[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Read online

  Lawrence unwound the cord that closed the envelope and slid its contents out. Yellowing copies of major papers from around the world, some dated as early as November 1938.

  “I was,” he said, “quite out of the picture when these were published. In one hospital or another. But Churchill says—”

  “Churchill doesn’t know!” both men interrupted.

  “Pogroms,” Weizmann said. “Like my family fled in Russia. Only this one in Germany—they call it Kristallnacht—spanned an entire nation and was administered with German efficiency.” His voice grated on the last, sarcastic words.

  “They want Germany Judenrein,” Aaronsohn broke in. “Free of Jews. Only no one will take them in. No other nation. Roosevelt said point-blank that he wouldn’t increase the United States quota on Jews; we have no place of our own to go to. So they’ve found their own solutions to getting rid of the Jews. In Germany and every other country they’ve entered: France, Poland, Russia, if they win there. Our people smuggled out photos of those solutions. Deutschland’ll be Judenrein, all right, once all its Jews are dead. And then, what of the rest of us?”

  The malaria definitely had its claws in Lawrence. That had to be the only reason that his hands shook so and sweat began to drip down his sides. Here was a photo of children packed into trucks; here a flaming synagogue; here, piled high, like cord…

  “I can’t believe we could be so wrong. Not after what he tried to do before the White Paper. But he doesn’t care,” Aaronsohn whispered loudly to Weizmann. “Look at him sitting there. If they were his precious Arabs—!”

  Hastily, Lawrence laid the last photo face down on the table. The pictures showed atrocity, slashed across the face of Europe. It was Tafas after the slaughter; it was the Horns of Hattin; it was Golgotha.

  “Jesus wept,” he whispered. He would have to believe that even his mother’s vengeful god, in whose name she had beaten him, trying to break his spirit, would weep at the final solution that the Germans had found. “Jesus wept.” He was shaking now, but not just from the fever and chills.

  “Your God hasn’t got a monopoly on tears, Lawrence,” said Aaronsohn. “I hate to admit it, but we need your help.”

  “You couldn’t have known this in ‘35,” Lawrence mused.

  “We knew something.”

  Against his will, he turned over the ghastly file of pictures and headlines, forced himself to study them. He could have the flesh lashed from his bones (though he flushed with shame to think that Churchill knew of that), could spend his life in penance, could live like an anchorite in Sinai; and nothing would make a difference in the face of such universal suffering.

  “In a civilized age!” he protested in a whisper and heard Aaronsohn laugh painfully. He wanted to believe that these documents were forged, that civilized people—even Germans—could not wreak such horrors on their fellow men; he wanted to deny that he had ever seen them. But he could not.

  “Stop Rommel, and you break the back of Germany’s power in North Africa,” Aaronsohn said, offering him the solace of direct action.

  Only he felt the shakes spread out from his center, to take possession of his whole body. He sagged against the table, sweating forehead pressed on the cool wood near the scattered photos and clippings. “The man’s sick,” Weizmann said. “I’ll ring—”

  “It’s malaria,” Aaronsohn said. “You don’t spend the time he’s spent in the East without getting it. Here, Lawrence. Forget your quinine along with your guts?”

  The familiar bitterness of quinine filled his mouth. He took the glass that Weizmann filled, holding it carefully in both hands.

  “Churchill wants you to stop Rommel,” Weizmann said. “You’re not likely to meet him, army to army—”

  “That’s not how desert wars are fought,” Lawrence muttered.

  Aaronsohn broke in, his violent enthusiasms making him seem much younger than his age, which was close to the Prime Minister’s. “It would be better to turn him. He’s like you, Lawrence. Enslaved to an idea, in this case the idea of a thousand-year Reich. Does he know what his masters are doing? Show him, and he’ll know what his choices are. He’ll have to.”

  “Like me? You overestimate us both, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s not what my sister said.”

  For the second time that night, Lawrence fought to stifle a hoot of laughter that would have gotten him punched in the face. Sarah Aaronsohn, Aaron’s younger sister, who had taken command of his people while he was agitating in Europe. He had met her once or twice … in Cairo and Jerusalem; met her and been struck not just by her zeal, which matched her brother’s for fervor, or her brains (which were far better), but by the power, the special charisma that she possessed. Blue-eyed, blonde, an Artemis or a Deborah of a woman, she had fascinated all who had come into contact with her.

