Cold Allies by Patricia Anthony Read Free Book Online

reminded him of home.
    The road was crowded with new troops, men fresh off the battlefield and famished. He passed a vegetable market already stripped of its produce. On a street corner stood two Libyan noncoms, cutting into a melon with their bayonets. The thin flesh parted and juice poured out, staining the sidewalk like pale blood.
    Wasef looked hurriedly away. There had been too many corpses lately. The French had stopped him at Gerona, exacting ten thousand casualties. And the American general, Lauterbach, nibbled at the heels of his infantry battalion.
    Wasef made a right at the bombed ruins of the Museu Marítim and drove past the green swatch of grass at the Moll de Bosch. The flowers, he noticed with dismay, had been trampled. Tank tracks scored the lawn. In his rearview mirror he caught sight of the shattered spires of the cross-harbor cable car.
    Too bad, he thought wryly. The Gibraltar Dam had not only contained the rising Mediterranean; it had also kept the Allied navies out. Nothing had protected Southern Europe from the Arab advance. Nothing. And now war, not the ocean, had made its high-tide line in Barcelona, coming in on rolling breakers of metal.
    He parked his car on the Passiq de Colom and walked into the Western Command Center through a press of loud, ill-dressed soldiers awaiting orders.
    On his way up to General Rashid Aziz Sabry’s office, he shared an elevator with a young private with Moroccan insignia on his shoulders. The boy was eating a jar of Apricot Facial Scrub with crackers, probably thinking it was some sort of gourmet Western dip. Wasef considered enlightening him, but was stopped by the happy look on the boy’s face.
    The colonel got off on the fifth floor. In the anteroom, an Algerian lieutenant was berating a Libyan sergeant at the top of his lungs. From what Wasef could glean from the tirade, the NCO had started a fire in his room, thinking to cook a piece of meat.
    Neither looked up as Wasef made his way around them. The lieutenant was too furious, the sergeant too abashed.
    Wasef knocked at the commander’s door and waited for an answer. When none came, he entered anyway, and surprised his fellow Egyptian in the middle of reading field reports. The corpulent, bearded general, seeing his colonel, rose. Sabry gestured at the closed door and the noisy harangue beyond.
    “You see we are a rabble,” the general said with a pained, lopsided grin.
    Wasef saluted, but Sabry waved the salute away.
    “They steal things out of stores,” Sabry went on. “They murder shopkeepers. It is a terrible war when we shoot merchants.”
    “Hang them,” Wasef suggested, taking a seat.
    Sabry sighed. “Hang them for stupidity, and we would have to hang them all. They are young boys mostly, our soldiers. Sheepherders and mechanics.”
    “Not enough mechanics,” Wasef said. “Not nearly enough for our tanks.” He glanced out the window and caught an unexpected, heart-stopping sight of the Mediterranean.
    Sabry had apparently followed his gaze. “It reminds me of Alexandria, doesn’t it you?” he asked. “Alexandria before Egypt died and the Nile became a trickle.”
    ‘They should have shared,” Wasef said bitterly. He turned and saw the general regarding him, bemused. ‘‘The Nile?” Sabry asked.
    ‘‘The food.”
    The shouts from the anteroom stopped. Either the lieutenant had finished dressing down the sergeant, Wasef thought, or he had strangled him.
    In the silence, Wasef could hear the general’s soft sigh. Food was an old argument, a moot argument now. Still, Wasef persisted. ‘The Greenhouse heat was a genocidal plot of the industrialized countries. They hoped we would be as the Chinese and not fight back.”
    “You don’t mean that,” the general said gently. “Surely you have not caught the paranoia of the masses, colonel. No one wanted the new deserts.”
    “No,” Wasef replied, refusing to be chided. ‘The sin of the Westerners was simply that they did not