Thud! Bang!

A flare whooshed upward from the no-man’s land and popped. Colors were shocked off the spectrum and made a reverse negative of the whole scene. Legionnaires scattered for battle stations in a world that was now swaying under the rocking sky light. A ground flare hissed opposite running boots. The relief guard was caught midway on the ladder. Like a monkey on a stick, he shimmied to the top to hand crank his siren.

Down the whole line, searchlights were snapped on. An explosion close by tried perforating Warz’ eardrums, and there was another blast, then another as legionnaires opened fire and splashed a half second of electric yellow-orange on everything spotlighted across from them in the perimeter. Armed shadows rushed past Warz to the fence, ambush and alert teams hoping it was insurgents, hoping the assholes would try to take their lives to give them meaning. They were cursing in French, German, Czech, Portuguese, Polynesian.

Warz had to see what was going on. Weaving from the jeep, he stumbled to a 10-foot-high chain-link fence and hung on it for balance. The new guard spotlighted the stage for him, and shaking there in a one-dimension scene bled of all color except black and white a lousy stone’s throw from success were four gatecrashers stuck in a minefield. All around them, other people’s admission charges dangled in the wire: flip-flops, hobo bags, pants, wrap-arounds, dresses.

A stop team arrived, scrambled for position and fired over the trespassers’ heads.  Shots at the ground could set off more fireworks and toe popper mines.

Somali Issa, Afar, perhaps Eritrean, whatever they were, Warz deduced, they were trespassers here to find work in order to get food because they were fed up with starving. Legionnaires that knew poverty themselves held their fire.

The trespassers had crawled through double concertina and three meters of double-apron fil-de-fer barbel until luck ran out in the 10-meter-deep minefield where one of them snagged himself on trip wire. The stolperdraht set off the parachute flare that was piggybacked to the sizzling ground torch. Before them was even more wire and then the big fence. How these people could negotiate what they did to make it in always amazed the legionnaires, although some troops had watched an octopus on the quay unscrew the lid on a jar of fish. To those men, sneaking in couldn’t be too difficult.

They were shouting German and French commands to duck and crawl forward. They told them they weren’t going to be hurt. Did the boukax want to return through the 10 meters of double-strand razor wire? How’d they’d like a second chance, to try again? But the trespassers didn’t understand. They saw the warning signs but couldn’t read. The man and woman––husband, wife?––they seemed to want to explain but couldn’t and were too afraid to pick off snagged belongings.

An infant in a katanga slung on the woman’s chest was too traumatized to clutch. Its tiny fists were shaking. Its mouth convulsed in silent screams that competed hopelessly with the siren. The woman held the child tight enough to crush it. An older child, a boy, perhaps five years old, was on his haunches trembling and holding his knees tightly. Clear liquid began dripping from his short pants.

The fizzing flare descended slowly on its toy parachute and the bizarrely lit scene died back to dark normal. Somebody went up the ladder to yell at the tower guard to stop grinding the siren. As it wound down, Warz heard radio chatter. Spicing the communiqué with another quaint epithet, the sergeant reported, “Bunjuls in the wire.” Nothing to worry about. One by one, the other tower lights began going off, but this post’s stayed on. If they didn’t intend to kill somebody, a sergeant yelled, they were not to waste bullets. Harassment shots at last ceased. Bored, disappointed legionnaires grumbled about lost sleep, unloaded and bitched again. Every time they toured here, this happened. Nobody ever came in shooting.

Then an intensely acrid stench crept out of the wire, a garbage smell with an awful sweetness. Warz took a harder look at a bundle frying in the ground flare. He made out a small rib cage lying like a broken white basket in a tarry pool and figured it out. When the trespasser struck the stolperdracht, the aerial torch was sent through the torso, tearing the body in half. He couldn’t determine age or sex, but the person was very young. He bet the trespassers didn’t know they’d lost one of their own.

Legionnaires hoped they wouldn’t be delegated come daylight to go in to pick their way among the mines and haul out the remains. One was going to be chosen, and he would be washing his hands in cologne for a week.

