Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (71 page)

    
There wasn’t a third scream. Some signal
from Ruthie’s brain stem must have told her to play dead. The silhouette was as
motionless as a mannequin and all the weirder for that. Raszer crept up to the
flap and took hold of the hem, then turned to order Shaykh Adi to sit and stay
well back from the tent. For whatever it might be worth, he delivered the
instruction in Arabic. He knew that whatever kind of creature might squat
behind the flap needed to be given a clear exit route. Hearing neither movement
nor the rapid breathing of an animal, and smelling nothing but the mineral
wind, he began to wonder if she’d merely spooked herself, but he called out
anyway: “I have a gun aimed at your head. Back away from the girl. Drop your
weapon and crawl out of the tent, or your brains will be on the canvas.”

    
He heard a tiny voice, at first
unrecognizable. It came only from the throat.

    
“Stephan . . . it’s . . . it’s a . . . ”

    
It was Francesca.

    
“ . . . Ss . . . ss . . . ”

    
“Oh, fuck,” he said under his breath, and
drew back the flap gingerly. Coiled at the foot of Ruthie’s sleeping bag was a
mature puff adder, its jeweled skin glistening. If it struck, she would likely
die; they could not get her to an antidote in time.

    
“Okay, Ruthie,” he said softly. “That’s
good. Keep still. Shallow breaths. Very slowly, slip your hands inside the
sleeping bag . . . ” He opened the flap as far as it would go and laid its
corner on the damp canvas of the tent’s roof. For the moment, it held. He set
the pistol on the ground and checked to see that his knife was still in its
ankle sheath. “If your sleeping bag is like mine, it has both outside and
inside zipper pulls. See if you can feel for it with your right hand. Easy.
Don’t let him see any movement. When you’ve got hold of it . . . blink.” She
did as she was told. A few seconds later, her eyelids came down. “All right, good.
Now unzip it as far as you can go without moving your upper body.”

    
He watched her forearm sink into the bag
and stop just above the elbow.

    
 
Shit
.

    
“That’s not enough,” he said. “Go a few
more inches; let your right shoulder follow your arm . . . like a nice, easy
stretch . . . Keep your left shoulder and your head still. That’s it. Just a
couple more. Easy.”

    
He took a breath. “Okay. Good. Now breathe.
Pull the air into your lungs, steady and slow . . . a little at a time, like a
balloon.”

    
Raszer dropped to a squat, unsnapped the straps
of his ankle sheath, and slipped out the seven-inch blade, setting it on the
ground just outside the door. He heard Shaykh Adi growling and turned to see
the fur along the dog’s spine standing erect.

    
“Easy, old man,” he said.

    
He pivoted back to Ruthie. “Hold that
breath in,” he said in a soft monotone. “Now bring both hands back to where
your knees are. Palms up. Fingers straight and together.”

    
She blinked once.

    
“Good. When I say, ‘Now,’ you throw that
sleeping bag over the snake as completely as you can. Don’t stop to check your
work. Roll right across the tent to the farthest corner, where Francesca is.
And then don’t make a move.”

    
The adder had taken all this in without
comment. Only a reptile could have maintained such composure. Any mammal would
have turned at least once to observe the threat from its rear.

    
Raszer inched closer, “
Now!
” he said.

    
She did as instructed—albeit stiffly--but
almost immediately the snake sensed its entrapment and began to move. A bad
situation, but Raszer was in it now, so he threw himself on top of the sleeping
bag and felt frantically for the snake’s bulk beneath the fabric. The sensation
of taut, sinuous movement under his belly made him shudder. This was a
formidable creature.

    
Once he had both hands around its middle,
he began instantly to feel for the head, for he knew he had to have a grip on
it before attempting to take the snake outside. He felt a narrowing and finally
a slight yielding at the glands and clamped down. The sleeping bag’s slippery
nylon lining gave him dubious grip, but there was no time to waste, so he
pushed back from the balls of his feet and shot out backward through the flap,
bringing the bag and its flailing contents with him.

    
“The knife, Dante!” he shouted. “Give me
the knife!” He rolled over on top of the writhing serpent, only barely able to
maintain a hold on its gullet. He felt the knife’s leather grip slap against
the palm of his right hand.

    
“I need light,” he called to Dante, who was
momentarily rooted in a paralysis he couldn’t free himself from. “Light!”
Raszer shouted again, the snake’s tail whipping, its entire body convulsing in
the effort to break his grip.

    
An agonizing instant later, the light
flicked on and Dante and held the beam shakily on the edge of the bag, where
only the tongue could be seen, still flicking maniacally in and out of the
nylon cocoon.

    
“Thanks,” Raszer said, then glanced at
Dante. “Are you all right?”

    
“I will be,” came the answer. Dante dropped
to his knees. “I’ll grab hold of the tail and try to stop him wriggling. When
you cut, cut high . . . just below the skull. If you hit the right notch, the
knife will go through like butter.”

    
Raszer flattened out his body and squeezed
hard. He’d have to slip his hand down to expose the head and access the soft
spot. That would mean momentarily loosening his grip. The spill from the
flashlight caught the gold glint in Shaykh Adi’s eyes. The dog had moved in
close and was watching the snake’s tail whip. His growl was feral, his
attention rapt.

    
Raszer rested the knife’s edge alongside
his knuckle and used the blade to lever his hand out of the way. He found the
notch behind the skull and put all his weight into the slice. The reptile’s
reaction was electric: As soon as it felt the blade’s bite, it summoned all its
strength into its midsection and writhed violently, shaking its head free in
one massive convulsion. Raszer felt the head slide from his palm and his life
slip into thin air.

