Khyber Run (24 page)

"Momand!” Oscar slapped me. “Zarak Momand!"

"I fucked the vein, Gunny. This ain't working."

"Make it work,” Oscar growled.

"Well, fuck. Where else can I try?"

"How the fuck should I know? Get on the phone and ask! Zarak!” Something stank, burned up my nose, unbearable. I turned away. The burning smell followed me.

Out of sight, other men talked. Trauma room discussion.
Jugular vein. Behind the ear down to the collarbone here. Take a second to study the diagram. Stick your finger here, right above the collarbone. Slide the needle into the vein at a real low angle...

Something stung my neck. I tried to move, tried to swat the bug, but Oscar's knees held my head, and Oscar's hands held mine.

Something real cold went through the side of my head, seeped through my brain. I shivered helplessly.

"Wezgorrey! Ricky!"

I tried to shake my head, but something held it still. “My name is Zarak."

"Then sit
up
, Zarak."

I sat up, to my astonishment, and almost passed out. Oscar caught me about the shoulders.

A pale young man stood over me, holding a plasma bag, the clear liquid catching the sunlight and reflecting it piercingly into my eyes.

I took a couple of deep breaths, scented with the faintly Listerine-like flavor of za'atar and ammonia somewhere. I felt...better.

I tried to find a nonbloody part of my sleeve to wipe my eyes, then saw a stack of bandages and used the top one of those.

The youngster's shadow swayed.

I looked up and saw the taut face, the white line around his mouth. My protective instinct stirred. “You. Sit down. Now."

He sat, hard, and looked surprised. “Yes, sir... Doc."

He was a one-striper, probably eighteen or barely nineteen. Poor kid. At least he held the plasma high overhead, so it would keep dripping its restorative magic into my neck. The helo passed over us again, and we all shivered in the blasting wash of wind. “Can't that thing land?"

"No, Doc. Not anywhere nearby. We're going to have to bring you up in a body basket. You and...uh...it."

I looked in the direction he couldn't. Tango's sleeves had caught in the branches of a shrub or young tree, and his blood leeched into the sandy ground amid the broken herbs, drawing a line toward another taller bush. I realized the herbs were lines between young trees, and that Tango's body had broken half the branches off one. Well, what lived would be heartily nourished; the gardener wouldn't lose all that much, inshallah.

This clotting stuff needed to get out of my arm before lack of blood perfusion did some damage. “Tell them to drop the basket. I'm ready."

I got into the basket with only a little help. I'd rather have ridden up in a loop, like Oscar and the private, but lying quietly in a basket is less humiliating than trying to ride a loop and falling out of it.

The helo landed at a base somewhere. The medics spoke German or something. A translator assured me they would put me under general anesthetic to patch up my arms. I didn't need it and swore at them. I was a trauma expert, and—

They popped a needle in me. I blinked right out.

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A rough, warm voice prayed at my shoulder. A rough, warm hand held my right hand. I couldn't feel the left hand and opened my eyes in a panic to look for it. It lay atop a sheet with a temporary cast encasing my forearm.

Pins had been taped to my fingertips and elastic bands ran from the pins to hooks set in the cast. Extensor tendon stretchers. Okay.

I took a breath in relief and looked to the other side at Oscar...not Oscar.

Some other dark-haired marine held my hand and prayed in classical Arabic. He was built like a fullback. He lifted a face as familiar as my father's, down to the wire-rimmed glasses. Hooded eyes bored into mine. “Are you awake or still just goggling the room?"

"Omar."

His eyes softened. “Yes. Do you need water?"

I did. He slid an arm under my shoulders and held a cup for me. The water tasted canned. I drank it anyway. Then he brushed a wrinkle from my pillow and laid me back down.

So this is what Omar looked like as a man. His glasses weren't nearly as thick as our father's, but he wasn't yet thirty, either. “You must take care of your eyes. The weakness..."

"I know. I'm seeing yet another specialist next week."

We looked at one another a while, the years between us dissolving. He'd prayed in Arabic. I hoped that meant he'd forgiven me for teaching him how. Even though some of the lessons had come violently. I should have found a softer way, appealed to his intellect perhaps. So many regrets. So many years.

