Cyborg, page 27
"Tamara, stay here," he said quickly.
Her hand grasped his wrist. "What are you going to do?" she asked.
"No time now. Just wait here for me, and be ready to move out fast."
He pulled free and became no more than a wraith in the blowing sand. Visibility was terrible, but that was to his advantage. He heard the turbine chopper overhead, following a grid search pattern. He dropped to the ground, waited until the sound diminished, then was on his feet and running to the wrecked MiG. He ducked under a wing, pulled up his left sleeve. The plastiskin plug he had started to release before, back in the Afsir camp. He reached in with two fingers of his right hand, withdrew a plastic cylinder, twisted it open. Two containers fell into his hand. He tried to remember the time exactly; six seconds, no more. He tried to listen above the wind for the Russian helicopter. Still seemed far enough away. There was a fuel tank cap recessed into the top of the left wing. He climbed the wing, pried open the cap, held one of the containers over the fuel tank opening, twisted it suddenly and released it. In the same moment he hurled himself from the wing and ran from the MiG, his legs pistoning against the ground. He was ten yards away when a sudden glare washed over him. Twenty yards off when the small flare bomb he'd dropped into the tank exploded the trapped kerosene vapors.
An explosion shattered the MiG as he dropped to the desert floor, hugging the ground. Chunks of metal went over his head. He waited a few more seconds and was up again, running to where Tamara waited.
"Let's go," he shouted, taking hold of her wrist and running again into the thickening sand. Behind them flames stabbed through the billows of windblown sand.
"You're crazy!" Tamara shouted. "They're certain to find it now!"
"Save your breath. Sure they'll find it. They'll have just enough time to know the ship blew up. They won't have enough time to see if we survived it. Not in this wind. They'll take a fast look and be on their way home as fast as they can go. Without ever knowing we made it safely out of that thing."
I hope, he thought as they ran.
CHAPTER 25
TAMARA DEMANDED that they stop after two hours of plodding through the increasing wind.
She had been walking close behind Steve, using his body as a buffer against the ceaseless howl of driving wind and sand. Still, the protection he provided was minimal. The air drove across the desert not with a steady flow, but a swirl, capricious in its pattern, remorseless in its strength. One moment she might feel relief from the wind, but this was only because of the changing direction of air. The next instant the wind curled around Steve's moving form, the pattern of air visible in the finer sand, driven so that when it slammed, scorching hot and raspy, it seemed to strike her with doubled fury. She stumbled now against his back, her hands clutching at his clothing to keep herself upright. Steve turned, his back to the wind, as Tamara buried her face hard against his chest.
"This is stupid," she told him, her voice muffled through the cloth bands torn from their shirts and knotted across their faces. "We're making hardly any distance at all. I don't think we've come more than three or four miles." She put her arms about him. "Steve, we must rest. This is madness. The wind, the heat… we'll wear ourselves out before we've hardly started."
He nodded, hating to agree with her. No question but that she was right. He had removed one of his uniform buttons, unscrewed the false cap, and had been guiding them through the howling wind by the compass, trying to move steadily to the east. He knew they had wasted many steps. No way to avoid it. The wind howled steadily, not a full-blown storm, but enough to rake them with its enervating heat and sand that was already deposited throughout their bodies. As much as he remembered from his survival schools he was still no match for Tamara's hard experience in the desert. She used the knife from one of her boots to cut their shirt bottoms into makeshift but excellent face masks that kept sand from clogging their nostrils and getting into their mouths. But their eyes were taking a beating, and she was right about the wind. It dried them out with appalling swiftness, and he thought more and more about what lay ahead of them. No wonder Tamara had brought up the subject of his leaving her to go on by himself. No false heroics there. She spoke as an Israeli soldier, a damn good one. His film had information vital to her country. It had to get back so that critical diplomatic—and possibly military—action could be taken before the Arab-Russian coalition could pull off at least a gigantic piece of blackmail. Those nuclear bombs and secret weapon emplacements in Afsir might well win for the Arabs what their Russian-supplied military efforts were impotent to do—the territory lost in the Six Day War and, ultimately, the destruction of Israel itself.
