The Crisis (67 page)

 

AN obliterating white flashed behind her sealed lids. Something heavy and hard struck her so hard in the back her body went numb. Gráinne heard a hollow, abrupt sound, like a slab of oak being chopped in two.

 

THE bullet enters her lungs and tumbles, slowed by the transition from air to solid. It exits, blowing blood and tissue out onto the sand.

 

HER knees buckled and she sank, the old man clinging bewildered to her arm, trying to hold her up. No time even to wonder what had hit her. But she grasped with that instinctive wisdom of the body that it was something very bad. Just when she'd thought they were safe.

Then she was down, the sand hot against her face. The old man was cradling her head in his lap. He was crying, asking why someone had shot her.

So I was shot, she thought drowsily. Starting to go.

Then she remembered. She forced her eyes open to see his grizzled chin above her face, between her and the sky, which was very bright. She opened her mouth and tried to force her throat to speak, but there was no air. When she tried to breathe nothing happened.

She tried to form words with her lips. Had to say it. He could tell New York. No one knew but her. It didn't come out, though.

She tried again. Just a sentence? No. Then, one word. Just one.

Her lips were still parted when the black birds flew in from all the edges of the world, faster than any bullet, rushing in on her more rapidly than she could ever have believed anything could move.

 

AISHA turned at a muffled clap, like the sound you hear when one car backs into another, not hard enough to crunch metal, but an impact.

“What the fuck,” Erculiano said.

Her mouth opened but nothing entered her mind except what her eyes drank in. Rooted to the ground, she stared as the pink mist bloomed and faded, as the still-living but headless body stood jerking. A second clap sounded and it folded and fell. A few yards away one of the hostages,
a woman, trailing the others in the company of a bent little man, sagged to her knees, holding her chest. The old man howled.

 

THE bolt release snapped forward, feeding the second round. Teddy settled back into position, left elbow in the same cup of sand, biceps dead in the tight sling. Inhale. Exhale. Align sights. Slow pressure.

Slam and recoil and dust. Could they miss seeing that dust? He didn't think so.

“Shot two, center hit, TI down. Call the cleanup crew. Shift to secondary target.”

Teddy shifted but they were running now, ducking or hitting the ground. Were those distant screams? He tracked another bad guy, a white turban this time. Fired, but was pretty sure he missed.

But he'd gotten the principal. The asshole who'd blown up the Cosmo, started a war, killed a hell of a lot of marines. No reason to waste tears on him.

“That's it,” he grunted, looking around for any trace they might've left. Brass sparkled in the sand. As the first return fire cracked out from the hilltop he scooped up empty shells. One, two, three. They burned his palm. He slid along the ground, crawfishing back into cover.

“Let's haul ass.”

Above them, above the men who stood firing downhill, the others who hustled shivering hostages into vehicles, above a wailing woman in black who crouched by a motionless body, the crows circled. They called harshly to each other, as if denying what they'd just witnessed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
HE admissions area was hot, crowded, a Babel in a hundred tongues. Aisha cradled the warm bundle in her left arm, maneuvering her carry-on with her right and wishing her purse weren't so heavy. She felt both not herself and as if she were only now commencing real life. In only three weeks her existence had realigned itself as radically as if the force of gravity had suddenly shifted ninety degrees.

She jiggled her new burden, looking down.

Dark eyes met hers with a welding that made her heart stop. A button nose needed wiping again. A dimpled cheek. Warmth gushed again, a fountain of sheer selfless pleasure. Better than sex. Better than anything she'd ever felt. A tiny hand rose, waved about, then fastened to the satin border of the pink blanket. The sweet scents of formula and powder enfolded her. Each time she picked her up it seemed more natural.

Peyster had leaned back in his chair when Aisha said she needed a special favor. Quirked his eyebrows, pursed mouth reluctant. Until she'd pointed out how much she knew—or rather, how she'd helped score a major success against the insurgency. Al-Maahdi was dead, shot in a fracas among his bodyguards during the hostage exchange. A huge thorn in the side of U.S. policy in the region plucked out, and all the hostages safely returned. Except for the Irish geologist, of course. A tragedy. Hit by a stray bullet, dying before a medic could stabilize her.

“All right,” he'd said. “Let's hear it. What do you want? Job with the Agency? Letter of commendation? You're right, we couldn't have done it without you. He'd never have trusted us enough to turn up.”

That hadn't felt so good, the intimation she'd betrayed a trust. But she'd stuffed that and simply said, evenly as she could, “There's someone I want to take back with me, Terry.”

. . .

AN old Jewish woman smiled at her, cooed at the baby, who regarded her with startled eyes. The woman gestured Aisha ahead of her in line. With her red official passport and federal ID, Aisha could have bypassed this line altogether. But she wanted this on the record. She wanted a paper trail.

Finally she was face-to-face with a heavyset, skeptical-looking woman with a Customs and Immigration badge on her blouse. Aisha laid her blue passport on the counter and shoved it under the glass. It was brand-new, uncreased, just issued by embassy staff in Ashaara City. The photo showed her and Tashaara. Trying to look bored, she slid the CROBA through too. The woman glanced at it, then up at her.

All bureaucratic, not very exciting. Not nearly as dramatic as smuggling Nuura's baby home in a duffel, her fallback plan. But like a magician, Peyster had angled his lopsided smile and all difficulties had fallen away. “You
have
gained some poundage lately,” he'd said. “And those awful tents you wear—let's just say this won't be too hard for anybody around here to believe.”

The Consular Report of Birth Abroad, which the woman behind the glass was now examining, documented the out-of-wedlock birth of one female child, Tashaara Ar-Rahim, to one Aisha Ar-Rahim, U.S. federal employee and citizen on duty abroad. The legal equivalent of a birth certificate, it entitled the child to U.S. citizenship based on her mother's nationality.