He cleared his throat. “Blue will be here shortly. We can't believe you found the folks. We've been looking for over two years."

"They'd moved. Ben found them too.” I thought of saying where, but the walls were flimsy, and I of all people knew that whatever was said in any part of a hospital would soon be heard in every part of the hospital.

His hand tightened on mine, and his eyes searched mine. He glanced about and whispered one word. “Badal."

"Khallas.” It was over.

Again, his eyes searched mine. He nodded shortly.

"Echo, how is he?"

"Hairline fractures at C1/C2 and at C5. I'm told he was in surgery before the swelling set in, though. They're confident he'll see full recovery."

A C5 break was the hangman's fracture. “Is he here?"

"No, Germany. Landstuhl. They have facilities you wouldn't believe."

Germany. I'd been to Berlin once, a gray city with gray-black streets, steel gray water, mottled gray snow, grayish lumpen food, and gray-white skies. “Will I be staying here, or going back to my ship?"

"Here, unless you really want to head back to the ship. I've got the use of a place in Plywood Alley for two weeks. Tomorrow, when you're released, you can come stay there. You've got another ten days on TAD, but my unit's on maneuvers—"

"Cap'n?” A voice rose sharply from beyond the door. “Cap'n Momand?"

Omar rolled his eyes. “You think you can yell any louder, Kilo? This is a hospital."

An officer? My brother was an officer?

Sorrow had been an officer too. Somehow, that part of it struck only now.

A skinny kid poked his head in the door. “Sir, the MPs have Lima and Delta. Remember yesterday some jerks was up in that prayer tower, dropping candy for kids and shooting them with rubber bullets when...uh..."

His pale eyes were fixed on my right hand, folded possessively in my brother's. He gulped and red rushed through his face.

Omar clasped his other hand over mine. “Zarak, this is my radioman, Private Kellner. Kilo, meet my older brother, HM1 Momand. You may call him Doc."

"Oh! Honored to meet you, Doc."

I nodded at him, “Hello, Kilo."

"Cap'n?"

"Go,” I told them, extracting my hand from Omar's. “Rescue your men. Come back, if you get a chance, and tell me how it went."

An aide checked my vitals, spoke cheerfully to me in some language that might have been German or Swahili for all I knew, and helped me locate the head. I think I had just agreed to be shaved when Blue arrived: First Lieutenant Mohammed Momand. He looked too much like Echo, and he didn't know what to do with his hands, or where to look, or what to say to me. I shooed away the aide, not before he exchanged a few chipper-sounding words with Blue.

Blue turned a motorcycle helmet over in his hands and set it on a too-narrow shelf overhead. It fell. He caught it and set it again more precisely. It fell again. He stood and put it on the seat. “I'm sorry. I thought y'all could just arrest him."

Him. Tango. “The mission was your idea?"

He shook his head vigorously. “I don't have the pull to authorize any of this. I just knew I couldn't speak enough of the language any more, and I feel like people spit in my food every time I sit down in a restaurant here. Omar's got the local lingo, but he's also got so much fucking responsibility."

He paced to the door, listened at it, and paced back. “You've always been the one who could do things. I knew if anyone could figure out this mess without creating an international incident, you could."

"Blue, come here."

He came to sit on the edge of my cot.

I touched one polished-gold eyebrow. His flinch hurt. “Did I create an international incident?"

He stood and paced. “No. At least not yet. And if things stay quiet another twenty-four, we can all relax a little."

"Then why are you so anxious?"

He quirked a grin. “Well, you're never going to play the piano again."

I laughed, shocked. When would I ever play the piano?

Blue grinned more broadly. Then his face went serious again. “Are you going to disappear on us again? Do you hate us that much?"

That cut deep, twisting a blade in my heart. “Do you hate me?"

"No."

That wasn't a completely true answer. “Are you a Muslim?"

He squirmed. “Not a good one. I...I sing."

I remembered the times I'd beaten him for singing with the radio, for sneaking into the piano room when he thought I couldn't hear and picking out tunes of Godless songs. “I am no longer required to act as your father, Blue. Your soul is your own."

He clasped my hand then and spoke in a rush. “I have a girlfriend. I'd love for you to meet her."