He'd thought about that as they plodded along, picking their way carefully, faces down, Tamara staying as close behind his body as she could without impeding his own progress. Once this damned wind fell off, and Tamara thought it might die down by late afternoon, he knew he could start out with a steady running pace that would eat up the miles. Much faster than she could move. Okay, Tamara was right by her lights. Not by his. He'd risk his life, had been doing just that, but for his own country, for the mission, for the damned challenge it provided him because of what he'd become and what he was. Something else, too: Call it quixotic, old-fashioned, whatever, he simply could not deliberately abandon Tamara to this hellish country. Put another way, her survival was more important than the rest of the mission. More important, he was astonished to realize, than his own. He doubted Mr. McKay would approve of such an unprofessional scale of priorities, and he was ever surer the Israeli high command would censor him, but they were there and he was here, and that was that. Maybe it was the cyborg over-compensating to be human. The hell with it, he'd listen to no more from her—or himself—about it.
Finally it became too difficult to speak, to be heard over the hollow, booming thunder of the wind and the constant hiss of sand racing over the surfaces. It was even more difficult to walk. They had to quit, and they started searching for a windbreak. They found it beneath the sharp cut-off of a high slope, and Tamara and Steve sank gratefully to the ground, their backs huddled to the wall of the hard-packed earth.
For several minutes Tamara was content simply to rest, to give her tortured lungs the chance to breathe without dragging dust and sand through her throat. She leaned against Steve, her head resting against his shoulder, her eyes closed as slowly she regained her breath and her strength. Steve took the opportunity to look around them. It must have been a wash of some kind, he realized. Either wind or water had sliced a deep furrow in the ground to create the sheer earthen wall and overhang above them, shaping it into a cupped arch that effectively took the wind and blowing sand away from them. Seated quietly, away from the direct, booming cry of the wind, he heard the sand as something new, making a sound surprisingly like dry, powdered snow racing over the frozen surface of the Arctic. To his left and right the sand arched almost straight out from the curving edges of the natural cupola, sand etched against what was left of the sun, a glowing half-light, yellowish in color, unreal, appropriate for the unfriendly world outside. They were in a pocket surrounded by fury, sand racing overhead and to each side of them, but reaching them only as particles sifting or trickling down the embankment against which they were resting.
If they had winds on the moon this is what it would be like, he thought. That fine powdery surface, whipped up and cast ahead—he remembered his own hours of slow movement on that cindery, dusty surface. Not like this sun-baked hell. No air, nothing to move the dust… Mars, that's another matter. They've got the granddaddies of all dust storms, cover the whole damned planet, like that one back in November of seventy-one. Winds of two hundred miles an hour and more. Miles high. A whole world wrapped in dust. Dust, but there wouldn't be much sound to it. Couldn't be. That's real dust there. Not sand. Sand comes from water eroding rocks down to the size of grains and—
He brought himself up short. Danger there. He was drifting, letting himself slide way down into the back of his mind, escaping from the moment. You've been in this sort of business before, he told himself, enough to know that if you can't cope with reality you hide in memories, escape… He wondered why his body seemed to be shaking, and turned to realize Tamara was prodding him. She smiled and shook her head. "Give me your jacket, I've already asked you for it three times."
He wondered at her request but slipped from the uniform tunic and handed it to her. Quickly she removed her own tunic, opened another button to release thin, hard fishing line. She handed him the knife. "Cut a series of holes about an inch apart along the edge of each jacket," she said. When he was through, she pulled the fishline through the holes, knotting each one until the two tunics together formed a makeshift shelter over their heads and shoulders. She cuddled as close to him as she could move, then, suddenly startled, pulled away, still hooded by the makeshift cape. "What's wrong?" he asked.
