Inside Straight

They saw four women and a boy trying to pull a horse wagon of the sort his father used to carry tourists up the mountain. Jonathan took a picture with his cell phone. They saw a mother with three infants on her back, and a man with a wrinkled old woman slung across his shoulders. Jonathan snapped them both. They even saw a thin young girl pushing a wire grocery cart as tall as she was. Inside it was a squalling infant with a missing leg, on a bed of rags. “A poignant image of displacement,” said Jonathan, as he took the picture. Hundreds clutched backpacks, suitcases, and bundles, and all of them were shoving, stumbling into one another in their haste to get away. Some appeared to be near the point of collapse. Klaus had seldom felt so angry or so helpless as he did watching the human river flow past him. He wondered how many would live long enough to see Lake Nasser.

“It’s time.” John Fortune was mounted on a l ong-necked Arabian mare, a lean red horse bred for the desert sands.

Klaus mounted up beside him on an Arab mare as black as the Egyptian night, while Jonathan climbed gingerly onto an old dun-colored gelding. Hive had his legs today, but under his keffiyeh both his ears were missing, along with his pinkies, ring fingers, and two toes off each foot. Klaus had not inquired about his genitals, although it struck him that Jonathan had sent out more wasps than could be accounted for with just some toes and fingers.

The horses were a parting gift from Sobek. “They will not run out of gasoline, at least,” the crocodile god had told them. John Fortune turned out to be a skilled rider. He’d gotten a pony for his seventh birthday, he told Klaus, and had taken riding lessons all through his teenage years. “Never rode without a helmet, though. Mom was afraid that if I fell it would trigger my wild card and turn me into a bowling ball with tentacles.”

Or a fire-breathing lion. Klaus was good with horses too, though these spirited Arabians were more temperamental than his father’s huge German plow pullers.

Sobek had seen to their clothing, too, providing them with Bedouin garb better suited to the red lands than denim cutoffs and American Hero T-shirts. “Hey, cool, Lawrence of Arabia,” Jonathan had enthused when the three of them donned their Arab clothing for the first time. In his blog he wrote that John Fortune made a good Omar Sharif and Lohengrin could pass for Peter O’Toole on steroids, but “Anthony Quinn I’m not, though I did like him in that Zorro the Greek flick.”

The whole world was moving south, but the three of them rode north. Jonathan’s wasps had seen detachments from the Egyptian Third Army moving rapidly down the Nile. They had guns and tanks and planes, just as Sobek had foreseen. Wherever they encountered jokers they shot them out of hand. With them came the jackals of Ikhlas al-Din, flying the flag of the caliphate.

“We cannot hope to win this fight,” John Fortune told them, when they stopped for a drink of cool water late that afternoon. “There are too many of them, and only three of us. All we can hope to do is confuse them, delay them, and buy some time for our own people. We need to dart in, sting them, then turn and fly away to sting again somewhere else, like Jonathan’s wasps.”

“Ja,” said Klaus. “Sting and run. I understand.”

“Righto,” said Jonathan. “But you know, sometimes when you sting someone they swat at you. Just thought I’d mention that. Sometimes all the wasps don’t make it back.”

John Fortune nodded thoughtfully. “Jonathan, it was brave of you to stay, but—”

“I overslept,” said Bugsy. “That’s all it was. I missed the bloody boat, so what the hell. Missus Hive’s little bug is in. Fucker tried to cut my head off!” He scratched under his keffiyeh. “I’m thinking tanks. If I can find some way to get inside, twenty, thirty wasps could really mess up a crew. Sting their hands, their arms, their faces. Crawl inside their pants and sting their dicks. I’ll lose some bugs, but there’s more where they came from. You think if I fly down that big cannon on the turret, I’d pop out inside the motherfucker, or what?”

“Try it. Let us know.” John smiled. “Too bad Rustbelt isn’t with us. He’s the guy you really want for tanks.”

As the sun was sinking in the west, Jonathan reported that the advance units of the Third Army had left the river. “Where the road makes its big loop, they’re cutting straight across the desert. Armored cars, tanks, infantry. Apaches, too. Fuck it, I hate helicopers. The backwash blows my bugs to hell and gone.”