluted each other, and they went on.

At fifteen thousand feet above the desert, Michael had a dream of a wolf tumbling from the sky. He opened his eyes with a jolt. “Everything all right?” he asked the pilot, in a voice more reedy than he would have wished.

“Fine, sir. Just relax.”

Michael checked his watch. A grand total of nineteen minutes had passed since they’d left the airfield. He gave an inward groan and shifted again on the seat as much as the belt would allow.

“Oh, Keyrist!” whispered the pilot, and Michael’s heart jumped because he knew something had just gone terribly wrong.

One of the Spitfires veered away and dove to the right. Through the plexiglass canopy Michael saw the glint of metal rising from the earth. Two airplanes? They were coming up fast, from about twelve thousand feet. He made out the shapes of German aerial predators: Messerschmitt Bf 109s, painted in desert camouflage hues. The one in the lead had a solid black tail with the Nazi symbol painted in white upon it.

“Jesus! Jesus!” said the pilot, whose head was on a swivel searching for more enemy fighters. To the credit of his nerve, he kept the lumbering Lysander steady. Then the black-tailed 109 flashed past between the Lysander and the second Spit, on its way to a higher altitude. The Spitfire behind Michael’s plane took after it. “Steady!” the young man said suddenly, and very loudly; he was speaking to himself.

The second Bf 109 came up firing. Tracers zipped across the sky. The remaining Spitfire on point tipped its wings over and fell away. Michael saw it roll in order to get a position behind the 109 as it passed. The Spitfire’s wing guns sparkled, and again tracers reached out for their target but fell short. Michael looked out the canopy to his left and saw that the black-tailed 109 had gotten on the rear of the first Spitfire and was gaining on it. The Spit jinked to the right; the Messerschmitt followed. German tracers shot out in a pattern that might be called beautiful in any other situation, and as the Spit jinked to the left the bullets caught it and tore pieces of metal from the fuselage. The Spit dove and the black-tailed 109 dove after it, even as the third Spitfire got on the 109’s rear and hung there at incredible speed.

“That’s Rolfe Gantt’s 109,” the Cockney pilot said, his voice thick with both fear and awe. “We’re gettin’ out!” He throttled up, the engine screamed as much as a sand-scraped antique engine could, and the Lysander nosed down with an effect that lifted Michael off his seat and made the belt feel as if it were slicing him in two. He had no inclination to scream, but the desire was there.

They went down fast.

Suddenly something was coming down faster. The burning front half of a Spitfire, its wings and fuselage pierced by machine gun bullets and fist-sized twenty-millimeter cannon rounds. It fell past the Lysander, its control cables dangling from the torn-away rear half, and the black-tailed 109 turned away from the tumbling wreckage.

Michael watched the Messerschmitt evade tracers from the Spit on its tail. The aircraft was ascending again, and suddenly it cut its speed and rolled to the left and the Spit went past it just a little too far. As the Spitfire tried to correct its course, the black-tailed 109 made a complete roll and came up shooting at the Spit’s belly. Pieces of metal flew. A bright red flame rippled along the right wing. The Spitfire turned over on its back and the 109 raked it with a burst of cannon shells. Ebony smoke and crimson flames erupted from the Spit’s engine, the prop froze and the aircraft went down to the desert ten thousand feet below.

Michael craned his neck to see the third Spitfire fighting for its life in a battle with one German eagle, and then the black-tailed ace joined the fray. Tracers flew in every direction. The planes crisscrossed each other. But in a matter of seconds, the 109 with the camouflage-painted tail made a mistake of timing and ran into a line of slugs that floated sinuously across the sky. Black smoke bloomed from the engine. The prop spun off, one blade missing. As the 109 started to fall in a slow spiral, the canopy was pulled open and the pilot jumped with his parachute pack on his back. He disappeared from view.

“Down, baby, down!” the Cockney pilot shouted, about to tear the Lysander’s wings off. In the rear seat was a man who was bracing himself with hands, elbows, knees and feet and seeing his thirty years of life pass before his eyes.

The remaining Spitfire and the Messerschmitt came down twisting and turning around each other. Michael watched, transfixed, as their pilots battled for position. Tracers hit empty air that had not been empty the second before. A collision was narrowly missed. One plane zoomed upward and one shrieked down. Michael realized, with dry mouth and feverish brain, that the black-tailed 109 was turning toward them in an elegant curve, and it was going to get them in its gunsights.

The tracers reached out. Slowly, it seemed. With great, deadly and terrible grace.

The Cockney pilot abruptly chopped the throttle and turned the plane on its side to fall to the left, but the tracers were upon them and there was nowhere to hide.

The feeling, to Michael, was as if the aircraft had run over a cobblestoned road.

It was a rough shake. Amid the shake, the windshield popped and cracked as at least one slug passed through it. Holes punched through the bottom of the plane and then through the roof. The pilot gave a strangled cry. Michael smelled scorched metal and fresh blood. A red mist swirled in the air before it was sucked upward. Then the 109 streaked past and the Lysander rolled over in its wounded agony, its engine cylinders gasping for air.

Michael Gallatin was stretched up against the belt one second and the next he was smashed into the seat. The Lysander was tumbling down. The pilot was slumped forward. God save the King, Michael thought crazily as sky became earth became sky became earth. He clasped hold of two rubber handgrips on the back of the pilot’s seat and thought how utterly ridiculous it was trying to brace himself from an aircrash at roughly two hundred knots per hour.

Metal flashed alongside the Lysander. The Spit and the black-tailed 109 were fighting on their way down. The Spit had taken some damage and smoke was curling from the engine, probably blinding the pilot. Rolfe Gantt’s plane bore a dozen bullet holes along the fuselage. The two combatants went at each other again, head-to-head and guns blazing. In the middle of another roll Michael’s bloodshot eyes saw Gantt’s 109 lose a section of its right wing in a burst of flying metal, but an instant later the German’s bullets hit home. The entire front of the Spitfire exploded. The Spit seemed to collapse on itself, the wings folding, the fuselage crumpling like a tin can that had been stepped on. It simply fell apart, and what might have been a burning body dropped away with arms and legs outspread.

“Got it, sir! Got it, sir!” the Cockney pilot moaned, as he fought against unconsciousness and the violence of the spin to gain control of his aircraft.

Michael was near passing out himself. The blood swelled in his face and roared in his ears. He hung onto the handgrips with desperate and perhaps terrified strength.

“Got it, sir! Got it, sir!” the pilot kept repeating, over and over, in a voice that sounded mangled.

And then, quite suddenly, he did have it. The Lysander righted itself. They were still going down fast, onto a terrain of yellow sand and black rocks about a thousand feet below. The pilot pulled back on his yoke and the nose came up. “Got it, sir!” he said, with bloody triumph in his mouth.

Something huge and dark swept over them. An extended wheel hit the Lysander’s left wing and knocked the bulky airplane through the sky. Michael saw the belly of Gantt’s 109 pass overhead. Fire was licking around the motionless prop. The Messerschmitt headed down.

Again the young pilot fought for control. This time it was obvious he was almost done. When Michael dared to look to the left, he saw the wing on that side torn to tatters.

“Can you get out, sir?” the pilot asked, which demonstrated his state of mind since Michael wore no parachute.

“Put us down!” Michael told him.

The pilot nodded. He coughed from deep in his chest and blood spattered the cracked glass before his face.

“Yes sir,” he managed to say.

The Lysander slipped to the left. The pilot corrected. The Lysander slipped to the right. The pilot corrected. He cut all power and lowered whatever flap was still working. He moved with slow and maybe dying deliberation. The Lysander began to turn on the side of its disabled wing. The ground was rising to meet them; it was all sand-shiny and hard angles of rock. Michael judged a hundred feet to go. He braced, if bracing would do any good.

“We’re in for it, sir,” said the pilot, in a voice that now sounded distant and almost childlike, as if he were falling down through time itself.

Fifty feet, Michael thought. The beads of sweat on his face were sweating.

Thirty feet.

“Yes sir,” said the pilot, answering some unknown command.

They hit.

There was a bone-jarring crunch. Michael was thrown against the side of the plane so hard he heard his left shoulder either separate or break with a noise like the pop of a broomstick being snapped. His cap flew off. The left side of his face smashed into the canopy, which surprisingly did not shatter. Maybe his cheekbone and jaw had shattered, he didn’t know. Pain fogged his vision. His left arm had gone cold. He lost his handgrips. There came a sound of metal being ripped away, and the Lysander was skidding on its belly because its wheels were gone. It went on, banging into and over stones and across the slithering sand. In its progress the Lysander turned to face the way it had come, and when at last it ceased its motion Michael Gallatin sat facing westward, bleeding and groggy amid a symphony of metallic moans and creaks and ticks and muffled thumps like a dying heartbeat.

It came to him, sometime in the next few seconds, that he smelled the hot sweet friction of sheared-off metal and the bitter aroma of smoke.

He blinked. Was his jaw even still connected to his face?

Smoke was starting to fill the cockpit.

He had to move.

His left arm would not, and pain speared from shoulder to collarbone when he tried. He got his seatbelt unbuckled with his right hand. Blood was in his mouth. He spat it out. He unlocked the canopy and shoved the cracked plexiglass open. He flung his kitbag from the plane. Then he climbed up and tumbled over the side onto the stony ground, an effort that again sent vicious pain through his injured arm.

Small flames were starting to curl up around the engine from beneath the wrecked plane. “Get out!” he called to the pilot, but the young man didn’t move.

Michael pulled himself up and instantly fell to his knees again, his balance for the moment a matter of past history. He realized the fire was growing, and he had to get the pilot out. He stood up, stumbled and righted himself. The sun’s power beat down upon his skull and he was nearly blinded by the glare. Blood was trickling from both nostrils. His left eye was rapidly swelling shut. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and got hold of one of the metal reinforcement strips that ran along the pilot’s canopy to flip it up. His right arm strained, but the thing was locked tight from within. He banged on the blood-spattered plexiglass. The pilot stirred, turned his head to display the gore that had streamed in a torrent from his mouth, and stared numbly at Michael Gallatin. The front of the pilot’s shirt was red where at least one bullet had hit him in the chest.

“Unlock it!” Michael shouted. And then again, if the young Cockney hadn’t heard: “Unlock your canopy!”

The pilot just stared at Michael, his swollen eyes heavy-lidded.

With a flash and a low hollow whump the engine burst into flames.

“Unlock your canopy!” Michael urged, and began to beat against the plexiglass with his useable fist.

Fire rippled from the engine toward the cockpit. The heat staggered Michael back.

A gout of red flame jumped into the pilot’s cabin. The young man continued to stare without speaking at Michael Gallatin, and even as he caught fire and began to contort into a shape no longer human he made no sound. Before Michael’s eyes he became a blaze, and one crisped hand reached up to press feebly against the blackening canopy. Then it fell back into the flames, and what looked like a swarm of a thousand glowing red bees swept around and around at the center of ashes and smoke.

The Lysander was being consumed, sending up a black smoke column. Michael backed away from the heat. The canopy exploded with the noise of a shotgun going off.

At a distance away from the conflagration Michael sat down on the ground, like a boy before a summertime campfire. He felt himself let go, because he had nowhere to get to in a hurry. Then the darkness came upon him as suddenly as if the sun had gone out, and when he fell onto his injured shoulder he gave a small gasp of pain but his eyes were already closed and he was for the moment also extinguished.

Two

“Hey, Englisher!” said the voice, speaking English. “Are you dead?”

The toe of a boot prodded Michael’s side.

He heard the voice and felt the prod, but it took him a few more seconds to fight up from the dark. When he opened his single working eye, he was in a world of blinding white light and dry heat that baked the lungs with a breath. He sat up and saw the gun pointed in his face.

“Easy,” cautioned the man behind the Walther P38 pistol. “Do nothing fast. As if you could. Friend, you are in one hell of a condition.”

Michael looked up at his visitor.