Tashaara began fussing, as if sensing how much was at stake. Aisha hugged and kissed her, inhaling the sweet clean smell from the crown of her little head. Would the woman object? Sense something unusual, wrong? Her uninterested gaze as she held up the passport, comparing it to their faces, said she didn't much care. She was a light-skinned sister, a bit heavy herself, cheeks dotted with large freckles. Maybe even a Muslim, to judge by her close-cropped hair. Aisha smiled at her. “Salaam,” she said, on the off chance.

“You shouldn't be in this line,” the immigration officer said. “Next time, just go through the U.S. Citizen line. With your daughter.”

“I'm sorry. I wasn't sure.”

“That's all right. By the way, I love your scarf. Is that from Africa?”

“Yes, from Ashaara. Thank you.”

Aisha almost offered it to her, then remembered: officials here didn't require gifts. Two thumps of a rubber stamp and her new daughter was legally in America. She crammed the paperwork awkwardly into her purse, turning away so the woman wouldn't pick up on her welling eyes. She'd never found out, might never know, what'd happened to Tashaara's
mother. Vanished, like so many others. But Nuura's little girl had a future now.

And a family. Aisha's sisters and mother stood waiting outside the barrier. She walked toward them heavily, feeling new weight on her hips, in her arms. Feeling her new gravity, a different, slower sway to her walk. There'd be questions. Reproaches, no doubt. But the excitement in her mother's eyes told her none of it would be vented on the baby.

Yeah, Maryam would go crazy pampering her new granddaughter. What would be hard—much harder, now, than she'd anticipated—would be leaving the baby with her mom in Harlem while she went back to Washington. Still, she could ask for leave. Maternity leave? That might be pushing it. Keep it under the official radar. At least for a couple of years, till everyone was used to the picture on her desk, a smiling little girl in pigtails, and how her daughter was living with her mother in New York.

“We couldn't save them all,” she whispered to the tiny face that stared up with frightening intensity. “But I saved you, my sweetest and dearest. You'll never be hungry, or afraid. And now you're home.”

“Aisha! Aisha! Over here!”

“Is that her? Is that the baby?”

She lifted her head, and smiled through the tears.

ESKAN VILLAGE, SAUDI ARABIA

Teddy came so hard his head felt like it was about to explode. It lasted and lasted, which didn't surprise him. It'd been forever since he'd gotten any.

“Did you come already? Did you?”

The captain's voice was concerned. He grunted and rolled off, hoping she didn't reach for another cigarette. Since he'd called and said he was back, to get somebody to cover for her at the site and come to his room, she'd been dewy-eyed and acquiescent. Not even any complaints about how often he had to rush for the can.

Like right now. “Back in a minute,” he muttered, and rolled out and padded across the floor.

The diagnosis had been worms, all right, but the cure was almost as bad as the disease. Resting on the throne, looking around the unadorned bathroom, he let himself sag until he was resting against the wall.

 

HE came to with barely knitted collarbone aching and the wall slamming beside his ear in a rhythmic syncopation. He must've zonked out right there on the shitter.

He and Kowacki had adjoining rooms. The other SEAL had picked up an Army nurse at the PX. A little butt-heavy, but perfectly serviceable for field use. Sounded like Whacker was catching up on his missing pussy time too.

Good for him—they'd earned it. Since they'd pulled out of Ashaara the team had been in Park, assigned to Centcom but without anything to do. It did seem like things were quieting down in the Mideast, though.

He got up reluctantly, washed his hands, hawked phlegm into the sink, a slick tan wad of coughed-up sand.

When he went into the darkened bedroom she was snoring. Turned on her side, legs drawn up, dark bush sticking out like a little tail. He looked down, feeling nothing. She was getting clingy. They did that. First outraged, then all lovey, and finally, into full barnacle mode. You enjoyed it while you could, and let go when it got to be too much.

A clang outside. He dropped into a combat crouch, heart suddenly slamming, head up. Listening.

The pistol was in the drawer with his skivvies. Cradling the weight in his right hand, safety off, he waited.

Was that breathing, outside his door?

He covered it, picking up the night sight, until he half reluctantly concluded it wasn't breathing. Just his own pulse slamming away in his ears. He straightened and padded to the window. Standing out of the line of fire, he twitched the drapes back. The street was empty. He couldn't see whatever had made the noise. The lights buzzed with a coral glow on naked asphalt, the cookie-cutter roofs. Beyond them the sky hung dark.

Out of nowhere, he was back in that house. Trapped in the kill zone, flashes of gunfire above. Then the grenade had come arcing down—

His hands shook. He took deep slow breaths, staring at his reflection in the dark glass. Pale eyes gazed back, filled with things he didn't want to remember. The air force officer had brought some Johnnie Walker. It was in the kitchen nook.

The grenade arced down from the flashing darkness. Hit the ground, and bounced—

No.
He didn't want to get like the old warhorses back at Dam Neck, running on ethanol like a Brazilian bus. Smelling of Jack Daniel's at 1500, backing their pickups into the younger guys' cars in the lot, crashing in the empty barracks at the National Guard base up the road instead of going home.

Maybe he should reconsider getting out, making that movie. But even as he thought it he knew he wouldn't. Acting, directing, were just illusion. Dreams. Make-believe. He'd grown up in that fantasy world, and as soon
as he was old enough, run as far as he could. What good were fantasies, when you could live the adventure? Be a fucking SEAL, ripped, cool under fire, better than 007, the man every woman wanted to get creamy with, the man every man you met wanted to be?