52

THAT NIGHT, SOMEWHERE IN the Negev desert—she is unsure precisely where, having dropped down out of the sky in an all but featureless landscape that might as well be the moon—Alex sits in a dry riverbed by the side of a paved road. She has already changed into female garb, her pilot’s uniform stuffed into the bag that had held her makeup, dress, and high heels. The road is doubtless marked at some point, but all she can tell is that it runs north-south. Her compass is functioning, as is her mind, which seems to go into overdrive under critical conditions. As a pilot, she felt confident in her competence during training flights, or when delivering a plane, but once in combat she is always ramped up, super-capable, her reflexes so quick they operate without her knowledge, eye-to-hand controls moving seamlessly without routing through the conscious brain. In the more quiet moments of her life, and this is certainly one of them, she wonders if her wandering gender identities are in some way connected to the peculiar duality of her abilities as a pilot.

For hours, a dozen lappet-faced vultures have been circling above, even now in the moonlight. These respect neither rank nor politics, gender nor nationality. As far as the vultures are concerned, Alex is just another lone animal that soon, without water, will be weak, delirious, defenseless. The morticians of the animal world, they normally wait respectfully for their meals to die. But unconscious living flesh is the same as dead. Their eyesight is as sharp as that of the local Bedouin, whose appetite for prey is no less refined.

These Negev tribesmen are capable of spotting a lit cigarette a mile off. Alex knows enough about the clans hereabout to know how much danger she is in. In fact, though Israel Air Force doctrine focuses on saving aircraft as well as pilot, in case of an emergency over the Negev a forced landing is never advised. Let the plane crash elsewhere, miles from where your parachute falls. Landing the plane successfully means the pilot will be found in a matter of minutes, because there is no way to distance oneself sufficiently from the aircraft before it will be spotted by enemy reconnaissance from above, enemy ground forces nearby, or by camel-mounted Bedouin tribesman eager for bounty. In this three-dimensional game of chess, it is better to remain a live pawn than a trapped queen.

But this queen does not feel trapped.

Alex is already on the offensive, planning her next moves. First priority: wheels.

Just as she finishes applying her lipstick, a kind of crimson this evening (she prefers earth tones for daytime), a convoy of Egyptian infantry, some twenty trucks, comes into view. There is sufficient moonlight for her to identify the unit number painted on the sides, but of course no one to report it to, and no radio to report it with. Anyway, trucks full of infantry are not what she needs. Within a few minutes, there it is: a ’70s-era Cadillac sedan painted olive green and flying the red, white, and black standard of the Egyptian high command.

She scrambles out of the wadi, no easy matter in four-inch heels, and flags the Cadillac down, showing a bit of leg in the process. As though magnetized, the staff car pulls to a halt, then backs up.

While she stands in the moonlight, the young adjutant driving leaps out to open the rear door. She cannot see inside but hopes there is no more than one passenger. Waving her left hand gaily she approaches the car with the other behind her back until she is close enough: one passenger, struggling to get out of the car. So far, so good. But she is still too distant for certainty. As she closes the gap, the single passenger, an obese colonel, manages with the aid of his adjutant to exit the car. He is grinning.

She takes the adjutant out first, one shot to the head. He is still crumpling when she shifts the barrel of her 9mm Israel Military Industries pistol and drops the obese colonel with two shots. In motion immediately, she kicks off her heels and gets to the car. The colonel is still moving. All that fat. There is less fat around his skull. A third shot does the job.

She knows she has mere minutes before more Egyptian traffic appears, every one of their vehicles running with full headlights, sign enough that for the Egyptian Army the war is over, the area secure. She leaves her pistol by the car, not the best thing but she needs both hands and her dress affords nothing to tuck it into. The fat colonel’s uniform will do her no good, but after cutting through his trousers with a small, sharp IAF-issue emergency blade, she relieves him of his huge boxer shorts—a white flag may come in handy later. After rolling the huge corpse into the wadi, she turns to the adjutant. In a moment she is out of her clothes and into his, not a bad fit at all, though she will have to adjust the pistol belt holding up his, no longer her, pants. The adjutant’s Colt Commander, a .45, looks so new she wonders if it has ever been fired.

“Shit,” she says aloud. She should have done this before.

Climbing down into the wadi, she removes the colonel’s brass insignia of rank and his pistol, another Colt, but this one gold-plated. She climbs back to the road, wraps her heels in her dress, tosses the adjutant’s shoes into the front of the Cadillac, and takes off, leaving the bodies of the adjutant and Lieutenant Colonel Anwar, head of Egyptian Special Operations Branch, for the lappet-faced vultures.

In this there is the irony of rough justice. Col. Anwar has just come from setting up a “relocation camp” for the Hamas leadership of Gaza. Allied to the Muslim Brotherhood that for decades has been a thorn in the side of Egypt’s secular leadership, Hamas has long been at the top of the Egyptian army’s hit list.

Relocation is of course a euphemism. Just outside of Beersheba, Col. Anwar personally supervised the mass burial of twelve hundred Palestinians identified as Hamas, many of them accurately. Though Col. Anwar would have preferred to spend a bit more time on each one of these enemies of Egypt, this is hardly practical: wholesale torture in a war zone might leak out of even the most hermetically sealed area. The only choice was machine gunning them into mass graves and then bulldozing tons of sand to cover the bodies deep enough so that the ever-present vultures, whole flocks of which had migrated to feast on the victims of this war, would not spread their bones across the desert floor to become a diplomatic embarrassment and then, later on, a problem for tourists. For tourists, there can be nothing worse that coming across a pile of human bones before lunch.

Col. Anwar’s engineers had identified a spring close to the burial spot, which is why it was chosen. In a matter of weeks, Egyptian peasants are to be brought in to plant date palms over the mass graves, whose decomposing bodies will provide excellent fertilizer and the spring adequate water. A meticulous planner, Col. Anwar early on filed a claim for the site, together with a thousand acres surrounding it, more than sufficient for a village. Given a bit of luck and special investment from Cairo, one fine day the village might become a city. Upon maturity, the palms alone will provide an annual profit sufficient to ensure a wealth stream to generations of Anwars, to say nothing of rents from the village, and then—Allah willing—the city into which it might grow. According to the Egyptian proverb: Plant today, feast tomorrow.

But according to another Egyptian proverb: Because we feared the snake, we missed the scorpion.

In her adjutant’s uniform, adorned with Col. Anwar’s rank insignia, Alex reaches the first of what will be many Egyptian checkpoints. Half a dozen vehicles are lined up. Alex drives the Cadillac briskly around them, taps the horn, and takes the salute of the four infantrymen standing guard. Having removed her makeup and blond wig, Alex returns the salute with the casual ennui of a staff officer and drives on through, barely slowing down as the barrier is lifted.