Warz pitied the victim. The child got itself killed trying to get a job no better than hauling shit. But now he heard rumbling. Something was going on in the north. The other towers’ searchlights were going on again, sweeping their fields before nervously ticking upward. Then, far above the end of the northern perimeter, a few patterned lights appeared.

High in his tower, the relief glassed the sector and told the invisible friend he usually sought out when alone that once at home in Perpignan he watched a design of lights cruise over the city, suddenly and altogether turn on a centime, then streak out of sight. He never told anybody else. It wouldn’t have been wise. People were people, always ready to invent witches to burn. Only, this UFO was not leaving. It kept getting lower, too, and coming on.

The rumbling was growing in the far sector. So were the lights. The ground flashed and kept flashing, and the lookout realized people over there were shooting at the thing. The sentry strained to hear siren wail, listened for the phone to ring with the order not to worry, and he made out the image. It was a plane, a big one, the size of a bomber. The Russians were rumored to have given a few to the neighbors. Then molten red streaked skyward. Tracers. Searchlights swung high one after another. He let go of the field glasses and cranked the siren’s handle again.

The little chief corporal, meanwhile, was standing sideways to present less of a target, waiting with an aimed 9mm pistol for a clear shot at the lit cockpit to kill the whole damn plane.

The sentry was horrified. The aircraft was coming in so low he believed it was going to take out the tower. Lights slicked its belly and wings as thunder took hold of the earth and shook it. His phone rang. If they were calling to tell him to jump, he couldn’t hear the bell. He had to stay, defend his position. He brought up his rifle, aimed at the airplane, and said, “Fuck this!” Half-way down his vibrating perch, he  jumped while the giant craft went roaring and screaming over him.

More 44mm pyrotechnics went off without distracting the single-minded chief corporal whose pistol bucked and flamed at the Leggo-like figures in the cockpit. Then the jeep’s windshield exploded. Warz almost beat shattering glass to the ground, chased by the idea of a small needle-nose missile spinning toward him at half a mile a second. Shards and ejected casings pattered on his back. He pressed the side of his face into the sand. A hot casing embedded itself over the cheekbone. He let the brass burn rather than move off it. Another stray panged on the jeep.

The roar boomed like the end of the world. Warz covered his ears. Then the noise lifted with the plane’s ascent. A line of well-lit portholes was stuffed with faces staring back at two dozen semiautomatics chasing them with fire even after the plane banked and glared “Air Madagascar.”

A Prick 25 squawked threats of execution, that nobody on the plane better be hurt because the punishment would be worse. They were told never to shoot at the city or shine the lights skyward because this shit could happen. The lights could make the pilot think the perimeter was an approach to the airport, or even one of the runways. The airport was close, remember? Why didn’t the other positions answer their goddamn phones?

Thud!

There was a white flash. The party wasn’t over. A toe popper mine had exploded. A big animal bellowed.

Thud!  Bang!

Another flare went up. Then another one whooshed and popped to burn magnesium shavings, and the pair began swinging like Chinese lanterns. Objects became shadows that rocked off and on as though somebody was playing with a light switch. Warz got off his belly to discover that, a couple hundred meters down the line, the fence had caught two camels.  Smoke and dust from the explosion were obscuring one of them. The victim was lying across razor wire, roaring in agony from a partially vaporized foot. Its neck flailed the fence.  The other animal was trying to get away but only tearing itself on the wire’s tiny blades.

The ranking noncom and the little corporal stopped beating the troops off the plane and herded them to the new trouble.  Once there, they opened fire.  Removal would be less dangerous if the camels weren’t alive.

But one who hadn’t enlisted to kill dumb animals changed his mission. He knew they wouldn’t investigate, and he didn’t accompany the others. Instead, he took aim where he was and shot, and the trespassing man’s head shattered. The scraps went flying to smack the slick obsidian features of another with his own orders, a black legionnaire from the Côte d’Ivoire. As a seminary student, he always helped the unfortunate. Unable to suppress his nature or wait for morning, he’d been tip toeing his way around the ordnance in the surreal light to guide the survivors out of the trap. Now, angrily, he picked pieces of failed hope off his face.