The General and the Horse-Lord Read online

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  Dreamspinner Press

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The General and the Horse-Lord

  Copyright © 2013 by Sarah Black

  Cover Art by Paul Richmond

  http://www.paulrichmondstudio.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Dreamspinner Press, 5032 Capital Circle SW, Ste 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886, USA.

  http://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/

  ISBN: 978-1-62380-513-5

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-62380-514-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  April 2013

  Prologue

  Kuwait, 1990

  “GENERAL, there’s a Kuwaiti boy here, says he has a letter for you. Won’t give it to anyone else. I frisked him. He’s clean, but he won’t tell me what he wants. Just says he has a letter for you, and it’s life and death.”

  John looked up at his sergeant. “Can you check on it?” He leaned back over the topo map, drew in the route for the new bridge. “We need to do it here or here,” he said, pointing to the penciled alternate. “Otherwise the roadwork will take too long to build.”

  His chief engineer followed the line of the river. “Where was the old bridge before they blew it?”

  John pointed to the trail, marked as a dashed line on the map. “The foundations are gone. They tried to run a tank over it. The tank’s still there, but no way can we move it, not with our current equipment.”

  Sergeant Miller was back. “Sir, you may want to see this kid. He speaks excellent English with a very proper Brit accent. His sandals are torn up from the road, but they were expensive once. He asked for John Mitchel, not General Mitchel. Didn’t know your rank.”

  John looked up, puzzled. “Yeah, okay.” He threw a towel over the map. “Send him in here.”

  The boy was small and thin, maybe eight years old, with dusty black hair and deep circles of fatigue under big, dark eyes. He stepped up, held out his hand to John. “Sir, are you John Mitchel? I am Abdullah al-Salim. I believe you know my father.”

  John shook his hand. The boy was trembling, shock or pain, maybe both. “Of course I know your father. He’s my good friend. I know you as well, though I haven’t seen you since you were three, I think, already kicking a soccer ball around the yard. I thought your father had the family back in Cambridge. Sit down and let’s get you some water.”

  “No, not yet. I have to give you the letter.”

  His lips were cracked and bleeding from the heat, and he was swaying on his feet, his face suddenly pale under the dust. John picked him up and set him down on his lap. He was as frail as a bird. “You eat and drink, and I’ll read the letter, okay?” He looked at Miller, and the man nodded, left the tent to get food. Miller had kids. He would know what to bring. “Where’s your father? Is he still at your house?”

  “He’s hiding behind a wall in the basement. The soldiers came looking for him. He sent my mother and sisters to Lebanon, and he sent me to find you.” The boy closed his eyes, laid his head down on John’s shoulder with a sigh.

  John put his arms around the boy. “You’re safe now. Just rest, Abdullah.”

  “Please, will you help him? Sir, I don’t think he was planning to come out.”

  John opened the letter. He recognized the handwriting immediately.

  John, my friend.

  I must beg your help for my son. The women, they will be safe, but the Iraqis are taking the sons of men like myself, leaving them in shallow graves in the desert. It’s a very old technique in war, is it not? It means something different to me today than when we studied together. Please, John, get him out of Kuwait and to safety. He is the very best of me. Don’t worry about me. I’m an old man, but my son is filled with beauty and light, and the world needs his light.

  Omar.

  Miller came in with a bottle of water and a thermos cup of soup. John stood, set the boy down on the desk chair. “Drink some water and eat the soup, then we’ll talk. But tell me this, is your father still in Al Jahra? I remember your house had orange trees in front. Is that the one?”

  The boy nodded yes, his eyes on the bottle of water. He looked up at Sergeant Miller. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” Miller pulled up a chair. “I’ll just sit with you while you eat, son. Are you hurt?”

  The boy shook his head. John ducked into the second room of the command tent, spoke to his radio operator. “Balish, can you get CW-3 Sanchez on the radio? I need to know where his squadron is.”

  “The Horse-Lords? I think they’re two klicks down the road, General. Do you need him if he’s free?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Gabriel walked into the command tent ten minutes later, his flight suit dusty. “I’ve got an Apache fueled up, General.” He looked tired, his eyes dark and warm and smiling.

  John let himself take a long look. “Sanchez, I need some transpo and backup, but feel free to say no. This is off the books, a little rescue mission into the city. I’ll probably get us killed. We’ve been ordered not to do anything stupid like this.”

  “Roger that. Congratulations for putting on the star, General.”

  John smiled at him. “Yeah, a week now. I should enjoy it, because I’m about to lose it.” He pulled Gabriel to the back of the tent. The boy was sleeping on his field cot. “This is Abdullah al-Salim. He’s the son of an old friend, Dr. Omar al-Salim. Omar was my dissertation advisor at Harvard. We’ve been friends for years. He taught me Greek, Gabriel.”

  Gabriel nodded. “Okay, Greek, got it. What do you need?”

