Gorgeous East by null Read Free Book Online Page A

to kill us.”
    “But we’re neutral, you and I,” Phillipe said reassuringly. “We’re here to help them. Get them better drinking water, more food. Medicine. Why should they want to kill us?”
    “It’s too late for all that now,” the doctor said. “Thirty years too late. The Saharouis hate the UN and they hate MINURSO for maintaining the status quo. For failing to act.” A pause. “Are you married, Colonel?”
    “I am,” Phillipe said.
    “You’re a lucky man.” Milhauz studied his socks, a fine grit now caked into the weave. “I have no wife”—he interrupted himself with a wordless exclamation, then—“I have wasted my life in the desert among people who hate me! I should have stayed in Zurich, gone into banking, gotten married. That’s what my mother wanted me to do. She’s very old now, and she’s alone.”
    Phillipe stood, brushing sand from the seat of his pants. “We won’t sit around waiting for this blow to fall. We’re going to start walking.”
    “To where?” The doctor threw up his hands. “We can’t go to Awsard, not after this. The next camp is seventy-five kilometers away!”
    “That’s nothing,” Phillipe said. “An easy three-day march, even in these conditions. We’ll go by moonlight, sleep during the hot hours. I’ve got a compass and plenty of training in orienteering, believe me, so we won’t get lost. Contrary to popular belief, not a single Legion patrol has ever been lost in the desert, not in a hundred and seventy-five years. We’ll carry water and as many crackers as we can hold. We’ll get there all right.”
    Dr. Milhauz looked up hopefully, shielding his eyes. “Do you really think so?”
    “Ever bet on the horses, Doctor?”
    “No.” Dr. Milhauz shook his head. “I don’t gamble. Economically speaking, it doesn’t make sense.”
    Phillipe squinted toward the heat shimmer of the horizon.
    “One of the places we love to go, my wife and I, is the track at Long-champs,” he said. “It’s a beautiful green place with all the crowds on a Saturday and the horses, just magnificent, going over the jumps. Really, there’s no finer sight. Do you know”—he paused, remembering, suddenly—“last time we went, my wife put down a single bet on three horses and hit the tierce in disorder? The woman won five thousand EU and some change! All this is to say that she’s damned lucky and I know—I’m absolutely sure!—some of that luck has rubbed off on me.”
    He looked down at Milhauz sitting there helpless. He felt sorry for the man.
    “Courage, Doctor. You’re safe with me. I’m going to get a couple hours sleep inside. We leave at moonrise.”
    And he went into the tent and lay down on the carpet and fell asleep instantly, to the sound of a Satiesque piano pleasantly tinkling from a pleasantly appointed room, its tall window overlooking a charming private garden somewhere off the Place des Vosges in the Paris that existed always at the back of his mind.

    Phillipe woke up long past moonrise. Doctor Milhauz was gone. He walked around the tent, calling the doctor’s name, and was answered only by the wind. He climbed the nearest dune and stared into the gloom of the desert but couldn’t make out any sign of the man, not even a trail of footsteps in the sand. A cold, queasy feeling began to spread in his gut, that might have been the result of days of eating nothing but UN survival crackers and drinking stale water, but wasn’t.
    He hurried back to the tent, made a sling for two plastic gallon jugs of water out of his blazer, stuffed his pockets with more crackers. But when he stepped out of the tent, compass in hand, to orient himself to the bleak horizon, he found them there waiting for him, as if they had sprung up, fully formed, from the cooling sands: six dark figures, dressed in the long hooded robes called djellahs—dark blue or black, hard to tell. Their faces were veiled. Only their eyes gleamed in the darkness like the yellow eyes of