What Might Have Happened Part 17

But he could not.

"Stop Rommel, and you break the back of Germany's power in North Africa," Aaronsohn said, offering him the solace of direct action.

Only he felt the shakes spread out from his center, to take possession of his whole body. He sagged against the table, sweating forehead pressed on the cool wood near the scattered photos and clippings. "The man's sick," Weizmann said. "I'll ring-"

"It's malaria," Aaronsohn said. "You don't spend the time he's spent in the East without getting it. Here, Lawrence. Forget your quinine along with your guts?"

The familiar bitterness of quinine filled his mouth. He took the gla.s.s that Weizmann filled, holding it carefully in both hands.

"Churchill wants you to stop Rommel," Weizmann said. "You're not likely to meet him, army to army-"

"That's not how desert wars are fought," Lawrence muttered. Aaronsohn broke in, his violent enthusiasms making him seem much younger than his age, which was close to the Prime Minister's. "It would be better to turn him. He's like you, Lawrence. Enslaved to an idea, in this case the idea of a thousand-year Reich. Does he know what his masters are doing? Show him, and he'll know what his choices are. He'll have to."

"Like me? You overestimate us both, I'm afraid."

"That's not what my sister said."

For the second time that night, Lawrence fought to stifle a hoot of laughter that would have gotten him punched in the face. Sarah Aaronsohn, Aaron's younger sister, who had taken command of his people while he was agitating in Europe. He had met her once or twice ... in Cairo and Jerusalem; met her and been struck not just by her zeal, which matched her brother's for fervor, or her brains (which were far better), but by the power, the special charisma that she possessed. Blue-eyed, blonde, an Artemis or a Deborah of a woman, she had fascinated all who had come into contact with her.

Only the Turks had resisted her. They had beaten her and her sixty-five-year-old father savagely. Afterward, she had stolen a pistol and shot herself. She was twenty-seven, the whole of life before her; and it had taken her four days to die, and weeks for the news to reach her brother and the rest of the western world. Years later, after Deraa, Lawrence had remembered her. She had not feared to sacrifice her life; all he had managed was to retch and beg for mercy. Yes, and steal corrosive sublimate to use if he were recaptured.

Aaronsohn stared narrowly at Lawrence. Were they true, those rumors? Again, Lawrence fought not to giggle. He had proposed marriage once in his life, and the woman had laughed at him, had become engaged to his brother Will, also dead now in the War. He was not a man for women, not that way. Lawrence shook his head. Would you want your sister to marry one? The question became a terrible irony.

"I didn't think so," Aaronsohn muttered. "Too much in love with pain, or-"

Weizmann laid a hand on his arm, cautioning him. Aaronsohn shook it off. "Bygones are bygones, Chaim. We need him, poor devil that he is."

A particularly strong explosion rattled the windows and the gla.s.ses in the conference room.

All three men glanced at the ceiling, as if expecting it to collapse.

"That was a close one," Aaronsohn said. "If the Germans' aim gets any better, we may none of us survive the night."

Weizmann opened his gold watch. "It's almost morning.

We can expect the bombardment to stop soon. Then it will be time to go."

"Will you help us?" Aaronsohn asked, the hostility gone from his voice.

"I will fight," said Lawrence. "For all of us."

"We would welcome your help," Weizmann said, diffident now. "And your voice, when the war is over."

Will I be alive after the war is over? Will I even want to be? Lawrence wondered. Time to discuss that later.

"The P.M. said I should be briefed. With your pardon, gentlemen, I'll find his secretary and get started." He gathered up the pictures that neither Weizmann or Aaronsohn seemed willing to touch. "By your leave, I will keep these. Study them. Remember." Again, he was struck at how easy it was to be Colonel Lawrence, ending a staff meeting. "I shall do my best for you. You have my word on it."

Weizmann and Aaronsohn were at the door when Aaronsohn turned. "Lawrence?" he called. Lawrence paused on his way to the windows. No, he had better not lift the blackout yet. And what good was dawn now, in a world gone wild? If dawn were rosy-fingered, as every schoolboy learned when he studied Homer, it was from dabbling in blood. He had seen blood on the sand, dawn over a battlefield; somehow this carnage in a city where the dying gasped their last words in his own language turned dawn into sacrilege.

"What is it?"

Aaronsohn shook his head, almost shy as he seemed to struggle to find words. "Only an old saying I wanted to tell you: next year in Jerusalem."

The door closed behind him.

The big Liberator Commando labored over the Mediterranean, struggling toward Cairo. Its cramped cabin stank of oil and human fear, and the oxygen mask made Lawrence's head ache and red lights go off behind his eyes.

