Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (68 page)

    
Abandoned to warriors and brigands, the
space offered little evidence of any permanent settlement—an occasional
shepherd’s hut, perched way up in some cleavage of earth, a stone well, but
nothing that resembled community or commerce. There were the skeletal remains
of bomb-gutted military transports overturned on the roadside, wheels stripped,
canvas in wind-whipped tatters, and empty crates and trunks of ordnance, but so
far, no soldiers. Francesca assured him that this would not remain the case,
that the mountains they were headed into were the heart of the Kurdish war. She
added that if the fighters weren’t on the road, that meant only that they were
in the hills, sighting down at them.

    
At four o’clock, as they began to mount a
steep grade, Francesca slowed and pulled onto the shoulder. Once Dante had
drawn up behind, he hopped out, taking a pair of binoculars up the rock.

    
“The last time we were through this pass,”
she said, “there was a Turkish army checkpoint on the other side. If it’s still
there, we may have to double back and take the long way around.”

    
Raszer ran his hands over his brown friar’s
robe, the mainstay of his disguise. “Will this getup help or hurt?” he asked
her.

    
“It probably won’t hurt,” said Francesca.
“There are still Christian missions in these mountains. And they used to let us
bring European trekkers through here in spring and fall. Things have changed,
though.” She climbed out of the car. “I’m going to pee,” she said. Shaykh Adi
followed her into the gully, presumably to do the same.

    
Raszer gave Ruthie a nod. “Go now if you
need to. If we get stuck at the checkpoint, you may not be able to get out for
a while.”

    
“So did we?” she asked again, and smiled.

    
“If you’re not sure,” he said, returning
the smile, “then I’m going to say no.”

    
She gave him her middle finger, and he got
out to have a cigarette.

    
Within sixty seconds, there was a fine
coating of dust on his shaven pate. In another sixty, the grit was in his
teeth. The wind here was abrasive enough to polish a diamond. He left the car
and hiked a couple hundred feet into the scree to collect his thoughts.
Francesca came up out of the ravine and stopped a few yards short of him, her
hands on her hips. For a moment, she made as if to speak, but didn’t.

    
Raszer crushed out the cigarette and turned
to see Dante rockhopping down the incline like a goat, the binoculars in his
hand. He arrived out of breath.

    
“What’s it look like?” asked Raszer.

    
“There’s still a checkpoint,” the boy
answered, “but it’s PKK. That’s good for us. If the Kurds control this pass,
then they probably control the whole sector.”

    
“Safe passage?”

    
“Well . . . safer. We’ve been using Kurdish
guides on our treks for years, sometimes even sharing campsites with PKK units
way up in the hills. We’re closer to Baha’i and they’re closer to Alevi
Marxists—but it’s the same root: Yezidi. ”

    
“These mountain Kurds are Yezidi?”

    
“Most of ’em. Or some variation. In five
years, this spot’ll either be the northern frontier of a Kurdish state or the
site of an Armenian-style genocide.”

    
“Let’s go,” Francesca called, heading down
the slope. “We’ve got to make another hundred miles before we stop for the
night.”

    
They piled back in, Raszer keeping his
shotgun seat. Francesca pawed through her belt pack and handed Raszer the
Canadian passport and visa that the authors of his present journey had prepared
for him.

    
“Compliments of Philby Greenstreet,” she
said.

    
Raszer examined it. It was a first-rate
job.

    
With a groan and a rattling of valves, the
Toyota crested the seven-thousand-foot pass. Along with the engine’s cacophony
was another soundprint: a high-pitched whine accompanied by a throbbing drone,
punctuated by two sonic booms.

    
“Stop the car for a sec,” said Raszer. “And
let me use your binoculars.”

    
Three miles down the narrow and precipitous
road, he could make out the checkpoint clearly. He couldn’t tell how heavily
guarded it was, but the nearby barracks suggested a small garrison. He lifted
his gaze to the sapphire sky and saw the vapor trails, then followed them to
the tiny, birdlike shapes at their head and put the field glasses to his eyes.
“Shit,” he said, then got back in the car.

    
“Those are American fighters,” he told
them. “A flyover. Wonder whose side they’re on today.”

    
“I hope they don’t mistake us for a
convoy,” was all Francesca said.

    
A scant minute later, there came another
rumble, throatier, rougher, and closer. After that, multiple drones of various
pitches. More planes. Francesca dropped the Toyota into second and braked.

    
“It’s a squadron,” she said. “Can’t tell
whose . . . probably Turkish, from the sound of the engines.”

    
“With the Americans as their escorts,” said
Raszer.

    
The mountains shook, releasing a cascade of
rock, and in the valley below, the earth erupted in flame, smoke, and soil as
if heaving up a dozen small volcanoes. When the dust cleared, what had been a
Kurdish outpost was no more.

    
“Jesus,” Ruthie hissed, perching forward to
peer over Raszer’s shoulder. “That could have been us.”

    
It took almost ten seconds for the road to
stop trembling.

    
Raszer turned to Francesca, who had stopped
the car. “Is there another road?”

    
“Not one we can get on soon. We’ll have to
make it at least to the Zap River gorge near Uludere before we have an
alternate. The road splits just past there, and there’s a low route that runs
along the river. Unfortunately, it’s popular with pirates.”

    
“Pirates?” Ruthie queried.

    
“Thieves and human traffickers,” explained
Francesca, and added, “They especially like American girls. They fetch a good
price in Bahrain.”

