The Crisis (2 page)

Other figures spill from the corn rows. Adults and children, carrying hoes, bundles, babies. Some tow goats, others sheep. A woman waddles with a chicken tucked under each arm, the fowls regarding the children with emotionless eyes. A one-armed elder pushes a rubber-tired farm cart down the bank into the slowly eddying water. A toothless old woman lies on her back in the mud. As the children pass she smiles, reaches out her hand to Zeynaab. Smoke drifts overhead, a dirty drape between them and the misty sky.

When Nabil looks back, the village is already gone.

 

THREE days later, the children lie sprawled in the shade of an acacia. The sun's bright today, and hot. The road is inches thick with yellow dust and they're covered with it, like yellow children. It smells of dung. They're wrapped in castoff clothing picked up along the road. There's plenty to choose from. Bandits discovered the refugees the day after they began walking. Some they beat, others they killed. A boy not much older than Ghedi they simply took. Sharpened sticks are propped against the tree. At their feet is a shallow hole.

Ghedi sits with eyes open, watching the shimmer of heated air on the sand. He sees camels lurching side to side. When he blinks there are no camels there.

“Give her to me,” he says.

Zeynaab hands the wrapped bundle over. Yesterday a man offered to buy Zeynaab from her brothers. He offered food for them all if she'd come with him. The sharpened sticks kept him off. He'd laughed, and asked what they were. Samaale? Bantu? “You look like Bantu,” he told them. “Scum of shit, offspring of hyenas. Die on the road, then. You'll never reach the city.”

Nabil presses the back of his hand to his parched lips. The people who live along the road won't let the refugees use their wells. Yesterday, after he sharpened their sticks, Ghedi traded the knife for water. The rice and
muufo
bread are gone. Zeynaab chewed some up and tried to feed the baby some but it wouldn't eat. It kept its eyes closed, eyelids jerking as if it was having bad dreams. They tried to give it water but it wouldn't drink. This morning when they woke it was dead.

Ghedi lays the bundle in the hole. Each child sprinkles a handful of dirt. They scoop with their arms until it's covered.

“Find stones to pile on,” Ghedi says. “Or the dogs will dig her up. Remember this tree. Remember that hill. When we come back with Uncle we'll find
her again. Take her to the village and bury her with Grandma. And with—” But he can't say
Mother
.

Nabil's weeping but without tears, just choked gasps. When he rubs his lips they crack into plates that bleed. He wants his mother. He talks to her in his head as they walk.

Zeynaab feels as if there's an empty room behind her eyes. The man yesterday had stared at her as if she were something to eat. For a moment she'd almost said, Yes, give us food and I'll go with you.

Maybe today she'll have to.

 

ALL afternoon the dust rises as the road climbs. Their village wasn't the first, or the last. Thousands of others walk the same road. The land of farms and rivers lies behind them, and there are no more trees. This place grows only rocks and twisted gray cacti. The children trudge along, each in his own hell of thirst and hunger. Their ears ring from the heat. One woman gives Nabil a sip of vinegary water. The others ignore them. They move in clots, with those they know, from their own villages or families. They sit apart when they halt. Those who have food don't share; those who have none don't beg.

At last the procession thickens, slows, wends to a halt. From ahead comes shouting. Ghedi jumps in place, trying to see over the crowd. Finally he tells his brother and sister, “Stay here. Stay right here.”

“Don't go, Ghedi,” Nabil whimpers.

His brother slaps the back of his head. “Shut up. I'll be right back.” He twists off between the grown-ups, lithe body and long bare arms and legs like a snake slithering through a rock pile.

A rumble echoes through the stony hills. The crowd stirs. They pick up bundles, pull children closer.

“Bandits,” someone says. “Rebels,” mutters someone else.

The pickups gun up the slope. Men hang off, rifles in one hand, the other gripping handholds. The vehicles circle inward, trailing dust. The men on them are lean and hard and keen-faced as bronze arrowheads. Ghedi can't make out what clan they are. There's bad blood and bad memories all through these lands, fought over for so many centuries. So much to account for, to avenge or atone. Struggling toward the front of the crowd, he can remember only parts of it. Only what he's been told is his own history.

The cries come on the wind, on the blowing dust. They're high, exultant, mingled with the grind of tires, the noisy honking of the trucks.

Then the killing begins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE TRANSFORMATION

T
HE symposium ran all afternoon, with papers like “Expert Maintenance Advisory Systems for Deployable Forces” and “Living with OPA-90 Oil Spill Response Requirements.” Outside the summer sun blazed down, but the symposium-goers roved an air-conditioned display area. It was indirectly lit, lofty-ceilinged, and corridored into long aisles; its booths featured near-life-size displays of missile launchers, swimmer delivery vehicles, modular radios that frequency-hopped a thousand channels a second.

Dan Lenson was in short-sleeved khaki, the silver oak leaves of a full commander on his collar. They'd glittered once, but they weren't new now. His sandy hair showed silver. The crow's-feet around his gray eyes were deeper. But he was still lean and still managed to run fifteen miles a week.

He sighed, swirling a plain tonic from the complimentary bar, looking at a mockup of yet another weapons system. He didn't think more weaponry necessarily made the country safer. Not the way money was spent on the Hill, a process he'd seen too close up to have much faith in. But he'd also seen too many of its enemies, at too close a range, to believe no weapons were necessary at all.

Grimacing, he kneaded a neck vertebra reinjured in the Strait of Hormuz. An operation involving a Russian-export rocket torpedo that even now wasn't public knowledge. And for good reason.

“Dan. Dan Lenson, isn't it?”

He turned to find himself face-to-face with a small man in service dress blue. His sleeves gleamed with gold, and behind him, silent but attentive, a lieutenant carried a black computer case.