  Only the Turks had resisted her. They had beaten her and her sixty-five-year-old father savagely. Afterward, she had stolen a pistol and shot herself. She was twenty-seven, the whole of life before her; and it had taken her four days to die, and weeks for the news to reach her brother and the rest of the western world. Years later, after Deraa, Lawrence had remembered her. She had not feared to sacrifice her life; all he had managed was to retch and beg for mercy. Yes, and steal corrosive sublimate to use if he were recaptured.

  Aaronsohn stared narrowly at Lawrence. Were they true, those rumors? Again, Lawrence fought not to giggle. He had proposed marriage once in his life, and the woman had laughed at him, had become engaged to his brother Will, also dead now in the War. He was not a man for women, not that way. Lawrence shook his head. Would you want your sister to marry one? The question became a terrible irony.

  “I didn’t think so,” Aaronsohn muttered. “Too much in love with pain, or—”

  Weizmann laid a hand on his arm, cautioning him. Aaronsohn shook it off. “Bygones are bygones, Chaim. We need him, poor devil that he is.”

  A particularly strong explosion rattled the windows and the glasses in the conference room. All three men glanced at the ceiling, as if expecting it to collapse.

  “That was a close one,” Aaronsohn said. “If the Germans’ aim gets any better, we may none of us survive the night.”

  Weizmann opened his gold watch. “It’s almost morning. We can expect the bombardment to stop soon. Then it will be time to go.”

  “Will you help us?” Aaronsohn asked, the hostility gone from his voice.

  “I will fight,” said Lawrence. “For all of us.”

  “We would welcome your help,” Weizmann said, diffident now. “And your voice, when the war is over.”

  Will I be alive after the war is over? Will I even want to be? Lawrence wondered. Time to discuss that later.

  “The P.M. said I should be briefed. With your pardon, gentlemen, I’ll find his secretary and get started.” He gathered up the pictures that neither Weizmann or Aaronsohn seemed willing to touch. “By your leave, I will keep these. Study them. Remember.” Again, he was struck at how easy it was to be Colonel Lawrence, ending a staff meeting. “I shall do my best for you. You have my word on it.”

  Weizmann and Aaronsohn were at the door when Aaronsohn turned. “Lawrence?” he called.

  Lawrence paused on his way to the windows. No, he had better not lift the blackout yet. And what good was dawn now, in a world gone wild? If dawn were rosy-fingered, as every schoolboy learned when he studied Homer, it was from dabbling in blood. He had seen blood on the sand, dawn over a battlefield; somehow this carnage in a city where the dying gasped their last words in his own language turned dawn into sacrilege.

  “What is it?”

  Aaronsohn shook his head, almost shy as he seemed to struggle to find words. “Only an old saying I wanted to tell you: next year in Jerusalem.”

  The door closed behind him.

  The big Liberator Commando labored over the Mediterranean, struggling toward Cairo. Its cramped cabin stank of oil and human fear, and the oxygen mask made Lawrence’s head ache and
red lights go off behind his eyes.

  He had been two days in flight for a trip that ordinarily took six days, making short hops between Takoradi, Kano, Fort Lamy, El Obeid, and so on until Cairo.

  But “there is no time for safety!” Churchill had declared, and so the Commando, its bomb racks stripped to let its passengers sleep, blanket-wrapped like frozen mummies, on metal shelves, had flown out of Lyneham to Gibraltar. It flew eastward in the afternoon across Vichy as dusk fell. At Gibraltar it acquired its escort of Spitfires. Then it proceeded across the Mediterranean, flying to intercept the Nile at about Asyut. There it would fly north to the Cairo landing grounds northwest of the pyramids.