The man wore a tan-colored short-sleeved shirt open to show his white undershirt and a pair of tan-colored trousers tucked into dusty black boots. On the pocket of his shirt was pinned his Iron Cross and his Luftwaffe airman’s badge. He was an example of the handsome Nordic breed, with the touselled blonde hair of a wild little boy and sardonic amber eyes that belonged to a worldly-wise man. He was of compact, powerful build with a chiselled face, a hooked nose and a firm jaw, and he stood about five feet ten. Across his right cheek the slash of a fencer’s scar showed pale against his desert tan. A second smaller scar divided the left blonde eyebrow into two halves. Michael thought that this man had definitely seen his share of action, and perhaps another man’s share as well. The way he held the gun said he knew how to use it and would use it at the slightest provocation. The amber eyes focused fully on Michael and the pistol was unwavering, yet the man had also today seen his share of injury. Blood from a gash at his hairline had coursed down his forehead and along the right side of his face. His lower lip was split open and blood had dried on his chin. A blue knot swelled over the left eye. He had been through some rough weather.

Behind the man, maybe two miles away, Michael could see the black smoke rising from another aircraft wreck. This pilot had not come down with his ship, however, for he still carried his parachute pack slung over one shoulder and folded up within it could be seen the white chute itself.

“Name?” the man asked.

“Gallatin,” Michael answered. His jaw felt dislocated, but so be it.

“Gantt,” the pilot said. “This is yours?” He motioned quickly with a tilt of his head toward the open kitbag on the ground a few feet away. Michael figured the man must have carried it over from beside the still-burning Lysander, since it was scorched by flames.

Michael nodded.

It had been gone through. Michael noted his Colt automatic in Gantt’s waistband under the outer shirt. Michael’s change of clothes was scattered around, and the canteen with its black leather shoulder strap lay atop his second pair of shorts. He could not fail to see the three bullet holes in the kitbag’s canvas and the bullet hole about midway up the canteen. Gantt had pushed a knot of cloth into the hole. “Unfortunately most of the water was lost,” Gantt said, “but I did squeeze some back into the canteen from your clothes.” He frowned and glanced toward a third plume of black smoke many miles away. “The talented bastard who shot me down had a superb Immelman, but he was not quite so good at his snap roll. What was his name?”

“I don’t know. I’m not a flyer.”

“No, you’re a faller,” came the reply. “You should feel lucky you’re not dead. Most who tangle with me end up that way.”

“Do most who tangle with you,” Michael said carefully, “not have guns on their planes? What was the point of shooting down the Lysander?”

“You got between me and a Spit. The bullets go where they go.” Gantt quickly scanned the horizon. “Now it’s time for us to go. They’ll see the smoke and come looking. Stand up.”

“No,” Michael said.

“What did I hear, Englisher?”

“I said…no. Meaning I’m not standing up. You go where you please, but I’m staying here.”

“Are you?” Gantt stepped forward and placed the gun’s barrel against Michael’s injured shoulder. “I can hurt you a little more, you see.”

“Go ahead. I’ll just bleed some and wait for the RAF to arrive. As you say, they’ll see the smoke and come looking.”

“I didn’t mean your air force will come looking,” Gantt said. “You’re too far from your base and you’re off the regular patrol route. I’m talking about the Dahlasiffa. The Death Stalkers. You have heard of them, yes?”

Michael had heard rumors. Supposedly the Dahlasiffa was a warlike tribe of scavengers who stripped corpses of anything valuable after a battle. They knocked out gold and silver teeth, took money, watches, medals, helmets, boots, and it was speculated they were likely stockpiling rifles, pistols and grenades to use against enemy tribes. Michael had never seen a Dahlasiffa or met anyone who’d seen one, but the word at HQ in Cairo was that the Dahlasiffa not only stripped corpses but also made short work of the wounded.

“They’re real enough,” Gantt said. “They usually travel in packs of six or seven. We’re in their territory. They’ll see the smoke and they’ll come looking to strip corpses. And they won’t care who’s wearing what uniform, either, or how close to being a corpse you are. They’ll finish that job. What’s the brand of your watch?”

“Rolex.”

“Breitling.” Gantt showed Michael the watch on a brown leather band on his wrist. “I intend to keep it, and my arm. Shall we go?”

Michael thought about it, but not for very long. The Lysander, burned to its metal framework, cast no shade. The world was made up of yellow sand, black rock and white glaring sun. It was a furnace. He stood up.

“Carry your bag,” Gantt told him. “And…oh, yes… I have your nice straight razor in my pocket, if you’re wondering. I’ll carry the canteen. But you should put those clothes back in your bag, as well. They might be useful.”

Michael did what he suggested.

“Your left arm’s broken?” the flyer asked.

“Possibly. Whatever, it’s not working.” Michael had already considered his situation regarding a change to wolf form and tearing this man into pieces even the Dahlasiffa could not loot. The problem was, he couldn’t run on all fours. He couldn’t leap to avoid a bullet. So in this particular instance he had more power on two legs, as a man.

Gantt nodded. “Bind it up,” he said, as he once again cast his gaze along the horizon.

Michael spent a moment getting the dark blue collar scarf tied around his neck and then forcing the arm into it. The pain made him growl deep in his throat. When he was done, fresh sweat stood out on his face. He picked up the kitbag, moving as slowly as a hobbled old man.

“Go!” Gantt pointed to the west. “This way!”

It was no surprise to Michael that Rolfe Gantt, the German Messerschmitt ace who since the beginning of his career in the 1939 invasion of Poland had shot down forty-six enemy planes—and now added four more credits to that number—wished to head toward the German lines instead of toward the British in Cairo. Michael was more versed in the ground war but he’d certainly heard and read of Gantt’s prowess. There were other Luftwaffe aces in North Africa, among them Richard Thess and Franz Ubevelder, but it was Rolfe Gantt who’d appeared on the cover of last month’s German Signal magazine, standing with his arms crossed and a wide grin on his face in front of the black-tailed 109.

Michael walked, carrying the kitbag. Gantt held the pistol on him for a while, but then lowered it to save his arm strength.

Michael knew exactly what Gantt wanted: to find a German patrol or outpost as soon as possible, to give up his prisoner and maybe get a truck ride back to his airfield.

Then it was off to a POW camp for Michael Gallatin, and it would be a very long war for a caged lycanthrope.

They crossed a landscape that seemed to have no beginning and no end. It was a world apart in its solitude, its merciless fury, its silence but for the hissing of a sudden wind that brought a further blast of heat and a scatter of sand thrown into the eyes.

They hadn’t gone very far when it was obvious to Michael that they weren’t going to get very far. His shadow upon the stony hammada was the blackest ink. The sun drove a white-hot spike into his head, he was already craving water and the flies had found them. Found their wounds, to be more exact. First one or two came to feast upon the crusted gashes, and then they summoned others to the banquet. Within thirty minutes of leaving the Lysander’s charred skeleton, Michael was the victim of a moving mass of flies that clung to a cut above his left eye. A score of flies tried to get up his nostrils at the tasty gore he was breathing around. They fastened themselves to his lips and crawled into his mouth, and no amount of head-shaking or slapping them away could keep them from their food. Also, they did have a taste for sweat. Likewise, Rolfe Gantt’s forehead wound was the focal point of a fist-sized clump of flies that writhed and rippled in nearly orgasmic delight to get at what he was made of. They got hold of his split lip and tried to winnow into the fissure, to break it open so more blood would flow. They dashed themselves against his eyes as if to blind him and make him drop. They spun around his head like a dark halo, and settling down into the thick blonde field of his hair they sucked at his scalp for salt.

Michael spat out a few flies. “The survival manual says the first thing to do is get your head and face covered. Then only to travel at night.”

“The survival manual doesn’t have Dahlasiffa in it,” Gantt replied. Squinting against the midday glare, he looked back the way they’d come. “We’ll keep going for awhile.” As they walked, he opened the canteen and took a quick drink. The disturbed flies buzzed with indignant anger. “Here,” he said. “One swallow only.”

Michael took the offered canteen. The water tasted of his laundry soap. He returned the cap to the canteen and the canteen to Gantt, who returned the strap to his shoulder.

“Keep walking,” Gantt told him, and motioned with the Walther.

“You’re sure you’ll find anything out there?” The out there Michael referred to was the shimmering wasteland that stretched before them, mile upon empty mile.

“I have a very good sense of direction.”

“So do I, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find an outpost before you run out of water.”

The canteen had held maybe enough for each of them to have two or three more swallows. Flies whirled around Michael’s face and darted at his good eye, trying to get the moisture there. He suddenly decided he’d had enough of this, and if the German ace wanted to shoot him it would be a bullet put to good use. He stopped walking.

“Go on! Don’t stop!”

“I’m putting something over my head. And you stop waving that damned gun around. Does it look like I’m in any shape to give you trouble?”

Gantt had lifted the pistol to take aim at Michael’s battered face. Now he slowly lowered it. “No,” he said, with the hint of a smile. “I suppose not.”

Michael put the kitbag down amid the stones and knelt beside it. He found his small bottle of Trumper Lime aftershave, thankfully neither broken by a bullet nor the impact, which had enough alcohol in it to heal small razor cuts. It would do as well as anything on wounds suffered in an aircraft crash. Working with one hand, he got the bottle open and splashed liquid on the cut over his eye. It stung like the devil’s own joyjuice, but surely it would do some good. At least the way the flies buzzed meant they didn’t seem to like the smell. He rubbed more of the liquid all over his face and felt small stings from chin to forehead.

“You English,” said Gantt, with a note of disdain. “That’s why you won’t win this war, you know. You’re too addicted to your comforts and your little…what is that? Aftershave lotion?”

“That’s right.” Michael screwed the small crown cap back on. “Here.” He threw it to Gantt, who caught it by reflex in his left hand. “The alcohol will help.”

“I don’t choose to smell like a small British island in the Caribbean,” Gantt answered, but he didn’t throw it back. “Don’t you people take this war seriously?”

Michael decided to ignore the man. He brought a tan-colored shirt out of the kitbag. Shaking the flies off his wounds, he tore the shirt in a couple of strategic places and began to wrap it around his head and face in his best approximation of a desert tribesman’s keffiyeh. “Take, for example, your tea breaks,” Gantt went on. “Why does everything stop at a certain hour for you people to drink tea? You even stop during an advance to drink tea. Don’t you understand the value of discipline?”

“I don’t stop for tea breaks,” Michael said as he continued to adjust his head covering, “but I think they are a form of discipline.”

“You Englishers are children living in a dream world.”

Michael got the shirt arranged so he had a torn slit he could see through. Otherwise, everything was covered. He tucked in a bit of cloth here and there to make sure it stayed on. “And I suppose you Nazis are living in the real world?”

Gantt frowned, his eyes darkening. “I’m not a Nazi.” He opened the bottle of aftershave with his teeth and splashed some on the flies that feasted at his forehead wound.

They lifted up with a noise like little airplanes and flew wildly in search of another landing strip. Gantt winced at the pain but poured some more of the stuff on for good measure. “Never a Nazi,” he continued, as the liquid ran down his face. He glanced quickly up toward the burning orb of the sun, measuring its force upon his skull and his willpower. The flies were already coming back, one by one. He shrugged off the canteen and the parachute pack.

“What’s your first name?” he asked.

“Michael.”

“All right, Michael. I will shoot you if you move in any way in the next two minutes. The bullet will go into your knee, and it will be a crippling shot because I am a very good shot. Then, though I desire to take you back as my prisoner, I will leave you here to die. Do you understand that?”

Michael nodded. He had no doubt the man would do exactly as he said. It was best to bide his time, to wait for an opportunity, and to seize it when it came. The problem was going to be seizing it with one good arm.

Gantt removed his shirt and pulled his undershirt up over his face. He positioned it so he could see through the neckhole and his head was covered, and then he put his shirt back on and retrieved the other gear. He recapped the Trumper bottle and slid it in his pack. “Very obedient of you,” he said, “and very smart. You’re a major, I see. But you wear no other insignia. What’s your speciality?”

“Reconnaissance.”

“Ah. So you’re used to walking the untrodden path, is that correct?” Gantt motioned with the pistol toward what the Berber tribesmen might call the plain of sorrows. “After you.”

They went on.

The sun was their enemy. Scorpions scuttled amid the stones at their feet. The sky was burned white, and the earth the color of ashes. The land broke into ravines and descended nearer to Hell. Sand began to pull at their boots and the dazzle tortured their eyes. The hot wind came up and tore at their makeshift keffiyehs. As he trudged onward, Michael realized only his physical training—and perhaps his supernatural training—was keeping him on his feet. He thought that Rolfe Gantt must be in excellent physical shape too, or maybe it was the sheer force of will that kept Gantt going.

