labor, beginning to look forward to the rest that came with attending to the sheep… Not a stone. He used his tool to pull the dirt away from — oh, that.
People often wonder at the process. Farmers the world over have joked of it since farming first began, the way that farm fields produce rocks. Stone fences along New England lanes attest to the superficially mysterious process. Water does it. Water falling as rain seeps into the soil. In the winter the water freezes into ice, which expands as it becomes a solid. As it expands, it pushes up rather than down, because pushing up is easier. That action moves rocks in the soil to the surface, and so fields grow rocks, something especially true in the Golan region of Syria, whose soil is a geologically recent construct of volcanism, and whose winters, surprisingly to many, can grow cold and frosty.
But this one was not a rock.
It was metallic, a sandy brown color, he saw, pulling the dirt away. Oh, yes, that day. The same day his son had been—
What do I do about this damned thing! the farmer asked himself. It was, of course, a bomb. He wasn't so foolish that he didn't know that much. How it had gotten here was a mystery, of course. He'd never seen any aircraft, Syrian or Israeli, drop bombs anywhere close to his farm, but that didn't matter. He could scarcely deny that it was here. To the farmer it might as well have been a rock, just a big, brown rock, too big to dig out and carry off to the edge of the field, big enough to interrupt two rows of carrots. He didn't fear the thing. It had not gone off, after all, and that meant that it was broken. Proper bombs fell off airplanes and exploded when they hit the ground. This one had just dug its small crater, which he'd filled back up the next day, unmindful at the time of the injuries to his son.
Why couldn't it have just stayed two meters down, where it belonged? he asked himself. But that had never been the pattern of his life, had it? No, anything that could do him harm had found him, hadn't it? The farmer wondered why God had been so cruel to him. Had he not said all his prayers, followed all of the strict rules of the Druse? What had he ever asked for? Whose sins was he expiating?
Well. There was no sense asking such questions at this late date. For the moment, he had work to do. He continued his weeding, standing on the exposed tip of the bomb to get a few, and worked his way down the row. His son would visit in a day or two, allowing the old man to see and beam at his grandchildren, the one unqualified joy of his life. He'd ask his son's advice. His son had been a soldier, and understood such things.
It was the sort of week that any government employee hated. Something important was happening in a different time zone. There was a six-hour differential, and it seemed very strange to Jack that he was being afflicted with jet-lag without having traveled anywhere.
“So, how's it going over there?” Clark asked from the driver's seat.
“Damned well.” Jack flipped through the documents. “The Saudis and Israelis actually agreed on something yesterday. They both wanted to change something, and both actually proposed the same change.” Jack chuckled at that. It had to be accidental, and if they'd known, both sides would have changed their positions.
“That must have embarrassed the hell out of somebody!” Clark laughed aloud, thinking the same as his boss. It was still dark, and the one good thing about the early days was that the roads were empty. “You really liked the Saudis, didn't you?”
“Ever been over there?”
“Aside from the war, you mean? Lots of times, Jack. I staged into Iran from there back in '79 and '80, spent a lot of time with the Saudis, learned the language.”
“What did you think of the place?” Jack asked.
“I liked it there. Got to know one guy pretty well, a major in their army — spook really, like me. Not much field experience, but a lot of book-learning. He was smart enough to know that he had a lot to learn, and he listened when I told him stuff. Got invited to his house a coupla-three times. He had two sons, nice little kids. One's flying fighters now. Funny how they treat their women, though. Sandy 'd never go for it.” Clark paused as he changed lanes to pass a truck. “Professionally speaking, they were cooperative as hell. Anyway, what I saw I sort of liked. They're different from us, but so what? World ain't full of Americans.”
“What about the Israelis?” Jack asked as he closed the document case.
“I've worked with them once or twice — well, more than that, doc, mainly in Lebanon. Their intelligence guys are real pros, cocky, arrogant bastards, but the ones I met had a lot to be cocky about. Fortress mentality, like — us-and-them mentality, y'know? Also understandable.” Clark turned. “That's the big hang-up, isn't it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Weaning them away from that. It can't be easy.”
“It isn't. I wish they'd wake up to the way the world is now,” Ryan growled.
“Doc, you have to understand. They all think like front-line grunts. What do you expect? Hell, man, their whole country is like a free-fire zone for the other side. They have the same way of thinking that us line-animals had in ' Nam. There are two kinds of people — your people, and everybody else.” John Clark shook his head. 'You know how many times I've tried to explain that to kids at The Farm? Basic survival mentality. The Israelis think that way 'cause they can't think any other way. The Nazis killed millions of Jews and we didn't do dick about it — well, okay, maybe we couldn't have done anything 'cause of the way things were at the time. Then again, I wonder if Hitler was all that hard a target if we woulda ever got serious about doing his ass.
“Anyway, I agree with you that they have to look beyond all that, but you gotta remember that we're asking one hell of a lot.”
“Maybe you should have been along when I met with Avi,” Jack observed with a yawn.
“General Ben Jakob? Supposed to be one tough, serious son of a bitch. His troops respect the man. That says a lot. Sorry I wasn't there, boss, but that two weeks of fishing was just about what I needed.” Even line animals got vacations.
“I hear you, Mr. Clark.”
“Hey, I gotta go down to Quantico this afternoon to requalify on pistol. If you don't mind me saying so, you look like you could use a little stress-relief, man. Why not come on down? I'll get a nice little Beretta for you to play with.”
Jack thought about that. It sounded nice. In fact, it sounded great. But. But he had too much work to do.
“No time, John.”
“Aye aye, sir. You're not getting your exercise, you're drinking too goddamned much, and you look like shit, Dr. Ryan. That is my professional opinion.”
About what Cathy told me last night, but Clark doesn't know just how bad it is. Jack stared out the window at the lights of houses whose government-worker occupants were just waking up.
“You're right. I have to do something about it, but today I just don't have the time.”
“How about tomorrow at lunch we take a little run?”
“Lunch with the directorate chiefs,” Jack evaded.
Clark shut up and concentrated on his driving. When would the poor, dumb bastard learn? Smart guy as he was, he was letting the job eat him up.
The President awoke to find an unkempt mountain of blonde hair on his chest, and a thin, feminine arm flung across him. There were worse ways to awaken. He asked himself why he'd waited so long. She'd been clearly available to him for — God, for years. In her forties, but lithe and pretty, as much as any man could want, and the President was a man with a man's needs. His wife, Marian, had lingered for years, bravely fighting the MS that had ultimately stolen her life, but only after crushing what had once been a lively, charming, intelligent, bubbling personality, the light of his life, Fowler remembered. What personality he'd once had had largely been her creation, and it had died its own lingering death. A defense mechanism, he knew. All those endless months. He'd had to be strong for her, to provide for her the stoic reserve of energy without which she would have died so much sooner. But doing that had made an automaton of Bob Fowler. There was only so much personality, so much strength, so much courage a man contained, and as Marian's life had drained away, so had his humanity ebbed with it. And perhaps more than that, Fowler admitted to himself.
The perverse thing was that it had made him a better politician. His best years as governor and his presidential campaign had displayed the calm, dispassionate, intellectual reason that the voters had wanted, much to the surprise of pundits and mavens or whatever you called the commentators who thought they knew so much but never tried to find out themselves. It had also helped that his predecessor had run an unaccountably dumb