  The plane was freezing, and Lawrence abandoned his comfortless shelf for the observer’s seat in the cockpit. The Commando had reached the point of no return, when just enough fuel had been burned to make retreat impossible, even if it had been allowed, when the Luftwaffe arrived. They had expected it. Immediately the Liberator and its guardian Spitfires climbed steeply, above fifteen thousand feet … sixteen thousand … seventeen—to where the fighters’ engines strained to function.

  And there the Spitfires turned to dive on the Messerschmitts, while the bomber continued to climb to twenty-five thousand feet. A shot to one suicidal Messerschmitt blew away part of the tail assembly; the German plane exploded (like a Turkish train in smears of orange and black) and the converted bomber bounced in the shock waves. And still climbed. Lawrence had not known that it was possible to be so cold, or to feel so helpless as three of his escorts exploded into crimson horror or spiraled and smoked down into the water with the German planes they had destroyed instants before.

  Those deaths are on your soul, he told himself, and ached to lose his guilt in action. Instead, he must sit, wrapped in blankets and strapped like a senile millionaire into his seat and his parachute, breathing cold oxygen through the painful constrictions of a mask, while the plane strained in the thin air toward safety. For moments at a time, he felt no fear; then panic—to die, strapped in, flaming down to crash like Phaëthon into a cruel sea—clutched him, and he despised himself. After all, he owed England and Germany both a death; did it matter if it occurred in 1935 (as the papers said) or now, in the winter of 1941?

  I haven’t risen from the dead, he wanted to tell the sweating, muttering men who had tended him throughout the trip with a mixture of worship and worry. They were young men, dying at an old man’s orders so a middle-aged man (no man at all, if the truth be known) could be landed safely in North Africa to confront another middle-aged man who built his war on the lives of his young men. It galled him that they regarded him as a hero. If they saw those letters that Churchill had extracted from that wretched Bruce, the respect, the awe, even, of those junior officers, would change to contempt.

  Best not chance that, not when so much depended on his actually being the garish Lawrence that American journalists had created. But he found their solicitude—kindness and concern for the old, sick man —more taxing than his malaria. Which had, in any case, abated, till the next time, leaving a curious lassitude and an even more curious clarity of mind, which the brief, sharp terror of the dogfight had only made more keen.

  His mind ranged ahead of the wind that whistled over the injured aircraft, singing descant to the panting engines. After a while, he turned from watching imperfectly understood instruments to reviewing what he had been told.

  With fingers stiff in their fur-lined gloves, he checked to make certain that he still had the precious oilskin envelope of photographs that he would take with him into the desert. Topmost was the picture of his quarry. He fumbled the packet out and drew forth the photo: Erwin Rommel, general that was and field marshall hereafter; Rommel with his fox’s grin, his ferocity, and the chivalry that seemed so odd and so familiar. They were much alike, in some ways: both middle-aged, both of less-than-average stature; both with a gift for sensing the presence of the enemy and using the desert itself as a weapon; both quite capable of marshaling and moving heaven and earth to compel men to their goals.

  And, in the end, it was their names, as much as any army, that won them their victories. A stocky man, a punctilious man with his careful hats and uniforms, his blue Pour le Mérite at the throat. A family man, this Rommel, with a wife he rarely saw. Now that was unlike Lawrence. Rommel had a son, too, and professed himself never to be happier than when he was guiding young people. How did Rommel feel, Lawrence wondered, about sending the young men of the crack Afrika Korps out to die?

  Well, Lawrence could show him other young people who would have been glad of his protection: the dead of Europe, the lifeless, accusing faces that grinned sightlessly and forever at the camera. If you can kill him, do so, Churchill had ordered. Dead is safe. But Churchill, as Lawrence had known for years, was a man who well understood the value of inspiration.

  What if Rommel could be turned, a knife snatched from a killer and used upon him instead? What if, indeed? Perhaps the cold, the exhaustion, and the thin air had spawned this fancy, Lawrence thought. At such times of stress, intellect and instinct fused, and his mind ranged apart from his waking self in a condition akin to prophecy or perhaps madness. If he could shatter Rommel’s faith … it might even be that Germany would take care of his death. And Lawrence had had a bellyful of causing death.

