The Millennium Blues Page 5

  “Over the hills to the south of the defensive positions,” she said. “Isn't that an attacking detachment working its way toward the flank?"

  “Yeah,” said the pilot, and turned the helicopter in that direction.

  But the defensive air power had seen the threat as well, and hurtled from the sky to strafe the detachment, while towering dust toward the west suggested that reserve tanks had begun rumbling toward the hills.

  “Some jets are approaching from ten o'clock,” the pilot said.

  “Let's not get caught in the middle,” Krebs said. “Kick in the afterburners and head for Cairo."

  But before she could finish the sentence, an explosion rocked the helicopter and as Krebs was blacking out she felt the ship spin sickeningly out of control toward the desert floor below.

  They had started their day in Beirut with some establishing shots of a ruined city: desolation broken here and there by the glistening stone and orange girders of new construction, like hopeful flowers springing through the ashes of winter. One of the newer buildings had been demolished in the early dawn by a light plane loaded with explosives that had kamikazied into it.

  Maybe it had been something to see when it had happened, but now it was just another ruined building. The airplane debris was indistinguishable from the other rubble. They had taken shots of the building from several angles, some footage of militia rushing around in old trucks, cars, and jeeps, and other guerrilla forces firing at them, and a few sniper bullets had whined off their armor plating, but all the real action had been on the ground and a ground crew already was on the job.

  Someday, Krebs had thought, they would let her have an assignment in a combat situation on the ground, and she would show them what she could do. That was where the glory and the advancement was. Why didn't they realize that women could handle it? Why didn't they realize that she could handle it?

  “All right,” she had said into her throat mike, “we've got more than anyone will ever use. Let's go find the front."

  During the two-hour trip, one of the cameramen had moved back to sit beside her. He had nodded at the footage she was spot-checking. “Pretty good stuff, eh?"

  “Good camerawork, Bob,” she had said. “You can tell Fred I said so. You're both professionals.” It was the best compliment she could pay the work of people who got paid for what they did. She thought he understood that. She hoped he thought she was a professional, too.

  “It takes a good director,” he had said. “Fred and I were saying, we'd rather work with you than anybody. We're going to get the shots, and you aren't going to get us killed."

  “Thanks."

  “Cigarette?” He had offered her an opened pack.

  “No thanks,” she had said. “Never use ’em."

  “Stupid, I guess,” he had said. “Lung-cancer rates keep going up. Heart attacks, too, I hear. But what the hell! The world may end this year."

  “That's just superstition,” Krebs had said.

  “Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. We won't know until it's too late. Stuff we've been shooting, though"—he had nodded at the monitor—"makes you wonder."

  She had turned to look at him. He wasn't a bad-looking guy, even though he needed a shave and was getting bald. He was tall and had broad shoulders, and balding men sort of turned her on. “I'm never sure if all you cameramen look at what you shoot."

  “Hey,” he had said, “I'm human, too. I got feelings. You get a little deadened after awhile, just like doctors and undertakers, but we notice things. Staring through a viewfinder, of course, what you see is how good a shot it is. Only there's a place in the back of your head somewhere that sees what's going on and tells you about it later."

  It had pleased her to learn that other people felt it, too. “I understand. But this war isn't that different. There've always been wars. Terrorism, too. How would you have liked to have lived when the Thugs were terrorizing India, killing people as part of their religion. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to die by a bullet or a bomb, and maybe even better by an atomic bomb, than a spear through the belly or an arrow through the back. Maybe it's the mass slaughter or the impersonalization of death that makes it seem worse."

  “I got some Indian blood in me,” Bob had said, “and I can imagine fighting, and maybe dying, for your family or your home. Killing other people for it, too. It's killing without reason that's hard to understand. I think the Indians got a bad deal. Bad press, too. If CNN had been around, maybe they'd be remembered better."

  “There've been plenty of other times,” Krebs had said, “when life was even cheaper than it is today—the Middle Ages, for instance, or Rome when it was being sacked by the Visigoths and the Huns, China under most of its emperors, the Middle East when it was being ravaged by the Mongols, Mexico under the Aztecs—"

  “Okay, okay,” he had said, raising his hands in mock surrender. “You really know a lot of history. But I still wonder if maybe this year ain't different."

  “Just because we assign numbers to the years and attribute greater significance to some numbers than to others,” she had said, “doesn't mean that the universe pays any attention."

  “What about predictions?"

  “What about them?"

  “Some people made some pretty accurate predictions about what was going to happen. Edgar Cayce. Nostradamus. Jean Dixon."

  “All ambiguous or after the fact or phony,” she had said firmly. “If they could really predict the future, they'd make themselves rich betting on horse races or buying and selling on Wall Street; they wouldn't die poor and persecuted, or have to make money by selling their predictions."

  “I never thought of that,” Bob had said. “But what about the Bible? It's full of predictions. Back then religion was more important than money."