The wind strengthened and swirled sand before it. Grit stung the eyes like sharp bits of glass. They kept their faces lowered. Michael began to think that the time to act was approaching. One false stumble might do it. One stumble and sidestep and then…what? An elbow to Gantt’s jaw? A knee to the groin? He doubted he would be fast enough to get through the flyer’s guard; after all, Gantt was an expert at recognizing a developing danger, and it was likely he was expecting something right now. But how much longer did Michael dare go before he tried to overpower the man? He didn’t have a lot of strength left and it was ebbing fast in this heat. Damn the arm! he thought angrily.

If he had full control over his limbs, this scenario would have been finished to his satisfaction hours ago. But no, no…it was pointless to moan over a broken shoulder. He had to try something. He slowed a step.

“Don’t slow down,” said Gantt, indicating his level of awareness even with sand in his eyes.

“I need some water.”

“So do I, but we don’t get any. Not yet.”

Michael continued to slow his pace and put a small stumble in it for effect. “Water,” he said, calculating inches. If he could manage to knock that gun from Gantt’s hand…but there was the Colt automatic in the man’s waistband. Whatever happened in the next few seconds, it was going to be a dirty, close-run…

Gantt aimed the pistol at the ground between them and fired. The bullet ricocheted off a stone and screamed away. Then the Walther took steady aim at Michael again.

“Don’t try what you’re thinking,” said the flyer, his voice unnervingly calm. “You would be much too clumsy. So just keep walking, like a good obedient—”

He suddenly spun to the right and held the pistol out before him.

Michael looked in that direction.

A figure stood up on a slight hill at the edge of the curtains of blowing sand.

It was a small figure, dressed in dirty clothes that may have once been white. They were really not much more than rags that flapped in the wind. The figure wore a brown keffiyeh and on top of that sat a khaki-colored Scottish Tam O’Shanter cap, which Michael knew was a common headdress among Commonwealth soldiers.

“Come down here!” Gantt ordered.

The figure did not move.

Gantt glanced quickly at Michael. “Do you know the language?”

“A little.” He was limited, but he did know a bit from dealing with tribal scouts.

“Tell him to come down here.”

Michael spoke the command—Come here—in first Tamazight and then Tuareg Berber. The figure turned and ran and in a few seconds was gone from sight.

Gantt kept the Walther aimed into the swirling sand for awhile longer before he lowered it. “What do you make of that?” he asked, probably directing the question to himself. When Michael had no reply, the pistol found him once more. “Keep moving. And no more playacting, please. You’re no stumbler.”

Michael walked forward, with Gantt a few careful paces behind. The lycanthrope had decided to again bide his time, because surely an opportunity was coming. If not, he would find a way to create one before they reached the shadow of an Afrika Korps flag. Behind him, the flyer scanned left and right for more figures in the wind but none emerged.

Michael figured Gantt must have been spooked by the strange encounter, because a few minutes after the incident the ace said, “Entertain me. Tell me about yourself.”

“I wouldn’t care to waste my breath.”

“Fair enough. I’ll tell you about myself, then. Did you know that I’ve shot down…well, it would be fifty planes including the ones today. Fifty. Do you know how many pilots have never shot down even one plane? And here I have fifty chalked up! What do you say about that?”

“I say you’re walking through the desert, the same as me.”

“Yes, but there’s a very big difference between our futures. You’ll be a prisoner of war and I’ll be up there again. I belong up there, Michael. It’s where I truly live. Is there a place you truly live?”

Michael grunted quietly. The hunter from the woods is a very long way from home, he thought. “No particular place,” he replied.

“I’m sorry for you, then. All men need a place where they truly live. Where their souls and spirits are free. The sky is my place. I find it beautiful, even on a stormy day when the planes are grounded. It is a woman with a thousand faces, all of them exquisite. Are you married, Michael?”

“No.”

“Me neither.” He gave a short laugh. “As if I should ever wear such a chain! The first thing a wife would say to me is, don’t fly so high or so fast. And listening to her, and wanting to please her, would kill me as it has killed so many other pilots with…” Gantt searched for the right word. “Attachments,” he finished. He laughed again, only this time Michael thought it sounded a little forced. “Men like us don’t need attachments, do we?”

“Men like us?”

“The risk-takers. The men who must be on the battlefront. Take you, for one. Your reconnaissance work. That puts you at great risk, doesn’t it? And you’re out front, blazing a trail through the mines and tank traps? Don’t tell me you’re simply a desk jockey, because I won’t believe it.”

“I’m not simply that,” Michael said.

“A man of action can recognize a man of action,” Gantt told him. “It’s in the way you move. And you’re confident, even now, even with your broken shoulder, that I’ll never get you to that outpost, aren’t you? Even with a pistol at your back, you’re confident. You think I’ll make a mistake you can take advantage of. Yes? And I’m confident that I will not make a mistake. So what does that make us?”

“Two confident fools in the desert with a couple of swallows of water in a shot-up canteen,” Michael answered.

“No! It makes us comrades of sorts! Like chess players, you see? Two men of action, reduced to the barest minimum to survive! A challenge, to be overcome.”

“I think you need some more covering for your head.”

“Maybe I do, Englisher, but I’ll tell you… I find your confidence in this situation to be very interesting. And entertaining. I’m just waiting to see what you’re going to do to keep yourself out of a POW camp. Because I know you are going to try.”

“You would,” Michael said.

“Of course I would! I’d never give up trying. And that’s why we’re comrades of sorts, isn’t it?”

“If you say so.” A movement to the right caught Michael’s attention. When he looked, he saw across the white plain the small figure in the dirty rags and the khaki tam about a hundred meters away, keeping their pace.

“Ah, there he is again,” said Gantt. “Now…he’s not a Dahlasiffa scout, or he’d be on a camel. In fact, why isn’t he on a camel? I make him out to be…about four feet six? A small boy, I’m thinking? All alone out here? And why might that be?”

“If you want to find out,” Michael said, “offer him water.”

“And use up even a swallow of what we have? Now who needs his head covered a little better?”

“If he’s a native, he might know where a well is. In fact, he may be on his way there. So…one swallow of water for him could wind up filling the canteen. Once we get a decent plug in the hole,” Michael added.

They walked on in silence, but Michael could tell that Rolfe Gantt was thinking.

The wind had died and the sand had spun down but the sun had grown hotter. Michael’s mouth was parched. He figured the air temperature had to be at least a hundred and ten, and then the sun’s heat was intensified off the desert’s surface. Still, he was sweating and that was a good sign. When the sweat stopped…not good.

“All right,” Gantt said at last. “Tell him we have water.”

Michael abruptly stopped and Gantt pulled himself up short, then backed away a couple of steps. Out across the plain, the small boy also stopped and stared in their direction.

Michael made the declaration in, again, both Tamazight and then Tuareg Berber.

There was no response. “Hold up the canteen,” Michael said, and Gantt obeyed. Then Michael called out once more. His voice rolled through the silence, and the silence closed up in its wake.

No response. The figure just stood there, staring.

“He’s not coming in.” Gantt opened the canteen, put it under his head covering and took a quick sip that he let linger in his mouth for a few seconds before he swallowed. “Here.”

Michael sipped and also let the water, a warm yet delicious nectar, sit in his mouth. He sloshed it around and then, reluctantly, downed it. Gantt put the canteen’s strap back over his shoulder. “Let’s go,” said the pilot.

For the next hour, the figure stayed with them at a distance of never less than a hundred meters. They came upon an area of sand dunes that rose up in tremendous golden waves. What looked like piles of burned black rubble lay about, the perfect shelters for horned vipers and the three-inch-long scorpions they’d seen crawling around. Michael and Gantt at the same time saw the footprints leading from the hard stony surface up one of the dunes and over. Someone was walking ahead of them.

The small figure had vanished.

When they reached the top of the first dune, a hard slog for anyone no matter how physically fit, they saw the person who’d made the footprints struggling onward about two hundred meters ahead. It was a man in tan-colored clothes and wearing black boots. He had wrapped a dark green kerchief around his head. He fell and stood up, fell again and stood up again, and kept going.

“Oh my God,” Gantt said softly. “I think…that’s Hartler. My wingman. He’s wearing on his head the scarf his wife sent him.” He cupped a hand to his mouth to shout for his friend.

Before the shout could emerge, a piece of black rubble hit Gantt on the right shoulder. At nearly the same time, Michael saw six men on camels come up over a dune and surround Gantt’s wingman. Hartler fell to his knees. All the six men carried rifles, and one who seemed to be in the lead—a man wearing robes dyed bright crimson and a keffiyeh the same vivid hue—aimed his rifle at Hartler’s head.

“Get down,” Michael quietly told Gantt, who was already lowering himself to the sand. Michael got down on his stomach. Both of them watched over the dune’s rise at the scene as it unfolded, and both knew they were in the presence of the Dahlasiffa.

Two of the other men threw ropes around Hartler. One of the camels made a braying noise like harsh laughter, and two more got into an argument that involved the snapping of teeth until a short whip settled the disagreement. The man wearing the crimson robes and keffiyeh shot Hartler in the head at close range. The green kerchief took flight. When the rifle went off, Gantt shivered. Hartler pitched forward. His body was dragged between a pair of camels off across the sand and away.

Neither Gantt nor Michael moved for some time. Gantt’s breathing sounded like a key trying to turn in a rusted lock.

The Walther was clutched in Gantt’s hand and the hand was there within Michael’s reach. But first things first.

Michael grabbed up a handful of sand and flung it into the flyer’s eyes. Then he went after the gun hand, even as the blinded Gantt clubbed with it at Michael’s injured shoulder.

Grappling for the gun, they slid halfway down the massive dune. A blow from the Walther hit Michael’s collarbone on his wounded side and sent pain tearing through him. In that instant of agony his teeth began to lengthen; he could feel them bursting free from the gums. Small hairs rose up on the back of his right hand and along the arm, and the fingers began to change their shape.

Gantt’s knee crashed into his jaw. Michael fell backward, sliding away. Lights of every color glittered behind his eyes. He felt his spine contort as the change gnawed at him from the inside out. He got up on his knees and was met by a boot to the ribs. The pain of that, and the certainty that Gantt would shoot him if this meeting of men of action were to continue much longer, caused Michael to slam and lock his soul cage. The enraged green-eyed wolf held its anger in check. It slinked back into the dark. Then it settled down again to wait for a more opportune moment in which to sink its teeth into Rolfe Gantt’s throat.

“Do you think you’re clever? So damned clever? You’re a fool, is what you are!” Gantt, his makeshift keffiyeh nearly torn off, was standing over Michael with the pistol aimed at his enemy’s head. “I should shoot you!” he seethed. “One bullet to your brain and I’m finished with you!”

Michael looked up at the man with his single good eye. His own keffiyeh had come undone and his face was exposed. He spat out some fresh blood, the smell of which made his thirst and hunger explode. He managed a tight smile, but he had some trouble drawing enough breath to speak. A couple of broken ribs was all he needed. “If shooting me…is…worth bringing them back…after they hear the noise, then go ahead.”

Gantt’s finger twitched on the trigger. But when nothing happened during the next three seconds, Michael knew the shot would not be fired. His shoulder was killing him. Currents of heat and cold coursed through his arm. It had come out of the scarf and Michael had to ease it back into place, his teeth gritted against the torment. So much for the man of action, he thought grimly.

Gantt’s attention was suddenly diverted from Michael Gallatin. “What the hell do you want?” he asked someone, and Michael turned his head to see the boy in the dirty clothes, the brown keffiyeh and the khaki tam standing there next to the rubble pile he must’ve been hiding in. Michael surmised that the boy had seen the Dahlasiffa first, and he’d thrown a piece of rock at Gantt to keep the flyer from calling Hartler and getting them all killed.

“Ask him what he wants,” Gantt directed. Michael did, in the two languages, but he got no answer. “What’s wrong with him? Can’t he speak?”

You can’t speak? Michael asked, choosing the more common Tamazight.

The boy didn’t move at first. And then he lifted his right hand and made a chopping motion across where his mouth would be under the keffiyeh. He repeated it a second time, with more vicious emphasis. Michael thought he understood. Painfully, he got up and walked to the boy, who began to retreat.

No danger here, said Michael. Let me see.

The retreat ceased. The tam and the keffiyeh came off. The boy was about ten, with curly black hair and olive-hued skin and dark sunken eyes that had seen things no boy of ten should have ever witnessed. They were so full of misery and the shadows of sadness that they were frightening to peer into. The boy opened his mouth.

