Man in the Middle (36 page)

There were no fold-out beds, but I did see a door that I assumed led to a closet.

She said, “You’re just passing through, an impartial observer, a reluctant tourist, emotionally disconnected. I’m not. Nor are the hundred and fifty thousand soldiers and Marines fighting here. It’s life, and it’s death, and that’s how you have to play it.”

“Bullshit.”

“Is it? You didn’t even want to come. You’re here only because Phyllis and I shamed and pressured you into it.”

True enough. And yes, maybe that did make it, not easy, but at least
easier
to pass judgment. I had
my
wars,
my
battles—Panama, the first Gulf War, and Mogadishu—and as my father likes to say about
his
wars, those were the last
real
wars. No, I had no emotional connection to this one—like empathy and sympathy; I understood, I just didn’t emote. I avoided eye contact with her, opened the door, and inside was, in fact, a fold-up bed, which I reached for.

Bian said, “Look at me, Sean.”

I looked at her.

“You weren’t so judgmental tonight when we threatened those men with execution. That also is a violation of the laws of war. Going all high and mighty now doesn’t look good on you.”

There was no need to point out the difference between threatening and doing; she understood the distinction. And yes, I had crossed a line; she, on the other hand, had jumped galaxies.

She continued, “Had I been some burned-out, hyperventilating basket case, I would’ve killed those men. I couldn’t . . . and I didn’t. I deliberately wounded them. Explain that.”

I couldn’t explain it. Had it been battlefield rage or simmering racial hatred, those men wouldn’t be crippled; they’d be worm meat.

But in the eyes of the law, it mattered not whether her motive was expediency—as she claimed, to separate the chaff from bin Pacha—or, as she further rationalized, to immobilize a future battlefield threat. Shooting unarmed prisoners is, at the very least, an excessive use of force; at worst, it is a method of torture.

“Don’t be angry with me.”

“I’m disappointed in you. There’s a difference.”

“That’s worse.” I looked at her again and noticed that tears were coursing down her cheeks. She said, “I think there’s something between us . . . and . . . I . . .”

I grabbed the bed and tried to maneuver it out of the room. It was too large and unwieldy, and I said, “Give me a hand.”

“Tell me what you intend to do.”

“I’m going to report you.”

“To whom?”

“When I decide, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Am I under arrest?”

“Not yet. But consider yourself under military custody.”

“I want to finish this . . . I . . . I
have
to finish this.”

“I can’t trust you around prisoners, Bian. I’m sure I don’t need to explain why.”

“Then you’re not thinking straight. You can’t finish this without me. You know that.”

“Do I?”

“Yes. If we can get bin Pacha to talk, how many lives might that save? You have . . . This is very importent to me. Come on, we’ve come this far.”

She had a point. She understood the operating environment and she could converse in Arabic, whereas I couldn’t even ask, “Who’s handing over the moolah, bin Pacha?”

On the other hand, I could not get past the memory of those men toppling over.

She sensed that I was conflicted and said, “Satisfy your conscience after we’re done, okay? Mission first, right? What is it they say about babies and bathwater? What more damage can I accomplish?”

“Are you out of clichés yet?”

“You know I’m not.”

I looked at her. Against my better judgment, I said, “Promise you won’t shoot anybody.”

She smiled and crossed her heart. “Promise.”

“No mistreatment of the prisoners.”

“I won’t even squash a sandfly without your consent.”

“You won’t even pee without my permission.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“Give me a hand with this bed.”

She did and we carried it out to Doc Enzenauer, who in our absence had also hooked up Nervous Nellie to an IV. The doc was hovering over bin Pacha, and he looked up and said, “He’s stabilized. But without opening him up, I can’t diagnose how serious his wound is. He needs to be on an operating table right away.”

We lifted bin Pacha by his arms and feet and gently set him down on the bed. Bian explained to Enzenauer, “This is Ali bin Pacha.”

“I thought he might be.”

“So you’re aware of his importance, and the complications. There are several field hospitals nearby. But you understand the sensitivity of his identity becoming exposed?”

“I’ll give him a sedative that will keep him under and shouldn’t react badly to whatever the anesthesiologist pumps into him.” He added, “But I can’t guarantee he won’t talk.”

