The Crisis (18 page)

More years pass, and she grows into a young woman.

Then one day she hears a noise she's never heard before. It's like thunder down below the mountain. Then another noise, distant, somehow familiar, but it's some time before she remembers there are such things as motors.

The women come out of the weavery and the gardens to stand watching as—for the first time ever—a truck grinds up the mule trail that's the only other way up besides the basket. How did it get through the wall? Few of them have ever seen such a thing, but Zeynaab breaks into a sweat the moment she sees it. The men who jump down carry guns and she remembers. She runs to the cowshed. Trembling, she crawls into the hay.

They find her there hours later. By then the men are tired. They're covered with soot and blood. With wearied violence one drags her out. “Time to die, Christian,” he says. “All the others are dead, now you.”

“No. Not Christian! I'm Muslim!”

He seizes her arm, looks at her wrist. Her crossless wrist. “Then what are you doing here?” he snarls, and savagely twists her arm behind her. It's so painful she'd scream if his hand wasn't over her mouth. If his body wasn't against hers. If she had enough breath to struggle as the others jerk her skirts over her head and push her down into the straw.

 

WHEN they're done they leave her for dead, but don't make sure of it, as they have with every other woman on the mountain, and all the monks
too. When much later she staggers into the sunlight she doesn't know who she is, or where. The buildings are burning. The gentle bull lies stretched out dead. She looks at the bodies of women, children. Does she know them? What's the meaning of all this smoke?

She shuffles to the infirmary. The woman who welcomed her years before lies on a bed, the cord with the plaited crosses knotted around her throat. The men have done other cruel things to her too. Zeynaab kneels by her, wanting to pray, but not knowing who to. Where will she go now? At last she enters the burning refectory. She stuffs a basket with bread and cheese, then goes into the Sister Abbess's room.

Then she sets off down the mountain.

 

T
HE crackle woke Aisha before dawn in the low-ceilinged cubicle she shared with one of the translators. The embassy's housing coordinator had looked horrified when she'd asked to room with another Muslim woman. The only others were Ashaarans, maintenance and cleaning employees. Most lived in town, and the rooms for those who slept on-compound were small and shabby: a row of curtained-off broom closets in a shedlike building huddled out back.

Not that different from the slave quarters, behind some Big House.

Her roommate, a small, quiet woman named Nuura, wasn't in bed. The sheets were thrown back, but she wasn't there.

Aisha rose, dressed, quickly did
wudhu
in the sink, then took her rug out for morning
salat
, orienting by the sun through a dirty window. The past day or so she'd listened for muezzins out in town but hadn't heard them. Strange that there were no calls to prayer.

She stood and recited the intention to pray, then the
takbir
and the
other dawn prayers, prostrating, saluting the angels to her right and left. She did this in the Arabic she'd learned as a child in Harlem. Then muttered in English, “Forgive, bless, and protect me this day, and let all my work be done in your name.” She strapped on her SIG, checked that her badge and other walking-around gear was in her purse, and let herself out.

Dawn in East Africa broke as she hesitated in the doorway. The sky held a hot blush scented with burning. An uncertain breeze stirred the dust and flapped the flag above the chancery. She scuffed toward the administration building, the backs of her sandals flipping up powdery gouts. Someone had tried to grow grass here, unsuccessfully. There were trees, though, the local acacia. She looked across the open area always left at the heart of every American embassy in these mercurial lands.

Jolene Ridbout, the attaché, had given her and Erculiano a tour the day they arrived. The compound was enclosed by a rose brick wall less carefully mortared from the inside; its finished surface faced out. Beyond it was Ashaara; inside, the United States, with its own laws and customs and extraterritoriality.

Uh-huh . . . to her left as she trudged, the heat building as light flooded pale dust like weightless lava, lay a gated extension with tennis court and swimming pool and picnic benches. Close by huddled Conex boxes, one her makeshift office. Ahead rose the two-story GSA Building, where vehicles were repaired, laundry was done, supplies were taken in, and garbage was sorted to go out. A generator droned, and blue mercury-vapor security lights still burned over pickups and SUVs on neatly painted asphalt. To her right the ambassador's residence, a white-pillared neo-Victorian, shimmered like a bad dream.