“His tongue’s been cut out. Looks recent,” Michael said to Gantt. Then, to the boy: Your tribe did this? That got a shake of the head and a hand pointing toward a bloody green kerchief that lay in the sand two hundred meters away.

Dahlasiffa? Michael asked. The boy nodded once and closed his mouth. He wrapped the keffiyeh around his head and face, leaving a slit for the haunted eyes to stare through. The jaunty tam went back on, a soldier’s cap for the walking wounded.

“What do you think happened to him?” Gantt asked, standing behind Michael.

“War between tribes, I’m supposing. Maybe the Dahlasiffa raided his village. Could be they left him alive and removed his tongue as a warning. Maybe he’d befriended a Commonwealth soldier and the Dahlasiffa didn’t like that.” Michael rubbed his ribcage and thought it must be bruised instead of broken. He had gotten his wind back. He looked at his hand and saw no trace of the wolf. For now.

“Damn it,” Gantt said, but whether he was saying it for the sake of the boy’s plight or the fact that they had a straggler in their charge was unclear.

Michael noticed something the boy was doing with his left hand. It was balled up and he kept shaking it back and forth. There was a clicking sound. Michael reached out and prodded the hand to get him to open it. The boy resisted for a few seconds, the solemn dark eyes revealing nothing.

Then the hand opened.

In the palm was a pair of yellowed dice with red pips.

The boy closed his hand almost at once, and kept shaking the dice within it.

A gift from the same soldier who’d given him the tam? Michael wondered. “Give him some water,” he told Gantt.

“Hey, you don’t order me around!”

Michael turned to face him. The green eyes were hard and, as Gantt would have put it, supremely confident. “Water,” he repeated. The flyer muttered a curse that would have knocked down a B-17, but the canteen’s strap came off his shoulder. He uncapped the flask, stepped forward and gave it to the boy.

Drink, Michael told him.

The boy did. One sip under the keffiyeh, and one sip only. He knew from the amount of water in the canteen how desperate their situation was. He handed it back to Gantt, who had already gotten his head covering back into an orderly position.

Michael was running out of his knowledge of Tamazight. He asked the boy, A well nearby?

The boy made a motion with his right hand like a bird taking flight. He ended it with a finger pointing to the southwest. Michael took it to mean: A distance.

Which, to these people, could be many, many miles.

“What are you saying to him?”

“Asking him if there’s a well anywhere near. He’s saying… I think…that it’s a distance away, to the southwest.”

“How far?”

“He couldn’t tell me.”

“I intend for us to continue our present course.”

“All right,” Michael said. “We probably each have one swallow remaining.” He began to work his shirt back into position over his head and face. Had he ever been so feeble in his life? he asked himself. Everything was such a damned labor. The heat was sapping even the will to move. “Continue your present course. I’m going with the boy to find a well.”

“Pardon me?” The Walther pointed at Michael’s midsection.

Behind him, Michael heard the dice clicking together in the boy’s hand. What numbers were coming up? What pips of fate? Lucky sevens, or snake-eyes?

Michael had made his decision. If he could not overpower Rolfe Gantt, he was going to die here in this desert. It would be a death of his own choosing, at least a freedom of sorts, and not a miserable wasting-away behind coils of barbed wire. Besides, when they found out what he was they would likely fly him directly to Berlin, give him over to some bald-headed mad doctor with magnified lenses for eyeglasses and a thirst for dissection, to find out how the creature ticked. He would not tick for anybody. He listened to the dice, and then he spoke.

“Use the gun or put it down,” he said. His voice was calm and even, perhaps a little weary, but strong with the resolve of a man who does not fear the end. “I’m going with this boy to find a well. Maybe there’s one out there, maybe not. But I’m not going to let you walk me into a POW camp. Yes, I thought I could get away. Now I know I can’t trick you, or beat you. My compliments. But my time is running out. Yours also.” He paused to let that settle. The Walther did not move an inch.

Michael said, “I suggest you take the last of the water and continue your course. You might find a patrol or an outpost later this afternoon, or tonight, or tomorrow. You might run right into the Dahlasiffa. You have two guns, you can hold them off for awhile. Or you might run into a British patrol and then you can sit out the rest of the war but unfortunately the sky will not wait. Whatever you decide to do, Rolfe. It’s your day.” Michael dared to glance quickly up toward the sun. “Isn’t it lovely?”

“You’re out of your mind,” Gantt answered.

“I’ve come to my senses. No man will force me to do anything. Certainly not on what may very likely be the last day of my life. So, as they say: lead…follow…or get the hell out of the way.” Michael turned his attention to the boy: The well. Take me there.

The boy looked from one man to another. The dice kept clicking together in his hand. Then he stopped shaking them, opened his palm and regarded the number of pips revealed there. Michael thought that he too knew the great and mystic meaning of Fate in the lives of human beings.

The boy began to walk toward the southwest.

Michael followed.

Gantt stood at a crossroads, though beneath him there was only shifting and uncertain sand.

He watched the two figures, the small and the tall, walk away from him. He gazed along his present course, further to the northwest where he hoped he might find his brothers-in-arms. He looked at the canteen, and putting it alongside his ear he listened to the meager amount move within. Hardly enough to fill three thimbles.

It was a huge desert. Sometimes an eagle who flew so high could not realize the immensity of the earth below, for he was fixed on sky and currents of air and the desire to remain in that beautiful realm forever.

But he was fallen now, and he was just a man.

He let the pistol drop to his side.

His thought was: If they run into the Dahlasiffa, they’re going to need me.

Because he was a man of action.

He drew in a long breath from the furnace. Then he began to follow the two figures, the small and the tall, across the golden dunes toward the far horizon.

Three

In the shadow of a rough mound of red rock carved by the Sahara’s wind into a spidery shape more suited for an exhibit of Picasso’s bronze sculptures, the three wanderers rested.

The sun sat at the position of late afternoon. It, too, was turning red, and the desert landscape itself had taken on a bloody tinge. Silence reigned, but for the soft clicking that came from the dice in the boy’s left hand.

“Does he have to do that?” Gantt asked irritably, as he sat with his back against the rock. He had removed his head covering to let the sweat dry from his face. He was aware that he’d stopped sweating so much. Their water was gone.

Michael didn’t reply. They were all arranged in various positions on the parachute, which had been laid down to shield their bodies from the heat radiating off the hard surface beneath. Michael, lying on his back with his eyes closed, saw no point in answering. He thought the boy might be a little insane.

He, too, had removed his keffiyeh. The boy, sitting a distance away with his knees up to his chin, stared straight ahead through his slit of brown cloth, the tam on his head pale with dust.

There was no longer a need for Gantt to brandish a gun. The Colt had gone into his parachute pack and the Walther into his waistband. They were all equals now, and all equally tired and thirsty.

Gantt scanned the sky once more, as he had so many times. Searching for the aircraft—preferably German—that were never there. Then he focused his attention on the landscape, looking for six men on camels. Thankfully, they were never there either.

“Hartler was a good man,” said Gantt. His voice was husky, his throat scratched raw by the fine grit that had gotten through his undershirt and into his mouth a few grains at a time. This was the third time he’d said Hartler was a good man. Gantt closed his eyes, his head lolling. “He was a very efficient wingman,” he said, repeating himself. “Trust is an important quality, isn’t it, Michael?”

“Yes, it is.” Michael’s eyes opened; this was a new avenue of approach.

“I trusted Hartler with my life. Many, many times. He had a wife and two beautiful daughters. I told him… Hartler, give this up and go home. Tell them you have a family that you wish to live for. And do you know what he answered?” Gantt’s eyes, as bloodshot as the sun, opened to take Michael in. “He said he would go home when he was as big a hero as me.”

Again, Michael felt no need to respond. But he was listening, because he’d heard something different in the flyer’s voice.

“A hero,” Gantt repeated. “And I am, I suppose. No… I know I am. The letters and the newspapers…they say I am. Signal said it, in three issues. Yes, I am a hero. A shining light for the youth of Germany. For her future and her aspirations.” He once more looked to the empty sky.

“But let me tell you…let me please tell you,” he said quietly, “what the life of a hero is.” He swallowed grit and tried to gather saliva in his mouth. “It’s a hundred flash-bulbs going off in your face, but not one light on in your apartment when you get home.

“It’s vows of undying love, faithful loyalty and reckless sex, but not one plate of a home-cooked meal. It’s the look on a young man’s face when he tells you he too wants to be an eagle, and you have already seen so many faces of young men burned beyond human recognition.” Gantt was silent for awhile. The dice continued to click together in the boy’s closed hand.

“I am the hero,” he went on, quieter still, “who finds the weakness in weaker men. I am the hero who strikes from below, who gives no quarter and expects none. And to tell you the honest truth, Michael, I smile a little bit when the chutes fail to open. For the hero has done his work that day. He has done his work. But oh dear God, I do love the sky.”

Gantt shifted his position against the rock. Michael saw him lift his left arm and regard his wristwatch.

“Your Rolex,” said Gantt, with impudence returning to his voice. “A nice playtoy, but it can’t compare with a Breitling.”

“Is that so?”

“Absolutely so. Well, just look at the difference! Mine has a much larger face with clearer numbers, in my opinion, since yours does not have numbers but difficult-to-read bars where the numbers should be. Mine has an automatic winder and a chronograph. In fact, it’s been created specificially for use by aviators. I’ve had not a bit of trouble with any part of it in the four happy years of ownership. And your Rolex may be very handsome, if that’s what you feel you need to project, but it doesn’t have the pedigree of the Breitling.”

“Hm,” Michael commented.

“The Breitling brand dates from 1884. I believe the Rolex name was trademarked in 1908. If you care to calculate the difference between those years, you’ll find that Breitling has twenty-four years of experience on the Rolex. What do you say to that?”

“I’d say Rolex caught up very quickly to Breitling and surpassed that brand in short order. They learned from Breitling’s mistakes.”

“Oh, really? And how exactly has Rolex surpassed Breitling?”

“In the areas of waterproofing and shockproofing,” Michael answered calmly. “A Rolex was worn by the first British woman to swim the English channel, in October of 1927. You can imagine how cold the water was.”

“Yes, unfortunately I can only imagine,” said Gantt.

“After ten hours in the water, her Rolex was still performing perfectly,” Michael continued. “As for the area of shockproofing, my Rolex is still performing perfectly after—you may recall—this morning’s airplane crash.”

“Ah! Touché,” said the flyer, with a narrow-eyed smile. He held out his wrist for Michael to see. “But my Breitling still beats your Rolex. Beats it by far.”

“And why is that?”

“Because of the band. This leather band. You see it?” It was simply a brown leather band, nothing special about it that Michael could tell. “This band,” said Gantt, “is made from the leather on the instrument panel of my father’s Albatross fighter plane, from 1918. He died in action but he set his plane down first. A perfect landing, they said, and him shot full of holes. His wingman sent my mother a drawing of him that one of his squadron members had done. It was framed in the plane’s wing fabric and panel leather. After my mother passed away I decided I wanted my father to be closer to me than a picture on the wall. I decided I wanted him to fly with me.” Gantt turned his wrist before Michael’s face. “And here he is.”

Michael realized why Gantt feared the Dahlasiffa so much. They would certainly try to take the watch, and they would likely succeed. With it would go the band, which was actually the most valuable part of it to Gantt. And he would die knowing his father’s memory was lost to the hands of the Death Stalkers. Lost, never to be found. It was time, Michael thought, to start moving once more. He sat up and rubbed his injured shoulder. The boy’s hand kept shaking the dice, and occasionally he opened his fingers to see what the pips read. Gantt leaned back against the red rock, his face painted crimson by the setting sun, his eyes not on the gleaming watch but on the plain brown leather band.

Michael had never had such difficulty getting to his feet, but he made it. “I think we should—”

“Ow!” said Gantt, wincing. He had jerked his head away from the rock and grasped at the back of his neck. “Scheisse! Something stung me!”

Michael looked at the rock and saw a trace of movement in a shadow pool. Peering closer, he made out the three-inch-long black scorpion that sat there, king of its domain, its stinger coiled back and ready to deliver another strike.

“Scorpion,” Michael said. The poisonous kind, he did not say. The deadly kind, he did not say.

The kind whose venom could kill a man within several hours, he did not say.

He didn’t have to, because Gantt also saw the scorpion. Gantt drew the Walther and smashed its grip into the shadow pool until the scorpion was a mass of milky paste.