    
“Well, we’ll see how it looks when we get
there,” said Raszer. From his duffel he pulled out a plain white T-shirt. “Give
me a sec,” he said. He hopped out, tore the shirt down the middle, and tied it
to the antenna. “Let’s go,” he said. “Slowly. If there’s anyone alive down
there, we’re liable to get shot at coming this soon after.”

    
From two hundred yards away, they could see
that the road had been cratered and was entirely impassable. There was nothing
left of any of the standing structures but rubble and ash. The sole sign of
life lay ahead of them in what remained of the road. A soldier had been thrown
by the blast and had landed a good hundred feet from what had once been the
gate. Both arms and one leg were gone, and the remaining leg was folded
grotesquely behind him, as if he’d been a toy, dropped by a careless child. The
limbless torso arched and dropped spasmodically, a mortally injured bug pumping
out its last reflexive heartbeats. Francesca stopped ten feet short.

    
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Ruthie burst out,
just short of hysterical.

    
Gripping the wheel, Francesca drew a breath
and turned to Raszer. “We’ll have to go around. We should have enough ground
clearance. The land is pretty flat here, but . . . there may be mines.” They
blinked at each other. She nodded toward the body in the road, her jaw tight.
“What do you want to do?”

    
Raszer thought for a tick before replying.
“What I would want done.”

    
Francesca nodded, and Raszer stepped out.
She was close behind him. He dropped to a squat beside the soldier, the hem of
his priest’s garment wicking up the young guard’s blood from the road. He was
not more than twenty, and twitching uncontrollably. Raszer made the sign of the
cross, then took his thumb and forefinger and laid them gently on the soldier’s
eyelids. “Let’s get you home,” he said. He slipped the soldier’s pistol from
his belt and put the barrel to the young man’s fire-blackened forehead.
He must be cold
, Raszer thought, his own
hand shaking. Then he fired.

    
Francesca, beside him now, wore an
expression he couldn’t decipher, and it shook him. He kept the gun, retrieved a
box of cartridges from the soldier’s pouch, and said, “Let’s go.”

    
They returned to the cars and talked
soberly as a group about the course they would take to avoid tripping land
mines. Reasoning mines would lie on the perimeter rather than close in, they
opted for a route that took them directly through the ruins, even if that meant
driving the Land Cruisers over smoldering piles of wood and heaps of fallen
brick that might conceal their own perils. Francesca eyed the pistol warily as
Raszer got back in.

    
“I know,” said Raszer. “I don’t like them
either. Do you want me to drive?” She shook her head.

    
They rolled through the fallen outpost at a
deliberate pace. Too fast would have been foolhardy, and too slow would have
invited fire from any possible survivors. There was a fifty-foot span of open
scrub on the southeast boundary of the compound to be crossed before they could
return to solid pavement, and it presented the greatest hazard.

    
It was the only place Francesca hesitated.

    
Raszer thought they ought to hug the road
as closely as possible, but he kept his own counsel and let the driver drive.
The killing of the young soldier was in his blood like venom. He knew he’d done
what the moment’s truth called for, but he couldn’t shake the doubt. The bombs
had taken the soldier’s limbs, but Raszer had taken his life. Would he have
done the same on a Jerusalem street in the aftermath of a suicide bombing? No.
Different rules applied. Under those rules, he’d have stayed at the man’s side
until the stretchers came, and then walked away clean, knowing full well that
too much blood had already been lost, and that even if by some chance the
soldier did survive, he’d curse his rescuer. Human choice is about what is
exigent, and exigencies are different in a war zone. Raszer knew all this, but
it didn’t stop the ache.

    
Suddenly, the front wheels hit pavement,
and two seconds later they were clear. Dante’s vehicle, however, had slipped
into a rut carved by the bombs, and his rear wheels were stuck and spinning.

    
“Fuck. I’ll go back and give him a push,”
Raszer said, opening his door.

    
“No,” Francesca said firmly. “No. He’ll get
himself out. Stay where you are.”

    
He knew she was right, but he could see
that her teeth were on edge. As a leader, she’d had to calculate the
incalculable: the awful preferability of losing one, rather than two or more.
“But if he keeps spinning his tires, he’ll dig up whatever’s down there.”
 
“He’ll get himself out,” she said. “I know he
will.”

    
Raszer watched the car through the dust-caked
rear window and realized that his impulse had been partly penitential, and
penitential heroism is usually suicide.

    
“Thatta boy,” he whispered, as Dante’s
tires finally bit into earth.

    
“Easy, now,” Francesca urged.

    
“He’s out!” Ruthie cheered, as the Cruiser
lurched forward.

    
“Now just follow my tracks, Dante,” said
Francesca. “Follow my tracks.”

    
“Hoo-wah!” Ruthie shouted when Dante was
safely across the shoulder.

    
And though the specter of bombs and blood
hung in the air like smoke, the earlier fractiousness faded and they began, at
last, to feel like one.

    
For the next forty minutes, they kept the
speed moderate and traveled without incident, although the road was pocked with
bomb craters every few miles, as well as with other evidence of the combat that
had torn the mountains for nearly two decades. On the high, flinty ridges,
Raszer glimpsed the remains of Nestorian churches; higher still were what
appeared to be much older ruins, windswept citadels of the Assyrian culture
that had once commanded all within reach of the Tigris. It was as rugged as the
Hindu Kush and just as unconquerable. How the Turks thought they’d ever keep it
from the indigenous Kurds was beyond his imagining, but they were still trying,
almost a century after the meddlesome West had carelessly drawn its borders.

    
No one, he thought—not even the legions of
an empire—keeps land like this from its tribal stewards. But nations and
jealous husbands are forever trying to hold on to what can’t be kept, and
now—against all logic—Turkey had the help of its NATO ally.