In between he had fought his way through a dozen miserable atolls in the Marianas and survived the hell of Iwo Jima. He carried seventeen scars on his body, all from combat, and was entitled to wear the ribbons of a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, and seven Purple Hearts on his chest.
He had always refused to take a commission, happy to stay a master sergeant, for he knew where the real power lay. He had waded ashore at Inchon, Korea, and when they finally sent him to finish his Corps days as an instructor at Parris Island, his dress uniform carried more decorations than any other piece of cloth on the base. When they finally retired him after two deferments, four generals showed up at his last parade, which was more than normally show up for another general.
The old man beckoned his grandson toward him. Don rose from the table and leaned over.
“Watch out for them Japanese, boy,” the old man whispered, “or they’ll gitcha.”
Don put an arm round the old man’s thin, rheumaticky shoulders.
“Don’t you worry, Grandpa. They won’t get anywhere near me.”
The old man nodded and seemed satisfied. He was eighty. It was not, finally, the Japanese or the Koreans who had gotten the immortal sergeant. It was old Mr. Alzheimer. These days he spent most of his time in a pleasant dream, with his daughter and son-in-law to look after him because he had nowhere else to go.
After lunch Don’s parents told him about their tour of the Arabian Gulf, from which they had returned four days earlier. Maybelle went and fetched her pictures, which had just arrived back from the developer.
Don sat by his mother’s side while she went through the pile, identifying the palaces and mosques, sea-fronts and markets of the chain of emirates and sheikhdoms she and Ray had visited.
“Now you be careful when you get down there,” she admonished her son. “These are the kind of people you’ll be up against. Dangerous people—just look at those eyes.”
Don Walker looked at the picture in her hand. The Bedouin stood between two sand dunes with the desert behind him, one trailing end of his keffiyeh tucked up and across his face. Only the dark eyes stared suspiciously out toward the camera.
“I’ll be sure and keep a look-out for him,” he promised her. At that she seemed satisfied.
At five o’clock he decided he should head back to the base. His parents escorted him to the front of the house where his car was parked. Maybelle hugged her son and told him yet again to take care, and Ray embraced him a
nd said they were proud of him. Don got into the car and reversed to swing into the road.
He looked back.
From the house his grandfather, supported by two canes, emerged onto the veranda. Slowly he placed the two canes to one side and straightened up, forcing the rheumatism out of his old back and shoulders until they were square. Then he raised his hand, palm down, to the peak of his baseball cap and held it there, an old warrior saluting his grandson who was leaving for yet another war.
Don, from the car, brought up his hand in reply. Then he touched the accelerator and sped away. He never saw his grandfather again. The old man died in his sleep in late October.
It was already dark by then in London. Terry Martin had worked late, for although the undergraduates were away for the long summer vacation, he had lectures to prepare, and because of the specialized vacation courses the school also ran, he was kept quite busy even through the summer months. But that evening he was forcing himself to find something to do, to keep his mind off his worry.
He knew where his brother had gone, and in his mind’s eye he imagined the perils of trying to penetrate Iraqi-occupied Kuwait under deep cover.
At ten, while Don Walker was beginning his drive north from Hatteras, Terry left the school, bidding a courteous good night to the old janitor who locked up after him, and walked down Gower Street and St.
Martin’s Lane toward Trafalgar Square. Perhaps, he thought, the bright lights would cheer him up. It was a warm and balmy evening.
At St. Martin-in-the-Fields, he noticed that the doors were open and the sound of hymns came from inside. He entered, found a pew near the rear, and listened to the choir practice. But the choristers’ clear voices only made his depression deeper. He thought back to the childhood that he and Mike had shared thirty years earlier in Baghdad.
Nigel and Susan Martin had lived in a fine, roomy old house on two floors in Saadun, that fashionable district in the half of the city called Risafa. Terry’s first recollection, when he was two, was of his dark-haired brother being dressed up to start his first day at Miss Saywell’s kindergarten school. It had meant shirt and short trousers, with shoes and socks, the uniform of an English boy. Mike “had yelled in protest at being separated from his usual dish-dash , the white cotton robe that gave freedom of movement and kept the body cool.
Life had been easy and elegant for the British community in Baghdad in the fifties. There was membership in the Man-sour Club and in the Alwiya Club, with its swimming pool, tennis courts, and squash court, where officers of the Iraq Petroleum Company and the embassy would meet to play, swim, lounge, or take cool drinks at the bar.
He could remember Fatima, their dada or nanny, a plump gentle girl from an up-country village whose wages were hoarded to make her a dowry so that she could marry a well-set-up young man when she went back to her tribe. He used to play on the lawn with Fatima until they went to collect Mike from Miss Saywell’s school.
Before each boy was three, he was bilingual in English and Arabic, learning the latter from Fatima or the gardener or the cook. Mike was especially quick at the language, and as their father was a keen admirer of Arab culture, the house was often full of his Iraqi friends.
Arabs tend to love small children anyway, showing far more patience with them than Europeans, and when Mike would dart about the lawn with his black hair and dark eyes, running free in the white dish-dash and chattering in Arabic, his father’s Iraqi friends would laugh with pleasure and shout:
“But Nigel, he’s more like one of us!”
There were outings on the weekends to watch the Royal Harithiya Hunt, a sort of English foxhunt transported to the Middle East, which hunted jackals under the mastership of the municipal architect Philip Hirst, with a “mutton grab” of kuzi and vegetables for all afterward. And there were wonderful picnics down the river on Pig Island, set in the middle of the slow-moving Tigris which bisected the city.
After two years Terry had followed Mike to Miss Saywell’s kindergarten, but because he was so gifted they had gone on together to the Foundation Prep School, run by Mr. Hartley, at the same time.