Then he looked at Michael with terror in his eyes.

The boy’s hand stopped.

“Razor,” said Michael.

Gantt pulled Michael’s straight razor from his pocket and gave it to him. He leaned forward. Michael opened the razor and found the sting just to the right of Gantt’s vertebrae. It was a small red puncture wound already becoming ringed with white.

Michael cut an X across the wound and squeezed the blood out of it.

“Did you get it all?” Gantt asked hoarsely, still leaning forward.

Michael didn’t know. He wasn’t sure how deep the stinger had pierced, or how much venom had been delivered. He got down on his knees beside the flyer. “Hold still,” he said, and he sliced another X into the flesh beside the first. Gantt made no sound. Then Michael put his mouth over the wound and sucked the blood like any good vampire in a Bram Stoker horror story.

He spat blood out and repeated the indelicate task. The smell and taste of it made the animal part of him salivate. He realized that the wolf could have a feast right here on this parachute dining-cloth. A third time he sucked at the wound and then spat out the fluid, and then that was all he could do.

“Thank you,” said Gantt. He put his fingers to the back of his neck and then held them, bloodstreaked, before his face. “Thank you,” he repeated.

“I don’t know if I got all of it.”

“All right. Thank you. You tried.”

“We’d better stay here awhile longer,” Michael decided. He noted that the boy had begun shaking his dice again. The boy’s eyes darted between Michael and Gantt. “Just be still,” Michael told the flier.

“Yes. As you say. Yes.” Gantt crawled away from the rock. He lay down on the parachute on his right side, trailing blood as it dripped. He curled up into a fetal position with his hands folded under his right cheek.

An hour passed, during which the sun dropped to the horizon. The light turned deeper red with blue shadows. The air cooled as night came on.

“I’m burning up,” Gantt suddenly said. His voice sounded thick. “Burning up,” he repeated. He sat up, and in the red gloom Michael saw the glistening of small beads of sweat on the man’s ashen face. “Can I have some water?”

“We have none,” Michael said.

“I must have water. My mouth…it’s not right.”

“We have no water,” Michael said carefully, for Gantt’s eyes were bright and wild with fever.

The ace put a hand to his forehead. “I’m burning up,” he said, as if this were news.

“Rolfe? Just lie down and be—”

“I must insist on water.” It had been spoken in German. “Would you deny a thirsty man?”

“Listen to me. Do you know where you are?”

“I’m… I’m…yes, I’m in the infirmary.” He nodded, verifying this illusion to himself. Again, he was speaking his native tongue. “I remember… I was flying. Then…there was oil on my windscreen. I couldn’t see. I knew I was going down. I jumped, and my parachute opened. What happened to my plane?”

“It crashed.”

“The lights,” said Gantt. “Why are the lights so dim?”

“Lie down,” Michael instructed. He decided to add, “Right there, on the bed.” He heard the clicking of the dice at his back.

Gantt looked around, obviously confused. He felt for something that was not there. “I don’t like it,” he said, in almost a child’s voice. “So dark in here.”

Some of the scorpion’s poison had gotten into his system, Michael knew. From what he’d read, there were thirty different varieties of scorpions in the Sahara and four of them were lethal to humans. The one that had stung Gantt was as toxic as a cobra. The venom could cause first high fever and hallucinations, then convulsions, and finally heart failure. It just depended on how much Michael had been able to get out of the wound.

“Yes,” Gantt said. “I think I will lie down.” He curled himself up again on his side on the parachute, and he closed his eyes.

Michael waited. He caught the boy watching him as the dice went back and forth.

A few minutes passed. Gantt appeared to be sleeping, his chest rising and falling.

He twitched suddenly, but it was a passing muscle spasm. Then he opened his eyes and sat up again, and now he glowered at Michael with an expression nearing rage.

“I said I need water. It is very uncivilized to keep water from a thirsty man. Do you hear me, sir?”

“Rolfe, there’s no more water.” Even as he said it, Michael knew it was hopeless.

Gantt was a wanderer in the desert beyond reason.

Gantt was silent.

And silent still, his dark-hollowed eyes fixed upon Michael Gallatin or whoever he thought Michael Gallatin to be.

“You can’t treat your patients in this manner,” Gantt said quietly. “These men here…they all deserve better, sir. They shouldn’t be so disrespected.”

Michael had no idea what situation the flyer thought he was in, or whether it had really happened in some way or was strictly fantasy. He saw Gantt’s hand go to the Walther’s grip.

“I want water. For all of us. Now.”

Michael spoke German: “Very well, then. You’ll get it. There’s a jug under the bed. Right there.” He pointed at nothing. “Reach under and bring it out.”

Gantt stared blankly at him.

“Under the bed,” Michael repeated firmly. “Right there.”

The dice stopped clicking.

“Thank you, sir,” said Gantt, and he leaned over to get the imaginary jug under the phantom bed.

Michael moved as fast as he could. He plucked the Walther from Gantt’s waistband and when the man looked at him, puzzled, Michael hit him as lightly as possible across the back of the head with the pistol’s grip. Lightly as possible, but hard enough to put him to sleep and quench his thirst.

Gantt lay on the parachute. His body began to convulse, the arms and legs twisting. For a moment it appeared as if, even unconscious, he was about to get up and go for the waterjug, but then he collapsed again and lay thrashing. Michael put the gun aside and got his sweat-stiff shirt. He knelt beside the man, and with difficulty due to the one hand forced the cloth between Gantt’s teeth. It might prevent him from biting his tongue off, or not, depending on how strong the convulsions became.

Then all Michael could do was crawl away and sit with the Walther in his hand.

He watched Gantt suffer, as the last of the light faded.

The convulsions became more violent. This hideous phase lasted about fifteen minutes before Gantt suddenly became still.

Michael checked his pulse. Weak. But the man was alive.

The night turned cooler. A group of jackals came nosing around, until Michael stood up and ran them off with a few stones. His Rolex showed the passage of almost three more hours before Gantt stirred and spat the cloth out and got slowly up on his hands and knees. He retched so hard it seemed his guts would spill out. Then Gantt moaned and cursed and said in a voice barely intelligible, “Damn, my head hurts.” He had spoken in English. After that, he curled down again in a fetal position and went to sleep.

Michael also slept. His last impression was of the boy, sitting cross-legged under the starry sky, the Commonwealth soldier’s dusty tam on his head and his face hidden by the keffiyeh. Whether he was asleep sitting up or not was anyone’s guess, but at least for the moment his left hand was motionless and the dice were silent.

Four

They reached the well when dawn was a thin streak of red across the horizon and the world was made of different depths of darkness.

How far they had come this night, Michael didn’t know. His legs felt ragged. His left arm was a dead weight. He had left his kitbag behind, to save his energy, but he carried both guns in the parachute pack and Gantt—weak and dispirited—had not protested. Every step Michael took might end in a stumble. But he’d kept going, one of three, walking right behind the boy and following behind him the Messerschmitt ace.

The well was not pretty. It lay up under an outcropping of rock and so was shielded from the sun. Uneven stones were built up around a small pool the size of a bathtub in a cheap hotel. Dried animal dung was scattered about where the jackals and wild dogs had unsuccessfully tried to mark their territory.

Pretty or not, the well was full of gorgeous water. Gantt’s cracked lips parted in a gasp of need and he flung himself forward past Michael and the boy.

He hung over the stones and pushed his face into the water. He reached in with both arms and splashed water over his head. He reached down deeper, into the cooler depths, and when his hands came back up Michael saw the entrails roped around them, and suddenly the gashed-open bloodless torso that the entrails had spilled from surfaced in front of Gantt’s face, and also bursting to the surface was a decapitated human head, mouth and eyes open, that bore the purple hole of a rifle bullet.

Gantt shrieked; there was no other way to describe the sound. He fought out of the blue entrails that bound his wrists, and staggering back he nearly fell over the boy, who also retreated—but in utter silence—from the grisly mess that fouled the well. Gantt went down to the ground among the animals’ leavings and clawed frantically at his own mouth until the blood ran from his lips.

Michael approached the well. He had already smelled the beginnings of putrefaction. Desert heat was not kind to a corpse. By the end of another day, the odor would even keep the animals from coming near. There was another scent in the air also: salt. He figured the water had been salted as well as fouled by human remains. He walked a few paces away and knelt down on his haunches to think.

He thought he understood the motive for this brutality. “The Dahlasiffa,” he said to Gantt, who had crawled on his belly a distance away and lay with his hands to his face. “They’ve poisoned this well to keep other tribes from drinking.” In the strengthening light, he found the camel tracks that led southward. “Their own village must not be far. They’ve likely got a well there. They’re probably demanding tribute from other tribes.” He stood up and looked over the hammada toward the south. A muscle worked in his jaw. “We need water, or we’re going to die.” He spoke to Gantt not harshly but firmly: “Stand up.”

“I can’t.” The other man’s voice was almost gone. “I can’t.”

“If you won’t stand up, I’ll stand you up.”

“Please…let me lie here. I can’t…dear God… I can’t—”

Gantt was interrupted by the hand that reached down and grasped the back of his collar, pulling his face out of the sand.

“You hear me,” Michael said. “Loud and clear.” His eyes gleamed bright green in the dawning light. The sun was a red semicircle rising over shadowed mountains to the east. “You can handle a gun. So can I. The guns can get us some water. That means we live, at least for another day, unless the Dahlasiffa kill us first. But I’m thinking they’re not going to be expecting two men with guns. I told you to stand up.”

“I’m done,” Gantt gasped through his bloodied lips, his eyes swollen from the horror of what he’d just seen. “You go.”

“The odds are not good for one man. Not much better for two, but they are better. Now…you’re a soldier and so am I. We go out fighting. Do you hear me?”

“I can’t make it. Please. I’m done.”

“I’ll tell you when you’re done or not.” Michael gritted his teeth and tried to haul the man up but for all his best effort he didn’t have the strength. “Rolfe,” he said, “don’t die on your belly.” And he decided to add, “Your father didn’t.”

Gantt didn’t respond for a few seconds. Then he reached back and roughly pushed Michael’s hand away. He slowly rolled over and sat up. He pressed his hands to his face once more and rocked back and forth.

Michael heard the noise of the dice. He saw that the boy was throwing them onto the ground and then leaning forward to read the pips before they were collected and the process repeated.

“We have to try,” Michael said, though he himself was unsure they could even get close enough to the Dahlasiffa village to try. “We can think of something.”

“I’m too weak. I can barely walk.”

“Can you crawl?” Michael asked.

Gantt lowered his hands and looked up at Michael Gallatin. His eyes were deep sunken, dull and lifeless. It was a bad sign, Michael thought. A sign of giving up. He reached into the parachute pack, got the Walther P38 and offered the weapon to its owner. “Take it,” he said when Gantt hesitated. “Go ahead and blow your brains out, if you want to. I’ll bury you out here or you can join Hartler for a long bath.”

Gantt stared fixedly at the pistol. He frowned, searching for solid ground in this desert hell. The sun was rising quickly now, and the air was already hot. No breeze stirred a particle of dust.

At last Gantt spoke. “Why would I want to commit suicide?”

“It would be faster than dying of thirst. You still have some strength left. The village may be only a few miles away. Their well will be clean.” Something Michael had read suddenly came to him. “If I have to die today, I want to die fighting to live.”

“That makes not a bit of sense,” said the pilot.

“I know. It’s one of your quotes from your last article in Signal.”

In spite of his raging thirst and deadening fatigue, Gantt summoned a weak smile. “You’re a strange bastard.”

“Save your insults for tomorrow. For today, take this pistol and stand up. I’m thirsty enough to kill for a drink. Are you?”

Gantt gingerly rubbed his raw mouth. Then he reached out and took the pistol. “Yes, I am,” he said, and with the greatest effort he got himself to his feet.

They aimed themselves along the camel tracks, with Michael leading the way, the boy next and then Gantt. As the sun steadily rose and the heat intensified the Englisher and German stopped to put on their face and head coverings, and then they continued southward.

They passed into a surrealistic landscape. The hard-packed crust of sand was brown with streaks of yellow. Emerging from the earth were huge ridges of wind-sculpted sandstone rocks standing twenty and thirty meters tall. Michael kept to the camel tracks, which led them through winding passages in the rocks.