  John grinned at him. Gabriel never wasted time on the nonessentials. “He’s been targeted as an intellectual. He asked me to get his son out of the country. Why don’t we go get him, send them both back home to America?”

  “Roger that, General. You know where he is?”

  “Al Jahra, just west of Kuwait City. In hiding.”

  “Oh, shit. Heavy tank losses in Al Jahra.” Gabriel looked closer at the sleeping boy, reached out and touched his foot. “His feet have been bleeding. Did he walk here barefoot?”

  “Sandals.”

  “Okay, boss. Let me go check the weapons. I’ll have to blow the helo if they try to take it. We’ll be on foot in the city.”

  “You got your side arm?” Gabriel nodded. “Let me see what else I can round up.”

  Gabriel was already moving out of the tent. “I’ll find some smoke grenades. Smoke is always good to make a confusing situation a little more confusing.”

  John checked the ammunition for his side arm, then grabbed two M16s and briefed Miller. “No one comes after me if I fuck this up, Miller.”

  “Why don’t you stay here and I’ll go, sir? We really don’t want to lose a general officer.”

  “Negative, Sergeant.”

  “How long before I sound the alarm?”

  “You don’t. I don’t come back, you get that boy to my sister in Virginia. Any way you ca
n, Miller, understand? His father’s got an American passport.”

  “Roger that, General. No worries. So where are you going?”

  “Al Jahra. I’m going to extract Dr. al-Salim and bring him here. I’m taking Sanchez.”

  Miller nodded. “Okay, well, your odds of survival just went up about 99 percent. We’ll give you twelve hours, and then we come after you.”

  “Negative.”

  “See you in twelve hours, sir.”

  Gabriel had set the chopper down on the tarmac beyond the last hanger. John climbed in, shaking his head, and the pilot lifted the helo into the air until they were clear of the makeshift base. “We’ve got twelve hours. Miller is such a pain in the ass. I gave him a direct order not to come after me and I know he’s going to blow it off and bring a frigging tank if we don’t show up on time.”

  “Actually, that makes me feel better. Did you see the new horse on the nose?”

  “Yeah. I like that golden mane. Wild. You always have the best art on your birds.”

  “It’s not art. It’s the soul of man and machine together. That boy walked here from Al Jahra? That’s over thirty miles.” Gabriel leaned over, took John by the shirtfront, and pulled him close. John could feel the heat of Gabriel’s breath on his mouth. He’d been chewing cinnamon gum. “Are we off to rescue an old boyfriend?”

  John smiled up into his eyes for so long Gabriel leaned a tiny bit closer, kissed him hard. John reached for his cheek and ran his fingers over two days of rough stubble. “You’re my only old boyfriend. Try not to get killed, okay?”

  “I haven’t slept with you since you’ve been promoted. I’d hate to miss sleeping with a general.”

  “You know we can’t let them take a general officer, even just a road-builder like myself. It would be too embarrassing for everyone. If things go south, you’ll need to take care of it for me.”

  “You’re saying, what, you want me to shoot you in the head if the bad guys are closing in?”

  “Roger that.” John wondered if he should tell Gabriel he loved him. No, that would freak him out worse than ordering him to shoot him in the head. John shoved the two rifles down between his knees. Gabriel studied the instrument panel. His mouth was pressed into a thin line.

  “Let’s get the job done and get through this night, pilot, and I’ll treat you to a bottle of tequila. And anything else you’d like.”

  Gabriel looked at him, an unwilling smile softening his mouth. “Anything?”

  Chapter 1

  GENERAL JOHN MITCHEL was not a happy man. He flipped through the pages of the essay and studied the nicely formatted footnotes at the end, then added the paper to the small pile on the corner of his desk. He was segregating the really good essays, the ones that were well-written and well thought out and researched. The ones that had been written and sold by hungry graduate students, in other words, because no way did any of the knucklehead freshmen in his Intro to American Political History write these small gems.

  What to do, what to do. They were originals, that was the problem. He could run a poorly written plagiarism through any number of online databases like Turnitin, catch the lazy sons of bitches that way. But this latest batch of papers was too well done for that. He mentally reviewed the current crop of grad students in his reading seminar on international leadership and political theory. They weren’t a bad bunch, but he didn’t think any single one of them would quote W.E.B. Du Bois, the Inaugural Address of JFK, and the letters of Lord Byron to reference a single point on how a people lost their free will.

  He pushed back from his desk and walked to the window of his office at the University of New Mexico. The grounds were spring green and cool, and the kids were lying about on the grassy knolls, earbuds in place and phones in their hands. He wondered if they were so distracted by their ever-present electronics that any deep thinking, the type of deep thinking that actually led to learning, was impossible. That was the problem, he thought, or, one of the problems, because he could make a list of problems without much effort at all. The kids could call up facts with scary quickness, but could they think about them long enough to understand what those facts meant? Was abstract thinking going the way of the dodo?