"Your arm. It needs attention now." She cut away the shirt sleeve. The blood had long before caked. She moved her face close to the wound and made a hawking sound. "I'm trying to raise spit to wash away the blood so I can see beneath it." She was already dry and her saliva greatly reduced. Nevertheless she managed to remove the covering of dried blood. She held the first-aid kit beneath the cape, broke the iodine and swabbed the wound. He gritted his teeth. Then she rubbed penicillin ointment over it and wrapped it tightly with gauze and tape.
"That thing have a mirror in it?" he asked. She searched the kit and handed him a small mirror, three by four inches. "We could need this, to signal a search plane— hopefully a friendly variety." He slipped the mirror into his shirt pocket. She put the kit on the ground next to him and returned her body to his, slipping beneath his arm and resting her face against his chest. For several minutes they were content to sit and regain some of their strength.
"Tamara?"
"Hunh?" She was almost asleep.
"That Russian chopper. The Israelis control the Sinai. How come they were so free and easy flying after us?"
She shook her head, still buried close to him, now with her arms about his body. "No one controls the Sinai," she told him. "Only small parts of it. The rest is worthless, like where we are. We don't occupy this area, just patrol it every now and then."
"That means they'll be back."
"I've been trying to tell you that. That's why I want you to go on by yourself."
"No way," he said.
"Please. I wish you to be serious."
"I'm listening."
"The information about the atomic bombs."
"Thermonukes, by the looks of them."
"Even worse, then. Steve, that information must get hack. The… pictures. Listen to me. By tomorrow morning, by noontime at the latest, I will be dried out. We have no water; there is none here in the Sinai. I will not be able to walk and I do not crawl very quickly. You also will be dehydrated. But it will affect you less than me. You are stronger. If you push on, sleeping by day, you possibly can make it, Steve. Please."
"Really, Tamara, knock this off right now. The answer is no. We move together." He glanced up. "Besides, those clouds are helping more than you think. It may not rain but the humidity level is up. We won't be losing body water as fast as before. So will you shut up and get some sleep? We're going to be moving all night."
She stared at him, shook her head sadly and moved close to him again. He felt her breasts against the side of his chest. Firmly against him. His arm moved around to hold her, to bring her tighter. She murmured quietly, moved his hand to her breast, and fell asleep.
They awoke to a deep orange moon, low over the horizon. Steve was awake first, careful not to move. He listened. For the sounds of engines, voices, anything. Silence. Even the wind was gone. He glanced at his wristwatch. After midnight. They'd slept longer than he'd planned. He called Tamara. A croak was his only sound. Startled, he swallowed—or tried to. His tongue was swollen, his throat sandpaper dry. He moved his tongue about his mouth, feeling it raspy against his teeth, his palate. He managed to produce some saliva, moved it from tongue to teeth, to the sides, then to his lips. This time his voice came through. "Tamara. Wake up." He expected what might happen and he held her. For a moment she shuddered, grabbing him tight. Finally she sat up, removing the cape from over them. Sand fell in a shower about their bodies.
She'd been in binds like this before, he realized. No attempt to speak. She worked her mouth slowly and carefully, building moisture, wetting her lips. He waited until she was through. She had a ghostly smile on her face as she looked at him. "How do you feel?"
"Lousy."
"This is the best we will feel until we find water." She stretched slowly, climbed to her feet. "By tomorrow night at this time…" she shrugged, as if she knew the futility of resuming their argument. She looked about her, studied the moon, coppery and huge, low on the horizon. "That will help as it climbs," she said. "The desert reflects light well." She turned to him. "I imagine you have not come to your senses."
"Let's go," he told her. He slung the improvised cape over his shoulder and hooked the first-aid kit to his belt. He checked the compass and they started out to the east.
