before she tried walking. She still did, even though she'd grown used to the path to Stauer's tent by walking it every night.
Finally, just able to make out enough of the tent and vehicle silhouettes to orient by, she started to step off. She'd also learned, the hard way, to give the tents a wide berth as their guy lines were always anchored some distance past the tent wall. Fortunately, the corduroy street Nagy and his engineers had put in helped to keep her on the right path, and without any unexpected holes to break an ankle in. She came to an ATV she recognized not by any distinguishing feature of its own but by where and how it was parked. Even if that hadn't been there, she could hear from a different tent than the one she sought the sergeant major, plus George and Webster, talking in normal voices. She turned there, off of the corduroy and onto some familiar sandbags, then slipped through the double canvas barrier, through the netting, and into the light.
'Wes,' Phillie said, head facing toward the tent's dirt floor, 'we need to have a long chat.'
'Shoot,' he replied, looking up from some paperwork he'd been about.
'It's . . . it's . . . I don't know where to begin.'
He thought she looked seriously nervous, very unPhillielike, as a matter of fact. 'Sit,' he said, pointing toward the cot. 'Think. Relax. Talk when you're ready.'
'I thought I was ready. But . . . ' Phillie sighed. 'Nothing to it but to do it, which is to say, not to do it.'
Now Stauer was very confused. 'To do what?'
'It. You know, the wild thing? Make the beast with two backs? Make love? Fuck. I mean we can't. Not anymore. Ummm . . . fuck, that is.'
He smiled; this was very unPhillielike. 'Okay. Just out of curiosity, why?'
'It's the girls,' Phillie almost moaned. 'Those Romanian ex-slave girls. I laid down the law to them: ‘You will not get laid. Period.' How can I do it when I told them they can't?'
Stauer smiled at the irony. 'You seemed pretty put out yourself when I first told you no.'
Her head rocked. 'Yeah. I know. But that wasn't so much the sex; I was mostly hurt because I thought you didn't love me anymore. And . . . '
Yes?'
'Well. I've been learning a lot here, even if I don't understand it all. And . . . one of those things I've learned is that I have to command myself before I've got the right to command anyone else.'
Stauer's smile changed from ironic to something approaching idyllic. 'Did I ever tell you what a great girl you are, Phillie?' he asked.
She sniffed slightly. This whole conversation was hard. 'Not in those words exactly. Well, not outside of bed, anyway.'
'Well you are. And for a lot more reasons than what you can do in bed.' The smile disappeared, to be replaced by a very, very serious expression, like someone in deep concentration or-as she would insist later- someone attempting to shit a brick. 'Moreover, since I'm not getting any younger, what say that when this is over we get mar-'
He couldn't finish the sentence because Phillie was on her feet, racing the short distance across the tent, throwing herself onto him and, in the process, knocking them both to the mud. After that she was too busy covering his face with kisses for him to get a word in edgewise, except when she said, 'Yes!'
'-ried?' he finally managed.
'Yesyesyesyesyesyesyes!' She pulled back from showering him with kisses long enough to ask, 'Umm . . . you want a quickie before I become a nun? A blow job, anyway?'
He laughed and reached up to stroke her hair, saying, 'Oh, hon, you have no idea how much. But . . . courage of your convictions, Phillie. It can wait.'
She laid her head down on his chest and whispered, 'Thank you, Wes. That was the right answer.'
In the next tent over, Sergeant Major Joshua stuck out one hand, palm up, saying, 'Pay up, gentlemen.' With fairly bad grace, Webster and George pulled out their wallets, peeling off, each, fifty United States dollars.
'How the fuck do you do that, Joshua?' Webster asked.
'Got to know people in our business, First Sergeant. Got to pay attention. Got to have had Sergeant Coffee come tell you a story about a young woman being assimilated into the military, what she said to some young girls, and what such a woman is likely to do.'
'Bastard,' said George, sotto voce, as he counted out two twenties and a ten. 'How about a bet on something else?'
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Africa is a cruel country; it takes your heart
and grinds it into powdered stone-and no one minds.
-Elspeth Huxley
D-61, Bajuni, Federation of Sharia Courts
Buckwheat thought the city was almost amazingly green compared to the bulk of the area.
'We get an annual monsoon here,' Wahab had explained, while driving their Hummer through . 'Mind you, that's always followed by an annual drought so the green doesn't last. Then again,' the native African sighed, 'nothing very good on this continent lasts very long. Still, we used to grow a lot of grain in this valley and could again.
'At least for a while, we could.'
'Until the next round of civil war?' Buckwheat asked.
'Until the next round of civil war,' Wahab agreed, swinging the steering wheel over to pull through a gate in a wall fronting the street. That turned out to be a mere shortcut. He kept on going through a courtyard then popped out on another street, on which he took a right. As if to punctuate Wahab's admission, a volley of gunfire burst out from what had to be a stadium, ahead and on the right. The gunfire was followed by screams and then a small mob of people exiting one of the stadium gates.
'Stop,' Fulton said, holding his left hand up, palm forward. Once the vehicle had halted, he stepped down from the Hummer and walked to the stadium gate, now clear. A young man, perhaps eighteen years old, sat beside the gate, with his back against the stadium wall. His head rested on arms folded across his bent knees and his body