He had been two days in flight for a trip that ordinarily took six days, making short hops between Takoradi, Kano, Fort Lamy, El Obeid, and so on until Cairo.

But "there is no time for safety!" Churchill had declared, and so the Commando, its bomb racks stripped to let its pa.s.sengers sleep, blanket-wrapped like frozen mummies, on metal shelves, had flown out of Lyneham to Gibraltar. It flew eastward in the afternoon across Vichy as dusk fell. At Gibraltar it acquired its escort of Spitfires. Then it proceeded across the Mediterranean, flying to intercept the Nile at about Asyut. There it would fly north to the Cairo landing grounds northwest of the pyramids.

The plane was freezing, and Lawrence abandoned his comfortless shelf for the observer's seat in the c.o.c.kpit. The Commando had reached the point of no return, when just enough fuel had been burned to make retreat impossible, even if it had been allowed, when the Luftwaffe arrived.

They had expected it. Immediately the Liberator and its guardian Spitfires climbed steeply, above fifteen thousand feet . . . sixteen thousand . . . seventeen-to where the fighters' engines strained to function.

And there the Spitfires turned to dive on the Messer-schmitts, while the bomber continued to climb to twenty-five thousand feet. A shot to one suicidal Messerschmitt blew away part of the tail a.s.sembly; the German plane exploded (like a Turkish train in smears of orange and black) and the converted bomber bounced in the shock waves. And still climbed. Lawrence had not known that it was possible to be so cold, or to feel so helpless as three of his escorts exploded into crimson horror or spiraled and smoked down into the water with the German planes they had destroyed instants before.

Those deaths are on your soul, he told himself, and ached to lose his guilt in action. Instead, he must sit, wrapped in blankets and strapped like a senile millionaire into his seat and his parachute, breathing cold oxygen through the painful constrictions of a mask, while the plane strained in the thin air toward safety. For moments at a time, he felt no fear; then panic-to die, strapped in, flaming down to crash like Phaethon into a cruel sea-clutched him, and he despised himself. After all, he owed England and Germany both a death; did it matter if it occurred in 1935 (as the papers said) or now, in the winter of 1941?

I haven't risen from the dead, he wanted to tell the sweating, muttering men who had tended him throughout the trip with a mixture of wors.h.i.+p and worry. They were young men, dying at an old man's orders so a middle-aged man (no man at all, if the truth be known) could be landed safely in North Africa to confront another middle-aged man who built his war on the lives of his young men. It galled him that they regarded him as a hero. If they saw those letters that Churchill had extracted from that wretched Bruce, the respect, the awe, even, of those junior officers, would change to contempt.

Best not chance that, not when so much depended on his actually being the garish Lawrence that American journalists had created. But he found their solicitude-kindness and concern for the old, sick man-more taxing than his malaria. Which had, in any case, abated, till the next time, leaving a curious la.s.situde and an even more curious clarity of mind, which the brief, sharp terror of the dogfight had only made more keen.

His mind ranged ahead of the wind that whistled over the injured aircraft, singing descant to the panting engines. After awhile, he turned from watching imperfectly understood instruments to reviewing what he had been told.

With fingers stiff in their fur-lined gloves, he checked to make certain that he still had the precious oilskin envelope of photographs that he would take with him into the desert. Topmost was the picture of his quarry. He fumbled the packet out and drew forth the photo: Erwin Rommel, general that was and field marshal! hereafter; Rommel with his fox's grin, his ferocity, and the chivalry that seemed so odd and so familiar. They were much alike, in some ways: both middle-aged, both of less-than-average stature; both with a gift for sensing the presence of the enemy and using the desert itself as a weapon; both quite capable of marshaling and moving heaven and earth to compel men to their goals.

And, in the end, it was their names, as much as any army, that won them their victories. A stocky man, a punctilious man with his careful hats and uniforms, his blue Pour le Merite at the throat. A family man, this Rommel, with a wife he rarely saw. Now that was unlike Lawrence.

Rommel had a son, too, and professed himself never to be happier than when he was guiding young people. How did Rommel feel, Lawrence wondered, about sending the young men of the crack Afrika Korps out to die?

Well, Lawrence could show him other young people who would have been glad of his protection: the dead of Europe, the lifeless, accusing faces that grinned sightlessly and forever at the camera. If you can kill him, do so, Churchill had ordered. Dead is safe. But Churchill, as Lawrence had known for years, was a man who well understood the value of inspiration.

What if Rommel could be turned, a knife s.n.a.t.c.hed from a killer and used upon him instead?