Bian looked at me. “Well?”

“We’ll move him first. We don’t want an ambulance coming and linking him and this airplane.”

“I hadn’t considered that.”

Enzenauer and I lifted up the cot and hauled bin Pacha out of the hangar while Bian trotted off to look for an MP with a radio to request the services of the nearest medevac facility.

I mentioned to Enzenauer, “I’ll accompany you. After he’s admitted, however, you’re on your own. Long night. I need sleep.”

“Well . . . that’s why I’m here.” He then asked me a good question. “How do we explain the victim? I assume you don’t want him recuperating in an American military hospital. So, something that justifies a release as soon as he’s ambulatory.”

An idea was forming inside my head, and I said, “Tell them he’s a member of the Saudi royal family. Shot by a terrorist, right? Stress his connection to the Saudi king and he’ll get first-class treatment.” I craned my neck around and looked back at Enzenauer. “How do we explain you?”

“That’s easy. Lots of rich Saudis retain their own personal Western physicians.”

I nearly told him I have my own proctologist, named Phyllis. He didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor, though.

He added, “I have a friend who does it. Lives in a monstrous mansion out in Great Falls. The pay is incredible.” He chuckled and said, “My wife’s always badgering me to get my own royal.”

“Now you have one. Your client, Ali al-Saud, was here on a business trip. He didn’t explain the purpose to you, because it was none of your business. Right? But he brought you here and asked if you wanted to accompany him to see the local sights. He was walking down the street, a stranger in dark clothing stepped in front of him, and bang. Completely arbitrary. Keep it simple. If they ask about you or your background, tell the truth. Just not the CIA part. The best lies stretch truth.”

He nodded.

“So you put your patient in a taxi, rushed him here to the American air base, and asked for help. You ran into me by the front gate . . . I located a medic—somebody from a unit at the airfield—he provided the IV and blood. Right?”

“Exactly how I remember it.”

“Don’t mess this up, Doc. Getting him out will be Phyllis’s problem.”

We set down the bed, and about three minutes later, Bian jogged up. She said, “An air medevac’s en route. Shouldn’t take long. They’re only three miles away as the crow flies.”

I explained our intentions and she agreed it sounded workable. I told her to remain in the airplane and babysit Nellie Nervous and reminded her not to kill him. I promised I’d be back in two hours and instructed her to call Phyllis from the plane and update her.

We heard the
whack-whack
of helicopter blades.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

G
ood news/bad news.

A suicide bomber struck near the city center, and our arrival coincided with the victims, a mass of broken, traumatized people streaming into the field hospital. Some walked or limped in; the majority were hauled in on stretchers. The admitting nurses were overwhelmed and rushing from patient to patient, sorting the horribly wounded from the merely wounded from the too far gone to save, a triage situation.

I had never seen anything like this. I had seen dead and wounded soldiers, but here the wounded were all civilians, for the most part women and children, looking bloodied and dazed as they cried out for attention and help. I saw tearful fathers carrying wounded little children, and little children standing with desperate expressions beside horribly mangled parents.

What did the terrorists hope to accomplish by this indiscriminate massacre? Worse, I overheard somebody mention that this was only half the casualties; the rest had been rushed to civilian hospitals, which eventually were overwhelmed and began diverting the overflow to the care of the U.S. military.

At one point, Enzenauer and I exchanged eye contact. The ugly irony of us bringing bin Pacha, here, at this moment in time, caught us both off guard and feeling guilty.

In this cauldron of misery and confusion, the admitting nurse asked only a few cursory questions and showed no curiosity or dubiousness about our responses before Ali bin Pacha was admitted for emergency surgery. In Iraq, it seemed, everybody has the inalienable right to get hurt without explaining why.

Doc Enzenauer dutifully emphasized the diplomatic importance of his patient to the admitting nurse, and a few minutes later repeated it word for word to an Army doctor, along with a few comments about his own credentials, which turned out to be fairly impressive—John Hopkins Med School, internship at Georgetown Hospital, specialties in psychiatry and the heart—and he was allowed to enter the surgery room as an attending physician.