  Good God. He sounded like an old man. He felt like one too, railing at the failures and posturing of the new generation, kids so young and so clueless, soft as a bunch of newly hatched baby birds, he sometimes wondered if they even had a language in common. It had been a bitch of a year. He looked at the calendar on his wall, another anachronism he wasn’t ready to give up, a calendar made out of paper, and onto which a person could write notes—and saw he was two days shy of the one-year mark since he’d retired from the army. Two days past his fifty-second birthday.

  The first year out of the military was a tough adjustment for most people, but he’d never really thought it would be a problem for him. He’d been preparing for his retirement career for over five years, doing postdoctoral seminars in political history and educational theory, studying the new technologies that allowed professors to teach online. His field of study was leadership. He’d been as organized and efficient as anyone could be, but he’d not been prepared for the fact he didn’t like the little shits he was supposed to be teaching to lead the world for the next fifty years.

  It alarmed him, this desire to slap some sense into the kids. His image of himself was mellow, Zen calm in the face of crisis, a deep and original thinker. He’d spent an entire career around young men and women. Maybe the kids who joined the military were different, a little more structured? Considerably more disciplined? Or maybe over the last years of his career, as he’d moved up the ladder, he’d been insulated from the kids by the senior enlisted and his officers. Maybe the majority of the screwups and boneheaded behavior had been dealt with at a lower level, and he’d never even known about it.

  If he was being honest, though, he would also have to admit he’d been lonelier than he’d expected to be, now that he was retired. Once you’re out, you’re out, and he missed the company of the men he’d spent his life with. He had friends, but it wasn’t the same as serving together, wearing the same uniform, having a mission in common, and the feeling of yearning for something lost, of missing something vital, had been twisting his stomach for months. He’d gone to see a doctor, even, and been told to take Prilosec. They’d wanted to schedule him for an endoscopy, but he never went back. The Prilosec did nothing, which confirmed his belief that what was sitting in his stomach like a ball of lead was loneliness.

  He stared at the small stack of essays on his desk. Enough. What was he going to do about this?

  HE WAITED until the majority of the kids had unplugged themselves from their various wires. The seminar was small, and they sat around tables to facilitate lively discussion and debate. The tables also allowed him to walk around behind them and see who was texting on their phones under the edge of the table, but that was just a perk. He handed back the essays. “Really very interesting work by many of you. So interesting, in fact, that I would like to know more about your topics and research. We’re going to do an oral defense of your papers, and the final grade will be a combination of both your written work and the oral defense.”

  A couple of kids were so pale and sick they looked like they were going to throw up. He pointed to Seymour White, the alleged author of the W.E.B. Du Bois masterpiece. “Mr. White, we’ll start with you.”

  THE dean of students leaned back in his chair. “John, I have to say I’m impressed. Your documentation is flawless. I wouldn’t expect anything less. But just to brief me, how did you manage to fail 89% of your entire freshman class at the final exam?”

  “I was expecting it to be worse, but some of them have the makings of world-class bullshit artists,” John said.

  “You made them give oral defenses of their final essays, is that what I understand?”

  “All they had to do was describe the topic of the essay, two major sources, and their conclusions. A single conclusion was all I
asked for.”

  “So am I to understand they not only bought their papers, they didn’t even bother to read them before they turned them in? Lazy little shits.” The dean grinned at him. “But still, we have a problem.”

  The general narrowed his eyes at the dean, but otherwise was quite still.

  “The complaint was made, and is, I’m afraid, a valid complaint, that the oral defense of the final essay was not described in the syllabus. You can’t change your scoring at the last minute and add a new requirement. But,” he sat up, a smile brightening his face, “I understand you scared a couple of them so badly they’re changing majors from political science to health care. God knows we need more nurses. You’re a legend, General. Brass balls and all that. But figure out what to do about your grades, okay? We need them by close of business today.”

  “SO WHAT did you do?”

  John shook his head and reached for the black pepper. “I never assumed they would let me fail the entire class. I had backup grades ready.” He twisted the grinder, and the ripe sweet spice of fresh black pepper on a grilled sirloin filled his nose.

  “Of course you did.”

  He looked up at the laughter in Gabriel’s voice. Gabriel Sanchez, Chief Warrant Officer-5, retired, his oldest friend. They had served together as comrades and brothers-in-arms on five continents and through every American conflict for more than twenty-five years. They understood each other, because both had followed the warrior’s path since they’d been young men. Warriors put honor first, and service, and the safety of the tribe. Everyone called Gabriel the Horse-Lord, for the lethal Apache helicopters he’d flown. “So how are you? What’s happening in your house?”

  He watched the line deepen between Gabriel’s eyebrows as he frowned. “All quiet on the Western front.” He hesitated, then, “Juan is having some trouble in school. Flunked algebra and he’s trying to pretend he doesn’t care. He’s acting weird. I don’t know what’s going on with him.”