Darpa Alpha

“What outfit you with?” Wain repeated.

“Head Hunters.”

“Where you based?”

“Here and there.”

Aussie had been rocking the infant to stop its crying, smiling down at him. “What do do you say we name the little bugger Blue Eyes?” he asked.

Wain and several other marines who had gathered around were grateful for something else to look at other than the heat waves of the desert in which mirages of beige, sun-baked buildings from nearby Karbala shimmered, suspended in the brutal heat.

“Blue Eyes?” said a machine gunner from his port atop a Hummer, the desert goggles on his “Fritz” encrusted with sand. “Since when does an A-rab have blue eyes?”

“Jesus,” said Wain, shading his eyes from the sun. “Think the kid’s old man coulda been one of our guys?”

“Or a Brit papa,” said the machine gunner. “Or an Aussie?”

“Or a Polack,” said another.

“Hey, watch it, Ryan,” interjected a Polish-American driver in the convoy.

Wain frowned. “Yeah, but I mean, having it off with the enemy?”

“With a woman,” said Aussie Lewis, winking at Wain. “It’s been known to happen.”

“Shit,” said Wain. “Would you screw a—?”

“If she said please,” joked Aussie.

There was a burst of laughter from the assembled marines — except for Wain. In the dream his face always clouded over with a brow-creasing frown of disapproval.

Aussie, shading Blue Eyes’ sleeping face from the sun, looked over at Wain, opining, “Not all Iraqis are the enemy, mate, though you’d never know that if you watch TV. Uh-oh, little guy’s wet himself,” he added. “We’d better—”

The crackle of a radio interrupted him and he heard the marines’ CO calling out. At this point, Aussie always realized he was in a dream, but was unable to extricate himself.

“Okay, guys,” the marines’ CO ordered, his voice crackling in the fierce, dry heat, “back in the vehicles. We’ve got an M1 tank column cutting across from Karbala. They’re gonna go ahead of us. Our sappers have confirmed these SpecFor guys’ suspicions. We definitely have a minefield two clicks ahead. I say again, minefield two clicks ahead.”

Aussie handed Blue Eyes back to Wain. “You know how to change a baby?”

“Into what?” joshed a marine. Aussie had grinned, and there’d been laughter as they climbed into their Hummers.

Wain stood, momentarily abandoned, holding the baby gingerly out in front of him as if it were a time bomb. “No. Hey, wait!”

“Gotta go, marine,” said a driver.

“Shit!” said Wain, rocking Blue Eyes with such intensity that the infant was screaming again.

“Easy,” Wain’s buddy had said sharply. “You’ll rock his brains out. Here, give ’im to me. My sister’s got a coupla kids. I’ll change ’im in the Humvee. Let’s go.”

“Well, why the fuck didn’t you tell me before?” Wain had reflected with a mixture of relief and irritation.

“I was havin’ too much fun watchin’ you. Should’ve seen your face when the SpecFor dropped that Iraqi dead in his tracks.”

“So,” said Wain, “you tellin’ me you weren’t surprised it wasn’t a woman?”

“Nah—”

“You lying fuck,” charged Wain.

As the convoy started off, Wain’s buddy told the driver to keep it steady, “No jerking side to side,” as he used a khaki T-shirt as a diaper for the little boy.

After the road had been cleared of anti-personnel mines by the seventy-ton M1 behemoths rolling unharmed and contemptuously over them, Aussie had taken Blue Eyes to the Arab Red Cross, the Red Crescent, in Baghdad. As he handed the child to one of the Crescent’s nurses, after the boy had been printed and a blood sample taken for the records, the dream, which always presented itself in vivid color, would suddenly and inexplicably change to a stark black and white of the kind Aussie remembered seeing in the film Sin City. Aussie enjoined the nurse to take care of him. “He’s an orphan.”

Aussie had known then that if no one claimed the little boy quickly, rejecting him because he might well be a half-caste Arab, the odds were that he would forever be an outcast as he grew older, and the danger then would be that the only refuge he would find would be in tight-knit terrorist families such as Hamas. There he would learn that as surely as all Christians and Jews were taught that they were descended from Abraham’s son Isaac, and that all Muslims were taught that they were descended from Abraham’s son Ishmael, he would be taught that his salvation lay in total obedience to Allah’s will — as defined by Hamas…

Over southern Idaho, a gut-wrenching wind shear slammed into the Honda jet, jerking Aussie violently against his safety H harness. Sitting back hard in his seat, his neck perspiring despite the cool interior of the Honda, Aussie Lewis once again tried to figure out why his particular encounter in the sun-baked Iraqi desert continued to haunt him, and in such tendentious detail. Then again, he reminded himself, he knew that many other vets had recurring dreams from their time in combat too. He shouldn’t be surprised.

What would have surprised him, however, was the speed with which the Red Crescent nurse in Baghdad had given the half-caste Blue Eyes to Wadi El-Hage, commander of Hamas’s anti-American operations. The corpulent and gimlet-eyed El-Hage saw Blue Eyes’ deliverance to Hamas as indeed a gift from Allah, blessed be His name, for the infant’s fair skin, if it did not change by the time he was in puberty, would be an invaluable asset to any Hamas agent selected to work against the Americans. Still, El-Hage had no illusions. It was no easy thing training a Hamas agent, for while it was essential in El-Hage’s view that the boy receive a good multilingual education in order that he might blend as easily with, say, the Americans as with the Russians, it must be a very carefully managed education so that the student would not become seduced by either Slavic or Western decadence.

CHAPTER FOUR

Two months before the attack on Lake Pend Oreille, three Russian generals who were out of work, out of hope, and out of money — due to the Soviet Union’s post-1989 collapse — were invited by two highly placed Ministry of Defense officials from Moscow to a secret meeting. The two officials, rebel officers of the old KGB’s Thirteenth Directorate, had chosen Orsk, the Russian city 950 miles southeast of Moscow and fifteen miles from the Russian-Kazakhstan border, for the meet.

Each of these generals, Mikhail Abramov from the Siberian Sixth Armored Corps, Viktor Beria from Infantry, and Sergei Cherkashin from Air Defense, arrived separately at fifteen-minute intervals to be interviewed by the two officials in a smoke-filled booth in Orsk’s Hotel Metropole. The two officials, in their mid-fifties, were dressed in ill- fitting suits, as if they hoped to blend in with the thousands of other government officials all over Russia, but both the fatter, red-faced man and his shorter, rotund colleague nevertheless had the air of bristling confidence that so often accompanies the sudden acquisition of money or power. Shiska—“Big”—and Maly—“Little,” as the three generals would subsequently refer to them, ushered Abramov, Beria, and Cherkashin into the opulent, red-velvet-curtained bar on the mezzanine. Big and Little began the meeting by empathizing with each of the generals in turn. They knew what it must be like, they commiserated with the three career officers, to have been rendered ustarelye—obsolete — by Yeltsin’s “democratic reforms,” to be “downsized,” as the Americans euphemistically called it. And then to have whatever savings you’d been able to accumulate wiped out, your pension worthless now because the government had failed to rein in inflation and criminal speculators from Moscow to Vladivostok.

“Like so many of your generation,” began Big, a cigarette dangling from between his thick lips, “you three generals served your country in the Cold War against the Americans, worked hard all your lives, and—” He paused, extending his arms, palms upward. “—what do you get?” No one answered as he sucked hard on the cigarette, its