  “The Bible's just like a clouded crystal ball—you can see anything in it you want, including a prediction that contradicts any other prediction. It helps to understand why a prediction is made, the motives behind predicting a Second Coming or the Final Judgment. A guy named William Miller predicted the end of the world back in the mid-1800s, basing them on various readings of Scripture. When it didn't happen, his followers became the Seventh Day Adventists. A guy named Russell predicted the millennium for 1914, and when only World War II occurred, his followers became Jehovah's Witnesses."

  “You really know a lot of stuff,” Bob had said admiringly, putting a hand on her trousered knee. “I like that in a woman."

  “Thanks,” she had said, and removed his hand gently. She was used to fending off passes, however disguised, and Bob's had been one of the gentler kind. “There's the battlefield."

  Krebs could not have been unconscious for more than a few seconds. When the blackness lifted, the helicopter was still swinging in the air and spinning like an elm pod in a spring breeze, and Krebs knew the ground could not be far below. An icy rage at the unfairness of it all stormed through her veins, and she struggled with her seatbelt until the buckle popped.

  On the other side of the small cabin Bob was hanging from straps over his camera. Krebs knew there was no help there. A forward surge threw her back in her seat. She levered herself up and grabbed a handhold high on the wall, and then another farther forward, fighting against the violent swings of the aircraft. Finally she reached the door to the pilot's compartment. Hanging to the handhold above, she got it open and saw the pilot slumped over the stick, while the cameraman and co-pilot beside him bled over the cracked window he leaned against.

  Krebs dragged herself forward, and pulled on the pilot's shoulder, not caring at that moment whether he was alive or dead as long as she freed the stick. Pushing him aside with her left hand, she steadied the stick with her right, partly through instinct, partly through her observations when she had occupied the co-pilot's seat. The helicopter straightened out.

  Only then was she aware of her muscle cramps and the sweat that covered her body. “Jerry!” she said. “Jerry!” But one look at the pilot's face told her that he was
dead. A splinter of steel had entered his throat from the right and emerged from the left, severing his jugular as it passed, and his life had gushed out instantly. Now his eyes stared unseeing toward the windshield.

  Krebs turned toward the co-pilot. “Fred!” Fred was unconscious but still alive. The blood on the window seemed to be coming from his right shoulder. She shifted hands on the stick to shake Fred with her right. “Fred!"

  For several long moments she did not think he would respond, and then his eyes blinked and he said, “What?” His voice was slurred and his left hand came around to his right shoulder. He opened his hand and looked at the smear of dark red. “I'm hit,” he said in amazement.

  “Fred,” Krebs said, “you've got to listen to me. Jerry is dead, and I can't fly this thing. You've got to take over."

  “Sure,” Fred said. “I'll take over.” But he didn't move to take the stick. He kept looking at his left hand.

  “Fred—” Krebs began, her voice and hand shaking.

  “How's Bob?” Fred asked.

  “I don't know, but if you just take over here, I'll go back to check.

  “Sure,” Fred said. This time his left hand came to the stick and settled on it.

  For the first time in minutes, Krebs relaxed. All her muscles went limp at once. “Let's get to Cairo, as fast as we can, Fred, if we can make it,” she got out. “After I check on Bob, I'll call and let Cairo know what's happened and tell them to have an ambulance waiting. Do you hear me, Fred?"

  “I hear you now.” He moved his left hand briefly to the panel to turn on the after-burners.

  A surge of power pulled Krebs back, but she clung to Jerry's seat and levered herself forward so that she could adjust the dean man's seat belt to keep the body from falling onto the stick again. At least the explosion, whatever it was, hadn't damaged the working parts of the ship. She looked at Fred's eyes. They seemed clear. They were checking the electronic map, the directional guide, and the windshield in front. “If you feel yourself fading, give a yell,” she said.

  She crawled back to Bob, afraid to stand. From the purpling lump on his forehead, his head apparently had slammed forward onto the inside camera mounted in front of the left window. But he was breathing.

  Krebs dragged herself back into her seat and began the long process of informing the Cairo office what had happened and what to expect when—and if—they landed. Afterwards, between trips to check on Fred and to put a temporary bandage on his right shoulder, in an attempt to bring some semblance of normalcy back into her life, she began reviewing the day's taping.

  The footage at Beirut was as inconsequential as it had seemed, and the battle scenes were not as dramatic as their eyes had viewed. They never were. But there were some usable shots, and one classic moment when the camera caught a youngster—he couldn't have been more than twelve—looking up at the helicopter just as a bullet hit him. It must have been an explosive bullet or a shell, because it nearly tore him in half.

  Krebs averted her eyes. On top of everything else that had happened today, it was too much. But in the midst of her revulsion she knew, all the same, that it was Pulitzer material. That single frame summed it all up, the futility of war, the pointlessness of the dying. She also knew that if they hadn't been flying overhead, taking their pictures, the boy might not have died.

  News crews did that. They didn't just report the news, they influenced it. It was the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle at work in the macroscopic world; the very act of observation changed what was observed. Nothing happened quite the same if it were being filmed for television. It was true. It was also unavoidable. Rational decisions demanded information. She could regret the boy's death, regret Jerry's death, regret all the events that her presence created, but she knew there was no other way, no matter what the know-nothings said. If the means were available, you couldn't willfully choose ignorance.