It was difficult for even Michael to keep moving as the heat grew, so he knew Gantt was struggling. Every so often Michael looked back at the others; the boy was all right, though moving slowly, but Gantt was losing ground. The scorpion’s venom was surely still affecting him. Couple that with the shock of seeing Hartler, and it amazed Michael that the ace could put one foot in front of the other. They were helped by the find of some spindly cactus plants, which when cut open by the razor afforded a small amount of liquid squeezed from the stalks. Still, the need for water began to take over every thought for Michael, to push everything else aside, and he was fully aware that both Gantt and the boy were kindred sufferers. They did not possess the animal drive that kept Michael directed on his path to survival.

Water. One might imagine it in the mouth. One might imagine its cool flow streaming over the head and face and chest. One might imagine lying in a chill pool of it, regaining the strength that the sun had stripped away. Water. At this moment of heavy silence and scorching fire, the dream of drinking it, of getting one swallow through the cracked lips into the dry mouth, was the only thing that could possibly lead them on for endless mile after mile. Water.

At last, as the sun began to sink down again toward the blue world of another night, as the jackals that followed them came sniffing in close for the smell of impending death but did not find it yet and so retreated to wait a few hours more, the three figures crouched on a ridge of rock and surveyed what lay ahead. Michael had seen it first, and cautioned the others to be careful in their approach.

He didn’t want the watchman atop the wooden tower to see them. The man, wearing the traditional robes and a keffiyeh, held a pair of binoculars. The man stood beneath an awning of tan-colored cloth that might have been the shirts of several dead soldiers stitched together, and hanging on a rope behind him was a horn he could blow into to alert the inhabitants of the village at his back. The horn, Michael noted, was a brass cornet probably once owned by some poor dead Commonwealth trooper whose commander valued the stirring music of a military march.

But for the camel trail that passed alongside the watchman’s tower, the village was encircled by a waist-high barbed wire fence. It was a village of many tents, many camels in a corral and many goats wandering about. Michael had already counted thirty-five people, most of them men but a few women and children. At the center of the village a dozen palm trees stood around a waterhole the size of a small swimming pool, which was obviously very jealously guarded. On the far side of the village was a second watchman’s tower. A nice secure setup, Michael thought. Especially since he knew one of those tents down there surely held an arsenal of weapons and ammunition stripped from dead soldiers.

“How the hell do we get into that?” Gantt asked.

Michael had already considered that question.

“After nightfall,” he said, “one of us walks in. He allows himself to be captured. He causes some kind of disturbance while his mission team gets through the wire. It’s up to them to find the tent where the guns and ammo are stored. If there are grenades, the place can be blown. Then everyone’s on their own to get their water.”

“Mission team,” Gantt repeated.

“That’s right. You and the boy.”

“You are mad,” said Gantt.

“You’ll know the time to cross the wire.” Michael kept his intense gaze fixed upon Gantt, not allowing him to look away. He gave him the parachute pack. “Take both guns. I won’t need one.”

“You’re going in without a gun.” Gantt grinned crazily. “Ah, ja! An Englisher’s plan! Make sure you douse yourself with your aftershave and have a spot of tea before you go in!”

“There’s no other way,” said Michael, “but my way.” He caught a faint aroma, drifting in with the cooling air. “Can you smell that? The scent of sweet water?”

“I can’t smell anything and neither can you.”

“Oh, yes.” Michael nodded. “I can.”

They waited behind the rock ridge as the sun went down. When the light faded and the gaudy stars emerged in their millions, torches flared in the Dahlasiffa village. Upraised voices could be heard: shouting, mixed with raucous laughter. Michael looked up over the ridge and saw a group of robed Dahlasiffa standing around what appeared to be a rectangular pit dug into the earth near the waterhole. It looked to him, from this distance at least, that two figures were balanced on some kind of beam across the pit and were grappling with each other.

“What’s going on down there?” Gantt edged up beside Michael to make his own assessment.

“I’m not sure. A celebration of some kind?” It sounded so, from the noise. Though the figures were fighting—or wrestling, to be more precise—there was no anger in the voices of the onlookers. Then suddenly one of the figures fell into the pit, there was an uproar of hollering and laughter and people jumped around with joyous abandon. The man who’d fallen into the pit came out of it, scrabbling up a ladder just for the purpose, as if hellfire had scorched his bottom.

Which was exactly in line with Michael’s plan.

Two more men got out on the beam and started wrestling. Again, the onlookers went a bit wild. “A sporting contest,” Gantt observed. “Maybe they’re gambling on who’s going to win.”

“Hm. Well, we’re going to win,” Michael said. He eased back down to where the boy sat, and Gantt followed. The boy was rolling his dice on the ground, again and again. Michael snapped his fingers in front of the boy’s eyes to secure his attention. Follow him, he said, and pointed at Gantt.

It was time to go get some water.

The hollerings and laughter intensified again. Now a pair of musicians had joined the throng: a drum began to beat and a high-pitched flute began to whistle. The air was fragrant with the aroma of grilled goat. They were having a regular party down in Dahlasiffaville.

Gantt caught Michael’s good wrist. “You can’t be serious. About walking in there without a gun. Even you Englishers can’t be that insane.”

“I was born in Russia,” Michael said, as if that explained it all. He pulled free. “I can promise you that I’ll be attracting all the attention, but you’ll have to be fast and careful getting across the wire. Find that weapons tent as quickly as you can and if you have the chance and means blow it to blazes. Take care of the boy and take care of yourself.”

“They’ll kill you first thing,” Gantt told him. “We’ll never even get down to the wire before you’re dead.”

“I say you will. Look for your opportunity and take it.” He spoke to the boy again:

Remember. Follow him. The boy nodded, the dice gripped in his hand. Then Michael crawled up to the top of the ridge again. He stood up and started down on the other side.

He didn’t look back.

He was apprehensive about what might happen in the next few minutes, but he was not afraid. He was prepared, and he was ready.

The music and the shouting went on. Michael reached the bottom of the ridge and began walking directly toward the watchman’s tower. The watchman had a small oil lamp up there, and a torch had been set beside the entrance to the village through the barbed wire. Michael strolled along as if he owned the desert and knew every scorpion by name.

Then a rifle barked and a bullet kicked up dust in front of him. The watchman hollered at him, probably a command to halt, but Michael kept walking. A second bullet hit the ground close to Michael’s left boot, so this time he decided it was in his best interest to stop.

The cornet was blown several times. A very sour note. The music, laughter and shouting from the village immediately ceased.

It seemed the party was over. Or perhaps, Michael thought, it was just about to begin.

Five

The robed watchman came down a ladder, pointing the rifle at Michael Gallatin’s midsection. Now would be an auspicious time, Michael thought, for Gantt and the boy to start their journey to the wire. Who is your shade? Michael asked. He had to ask the question again, in Tuareg, before he got an expression of semi-comprehension. He got no reply, but his meaning was: Who is your leader? The chief of a tribe was always known as its ‘shade’, for the amount of protection he offered his people.

Within a few seconds, other Dahlasiffa came running to answer the call of the cornet. Pistols and rifles—British, German and Italian—were in evidence. Some of the robed men carried torches or oil lamps. They got around Michael to keep him from advancing or retreating. They brandished their weapons and hollered at him as if each man fancied himself the shadiest one in the village. Rifle barrels began to push at Michael’s ribs and one brought a hiss of pain from him by touching his injured shoulder. But he kept the pain out of his face, and with great effort he maintained a calm half-smile.

A figure in crimson robes pushed his way through the growing crowd, though when they realized he was there they quickly moved out of his way. He got up close to Michael and stopped. The man had arranged his keffiyeh into a turban, revealing a handsome though somewhat vulpine face. A pair of black eyes under thick black brows glowered at him. He was in his mid-thirties, his flesh burnished dark brown. He had high cheekbones and a long elegant nose that any high-bred Englisher might have envied. In some other world, the man in the crimson robes could have been a Libyan film star. He was cleanly shaven and bore in his deep-set eyes a sharp and cunning intelligence. He spoke to Michael in a smooth voice that carried a quiet threat, using a language that had some elements of Tuareg but was not entirely Taureg and so was foreign to Michael.

Michael didn’t respond. The man in the crimson robes reached out and plucked at their visitor’s uniform.

“Brit,” said the man.

“An English uniform, yes,” Michael corrected.

“Brit,” the man repeated, because he could. He tapped his chest. “Nuri.” And he added in the King’s tongue for Michael’s enlightment, “Meaning fire.”

“Interesting,” Michael said. That spoke for the crimson robes. The Dahlasiffa’s shade was a showman. A rifle barrel pushed against Michael’s neck and another one pressed against his spine.

“Who is you?” His King’s tongue was not altogether perfect.

“Me?” Michael kept his half-smile. “Oh, I’m the Devil and I’ve come to destroy you.”

“Destroy…me?” asked Nuri. His eyebrows went up. His face was solemn for a few seconds. Then the mouth opened and he began to laugh. As he laughed, so laughed the others. In fact, the others laughed loudest even though they probably had no idea why they were laughing. Such was the power of the Fireman, it seemed. Nuri turned and announced in their language what Michael had said, and then the bottomless pit of laughter stretched wide. Some of the others began to dance, they were laughing so hard.

Some, it appeared, wept tears of laughter.

Michael waited for all the mirth and hilarity to die down. When Nuri ceased laughing, the others stopped too. He said something, very rapidly in his harsh language, that Michael failed to understand. “Say you Devil,” said Nuri, “yet you know not my speech? How is this?”

“Everyone knows the Devil is an Englishman,” said Michael, and when Nuri translated this the crowd went as crazy as any audience at a West End vaudeville show.

But this time Nuri only smiled; he did not laugh. He motioned for quiet and got it.

He examined Michael’s bruised face and swollen left eye at a distance of a few inches. He looked at the arm in the sling. He shook his head sadly. “You no Devil. You hurt, maybe crazy headed fool.”

“This is my disguise,” said Michael. Nuri didn’t seem to understand, so Michael amended it. “My mask.”

The Fireman reached under his robe and brought out a knife with a curved blade. He put it to Michael’s jawline. “Nuri cut your mask off,” he said, his eyes glittering in the torchlight. “Then know your real face.”

Michael had to brace himself. He had to hold himself steady. He had the feeling that now was not the time. The time was coming, very soon, but this was not it.

He said easily, “I’ve come all the way from Hell, Nuri. A long way. Won’t you show me a little of your village before I destroy you?”

The tip of Nuri’s knife dug into Michael’s flesh, but not quite hard enough to draw blood. Nuri began to laugh again. It was a low laugh, a dark and twisted laugh, and it was echoed by only a few of the others. Nuri lowered the knife and grinned. “All Hell,” he said, opening his arms wide to encompass the world. “Everywhere. Me. King of Hell. Me. King of all devils. You only fool with madness here.” He touched his own skull with the handle of his knife. “Where you from come? Do not know. Where you go… Nuri do know.” He called out what sounded like a series of commands. A rifle barrel came up between Michael’s shoulderblades and a pistol was aimed at the side of his head. Nuri turned away and walked through the throng. The rifle barrel shoved Michael forward. A man with three teeth darted in, chattering, and looked to be measuring Michael’s boots against his own well-worn sandals. Michael let himself be moved, as the crowd moved around him. At least, he thought, he was headed in the right direction, toward the waterhole.

He noted that the watchman had returned to his post and that Nuri, certainly no fool, had sent a trio of men with rifles out into the dark to see if any more devils lurked nearby. Gantt and the boy were on their own.

Michael was paraded through the Dahlasiffa village. Women, children and dogs kept pace with the knot of armed men who surrounded him. One dog in particular came running up and started barking and spewing spittle with such abandon that Michael thought it was going to take a bite from his leg, and then a man gave it a kick that sent it reeling back amid its more reluctant brethren. These were not gentle people. Michael knew that whatever was in store for him would be a kind of Dahlasiffa hospitality that he might not appreciate.

He was stopped somewhere within the village. Torches and oil lamps ringed him. The guns were everywhere, and they were all pointed at him.

The crowd parted once more as Nuri the Fireman approached. He again got up almost face-to-face with Michael. “Village mine,” he said. “People mine. Nuri rules here. You say different, Devil?”

Michael stared into the man’s eyes without flinching. “I say Nuri will soon be on his knees. I say Nuri will soon be begging for mercy.”

That brought a huge smile and a clap of the hands. Evidently Nuri was enjoying the baiting, as Michael had hoped a hardened killer would. He doubted that anyone in this world had ever spoken to Nuri thus. And who else would have the courage to say this to him, but the Devil himself?