They walked in silence, sometimes apart, sometimes Tamara taking his hand without comment and matching his stride. The free air temperature was down to… he didn't know how cool it was but it helped, as did the relative humidity. He recalled the deserts of Mexico and Arizona at night, remembered that during his survival training even in the worst deserts the relative humidity would climb to forty or fifty percent. That would cut down the loss of body water. Still, he figured they'd lost anywhere from three to five percent of body water. That was enough dehydration to make them acutely uncomfortable, and it was only the beginning. He brought to mind the old military trick of finding a smooth pebble to put in your mouth so you could suck on the rock and activate your salivary processes. Great, except that your body had to have nearly its full complement of water to begin with. All a pebble would do when you were dry was to rattle around on your teeth. He remembered the salt tablets. Same damned thing. One gram of salt helped to retain eighty grams of water in the body, but once again you have to have the body water from the start, and if you didn't the salt could make you crazy with thirst. Leave it alone, just keep going, keep moving.
Several times he heard the distant sound of engines, and stopped to scan the sky. Tamara's vision was far superior to his own, especially at night. She saw like a fox in the desert and pointed out distant lights in the sky when all he detected was sound. Nothing in the air was coming close to them. In fact, their closest visitor was a good twenty miles off. Not friendly, either. There were four of them, flying fairly low in a grid search pattern, dropping parachute flares. He and Tamara watched as they walked along, trying to be on the alert for anything that might approach from another direction. When it did their hopes rose and were promptly shattered. Two Israeli jet fighters, Phantoms, by the sound of them, thundered from out of the east and raced for the enemy planes. Radar picked them up well in advance, however, and the Russian or Egyptian planes, or whatever the hell they were, raced for the other side of the Suez Canal. Steve came to his senses after the Israeli fighters had disappeared. The small flare bombs. He had one in his pocket, another four still in the left wrist container. He could have twisted the fuse and thrown them as high as possible. Hard to miss that at night in the desert. But he hadn't. The loss of body water obviously was screwing up his thinking. He tugged at Tamara's hand and she stumbled after him. "Come on," he said roughly. She didn't answer and he wanted to hold her in his arms when he saw the cracked, darkening lips.
At three in the morning he called a halt for another rest. He needed to relieve himself; despite the desperate need for water his body still functioned and he had to urinate. He had the passing thought that he should walk away from Tamara but he was too numb, and such civilities at this time, especially after their living together (now he began to understand the foresight in that arrangement), seemed rather pointless. He turned to the side and his hands fumbled with the zipper.
"Don't!"
"What the hell's wrong? I'm sorry, but the facilities aren't quite what I'd ordered—"
"We can't afford to waste any liquid."
He looked at her with open disbelief.
"You don't understand," she said, forcing the words through a parched mouth. "Not drink. Dangerous. Salt from kidneys." The words came out slow, spaced carefully. "Wash out mouth, gargle. If not the tongue will swell, impossible to swallow." She breathed deeply and looked up at him. "Old trick of desert. Many Arabs… Israelis have lived because of this." She motioned weakly. "Need a container."
She searched about frantically, then pointed to his waist. "First-aid kit. Save ointment for burns, our lips. Rest useless to us. Use that."
He hesitated and her expression was one of weary exasperation. "Don't be a fool. Do as I say."
He opened the first-aid kit. It was a box that sealed tightly, made to resist the penetration of water. That meant it would hold liquids as well. But he still couldn't accept what she was saying, even though it clearly made sense. He emptied out the box, gave her the ointment, threw away the rest. He hesitated once more, and she gestured angrily for him to get on with it. He did, and to his astonishment, when he used the results as she directed, the cruel parchness of his mouth and throat ebbed away.
He brought her the container for her to do the same. She protested weakly that it was more important for him, that he needed his strength. He remembered what he had felt like, the cottony swelling in his mouth, barely being able to swallow. "Take it, dammit," he told her, and she did, repeating the process she'd taught him. Then with him supporting her, she provided what she could for the container. He sealed it off and returned the kit to his waist.