    
He sprung back and waited for the attack.

    
But it didn’t come. In the instant of the
adder’s escape from Raszer’s grip, Shaykh Adi’s powerful canine jaws had found
its tender neck and clamped down hard.

    
Dante swung around and turned the
flashlight on him. The dog had carried the writhing animal to the remains of
the fire and was now shaking all four feet of it violently over the still-warm
coals. The snake arched and recoiled and whipped help-lessly for a while and
then, finally, went limp. Adi held it in his jaws for a few moments longer to
be sure, then flung it onto the coals. A conclusive hiss rose from the embers.

    
Dante came to Raszer’s side. “I’m sorry,”
he said. “I was slow on the uptake.”

    
“Don’t beat yourself up,” Raszer replied.
“Snakes scare the best of us.” He gave Dante’s shoulder a squeeze, but his
confidence in the boy’s reflexes was shaken and Dante must have felt it.

    
“God, I hate those motherfuckers,” said
Ruthie, emerging cautiously from the tent with a blanket wrapped about her
shoulders. She cast a glance at the fire, then a wary look at Dante. “Are there
a lot of them around here?”

    
“The adders are rare in high country,” he
said. “You find ’em mostly on the Syrian plain and down through Arabia. But
there’re plenty of others. And tomorrow, we’ll pass through the Valley of
Serpents in the late afternoon. The valley’s a natural heat-reflecting dish,
and the brown snakes slither doon from the rocks at sunset to keep warm through
the night. We just have to make it through before the sun goes down.”

    
“Goddamn right we will,” said Ruthie,
shivering.

    
Francesca approached and stood next to
Raszer. “You okay?” she asked.

    
“Yeah. Fine, thanks.”

    
“Hmm,” she said. “You have steady nerves.”

    
“Just faking it,” he said.

    
“Is there really a difference?”

    
“Maybe not,” he said.

    
Francesca whistled Adi to her side. “It’ll be
sunrise in three hours. We’d better try to get some sleep.”

    
“Yeah, right,” said Ruthie, rolling her
eyes. “I don’t exactly have Lara Croft in

my
tent to protect me.”

    
“Ha!” Francesca shot back. “And who are
you? You could have brought thieves from every direction with your howling.”

    
Ruthie made a move toward Francesca, and
Raszer caught hold of her elbow.

    
“All right,” said Raszer. “Here’s what
we’ll do. Shaykh Adi will finish the night with the two of you. He’s the hero,
anyway. And I’ll take the next watch.”

    
“Agreed,” said Francesca. “But check on us,
will you?”

    
“Of course,” said Raszer. “Make sure your
flap is zipped tight.” He stooped to pick up the semiautomatic pistol from the
rocky ground. “And try to get along.”

    
There was, however, a problem with Raszer’s
plan. Shaykh Adi, who until now had tolerated Ruthie, suddenly decided he
didn’t like her at all. She entered the tent, and when Francesca then commanded
the dog to follow, Adi refused.

    
“Maybe he still senses the snake,” Raszer
said. “I don’t think animals figure time the way we do. It’s all still
happening for him.”

    
“He senses something,” said Francesca
softly. “But no. I’ve seen Adi kill at least a half dozen snakes, and he
usually sticks to me like glue afterward.”

    
“You go in first, then call him,” Raszer
suggested.

    
This strategy succeeded, but not for long.
Raszer had just settled into his vigil atop the rise when he heard Adi begin to
whimper, then whine, and finally howl. With a curse, Raszer fumbled his way out
of the tent and met Francesca and Adi halfway.

    
“It’s not going to work, Stephan,” she
said. “Something’s wrong.”

    
Ruthie emerged halfway from the tent and
shook the hair from her eyes. She eyed Raszer. “How ’bout her and the dog sleep
with Dante and you sleep in here? What’s with the separate tents, anyway? We’re
not fuckin’ Muslims.”

    
Francesca parked her hands on her hips and
waited for Raszer’s reply.

    
Raszer scratched his two-day growth of
beard and ran a hand over his polished scalp. Alone with Ruthie was not a place
he wanted to be right now. He knew himself too well. A curious and unsettling
thing: The more reason he found to mistrust her, the more he found himself
inflamed by her.

    
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “I’ll sleep in
your tent. With
both
of you. And I’m
bringing the gun in case either one of you disturbs my beauty rest.”

    
An hour later, as he finally drifted off,
he thought to himself that a man could probably do worse than to wrestle a
snake before bed.

    
The
coastal fog of spring, rendered milky by the morning sun’s straight-on rays,
reached all the way to the front stoop of Monica’s Silver Lake duplex. This was
her least favorite time of year. It felt nothing like the Aprils she’d known as
a child in southern Ohio. It lacked the kiln-baked clarity of L.A. summer and
the stormy drama of what passed for winter. The best thing about it was the
jasmine.

    
She could smell the bloom as she sat down
on the stoop with her tea to read the
International
Herald Tribune
. There was more trouble for the Kurds in the very part of
the world Raszer had entered. An article just below the fold all but made it
official that the Americans were providing stealth backing to Turkey in the
increasingly savage battle to deny its largest minority population a homeland.
Some alleged that the Syrians were arming the Kurds, and the Russians were said
to be behind the Syrians.

    
Raszer hadn’t phoned Monica in forty-eight
hours, and she hated that. She knew he was in mountainous backcountry where
even satellite communication must be spotty, and she could get only
intermittent and questionable fixes on his location by way of the implant. He’d
told her that he would leave the phone behind when he reached his destination,
but based on his last report, he was still a night short of that.