“Admiral Contardi,” Dan said, shaking hands. Vincent Contardi was chief of naval education and training, but word on the street had him
a front-runner for vice chief of naval operations, and the four stars that went with being the second highest officer in the Navy. They'd met before, though back then Dan had been so junior—just another fresh face holding a pointer—he doubted the admiral remembered. Their last meeting had been—

“At the vice president's party, wasn't it?” Contardi said. His high-domed forehead gleamed. “You were on the National Security Council staff. Before the . . . contretemps with General Stahl.”

Dan choked on his tonic to hear an attempted assassination described as a “contretemps.” He coughed into his fist. “Uh . . . yessir. Right.”

“You were with Blair Titus. I served with her on a medical compensation panel. Sharp lady. I know you're proud of her.” Contardi beckoned past him to someone, but added, as Dan started to turn away, “You and I had a chat that evening, as I recall. I complimented you on the Congressional, then we had a few words about a faster, nimbler military.”

“I remember that, sir.”

“Our ideas were sketchy then. Fuzzy, versus crisp. But since—you listened to our paper?”

“Yessir, I did.” It and the Q and A afterward, billed as the highlight of the symposium, had been filled with geekspeak: revolution in warfare, battlespace awareness, decision-making nodes; the PowerPoint slides had flashed by at bewildering speed. Dan had been intrigued, then baffled, and to judge by the faces of the rest of the audience, he wasn't the only one. “But, uh, I wasn't really—”

“I tried to talk Mac out of those equations, but he said anybody could follow it. Anyway, we've put some theoretical meat on the bones. Have you met Dr. Cormac Fauss?”

Fauss was six inches taller than Dan, a scarecrow in tweed jacket and black slacks and tasseled cordovan loafers, with a spiky mustache that wouldn't have looked out of place on a British col o nel. Contardi lifted his glass and drifted away, leaving Dan with his new friend, who he assumed was not a medical doctor, but one of the academics who assisted flag-level officers; mathematicians, physicists, the occasional economist. The British called them “boffins,” but the genus didn't really have a name this side of the Atlantic.

“Commander Dan Lenson,” Fauss said, measuring him like a tailor. “
Reynolds Ryan
. The Syrian incursion.
Van Zandt
. Desert Storm. USS
Horn
. And I heard something from Jenny Roald about your involvement with the Korean navy. Still at TAG?”

Dan nodded. The Tactical Analysis Group was the Navy's think tank, gaming and testing the three-dimensional tactics the fleet needed to fight
at sea. He'd been there for two years, with his commanding officer posting him overseas again each time he returned from an assignment. After what had happened in the East Wing, there were still elements in the command structure that might very well want his hide.

“It's really the wave of the future.” Fauss's confiding monotone managed to make everyone within twenty yards turn and look at them. “Transformation rests on three legs. One: networking. The transformational shift from industrial-era command structures to a robust network flow that lets co-protagonists self-synchronize decisions. More like a swarm of bees than a rigid hierarchy of information flow.”

“Don't bees have queens?”

“We're talking about command, not insect reproduction.”

“Sorry. But TAG doesn't get involved in—”

“It will, Dan. Transformation means changing everything—command and control, comms, intelligence, logistics, acquisition. It'll have a resounding tactical impact, especially on the smaller, faster nodes on the pointy end. The units the admiral calls the ‘Bar Brawlers'—that make initial contact with the enemy, and act as targeters.”

“Uh, I can see that.”

“But entrenched forces will resist.” Fauss leaned close to Dan's ear. “The ‘We've always done it that way' crowd. Your CO knows what I mean.”

His commanding officer was Captain Todd Mullaly, who was around somewhere; they'd driven up from TAG together. Dan looked, but didn't see him.

“And that's where you come in.”

“Me, Dr. F?”

“I mean, both TAG and the O-5, O-6 community. You'll be our shock troops. Senior enough to see the need, junior enough not to be calcified. Those who comprehend the world to come, and make it happen, will be the admirals and generals of the future. Those who don't—well, ‘It is the business of the future to be dangerous.' Alfred Whitehead.”

Dan's grip tightened on the glass. Was this fool threatening him? Sometimes he sensed threat where none existed. A doctor had called it post-traumatic. Maybe so, but it meant he had to keep a close rein. Step back sometimes, and calm himself. “You're talking to the wrong guy, Doctor. Making stars hasn't been on my agenda for quite a while.”

“But you have something most three-stars would kill for.” Fauss gestured at Dan's ribbon bar. “The Congressional gives you credibility. We'd like you on our side. Help us pry boulders aside, shake some foundations.”

“But what exactly are you trying to sell, Doctor? I don't get a clear picture when you start talking. Networking—what exactly do you mean by that? I know what the word means, but—”

“That a whiteboard over there? At that booth?” Fauss pushed his way between strolling senior enlisted. “I'll draw it for you.”

The dry-erase marker squeaked. A typical org chart took shape, commander at the top, subordinates beneath. Dan noticed each level below the next increased by seven, the proper number for optimal span of control.

“Industrial——age militaries. Weber's bureaucratic hierarchy. Information flows up, decisions down. The most rational and efficient organization. At least, in the nineteenth century.”

“Of course. How else?”

“Of course.” Fauss looked around the circle of faces that had gathered, attracted by that subtle ozone. “How else indeed.”

The marker squeaked again. This time, instead of a pyramid, a circle. Squiggly lines interlocked in its vacant heart. Threads webbed from one boundary to the other, intersecting at nodes Fauss emphasized with thumping dots of the felt tip.

“The outer ring: in contact with the enemy and the environment. They interact directly, through decision nodes that share and store information. The commander sets goals, rather than directing action.”