What if, indeed? Perhaps the cold, the exhaustion, and the thin air had sp.a.w.ned this fancy, Lawrence thought. At such times of stress, intellect and instinct fused, and his mind ranged apart from his waking self in a condition akin to prophecy or perhaps madness. If he could shatter Rommel's faith ... it might even be that Germany would take care of his death. And Lawrence had had a bellyful of causing death.

Rommel, in "Mammut," the armored command truck that was a prize from the British, roved where he would, over the sand, to menace Cairo with his Panzers and turn the waste between the British command and his own into a mine field. What if Lawrence joined the Berbers, traveling lighter and faster, antic.i.p.ating Rommel's every move until, finally, they could come face to face?

It was either inspired strategy, or the ravings of a lunatic; but reason had meant very little in the Wrar thus far.

"Colonel?" came a voice that managed to be deferential and well-bred even through the tinniness of the oxygen. Oxford, Lawrence thought, and probably one of the posher colleges.

Trinity, perhaps, or The House.

He laid a hand over the photo, almost guarding it from sight. Rommel was his designated prey, a relations.h.i.+p and task too intimate to be shared by this young lieutenant with the unshaven face, the red-veined eyes, and the keenness of a man for whom such things were but temporary. "Yes, Lieutenant?"

"We'll be descending soon. And, see, it's dawn, sir."

His eyes closed in relief.

Dawn flashed on the wings of the Liberator Commando and the surviving Spitfires as they descended. Lawrence blinked hard at the violence of the light. The wings burned silver as the water flowing through black earth toward the Delta and Alexandria-which, even now, Lawrence had heard, Mussolini dreamed of entering in triumph. If Lawrence had anything to say about it, Alexander's city should not fall to such as he.

Cairo. Because of Lawrence's travels in the East and his work in Carchemish, he had spent two years in Intelligence there. There was little there for him, now: not among the Gallicized aristocrats whose daughters collected gold for their dowries along with Paris gowns; certainly not among the English enclave that politely thronged Shepheards, concerned with tea, tennis, and tonic. For we were strangers in the land of Egypt. He wondered if that had been his thought, or thrust into his brain by his talk with Weizmann and that zealot Aaronsohn.

Help for the East, or, for that matter, for the world, if it came from Cairo at all, might come from the unknown fellahin by the Nile, from whom some advocate might rise as religions rose from the desert itself. For Lawrence, Cairo was a staging point. This war's incarnation of his old service would brief him, equip him, and send him out into the desert.

His hands clenched and his palms were sweating.

To his horror, he realized how eager he was.

The winter rain poured down as Lawrence rode past the border wire into Libya. For the thousandth time, he thought what a dirty war it was into which he had been thrust.

Blackmailed-if a man as guilty as he had a right to use the term-blackmailed and sentenced to a war full of whispers. In Cairo, spies of all the powers rubbed shoulders in safety, greeted each other with circ.u.mspect nods before retiring to their mutterings.

Lawrence himself was one such whisper. The rank and file might mutter that he hadn't really died in that cycle crash in May of 1935; they were ent.i.tled to hope. But it was another thing for him to confront narrow-eyed MI officers, present the P. M.'s authorizations, and watch them nod. "Churchill must be desperate," one man had remarked. Yet even he had stared at Lawrence as at a welcome ghost.

How do you hunt a desert fox? You use a myth, if you can first tame it.

In the end, Lawrence left Cairo almost unnoticed. Weighted against General Auchinleck's preparations of the Eighth Army to defend Tobruk against Rommel, even the appearance of a shadow from the last War was no more than a simple ruse: welcome, if it succeeded, but not expected to accomplish much. Auchinleck, in fact, had snorted and chuffed that the P.M. was pulling rabbits out of a hat again-d.a.m.ned mummery!-but he was welcome to try. He, however, was preparing for what had been named, rather grandiosely, Operation Crusader; Lawrence hoped that it had somewhat better luck than the Crusaders he had chronicled long ago in school.

Unlikely Crusaders, to resent an ally. But that had been the way of it in what Lawrence thought of as "his" war too: professional soldiers might envy his results, but did not trust him.

Allenby, he remembered, had handled him with the care that he had used for explosives. Still, he had ridden with Allenby into Jerusalem. Now there was a Crusade!

Once again, he had the sense that knowledge that he needed was being withheld. It infuriated him. For G.o.d's sake, what did he care for their games of powers and princ.i.p.alities? His honor, if he could claim to possess any, lay in the safety of the men with him and, perhaps, in any chance he might have to expiate some of the fresh guilt that had gnawed his liver since he had seen the pictures that he carried as a talisman. In the last war he had carried a battered volume of Malory.

