Holy War. Mike Bond
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the place we're in – la France? We burn over twenty billion francs of natural gas a year. A third of it comes from Russia, another third from Algeria – both unstable. Any day now we could lose two-thirds of our supply. Literally overnight. We have to diversify.”
“And you think Iran's more sure?”
“Iran has seventeen trillion cubic meters of natural gas, the world's second largest reserves.”
André thought of St. Honoré when they'd been little, at Institut Suffren. When St. Honoré’s mother drove up every morning in the big white Porsche and made him lift up his little tablier and piss on the tree outside before he went in to school. Running across the Champs de Mars, skinny knees, tablier caught in the wind. The Fields of War – how long since I've thought of it like that?
“The Government’s negotiating a pipeline deal with the Iranian National Gas Company,” St. Honoré said, “that could eventually supply one-third of our national need, at two billion francs a year cheaper than the Russians. Against that, André, how much do you think your brother's death should weigh?”
“Forty-seven French paratroopers died when Hezbollah blew those barracks, not just Yves.”
“France has always required her young men to lay down their lives – whenever she wants. The Government would argue, in the long run, that even Yves' death was for the good of France. When we're called, we don't get to choose how we might die.”
Again André thought of St. Honoré's little black tablier sailing in the wind. St. Honoré'd lost something, and he, André, had found it. But he couldn't remember what it was. “When were you ever called, Christian?”
St. Honoré was listening to traffic on Rue de Varenne. “We go back a long way, mon cher. But I don't ask you to like me. I just ask you to understand that your plan gets no sympathy here. In fact, if you go ahead with it, we're going to get badly in your way.”
“You'd tell him? Via your bedmates in Tehran?”
“He's overstepped his bounds, this Mohammed. Other people out there want him. The Russians, maybe, surely the Israelis, the Americans. But not you. We don't want la France mixed up in this.”
André felt sweaty, as if he'd been driving too fast. “If la France doesn't care about Yves, screw la France.”
“Unless you drop this idea, we have to do what it takes to stop you.” The phone buzzed; St. Honoré's hand fell on it. “All the way from the top, mon cher, the rule right now is don't piss off Hezbollah.”
André shrugged, stood. “I didn't come to ask your advice. I came to tell you.” He smiled. “So you don't shoot me by mistake.”
“If and when we shoot you,” St. Honoré smiled back, “it won't be by mistake.”
10
ASYRIAN 240 came over the Green Line, caught people running; a machine gun coughed, tracers darting among the runners. Three bodies lay in the street, one dragging itself backwards till the machine gun coughed again.
Rosa backed from the window. “Despite being surrounded, you seem to have lots to eat.”
One of the men crouched round the fire turned, mouth full of bread and lentils. “You've got plump enough yourself, on the outside.”
A round cracked across the ceiling. Mortars thudded, one, two, three, onto the roof.
“We're going to break out soon,” one said.
“He's got a plan,” another answered, chewing. “The people outside, they'll break in.”
“If you believe that,” Rosa said, “I've got another story for you.”
“And you think he'll listen to you?”
She returned to the window, edging her face round the frame, thought of a sniper's bullet hitting her head, how hard it would feel. Darkness had fallen on the Green Line, shrapnel wailing through the streets, sound of a chopper – no, two – beyond the Israeli lines, the metallic plaint of a buoy out to sea. Then she remembered that all the buoys had been sunk, and whatever the sound was it wasn't out there to save lives.
She heard a rush and patter in the street below. Fearing an attack she glanced down quickly and saw dark shapes, low, fast. She ducked back, against the wall, breathless. Dogs. The ones she'd seen – when? This morning?
She wanted to glance out again but it was too dangerous now; if there was someone out there with a night scope, next time she looked out he'd get her. That's how bad this situation had become, she realized; even an attack here seemed possible. While Mohammed awaited the word of God.
AN OLD MAN in a thin djellabah crouched on the cold concrete quay of Duisburg Station, selling cassettes from a packing crate, AC/DC on a black JVC beside him,
You're only young
but you're gonna die.
I won't take no prisoners,
won't spare no lives.
“Where do you get them?” Neill said.
The man glanced up, surprised by the Arabic, the European face. “Wholesale.”
“They're illegal copies.”
The man looked up and down the quay, shrugged. “Surely not.”
“Where you from?”
The man watched him. “Sidon.”
'"Poor Saida, so close to Israel, so far from God ..."'
Despite himself the man smiled. “There are many viewpoints.”
In a station café Neill ate steak and onions and drank Kaiser Pils till his train was called. A single compartment, first class, the window streaked with rain as the train meandered the bombed medieval memories of Cologne and followed the Rhine canyon south through the soft rolling Rheinisches Schiefergebirge, forests and castles on their crests, steep swathes of grapes below, past Koblenz, the ancient roots of European reason, the Odenwald, and he had again the sense he'd had in Inneka's bedroom, of the generations upon generations who had lived here. Like the sense of all the lives the rusted locomotive had towed across Europe. Here in these German hills, it seemed, was lost the ancient reason for man. Houses flitted by, singular and ephemeral as souls. There was no reason and no rule, no reason for man, falling in space, reaching for anything.
What was he reaching for, with Bev? With Inneka? They were going to die too, maybe before him. He was contorting his mind with worries about who to love, who to live with, for nothing. So that he didn't have to think about death.
He closed the window, took up the Arab newspapers he'd brought in Duisburg Station, and began to read them carefully.
PASTIS IS THE PARAS as much as the bullets themselves, André thought, watching its golden trickles down the inside of his father's glass. The hard friendships, the smoldering anger, the fun. “Michel!” his father roared. “Encore deux!”
“Got to go, Papa.”
“One more? Come on, mon fils, it does us good!” His father grinning his broad-jawed silvered teeth, chubby cheeks curling up into his eyes. “Leave these women alone, for God's sake!”
“Don't cast stones.”
His father tilted his pastis glass, contemplated it. André thought of the Red Indians, how supposedly they had learned the art of silence. How right his father had been to teach it, a soldier's gift. “I've known Haroun thirty years,” his father said. “Never had a reason not to trust him. But I've never learned who you can trust, for sure, until it's too late.”
“I don't trust anybody, Papa.”
“You saw your friend?”
“He's not my friend.”
“They're so in love with political solutions, those boys at Matignon.” His father drained the pastis, smacked his lips