Chapter - 2

  “Shadows in the sky”

  The boy watched the trucks carefully.

  These men shouted to each other constantly.

  Their words meant nothing to him , a language he did not know .

  Sharp sounds and Quick orders.

  But their movements were easy to understand.They were preparing for something.The trucks stopped along the ridge lines and shallow dunes.Machine guns were turned toward the northern horizon.

  The men waited.

  Minutes passed.

  Then the ground began shaking again .

  Stronger this time than the last.

  Much stronger.

  Through the binoculars, dark shapes slowly appeared across the open desert.

  Metal.

  Heavy metal.

  Tanks

  Behind them rolled armored vehicles and transport trucks carrying soldiers . A lot of them .

  Black smoke drifted from their engines as they crawled forward across the open sand.

  The machines looked enormous , but were also slow , patient and observing .

  One of the children gasped.

  The boy adjusted the focus of the binoculars.

  Flags moved above several vehicles.

  Green cloth snapping in the wind.

  He did not know the country.

  But he understood what he was looking at.

  An army - of men and of metal .

  The pickup trucks started moving first.

  Engines roared to life all at once.

  The vehicles rushed forward across the desert, spreading out in a wide arc. The scorching sun shining above them .

  Machine guns began to fire and long streams of tracer rounds cut through the air - colorful green and red .

  The tanks did not hurry.

  Their cannons slowly turned.

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  One of them fired.

  First came a flash and the sound came a moment later . Thunderous.

  A thunder that shook the valley.

  A pickup truck disappeared in an explosion of fire and sand.

  The children screamed and ducked behind the rocks. What else could they do …?

  The boy stayed where he was and watched the trucks circle and attack from different angles, firing constantly while avoiding the slow turning cannons.

  Some came dangerously close to the armored vehicles , but every time a tank fired, another truck vanished.

  The desert was now filled with smoke.

  Then a new sound arrived.

  A distant roar from above.

  Different from engines on the ground.

  The boy looked up.

  Dark shapes cut across the sky.

  Aircrafts .

  They moved fast.

  Too fast.

  The machines screamed over the battlefield and suddenly the earth erupted again.

  Explosions burst among the pickup trucks . Columns of red sand shot into the air .

  One truck flipped violently onto its side.

  Another simply disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

  The aircraft climbed and turned gracefully in the sky before diving again.

  The boy watched silently.

  The machines above were different from everything else.

  They did not crawl across the desert like the tanks.

  They ruled over the sky. Untouchable they seemed .

  For a moment he imagined the pilots inside them.

  Men sitting safely behind glass and steel.

  Looking down at the battlefield.

  Looking down at the trucks.

  Looking down at the soldiers.

  Looking down at the villages.

  Looking down at the children hiding among the rocks.

  From that height, the people below must look very small , like insects maybe , like ants moving across the sand …

  The aircraft passed overhead again, their shadows sliding across the ground.

  The boy felt something strange as he watched them.

  Not fear.

  Something colder.

  An understanding that these flying machines were built by men .

  Forged from steel and designed carefully and constructed piece by piece.

  Only for one purpose.

  To destroy other men.

  He looked down at the battle again.

  Trucks burning and soldiers running , sometimes on the sand and rocks , but sometimes over corpses of friend and foe alike .

  Tanks still pushed forward through the smoke.

  Everything on the ground looked chaotic and fragile.

  Human life - “ insignificant “.

  But the aircraft above moved with calm precision , like predators on the hunt .

  The boy lowered his binoculars slowly and for the first time did he understand how small people really were . How fragile human life was .

  A man could spend his entire life in the desert.

  Struggling.

  Fighting.

  Surviving.

  And yet from the sky he would look no larger than an ant beneath an elephant’s foot.

  The battle continued below.

  More trucks were burnt and more smoke filled the sky .

  More explosions this time .

  But the boy’s thoughts had already moved somewhere else.

  He remembered the tall man who lived beyond the canyon.

  The one who wore black robes.

  The man who gathered the children together every night and spoke about the world.

  The man who always said the same thing.

  “Power does not belong to the ones born strong but to those willing to take it by any means”

  At the time, the boy could not understand the meaning of his words ,but now as he watched the aircraft turn in the sky.

  And he began to understand quite clearly .

  He was small and he needed to get stronger , enough to get power himself .