I found a cup of coffee and sat and waited two hours before I could hitch a ride on a military ambulance transporting patients to the airport for evacuation to the hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. Both patients lay on stretchers, one unconscious, the other floating in and out, so dulled by drugs the difference was negligible.

An attractive nurse, who looked mildly Latina and seemed quite pleasant, rode with me in the rear of the ambulance. Her nametag read Foster, and I asked her, “What’s your first name?”

“Claudia.”

I didn’t see a wedding or engagement band, and I asked the question I ask all attractive women. “Married?”

“Five years now. My husband’s in New York City. That’s where I’m from. The Big Apple, right?”

“Isn’t that a suburb of New Jersey?” She did not seem to appreciate this comment, but she smiled a little dryly, and I asked, “Miss it?”

“What I would do for a real tuna ceviche. You know this meal? A Honduran dish. Served in a coconut shell. Muy delicioso. There’s a restaurant in the city, Patria. Real Latin food.” She laughed. “I still got four months left on this tour. My crazy husband already made a reservation for the day I get back. Is he some kind of nut or what?”

And so we passed the drive for a while; she loved her husband, she missed him, and couldn’t wait to get back and make babies by the bushel.

Claudia was Army National Guard—a part-timer—and the last thing she or her husband had expected was a combat tour that interrupted their lives. I eventually asked her, “What happened to these men?”

She pointed at the unconscious patient and said, “Sergeant Elby is a truck driver. National Guard. Like me.” She reached over and carefully adjusted his blanket, a gesture as unnecessary as it was telling.

“A roadside bomb, about a month ago. Both legs are gone, his left hip, too. Also his kidneys aren’t functioning, so he needs dialysis twice a day. The damage from these bombs is . . .” She looked away for a moment. “He might lose an arm before we’re done.”

Not they’re done, or he’s done;
we’re
done.

I glanced at Sergeant Elby—he appeared young, about twenty-five, and his face was heavily bandaged except for his nose, which was bruised, scabbed, and apparently broken. His left hand, also covered with scabs, stuck out from beneath the blanket. I noted a thick gold wedding band. I could not imagine this level of damage inflicted on a human body. In fact, I did not want to.

She stroked the hair of the other patient and commented, “Lieutenant Donnie Workman. He graduated from West Point only two years ago. Shot by a sniper during the assault on Karbala. The bullet entered his chest cavity and tumbled and ricocheted around, ripping up a heart valve and perforating a lung and his stomach. He’s touch and go.”

I watched her face as she stared down at these battered and broken men. I said, “You care deeply about them. I see that. Will you travel to Germany with them?”

“No . . . I . . .” She hesitated. “I’ll hand them off . . . to the flight crew. It’s a medical flight—good people, very competent, and . . . they don’t lose many passengers.”

She swallowed heavily and regarded their battered bodies. “We’re not supposed to become attached to our patients. But you know what? You do. A lot of them never speak to you. They can’t, right? But you learn so much about them. Always their friends stop by to check on them, and always they tell us this man is very special, and they tell us why, and these are the reasons we must save him . . . or her. Pretty soon, you know all about them.”

She seemed to be experiencing separation anxiety, and she seemed to want to talk about them. So I asked, “Like what?”

“Well . . . like Andy Elby . . . he has two children. Eloise and Elbert, six and seven. Wife’s name is Elma.” She smiled and said, “They’re from Arkansas, where funny names like that are common. You learn that stuff when you deal with a lot of patients. Anyway . . . Andy was a truck driver in civilian life, too. A simple guy. You know how that is, right? Poor guy, working full-time, doing the National Guard thing to pay for summer camp and braces for the kids. He never expected to be called up. Never expected this.”

Again I looked at Andy Elby. If he survived as far as Walter Reed hospital, Elba and the kids would join him there, staying in temporary lodgings, living hand to mouth. Having had several friends who lost limbs, I was aware of the aftermath—a numbing saga of operations as the doctors chase infections and try to cut off dead and infected tissue before it works its way up, like cancer, and destroys the body. Elba would be shocked when she saw him, and she and her kids would go through hell as the docs tried to coax and force Andy’s body back to a level where it could function on its own. As for what would come afterward, well . . . life would be different. Sad.