I smiled sadly. A girlfriend, not a wife. But I'd said the truth. His soul was his own, and I no longer had the burden or privilege of forging the weapon he was becoming.

The next day, Omar not having returned yet, I was discharged into Blue's care. I reluctantly let him tie my shemagh for me, and even more reluctantly climbed onto the back of his motorcycle. These things had always terrified me, ever since my first ride had ended in a road rash all along my right side. Luckily, his was a very quiet Japanese machine, not one of those helicopter-loud Harleys. Unfortunately, he decided I needed a tour of the city and took me around for many blocks, bellowing information about this landmark, or the musical taste of the assholes in that Toyota.

Suddenly, I knew where we were. “Stop!"

I climbed off the motorcycle, and Blue killed the engine. A group of laborers was cleaning out the ruins of the shop where I'd sat waiting for my garden seeds. The man who sang wasn't in sight.

The baked mud shell of the place remained, but it stank of wet char. “What happened to the man who was here?"

The foreman, identified by the fact he wasn't holding a shovel, squinted at me, at Blue, and back at me.

I awkwardly pried off my helmet and unwrapped my shemagh for the sake of good manners. “The man, the mujahid with no hands."

"That one? He was neither Sunni nor Shia, and then he became too friendly with the English. And so he met judgment. The boy is gone. The English took the girl. She might live.” He shrugged. “Inshallah."

The English
meant me and Oscar and the sergeant. Because of us, because of me, that inoffensive man had been killed, probably beaten to death. His little girl was in a hospital or an orphanage, the boy conscripted or sent for brainwashing. The little girl had a grandmother—was she begging beside the road, under one of these innumerable dusty burqas? My stomach twisted, but I kept my tone calm. “Did they bury his hands with him?"

"Of course, of course.” He seemed insulted that I'd feel any need to ask.

"Come on,” Blue urged. “We need to keep moving here."

I straddled his machine again. They'd given me two weeks here. How many lives could I destroy in that time?

The shack in Plywood Alley smelled of roach spray. Blue threw open both windows. An air conditioner was set in the middle of the front door. I turned the fan on full power.

"Fucking noisy,” Blue complained.

Noisy, yes. Did everything require a vulgar epithet, though?

But a week ago I'd been the one throwing
f
-bombs everywhere.

He checked the fridge, tossed a ginger ale to me, and popped the tab on a can of Coke. “I'd say home sweet home, but I've seen better dog kennels."

I sat down at the metal desk in the center of the room and elevated my arm in its sling. The pain pills had worn off—or been vibrated off. I wiped the top of the can, then braced the can with my elbow while picking at the pull tab.

"I swear, Z. You talked to that man like a native."

"I am a native,” I said quietly. The tab came up, foaming soda all over the lid of the can.

He paced, fidgeting, looked at me, and paced more.

I watched him. The room had two reading lamps, two unmade racks with linens folded at the foot, two windows, an empty bookshelf, a two-burner stove, the fridge, and the air conditioner in the door. There wasn't a lot to explore. “What aren't you telling me, brother?"

"You found the folks? You really went right over there and found them?"

"The border isn't exactly tight."

"Are they like you used to be? All inshallah, bismillah, alhamdulillah?"

My head hurt. My hand hurt. I sipped at the stinging-cold ginger ale. “Where do you think I got it from? Is this a problem for you?"

He swung his arms, cracking his knuckles against the fridge, and swore. Then he ran his fingers through his spiky white-blond hair. “I've spent all this time trying to prove I can be Muslim yet not be a religious freak. Now I don't know if I meet the standards at all."

I'd had the opposite discussion with a seaman recruit that Chaps brought to me a month ago, one who had just discovered Islam and thought being obedient had to mean being obnoxiously obtrusive. “Saying these things is a cultural norm, not a religious requirement. There are Christians who don't say ‘Praise Jesus’ out loud five or six times a day, just as there are Christians who do. If you don't pay attention to the words, they're just noises anyway. Their function is to focus your mind where it needs to be."

He grinned crookedly. “The holy words are just noises. I never thought I'd hear you say something like that."

I smiled back, though my head hurt too much to really care whether it looked right. “I'm not a teenager any more. From this side of thirty, I can see the difference between mellowing out and selling out."