“Devil,” said Nuri, “meet my son.”

A boy about fourteen appeared, hobbling on sticks covered with gauze bandages likely scavenged from a dead medic’s pack.

The boy, wearing a loosely-fitting white shirt and a pair of red-dyed trousers, resembled his father. Except his right leg was gone at the hip, and there was only enough remaining of his left foot to grip a small piece of ground. It was, really, the shape of a cloven hoof. Michael recognized the injury. It was what happened when you stepped on a mine. Even if you survived the blast, some body parts did not. Looking into the boy’s sunken eyes, Michael wasn’t sure how much had actually survived. The right eye was a white, rolled-back orb, sightless. That side of the face kept twitching violently as injured nerves spasmed.

“Hasib mine,” Nuri said quietly, up close to Michael’s ear. “Eldest son. Such pride. Is handsome boy? Say speak, Devil.”

The boy stared at Michael with as much hatred as Michael had ever dreaded to see. If this boy had a gun, the little play would be over. The hate was a living thing. It felt like a lizard with a skin of spines, and it smelled like a world on fire. Michael knew this boy. He knew him well. This boy was every sufferer that war had made, every orphan, every widow or widower, every amputee, every brutalized corpse in a shallow ditch, every piece of flesh that used to be a man, every silent scream.

He knew this boy well, and he felt terror to his soul.

“Handsome,” whispered Michael Gallatin.

“Ah!” said the Fireman, smiling. “Thank you so.”

Michael felt a night breeze blow past. He heard the rattle of the palms and he smelled the enticing perfume of the waterhole. The urge to drink fell upon him, and still stunned by this vision of war’s corruption he was seized by a moment of rare weakness.

“I would like some water,” he told Nuri.

“Thirsty is the Devil? How this?” Nuri’s head cocked to one side. In his eyes evil festered. “Drink,” he said, and he spat into Michael’s face.

The crowd shouted its sincere approval. They hollered and danced, and some of them fired their weapons upward into the night. It seemed to Michael that it was nearly time indeed.

Nuri spoke another series of commands. Hands grasped Michael by the arms—both arms, which caused him to grit his teeth and put his head down so they might not see him on the verge of crying out—and half-pushed, half-dragged him along. The entire Dahlasiffa nation seemed to be out in force, and like a sea in the desert they moved along with him in dusty waves.

They took him to the pit.

He lifted his head and saw that it was about six meters long and three meters wide. Across its length was the trunk of what had been a sturdy palm tree, secured on either end by piles of sandbags. Various clay jars stood alongside the pit. The crowd was festive, the musicians began playing once more, and Michael wondered what the hell he’d gotten himself into.

He was able to have a look into the pit. By the light of the flickering torches, he saw it was about a meter and a half in depth and had a short ladder leaning against one side. At the bottom, some scurrying around and others sitting deathly still, were perhaps three hundred scorpions. Pale brown ones, Michael noted. Those gave a nasty sting but were not poisonous. He was pushed and dragged along to one end of the palm log, and standing there with his right hand on his broken shoulder he saw Nuri take up position on the far end.

Nuri motioned to the crowd, and they were quiet. “Devil!” he called out. “Have we a contest!”

Michael remained silent. Two dozen guns from three nations were aimed at him.

Nuri stepped out onto the palm log. His balance was sure. He was grinning broadly. “Devil!” he said. “Meet us in…” He was having trouble with the translation.

“There,” he said, and pointed at the log’s center. “Have us…what call you…a cheerio little war. Me. King of all devils. You. Spit-faced fool.” He translated that to his people and they laughed so uproariously Michael was certain some had peed in their robes. It didn’t take much to keep this crew happy. Reading Michael’s silence as fear, Nuri asked, “Has Devil no brave?”

Michael was watching the scorpions. Maybe more than three hundred in there, he decided. But not poisonous. He knew he had to do this. “The Devil has brave,” he replied.

“Ah! Then well!” Nuri gave an order. One of the men picked up a clay jar and upturned it over the pit, and venomous black scorpions by the dozens began to slide out.

The audience had begun to dance and clap to the rhythm of the music. Nuri reached under his robes and brought out in his left hand the knife with the curved blade. The right hand gripped a piece of iron pipe with a half-dozen short chains attached to its end and a nail fixed on the end of every chain.

A second jar was upturned. Dozens more black scorpions slid into the pit. Some of them had obviously expired during what might have been a long stay in the jar, but enough crawled around twitching with anger to let Michael know the man who fell among them was not going to be loved to death. Another robed Dahlasiffa reached in, pulled the ladder up and threw it aside.

“Devil!” Nuri shouted. “Come, come!” He started out along the log, the knife low at his side and the chains already swinging over his head.

Michael nodded, if only to himself.

It was almost time.

Now…the question was…where were Gantt and the boy?

With extreme caution and in no particular hurry, Michael walked out foot-over-foot above the scorpion pit. This action received a roar of enthusiasm from the Dahlasiffas, who obviously had seen other uneven contests play out over this pit and knew what the final result must be, but surely it was never a dull moment when a hapless enemy either fought for his wretched life or begged for it. Either way, he was going to become a stinger’s pincushion.

“Come, Devil!” Nuri shouted, swinging the chains. “Come, come!” He walked along the palm log as if he could do this in his sleep. When Michael got within range, the nails came whistling at his face and he had to jerk back to keep his nose. His left foot slipped. He was aware of all the small darting movements in the dark piles below him. Now he had to focus on the task and that alone. Nuri walked forward with no fear and no reason to fear. The chains and nails went over Michael’s head as he ducked, and then the knife was coming at his stomach in a glittering blur. Michael retreated, to a chorus of what could only be derisive catcalls. But Nuri was quick and relentless, and with a savage grin on his face he flailed at Michael with the chains and caught him across the left bicep, tearing his shirt and flesh and throwing droplets of blood into the air.

The audience cheered for their hero, the Fireman in red.

Michael dodged another swirl of the chains but now the knife was driving in at his right thigh. He moved the leg in time to avoid the stab but caught a graze, and at close quarters he stepped into Nuri and headbutted the man. Nuri’s nose burst open, and the crowd went silent. Nuri staggered back, almost toppled off the log but regained his balance, and now with blood streaming from both nostrils he gave an animalish snarl and swung the chains and nails across Michael’s chest on the left side. Shreds of bloody cloth whirled up. The knife flashed, but Michael had already shifted his position and was ready for it.

He caught Nuri’s wrist and held it.

They stared at each other, man against man.

Nuri reared his right arm back to strike with the chains.

And Michael knew the time had come.

He opened the soul cage, just a crack, to let some of it free.

His hand, holding Nuri’s wrist, rippled and began to change. Michael directed its transformation, he willed it and controlled it and owned it. Within seconds the hand had darkened with hair; it had altered its shape, and its fingers had curved into the claws of a killer. Black wolf hair ran like strange vines up his arm, twining around and around.

And so too did Michael direct the transformation to his face.

Nuri’s movement with the chains had already frozen, for he saw the commingling of human hand and animal claw that seized his wrist. Blood was already being drawn. The pressure was about to crack his bones. His eyes widened and his mouth opened, but no sound emerged and certainly no laugh to be echoed by his people. The face. The face was what caused Nuri to give a choked cry that flew toward a scream.

For Michael’s features distorted in the space of a shuddered breath.

With the crunch of bones and the moist slippage of sinews and muscles changing their human position, they submerged and reformed and rearranged themselves like mystic continents on the map of a foreign world. A shadow seemed to pass over Michael’s face, and from its darkness emerged the maw of the wolf, the green eye that was not a swollen slit glaring without mercy into Nuri’s face, the wolf’s new and bleeding fangs promising agony upon agony. Or, at the very least, the Devil’s own justice. Michael held Nuri fast. He swept his one-eyed wolfen gaze across the crowd as the black forest of hair burst free from his facial flesh and flowed along his throat. He felt his back aching to bow down, and his limbs—even the broken one—yearning to take their primal shapes. The Dahlasiffa were, as one, riveted in place. Someone dropped a torch, and an oil lamp shattered on the ground. A woman screamed and a child yowled with fear. The voice of a man—no, several men—rose up gibbering to the night.

Michael Gallatin balanced not only on the palm log but between worlds. The werewolf’s green eye peered into Nuri’s face once more and saw the horror become madness; it happened in the stutter of a heartbeat. Saliva bubbled from Nuri’s mouth and dribbled down his chin. His eyes were scorched. He had truly seen behind the Devil’s mask, and now he was destroyed.

Michael let him go.

Nuri retreated. He slipped and fell. He landed on his back down amid the scorpions, both brown and black, and as he rolled in a mad and entirely useless attempt to avoid being stung the things got into his crimson robes and onto his keffiyeh and onto his hands and his face and delivered enough venom, Michael thought, to kill even the self-proclaimed King of Hell several times over.

Then the crowd of once-gleeful Dahlasiffa turned their faces away from Michael, and though some fell to the ground on their knees to beg for mercy from the merciless, the great majority of them fled for their lives.

An explosion across the village sent up red and white fireworks. Or, rather, pieces of shrapnel. A secondary blast held within it maybe four or five smaller explosions merged into one thunder. Gantt and the boy had obviously found the correct tent. But the work was mostly complete, because now even the Dahlasiffa who’d been on their knees were scrambling up and running. The mass of people ran shrieking and screaming toward the other side of the village. Anywhere, if they could escape the Devil. Even the dogs were getting out. Michael gazed down into the pit and saw Nuri on his stomach, trying to claw his way up the side. His hands had a number of scorpions on them.

Michael decided to leave the Fireman to his impending state of peace. He edged back from the wild just as he edged back along the palm log, and by the time his boots touched earth he was once more only a man. But, as sometimes happened, his teeth ached fiercely and he had to pee in the most pressing way.

The village seemed to be empty. Maybe the Dahlasiffa would stop running when they reached Cairo, or when they ran across the nearest minefield.

Michael walked toward the tent that was burning brightly and sending up deadly fireworks fit for the grandest holiday. Another explosion shot up a plume of orange flame and shook the ground. Mortar shells, perhaps? Other tents under the rain of burning munitions were catching fire; it was going to be a festive night after all.

In the glow of the flames, two figures were approaching. One tall, one small.

“My God!” said Rolfe Gantt when the distance closed between them. “What the devil did you do?”

“Exactly that,” Michael told him.

“Exactly what?”

“Never mind.” He scanned their surroundings and saw no other humans. The boy had begun shaking his dice again; it seemed that Fate knew no resting. “We’d better be careful,” Michael advised. “I think everyone’s gone but for the watchman and three men who went out to look for you two.” They hadn’t witnessed the performance, so they might be still lurking about. “Give me a gun.” He held his hand out.

Gantt started to give him the Colt and then suddenly paused.

The German flier had both pistols. He was weak and unsteady, but he was still in control of his senses. Michael knew what he was thinking.

“You’ll have to kill me,” Michael said, and he meant it.

The dice clicked…clicked…clicked. The boy opened his hand and stared at the pips.

“A fine pistol,” Gantt said, with a brief nod. “But not of German quality.” He put the Colt into Michael’s outstretched hand. Gantt’s eyes narrowed. “You’ve been cut up a little. We might find a medical kit somewhere.”

“Later. First…the water.”

The three of them walked through the village toward the waterhole. A few either very brave or very stupid dogs skulked around. The flames were still burning high, and every so often there was a boom and more shrapnel flew up.

“I suppose I won’t ask,” said Gantt as they walked.

“Ask what?”

“What you really did to frighten everyone out of here. I suppose I won’t ask. And I suppose… I really don’t want to know.” He gave Michael a sidelong glance, and Michael wondered if one of his fingers had not entirely been changed back when he’d first offered his hand to take the Colt. No, no; of course not. But…he was so very tired.

No, of course not.

They were almost to the waterhole when a figure on crutches emerged from between two tents and aimed the pistol he had somehow gotten hold of. Maybe it had fallen to the ground in the flight of the Dahlasiffa. Maybe he’d taken it from his father’s tent. In any case, Nuri’s son Hasid was armed and dangerous. First he aimed the gun at Michael but something on the boy’s firelit face and in the eyes that glittered with such venomous hate said it was useless to shoot the Devil, so he altered his hand toward Gantt. Two bullets were fired even as Michael shoved the flier aside.