West, toward the main gate, was the chancery. Glass and aluminum, with slanted louvers set to cut the sun and “pay homage” to local architecture. An inner barrier of chain link was topped with razor wire and anchored by a concrete structure styled to resemble a minaret but all too obviously a guard tower. It looked like a keep, a last redoubt; the chancery, like a very expensive prison.

She came to a deserted playground under one of the acacias and after a moment's hesitation lifted the hem of her abaya and began climbing a welded jungle gym painted in faded reds and yellows. She was sorry halfway up but kept clambering, and perched at last, teetering and panting, where she could peer over the wall.

The crackling was growing louder, a grinding like an icebound river giving way. Smoke columns pillared to the north. She wasn't sure enough of her bearings to know what neighborhood they came from. The crackling
ebbed and waxed, as if the miles of baking buildings were frying under the rising sun.

She wondered if little Bahdoon and Major Assad and the old secretary who spoke perfect Italian were out there.

She squeezed her eyes, balancing on the hand-worn steel. Remembering the raid Assad had taken them on. The frightened faces of the smugglers as his security troops had beaten them, bound them, thrown them into the trucks. Rebels? Possibly.

Where had they gone from there?

She remembered the tumbled bodies of the dead. Women. Children.

She saw again the angelic young man who'd sprinted past in the alley. Whom she'd held in her sights long enough to end his life. But hadn't.

What was happening out there? Who else was dying?

Perched there, she said a
du'a
for God to be merciful. Knowing that all too often, it seemed, the best He could do for those who suffered was death.

 

THEY called everyone together in the chancery lobby. A chandelier of polished brass and aluminum shards hung like a massive scimitar from a ceiling speckled with stainless eight-pointed stars. Ridbout stood with the ambassador as the white-haired former child star explained the situation. The president and his cabinet had fled. The embassy guards the Ashaaran army usually posted hadn't reported for duty that morning. Nevertheless, no grounds for panic. The Marines were on their way from Oman. Nonemergency personnel would be evacuated when they arrived. Essential personnel would stay, with U.S. military protection.

If conditions degenerated, he'd evacuate everyone, haul down the flag, and wait for peace to return to the Ashaara they loved. Until then he was staying. Feeble applause followed, barely rising to those watching stars.

Aisha noted Nuura squatting on the pale marble floor. Her roommate glanced past her, as if she didn't recognize her.

The DCM—deputy chief of mission—took over, reviewing the emergency action plan, making sure everyone knew his assignment. Ridbout came over when the meeting broke. A tall, deeply tanned, crew-cut marine in dark glasses followed her. “We've got a problem,” she began, no preamble. “No more Ashaaran security—you heard. Gunnery Sergeant Kaszyk here's in command of our Marine security det.”

“Gunnery sergeant.”

“Just call me ‘Gunny,' ma'am.”

“Unfortunately, we don't have a fully Inman-ized compound here. And
I've only got a one-and-six detachment, seven men total, to defend it. I need you and your assistant to help Gunny out,” Ridbout told her. “Unless you object. Gunny, this is Special Agent Aisha Ar-Rahim, Naval Criminal Investigative Service.”

“Any problem with that, uh, ma'am? Till we can get a patch over this situation?”

“None at all. But call me Special Agent, please.”

“How many with you, Special Agent?”

“Myself and one other.”

“Can you shoot? Any CQB training?”

“We trained with shotguns and M16s at Glynco. Not to your standards, maybe, but we can take down a building.”

He seemed to notice her abaya and headscarf then. Opened his mouth, looking her up and down; then closed it. “We'll put you on our Goalkeeper team. Come with me, please?”

 

BEING a Goalkeeper seemed to consist of sitting in a burnt-coffee-smelling “React Room” in the tower next to the USIS Library, just outside the concertina and inside the main gate. Kaszyk signed out rifles and vests festooned with magazine pouches to her, Erculiano, and two staff civilians who said they were Vietnam or Gulf War veterans. They took their weapons like young knights receiving their first swords. Aisha held hers on her lap, fingertips tapping metal and plastic.