  “Is that the one that got us?” a voice asked.

  She looked over. Bob was conscious. He was rubbing his forehead, but his eyes were looking at the monitor.

  “Bob,” she said, feeling a surge of joyfulness not only that he was alive but that she was no longer alone. “Are you okay?"

  “I think so. Those who live by the camera will die by the camera.” He gestured at the equipment hanging at eye level in front of him and then, a bit weakly, at the monitor. “Is that what took us out?"

  Krebs ran back the footage to the boy's death and then saw, beyond his mutilated body, the plumage of a ground-to-air missile moving toward the camera. “They really hate us,” she said. “Maybe I would, too, if I were down there."

  “You wouldn't be down there,” Bob said. “Neither would I."

  “We might, if it were our job. We're up here."

  “Yeah,” he said. “It's a crazy world. People used to talk about theaters of war; now it's war as theater."

  “That's good, Bob. Can I use it?"

  “Maybe I heard it somewhere."

  “We almost didn't have to wait until the end of the year, Bob."

  “Aw, I don't believe that stuff anyway."

  She looked back at the monitor and reversed the tape to the boy's last look at life. She froze that frame.

  “God,” Bob said softly.

  “All the other stuff they'll throw away, or file,” Krebs said, “but this will be on every television set in the world before the day is over. That and the rocket trail toward the camera. Is it worth it? Jerry dead? Fred wounded? The kid?"

  “Not if you counted it up ahead of time. But you never know. You want to erase it?"

  She didn't answer, but her finger was over the erase button. It was generous of him to make the offer: It was Pulitzer time for him, too. “You know what you said earlier? That you liked to work with me because I wouldn't get you killed. Well, I almost got you killed. I got Jerry killed."

  “That was just talk,” he said. “You know—man to woman talk. You're okay, though. It could have happened to anybody."

  “You're okay, too.” She felt warm toward him, almost sexually aroused by his presence and everything that had happened. Maybe that was what nearly being killed did to people. “Tell you what—if I get an assignment to cover the end of the world, I'll ask for you and Fred.” She took a deep breath and removed her finger. That day, Jerry's death, the boy's death, should matter for something. Maybe it would move somebody else to find some other solution than war.

  And there was the Pulitzer.

  She wondered why she was crying.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  May 5, 2000

  Murray Smith-Ng

  Murray Smith-Ng looked around the smoke-filled student hang-out and then at the tables around which the members of his seminar were seated and wondered, not for the first time, why he had consented to join the group in their end-of-the-semester celebration.

  Pitchers had come and gone like an extra-inning baseball game. Two tables had been pulled together to provide room for the eight of them; the one that Smith-Ng thought of as “the plodder” had gone home to his family after a single glass. Now the table tops were puddled with condensation and spilled beer in which soggy popcorn floated as reminders of the refilled baskets that had accompanied and reinforced the need for the pitchers. Sticky glasses registered various levels like bar room barometers. When they got below half empty, however, someone quickly filled them.

  The students sat on their wire chairs conversing by twos or threes, or leaning forward across the table to listen to one of the professor's stories, drinking their beer until they could hold no more and then weaving their ways between crowded tables down dark corridors to find the odorous restrooms. Smith-Ng occasionally thought about getting up, saying his goodbyes, and going home, but inertia, and too much beer, kept him weighed down in his chair.

  The Beer Cellar was dirty and cramped and old, but alumni would remember it as a place where, they would tell old friends, they had learned more about life and themselves than in any classroom. Above was an old cafe grand
fathered into a prime location next to the campus when a master plan had been adopted by the city; beneath it, a basement had been converted into a beer hall by enlarging a doorway and installing a bar, tables, and chairs. On weekends students blocked the intersection outside by wandering between bars, and when the restrooms were busy, as they usually were, aroused the resentment of nearby residents by pissing and puking in their yards and bushes.

  The Cellar was dark and noisy, but students milling, yelling, drinking, and rubbing against each other wove a protective cocoon against the dark responsibilities that lurked outside.

  Of the group around the two tables, Murray Smith-Ng had consumed the most. He had poured beer down his throat a glass at a time and between drinks consumed handfuls of popcorn, and he hadn't visited the men's room once. His students regarded him with awe. He was becoming a legend. He showed no signs of drunkenness, no signs even of uneasiness of bladder, but his speech had become a bit less precise and its subject matter more personal.

  “My mother was Chinese, you know,” he confided in them, “and my father was a Jew. You wouldn't know that from his name. He took the name ‘Smith’ to avoid discrimination. As a young Army doctor, he was ordered into Nagasaki after World War II to help study the survivors of the second atomic bomb dropped on Japan."

  “The second?” Calley asked. She had consumed less than any of the others, but she had been to the restroom three times.

  Smith-Ng looked at her. “The first one gets all the attention. Everyone forgets the second. I was a second son, you know. My brother died when he was a baby of a gen—of a genetic disorder of the liver. My parents argued for months about whether they should risk having another child, because, you see, my mother was on the periphery of the radiation effects."