  Rommel, in “Mammut,” the armored command truck that was a prize from the British, roved where he would, over the sand, to menace Cairo with his Panzers and turn the waste between the British command and his own into a mine field. What if Lawrence joined the Berbers, traveling lighter and faster, anticipating Rommel’s every move until, finally, they could come face to face? It was either inspired strategy, or the ravings of a lunatic; but reason had meant very little in the War thus far.

  “Colonel?” came a voice that managed to be deferential and well-bred even through the tinniness of the oxygen. Oxford, Lawrence thought, and probably one of the posher colleges. Trinity, perhaps, or The House.

  He laid a hand over the photo, almost guarding it from sight. Rommel was his designated prey, a relationship and task too intimate to be shared by this young lieutenant with the unshaven face, the red-veined eyes, and the keenness of a man for whom such things were but temporary.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “We’ll be descending soon. And, see, it’s dawn, sir.”

  His eyes closed in relief.

  Dawn flashed on the wings of the Liberator Commando and the surviving Spitfires as they descended. Lawrence blinked hard at the violence of the light. The wings burned silver as the water flowing through black earth toward the Delta and Alexandria—which, even now, Lawrence had heard, Mussolini dreamed of entering in triumph. If Lawrence had anything to say about it, Alexander’s city should not fall to such as he.

  Cairo. Because of Lawrence’s travels in the East and his work in Carchemish, he had spent two years in Intelligence there. There was little there for him, now: not among the Gallicized aristocrats whose daughters collected gold for their dowries along with Paris gowns; certainly not among the English enclave that politely thronged Shepheards, concerned with tea, tennis, and tonic. For we were strangers in the land of Egypt. He wondered if that had been his thought, or thrust into his brain by his talk with Weizmann and that zealot Aaronsohn.

  Help for the East, or, for that matter, for the world, if it came from Cairo at all, might come from the unknown fellahin by the Nile, from whom some advocate might rise as religions rose from the desert itself. For Lawrence, Cairo was a staging point. This war’s incarnation of his old service would brief him, equip him, and send him out into the desert.

  His hands clenched and his palms were sweating.

  To his horror, he realized how eager he was.

  The winter rain poured down as Lawrence rode past the border wire into Libya. For the thousandth time, he thought what a dirty war it was into which he had been thrust. Blackmailed—if a man as guilty as he had a right to use the term—blackmailed and sentenced to a
war full of whispers. In Cairo, spies of all the powers rubbed shoulders in safety, greeted each other with circumspect nods before retiring to their mutterings.

  Lawrence himself was one such whisper. The rank and file might mutter that he hadn’t really died in that cycle crash in May of 1935; they were entitled to hope. But it was another thing for him to confront narrow-eyed MI officers, present the P.M.’s authorizations, and watch them nod. “Churchill must be desperate,” one man had remarked. Yet even he had stared at Lawrence as at a welcome ghost.

  How do you hunt a desert fox? You use a myth, if you can first tame it.

  In the end, Lawrence left Cairo almost unnoticed. Weighted against General Auchinleck’s preparations of the Eighth Army to defend Tobruk against Rommel, even the appearance of a shadow from the last War was no more than a simple ruse: welcome, if it succeeded, but not expected to accomplish much. Auchinleck, in fact, had snorted and chuffed that the P.M. was pulling rabbits out of a hat again—damned mummery!—but he was welcome to try. He, however, was preparing for what had been named, rather grandiosely, Operation Crusader; Lawrence hoped that it had somewhat better luck than the Crusaders he had chronicled long ago in school.

  Unlikely Crusaders, to resent an ally. But that had been the way of it in what Lawrence thought of as “his” war too: professional soldiers might envy his results, but did not trust him. Allenby, he remembered, had handled him with the care that he had used for explosives. Still, he had ridden with Allenby into Jerusalem. Now there was a Crusade!

  Once again, he had the sense that knowledge that he needed was being withheld. It infuriated him. For God’s sake, what did he care for their games of powers and principalities? His honor, if he could claim to possess any, lay in the safety of the men with him and, perhaps, in any chance he might have to expiate some of the fresh guilt that had gnawed his liver since he had seen the pictures that he carried as a talisman. In the last war he had carried a battered volume of Malory.