Hasid fired once more as Gantt fell to his knees. Then Michael shot twice at Nuri’s son, and he didn’t know if the bullets had hit or not because Hasid was already hobbling on his crutches into the shadows, his cloven hoof tossing up a spray of sand.

In another few seconds, the Fireman’s son was gone.

“Ah,” said Gantt, in a weary voice. “Ah, verdammen Sie alles dieses.”

Michael knelt beside him. Gantt had both hands pressed to his midsection. The blood was rising on the front of his shirt. Shot twice in the stomach, Michael saw. “Move your hands,” he said, but Gantt would not. “Come on, let me see!”

“Jeder moglicher Dummkopf kann sehen, dass ich sterben werde,” Gantt answered, with a crooked smile. He’d said: Any fool can see I’m going to die.

“Not if I can find a medical kit.” Michael started to stand up.

Gantt grasped his wrist with bloody fingers. “Save your strength. Are you a surgeon? No. As they say…ich bin kaput.” He winced. A thin thread of blood broke over his lower lip. “Would you help me…get my back against something?”

Michael helped him up but couldn’t get him too far because Gantt began shuddering with pain. Michael eased him down so his back was supported against the side of a tent away from the danger of catching fire.

“Better,” Gantt said. “Thank you.” He was not sweating, but his eyes were wet. His hands pressed to his stomach as if to keep his insides from oozing out.

The boy knelt to the ground a distance away and began throwing his dice.

“Must he…do that?” Gantt asked. He waved a gory hand to dismiss his own question. “Ah, let him alone. I suppose it’s the only pleasure he has. Eh?” Moving with painful slowness, he withdrew the Walther from his waistband. Michael offered no help, thinking Gantt was still capable of his own actions. “German quality,” Gantt said, as he placed the pistol at his side. “Cannot be bested.”

A movement to the right caught Michael’s attention. Two Dahlasiffa men with rifles were coming their way. Maybe they were part of the trio who’d gone out hunting.

Michael fired a shot at them and they were gone like desert hares.

“Can you protect yourself while I get you some water?” Michael asked.

“I can. But…it’s very interesting, Michael. I am no longer thirsty. Please…go ahead…for both of you.”

Stay here, Michael told the boy. In the second tent he entered he found a suitable water vessel, a German canteen stamped with the palm tree and Nazi symbol seal of the Afrika Korps. He went into several others in search of a medical kit, but had no luck. He walked on to the waterhole. He got on his knees, cupped his hand and drank a few swallows that went down like the sweetest wine ever pressed from the most luscious grape. Then he filled the canteen full, and while he was doing this he had to interrupt the task to shoot at a man who was coming across the oasis from the opposite direction. The intruder turned his robed tail and ran. It seemed that without their ‘shade’ the Dahlasiffa fled from their own shadows. Which was fine with Michael. He spent a few more seconds to splash water into his face, and then he took the canteen and walked back the route he’d come. He knew he couldn’t give Gantt any water; the stomach cramps would only add to the man’s agony, and without professional medical attention Gantt was, as he’d said, kaput.

So, all he could do now was make Gantt as comfortable as possible and keep him company. He’d known stomach wounds like this to kill a man within an hour or so, and on the other end of that a man might linger for a day or more. It was, after all, up to Fate.

The dice were still being rolled, back and forth. Gantt picked up the Walther at Michael’s approach and then set it aside again. Michael gave the boy the canteen, and at last the dice were still while the boy drank.

Too fast, Michael cautioned. Too much. He took the canteen away. He sat on the ground a few feet away from the flier, at an angle so he could watch for more Dahlasiffas creeping back in. If they dared.

It seemed they did not. No more returned, as first one hour and then a second passed. The boy slept curled up with the dice in his hand. Gantt’s eyes grew heavy-lidded and closed, but Michael Gallatin remained vigilant. After a while Michael got up and went searching through the nearby tents for a medical kit. He found a box of British bandages and a box of Italian condoms, but not an ampule of morphine. He took the bandages and was able to pack Gantt’s wounds while the man slept. The front of Gantt’s shirt was a bloody mess. The two bullet holes were spaced about four inches apart and the slugs were still in his intestines.

At last, the sky began to lighten to the east. It was the beginning of another day.

Red shards of sunlight burst from behind a mountain range. The shadows shrank. The heat began to grow.

The boy awakened. Michael gave him a little more water. He sat cross-legged, staring at the sleeping Gantt. The dice were quiet in his fist. Michael leaned forward to check Gantt’s pulse and the man’s eyes opened. “I’m not dead,” said Gantt, but his face seemed to have taken on a certain gaunt and toothy quality Michael had seen before. It was amazing, how quickly that happened.

Gantt felt the bandages. “Nice work,” he commented. He looked at the sky. “Oh…it’s getting light.”

“Hot day coming,” said Michael.

“Is there any other…in the desert?” Gantt smiled at him, and then pain made the smile crimp and vanish. “Scheisse, die verletzt! Ah… I’m all right now.” He breathed shallowly, taking sips of air. “Michael,” he said after another moment.

“Yes?”

“I want to…apologize. For the…destruction…of your aircraft. I would not have wished…to have shot down…an unarmed plane. It was not…chivalrous.”

“I think chivalry has nothing to do with war.”

“True…but…there is…the ideal.” He had to stop speaking for awhile, to deal with the pain. Michael wondered if he should knock Gantt out…but what would be the point?

The boy’s dice were rolling once more. “In any case…sir… I apologize.”

“It was your duty,” Michael said.

“Yes. That.” Gantt winced and closed his eyes. For an instant he resembled a mummy, the cracks in his gray face full of dust, his mouth a grim pain-drawn line.

His eyes opened again, but Michael saw that they had dimmed. Their color was no longer amber, but a pale sun-bleached yellow. “I have always…loved…the dawn,” Gantt said, with an effort. “The cleanest air, you see. The aircraft performs…best…at the dawn. Oh, Michael!” He gave another tight smile. “You should have been with me…up there.”

“With you or against you?”

“With me. Oh…you wouldn’t have lasted…an instant…against me. Did I tell you…my count is now…” He was silent, figuring the numbers. “Forty-six. No. That’s not right. Fifty. I think. Yes, fifty.”

“An impressive number,” said Michael, who saw the boy leaning over the freshly-thrown dice to read the pips.

“Did we ever find…water?” Gantt asked, his eyes narrowed against the rising sun.

“Yes, we did.”

“Sehr gut.”

Gantt’s eyes slid shut again. Michael and the boy waited.

Perhaps ten minutes later, Gantt looked into Michael’s face and said, “You English. Playing at war. With your…tea breaks. Your…what was that? Aftershave lotion? Oh, my! Well…you…shall go down to defeat…smelling like gentlemen. For that… I salute you.”

“Many thanks,” said Michael, who didn’t think he could look into Gantt’s face much longer, for the man was fading away minute by minute.

And as time was of the essence, suddenly the essence became time.

Gantt held up his arm and began to remove his wristwatch.

“What are you doing?” Michael asked.

“This.” Gantt got the Breitling off. He regarded not the timepiece itself, but the plain leather band. “I want…you…to have it,” he said, and he offered it to Michael.

“I can’t take that.”

“If you don’t…they will.”

True enough. Eventually the Dahlasiffa would come back, Devil or not.

Michael accepted the watch. “I will take care of—”

“You’d better,” Gantt interrupted. “It’s come…such a long way.”

The dice were rolling, back and forth.

The sun was coming up. A hot, clear dawn. Flying weather, Gantt might have said.

“Michael?” Gantt whispered, his voice nearly gone.

“Yes?”

“We…men…of action,” he said, and then he smiled. “Must never…stop…trying. Eh?”

“Never,” Michael agreed.

“Good man,” said Gantt, and then he watched the sun as it rose higher.

Sometime during the next few minutes, he left this world.

Michael felt it, and saw the empty stare in the man’s eyes, and when he checked the pulse and heartbeat he verified what he already knew. The boy stopped rolling his dice and he sat looking at the body of Rolfe Gantt, the famous Messerschmitt ace, the shining example to German youth, the celebrity, the great lover, the man of action, the hero.

After a while the boy crawled forward. He put the pair of dice in Gantt’s right hand, possibly for luck in the afterlife, and then he closed the fingers and he stood up and stretched as if awakening from a long sleep.

Michael put the Breitling in his pocket. There was no need to bury Gantt; the Dahlasiffa would just dig up the body. But it was only a suit of flesh, and the bird had flown.

It was time to find another two or three canteens, fill them up and find a way back home.

The boy motioned him to the camel corral.

Michael had no idea how to handle one of those creatures. How to saddle them up and get the bridles set. But fortunately the boy did, and he was very efficient about it.

They wet cloths and wrapped them around their heads and faces. They hung the canteens by leather cords from the saddles. They headed off in the direction they’d come, the boy leading the way on his camel and Michael just along for the ride. His camel seemed to hate him, and spat and fumed like a vindictive old man. Probably something in the way he smelled, Michael thought. But the camel moved onward, and so did the day.

On the second morning, with a hard hot wind blowing from the southwest, the two riders came across a platoon of soldiers escorted by a pair of tanks. The soldiers wore British khaki, and the tanks were Matildas. When Michael had made the platoon’s lieutenant understand who he was and where he’d come from, he and the boy were placed on one of the tanks and driven to a small air base called Al Massir, about twenty kilometers to the east.

The base had a hospital. It wasn’t much, but they had soft beds and cooling palm-frond fans that turned at the ceiling. Michael’s broken shoulder was set and put into a cast and his cuts swabbed with iodine. He decided not to look into any mirrors for a while, because he’d seen the expression on the face of the young and attractive brunette nurse. Then Michael and the boy both slept more than twelve hours, and when they awakened they were given glasses of orange juice and plates of scrambled eggs, figs, and olives. An apple-cheeked, serious red-haired captain named Findley-Hughes came in with a clipboard to ask Michael questions and take notes, and this went on interminably until Michael asked the young man if he’d had his eighteenth birthday yet.

After that they were pretty much left on their own.

Except for the attractive brunette nurse. She came in quite often to see him, and to fuss over him, and to smooth his hair and once even to sit by his bed and sing to him.

She just couldn’t seem to leave that boy alone.

She brought him some jacks and a ball. Michael watched him shaking the jacks in his hand, and he saw the boy cast them on the floor and bounce the ball. And as he scooped up the jacks in the hand that used to hold a pair of dead man’s dice the boy smiled, and from then on the brunette nurse had him running errands around the hospital and the base. The doctor gave him a nickname: Jacky. Then one afternoon Michael heard the brunette nurse call him Jack, and the boy looked at her as if all his life he’d been waiting to hear that name spoken by a voice just like hers.

Michael learned that the nurse’s husband had been a Spitfire pilot who’d lost his life over Dunkirk. Her infant son had been killed in a German bomb raid in London in 1940. He didn’t ask her what the boy’s name had been. He didn’t think he had to.

Even the roughest road led somewhere, he thought.

On the morning of the fifth day, two officers in clean uniforms with polished buttons arrived at the base in a Douglas Dakota transport plane. Michael knew one of them as the man sometimes called ‘Mallory’, who wore a Colonel’s insignia. It was explained to him, as they sat under a striped awning facing the airstrip and drank Guinness Stout brought in a keg with the Dakota, that it was imperative he return to Cairo and, as Mallory put it, “get back on the horse”.

It was explained to him that he could fly back with them in the Dakota or, if his recent experience had somewhat sullied his desire for air travel, he might be driven in a truck back to HQ in Cairo. Of course, there was a very large difference in travel time between plane and truck, but it was his decision.

Not to put any pressure on him, of course.

Michael Gallatin sipped from his glass of Guinness and listened to the noise of an aircraft’s engine revving across the field. The sky was clear and untroubled by German fighters, yet who could say where the next Messerschmitt ace lurked? Michael had been dreading this moment, and his heart had begun beating harder. Perhaps, too, a fine sheen of sweat had risen at his temples.

He drew from his pocket a wristwatch.

He examined its face only briefly. It was the plain brown leather band that drew his attention. He thought of the old planes of the Great War, and how they were put together with wires, fabric, leather, and wood. How also they were taken up, as flimsy as they were, into the huge sky by small men with large dreams and the bravery of giants.

He ran his fingers across the brown leather. He listened to the engine revving, and heard it miss a beat.

They were still brave giants, in those cockpits.

Maybe it was time for him to grow a little larger, too.

He gave his answer.

“I’ll fly.”