“D' it go out?” Erculiano murmured, leaning toward her.

The message to the Bahrain Field Office. She nodded. They might be trapped, but it was on record: the NCIS team at Ashaara City was officially part of the defense.

Kaszyk unsnapped a binder. “Listen up. Defensive plan. We have twelve riflemen, including volunteers, and two light MGs. Not enough to defend a two-mile perimeter. These walls, any dirtbag with a ladder can scale them. So, we double-team the main gate and put two rapid reaction teams in the vans. Isolated incursions, trespassers, we send one and hold the other in reserve. When we have to send both, that's when we secure the gate and fall back to the chancery.

“If that happens, both fire teams fall back on the Goalkeepers. From there on we hold. I think we can, unless they come through that wire with something like a truck, vehicle-borne explosives.”

Erculiano lifted a finger. “The ambassador said a task force was on its way.”

“We hold out, sure, they can evacuate us.” The gunny's face seamed; suddenly he looked older. “But I saw what they did to the Kuwaitis in
Desert Storm. You can't liberate the dead. Holding till they get here, that's up to us.”

The radio crackled. “Post One, beachside overwatch. Movement along the fences of the tennis court.”

“Fire team one, deploy,” Kaszyk said, and the long afternoon began.

 

STANDING at the front gate, which was being rapidly sandbagged by marines and staffers wheeling the bags out on dollies from a side shed, she watched refugees stream past. Fleeing the city, thronging the road south toward Asmara. Occasionally a truck snorted by, or a Mercedes, but most went on foot, toting bundles and chests, pushing carts piled with children and old people, rolled-up rugs, brass and aluminum cookware, wall hangings. One cart, pulled by a donkey the size of a large Labrador, penned an electric water heater, its white bulk rolling back and forth like a disturbed whale.

A slight black marine with a scar from a repaired harelip asked, “Where you from, ma'am? You new here, right?”

“I'm with the NCIS. A special agent.”

“You Moslem? Way you dressed—”

“I'm from New York. Who are these people? Do you have any idea?”

“These the president's clan. Getting out of Dodge.”

She surveyed the passing crowd. “
These
are Xaasha? They don't look like they've done too well out of it.” When he didn't say anything she added, “And the rebels? Who are they?”

“Rebels is what the government says. Ain't seen any yet. May not even be any.”

“What do you mean? Might not
be
any?”

But he didn't say, just stuck out his lip and pulled a grenade out of a pouch and fiddled with the pin.

 

AFTER lunch, with the air outside like a hot towel over her face, the crackling started again. The portable radios beeped and chattered as the officers and the gunny discussed it. She waited with the vets and Erculiano and the marines who were neither on the gate nor in the vans at the moment. Finally word came to take position in the tower.

They climbed the steel steps and came out into something like an airport control tower, but without glass. Heat broiled down from the green steel roof like a toaster oven. A lance corporal said the shooting was coming from the National Museum. He sited a machine gun to cover the gate. He positioned her and Erculiano where they could watch the wall, and the two veterans the chancery. The Gulf War vet clanged a green
metal can down and handed out ammo. Aisha filled three magazines, forcing the cartridges down until her wrists hurt, then aligned them fussily on the concrete floor. They weren't to load their rifles until ordered to. She had her pistol ready under her abaya, too, but she had serious misgivings about firing at starving people. She returned a look from Erculiano. It was quiet up here, except for the shooting. Which was getting closer.

“Tower, Post One, gate; crowd headed our way.”

Gunny Kaszyk came up the stairs two at a time, boots ringing on metal treads. He looked around without letting go the handrails. Said a few words to the corporal, who went down with him and came back up with a case of bottled water. He passed the radio from his left hand to his right, then back, whistling through his teeth. The other marines leaned over the edge of the tower to spit the snuff they'd dipped before leaving the guardroom. The Vietnam vet sat on the ammo box, turning his tasseled loafers this way and that. He asked a marine if he could have a dip.