Here he was, in the desert he had longed for, yet it was a sea of mud, not the red sand and glowing ghibli of the North, nor the vast austerities of Arabia. Nor did he wear the white robes of a sharif of Mecca, but drab and coa.r.s.e garments, heavier-but not heavy enough to keep out the rain. They clung, leechlike, to numbing skin, draining the endurance from him.

All the stillness that he remembered had vanished. North Africa was full of noises: the sputter of overused engines, polyglot curses, and overwhelming all, the steady rainfall. It seemed impossible that these sounds should ever change or fade.

But one of Lawrence's guards (were they set to spy on him as well as guard him?) stiffened and drew closer. That had been a new sound, not the ringing in his ears. He reached for his pistol and slid off the safety.

He had been told to be prepared to encounter friendlies: here, apparently, they were. He was trying to remember the proprieties of greeting Berbers, as opposed to the many Arab tribes with which he had dealt, when the newcomers' leader rode up to him.

Berbers were fined down by their life; this man's sodden clothing outlined a stockier frame.

As he neared, Lawrence saw that under the mud, the exhaustion, and the deep weathering, the man's skin was pale and his eyes light.

"Colonel Lawrence, sir?" said this "Berber," carefully coming to not-quite-attention before saluting in the native style. The intensity of his gaze was almost an a.s.sault.

Lawrence nodded.

"Thank G.o.d, sir! I'm John Haseldon." His eyes gleamed and he all but peered into Lawrence's own, standing too close for English tastes, let alone his own, as Semites always did.

Lawrence groaned inwardly.

"What news, sir?" Haseldon asked. "Where is Rommel now?" he asked. Cairo headquarters had told Lawrence that he had been in Rome for his birthday, November 15.

"Wouldn't you have more recent news than I?" Lawrence asked.

"He landed safely in Africa, more's the pity. Anwar here," Haseldon gestured at a man indistinguishable from the other riders, "says that he and his brothers have seen him at Beda Littoria."

"We're headed there?"

Haseldon nodded, chewed things over, then spoke again.

"Sir, you've been at Headquarters. Any chance," he asked in a rush, "that Rommel will bypa.s.s Tobruk?"

Lawrence shook his head. "None at all."

The Italian General Bastico had argued for it, and Rommel had flown off to Rome to confer with Mussolini. The Eighth Army had men and tanks enough to hurl against the Afrika Korps, but the Afrika Korps had Rommel, man and myth.

Another man might have relished this contest. Lawrence rode with water dripping in miserable rivulets down his kuffiyeh and wished that the newcomer wasn't quite so energetic.

"It's good you've come, sir," said Haseldon. "Glad to have you here; we can show you quite a nice bit of action."

"Like the whole Eighth Army?" Lawrence asked.

"A little livelier than a major action," said this Haseldon, who wore his native dress with as much ease as once Lawrence had done. "Mad" English, as brave as he was crazy; and with the colossal bad fortune to have come to manhood after the singularly unfortunate event of Lawrence's involuntary celebrity. Haseldon, apparently, lived as a native among natives . . . and behind enemy lines. G.o.d help the b.l.o.o.d.y fool, thought Lawrence.

"What have you planned, then?" Lawrence asked, and beckoned Haseldon to ride at his side.

The indigs with him nodded, one chief acknowledging a second. Gravely, Lawrence turned to them, saluting in the Arab fas.h.i.+on because Berber courtesies had quite flown from his memory.

"First we ride."

"And then?" If this downpour got any worse, they might as well ride into the sea.

"Cozy little raid on headquarters at Beda Littoria, sir," said Haseldon. "I've been living outside of Rommel's HQ there for quite some time now."

"Is that where we're headed?"

Haseldon shook his head. "First, we head out toward Cyrene to pick up a few commandos that'll be dropped off by sub."

I knew nothing of this! Lawrence thought. For a moment, The P.M. will learn of this!

thundered in his mind. Then, he fought against the disastrous laughter that could turn too easily into hysterics. Would I believe someone who claimed to be me, either?

He fell silent and Haseldon, respecting his moods, was silent until they camped. He and his men crouched too closely together, showing Lawrence their maps. Here was the grain silo, followed by a row of bungalows. Soldiers there, Lawrence pointed, and Haseldon nodded, before indicating a larger mark on the map.

"That building, the 'Prefettura,' set back in a grove of cypress . . . that's where he lives. It's dark, isolated."

Lawrence nodded. "So, now what?"