The white-pine desk in Sarah’s bedroom had been stacked with real books and yellow legal pads filled with her small printing. She loved antiques, loved computers with keyboards and ballpoint pens, comic books and DVDs. There wasn’t a single photograph of Sarah’s mother in the room, not now, not ever. Katherine Dougan had disappeared just after her husband’s assassination and was widely regarded as having had a part in the conspiracy that had killed him, an attempt by radical Christians to destabilize the new Muslim regime. Despite Redbeard’s best efforts, she had not been found, and though the active search for her had long since been called off, Redbeard forbade even her name to be mentioned in the house.
Rakkim remembered wandering through the villa after he’d first arrived, room after room, remembered dipping a toe into the swimming pool and telling himself not to get too comfortable here, that it could all end as suddenly as it had begun. He was barely nine, street-smart and wary; Sarah was five, an orphan just like he was, lively and smart, already reading. The first time they met, she looked relieved to see him, as though she had been awaiting his arrival for a long time.
They had grown up together in that great house, swam laps and splashed in the pool, collected bugs in the woods with their bodyguards, and worked on their homework side by side in the study. A confirmed moderate, Redbeard had insisted that Sarah be as well educated as any male, encouraged to ask questions, allowed to play sports and wear contemporary clothing, except on the Sabbath. After her book came out, he probably regretted not being more strict with her.
The back road gave way to an even narrower road. He kept his eyes open for the glint of broken glass or cables stretched from tree to tree-people traveled here at their own risk. Even the army only drove through by convoy. He didn’t mind. In thirty miles the road got even rougher, became a web of winding gravel and dirt roads, abandoned mining paths, railroad rights-of-way, and forest service roads, most of them no longer on any maps.
Maps were only an approximation, that’s what he had learned in the Fedayeen. Trust your instincts, trust your eyes, and trust your brother Fedayeen. Only when all else fails should you trust a map. So what was he to make of the map he had seen in Sarah’s room tonight? A world map hanging over her desk, colored pushpins stuck in various places, all of them evidently related to her studies in recent American history.
Red pushpins marked the Islamic Republic’s early military forays into the Bible Belt: Charleston, Richmond, Knoxville, Abilene, New Orleans. All of their attacks had been rebuffed, the breakaway Christians fighting like rabid dogs, fighting to the death, blowing themselves to pieces rather than being captured. The Bible Belt counterattacks were marked with yellow pushpins…Chicago, Indianapolis, Topeka, Newark. What a meat-grinder Newark had been; over five hundred thousand dead, most of them civilians. After Newark the calls for an armistice had been too loud for either side to ignore. The false peace had lasted ever since.
Gold pins indicated Rakkim’s own Fedayeen operations, the ones Sarah knew about anyway. While the army had been relegated to a strictly defensive role since the treaty, the Fedayeen’s elite units mounted covert operations both at home and abroad. Gold pins were stuck in the Mormon territories of Utah and Colorado, a few more in Idaho and Montana when they had moved against Aryan Identity holdouts, more pins in Brazil and Nigeria. There were no gold pins to mark his last six years of service. No gold pins for his solitary reconnaissance insertions into the Bible Belt itself. No gold pins for Corpus Christi and Nashville, Biloxi or Atlanta. It was just as well.
Rakkim had seen something odd on the map in her bedroom. Squinting. It was only when the angle was right that he could spot the perforation in the center of China. He had moved closer, swept his hand across the map, felt the indentation. There was a pinhole on the Yangtze River. The only hole in the map without a pin to mark it. It wasn’t a mistake or a miss. There were no pins anywhere in China. Just a single pinhole in the middle of nowhere. There had never been a military attack on China by the Islamic Republic. China, the world’s only superpower, had maintained strict neutrality during the turmoil that had followed the Zionist Betrayal. So why had Sarah marked the Yangtze?
Rakkim slowed the car, looking for the spot…the cutoff. He had used it before, but it was hard to see in the rain. It was right after a sharp twist in the road, where his taillights would be hidden from anyone following. He crept along. There. He braked gently, then backed into the brush, branches slapping the sides of the car as he parked perpendicular to the road. Engine purring. Lights out. He rolled down the window slightly, the damp sweetness of the forest filling the interior. Rain dripped off the trees, sizzling on the hot hood of the car, and he thought of Sarah.
He had been eighteen when things had shifted between the two of them. Excited at leaving home for the Fedayeen Military Academy, Rakkim had bent down to kiss her good-bye.
“I’m going to marry you someday,” she had whispered, clinging to his neck. She was only thirteen, thin and gangly, but she spoke with the certainty of a woman.
He tugged at her hair, thinking she was joking.
She clung on to him. “You know it’s true.”
He laughed it off, but as the years passed, he felt the attraction too. Every time he came home on leave, she was more mature, wiser, still able to get inside him with a smirk or a knowing glance. Their feelings were never acted upon, rarely even spoken of, too powerful for words. Under Redbeard’s urging, Sarah had agreed to attend mosque with the son of the Senate majority leader, the two of them going for long walks afterward, chaperoned of course. The courtship lasted four months before she put an end to it. That spring, Rakkim just back from the Bible Belt, they walked into Redbeard’s office and asked for his blessing. Rakkim was twenty-five, freshly promoted and with the offer of a staff posting in the city. Sarah had finished university. They were in love. It was time to marry.
“Out of the question,” Redbeard had rumbled. Rakkim had argued his prospects while Sarah had assured Redbeard of the purity of their love and the propriety of their behavior. Redbeard dismissed their arguments with a wave of his hand. Then he dismissed Rakkim.
Perhaps if Rakkim had stayed Fedayeen he could have obeyed Redbeard’s order not to see Sarah again. Already on the fast track to command, honored for his courage and initiative, he could have married, had children, and continued to serve his country. Instead, after two more lengthy missions into the Bible Belt, Rakkim resigned his commission and moved to the Zone. Every day he thought about contacting Sarah, but she acted first. A year and a half ago, a lightly veiled older woman had bumped into him outside the military museum, pressed a message chip into his hand, and hurried away.
The next day Sarah slid beside him in the back row of a darkened movie theater. “I thought Fedayeen were bold. I kept waiting to hear from you. Were you going to let Redbeard decide your whole life-?”
Rakkim kissed her.
“That’s better.” Sarah stroked his face.
They had met every week or so for the next year, sometimes in the early evening under cover of darkness, sometimes in midmorning when she didn’t have classes, but always carefully-he had conducted military raids with less planning. Their affair was dangerous and doomed to discovery, but sweeter somehow because of it. Once after a policeman recognized Rakkim and shook his hand, they had promised to end the affair. The promise was broken a week later under a crescent moon, a lovers’ smile in the night.