Authors: Rick Mofina
23
Cold Butte, Montana
In Montana, Samara brushed tears from the corners of her eyes and cupped her hands around her tea. A chill had penetrated her.
Images from the night her world ended still burned.
In the morning, dust and smoke had arisen from the ashes of Samara’s house. A gentle wind carried wisps of cloud across the smoldering neighborhood.
The soldiers had vanished.
Samara was in shock, uncertain she was alive.
Her ability to feel, to form a thought, to speak, had shut down as scenes unfolded around her in a staccato slide show of horror.
Ahmed! Muhammad!
Someone called their names over and over.
Medical relief workers helped Samara into the rear of an ambulance. They treated her until she shook them off to watch rescuers extract two bodies—one large, one small—from the ruins of her home.
Ahmed! Muhammad!
Samara could not, did not, accept that they were dead. It was an evil dream.
Wake! Wake!
When would she awake?
Old women in black robes came to her with solace and prayers, supporting her as she knelt before the corpses set side by side on the ground. The sheets that covered them glowed white against the scorched earth. A hood had been tied around Muhammad’s head.
His face was gone.
She took his hand and held it to her cheek, her tears webbed along the dust that encased his skin.
She felt the warmth of his smile on the day they’d met at the university in London.
Muhammad.
She felt his goodness, his spirit, leave this earth.
Muhammad.
Then the women pried Samara from him and she watched the workers, faces covered with surgical masks, load him into the truck to take him to the morgue.
Muhammad!
She fell upon the smaller corpse.
Ahmed.
She pulled back the sheet.
To see his face in death.
Her son.
Her child.
Her life.
All who were near were jolted by Samara’s banshee wail that reached a degree of sorrow beyond this earth. Then, like an exaltation of angels, the robed women gathered over her to share the burden of her pain. Samara raised her hands to heaven to ask why.
A black combat helicopter patrolling the aftermath thudded above slowly. She saw the dark visors of the crew.
Watching the scene.
In that instant, her answer had been delivered, although it would not be revealed to her until later.
Samara looked upon Ahmed.
Tenderly she slid her hands under the sheet.
Lovingly she collected her son.
The old women admonished the relief workers who tried to take him from her and pushed them back.
Ahmed was weightless in her arms as Samara began walking through her devastated city to the morgue.
The old women followed, beating their chests with clenched fists, shouting prayers as others joined them to form a death procession.
As they passed from neighborhood to neighborhood, weary soldiers, fingers on triggers, eyed them, scanning them for signs of an insurgent ruse.
They glimpsed Ahmed’s small hand that had escaped his death shroud, as if to reach for reason in a time and place where it did not exist.
Helicopter gunships continued to hover directly above Samara as her tears fell upon her dead son.
In the time after, people from the hospital, neighbors and kind strangers from relief agencies helped her.
Samara had a vague and mixed memory of what followed.
She’d been taken to a room in the local mosque.
Muhammad and Ahmed were naked, side by side on tables where the old women guided her in washing them for their journey to paradise.
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The women prayed as the bodies were cleansed.
Then they were wrapped in cloths and placed in coffins.
The next day the coffins were secured to the roofs of cars, draped with flowers and driven slowly in a pro cession to a cemetery on the bank of the Tigris River, one of four rivers said to flow from Eden.
The coffins were lowered into a single plot to rest together, father by son. Samara’s friends struggled to keep her from throwing herself into the grave.
Depleted of life, Samara refused to leave the cem etery.
Hours passed, day turned to twilight, which turned to night and prayers. The old women understood and watched over her. Covering her with blankets and shawls.
When a new day approached, they made her tea and brought her bread. They sat with her in silence, contem plating the Tigris, a river as old as time.
A river that knew great sorrows and great joys.
A river that held the answers.
And as the sun broke, the old women answered the call to prayer, leaving Samara to gaze upon the Tigris.
Statue-still, she was a portrait of pain.
Numb, alone, disconnected from the world, Samara was being transformed.
Every passing second, every tear, every beat of her broken heart, brought her closer to an awful knowledge.
The chant of the old women completing the morning prayers ended. Without invitation, one of the oldest among the mourners took her place next to Samara and took her hand.
Gnarled fingers wrapped in leathery, sunbaked smooth skin traced the lines of Samara’s palm. The old woman studied it in silence for a long moment.
Then she spoke to Samara in an ancient dialect.
She had known Samara’s mother and her grand mother, she said, knew her people, that Samara’s tribe was descended from Bedouins, near the disputed region.
Samara will soon go there.
She will return to her people and the desert because the next stage of her life is there.
It is already foretold, here. The old woman gave Samara’s hand a gentle squeeze.
In the weeks that followed, Samara journeyed to the cemetery every day to contemplate her loss, the river and the old woman’s prophecy.
A few months later, she made inquiries to interna tional relief agencies.
Samara asked favors of influential doctors who knew diplomats, who could expedite matters as she prepared to go to the desert, to find whatever awaited her there.
24
The Rub al Kahli, Empty Quarter, Arabian Peninsula
The battered Land Rover and Mercedes trucks, each bearing the star symbol and lettering for a global relief agency, lumbered over the great dunes.
Occasionally they vanished in the sandstorm as they pushed deeper into the no-man’s-land straddling Yemen and Saudi Arabia’s Ash Sharqiyah, in the Eastern Province.
The two-truck convoy was on a rescue mission that had begun two days earlier. A twin-engine plane ferrying rig workers to the Gulf of Oman for a Dutch oil company spotted the remains of an attack on a Bedouin encampment some three hundred kilometers southeast of Abaila near the Yemeni border.
Nowadays, camel caravans were rare and Bedouin tribes seldom wandered this deep into the Empty Quarter. The desert in this isolated part of the world was among the most forbidding on earth, covering some half a million square kilometers with fine, soft sand and sand sheets. The region was largely waterless, un inhabited and, until the 1950s, was unexplored. Now, it
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was early summer, season of the
shamal,
the severe northwesterly winds which produce the most blinding and suffocating sandstorms ever known.
The Empty Quarter was a lawless zone ruled by terrorist gunrunners and extremist rebels. Local gangs routinely kidnapped tourists, foreign oil workers or travelers and held them for ransom.
Failure to pay resulted in beheading.
After traveling a day and a night and aided by a tem peramental GPS, the small search party had reached the reported location. It was not likely they would find sur vivors, the flight crew had warned.
It was dangerous proceeding as the winds hurled wall after wall of sand at the trucks, rattling windshields and hampering visibility. The relief workers were led by an Egyptian doctor from Cairo. Then there was a Brazilian, who’d left his job as a Sao Paulo banker, a young female American death-penalty lawyer from Texas, and an Italian soldier from Venice.
Out of the hot swirling sand-laden winds, which had blotted the sun, a large piece of fabric, a remnant of a tent, suddenly enshrouded the Rover’s grill, flapping madly on it like a traumatized victim as the party came upon the carcass of an animal, its stiffened limbs pointing skyward.
“Looks like a goat,” said the soldier, stopping the Rover. Pulling his head scarf around his face and stepping into the storm, he leaned over the carcass and saw it was not a goat but the corpse of an old man. He had been disemboweled. The soldier said nothing as the wind slammed against him. He knew the work of the group behind the crime. They would find no survivors here. When the soldier returned to the truck, he said to the others, “Let’s keep moving.”
From Ethiopia to Algeria, Kurdistan and Sudan, each of the relief workers knew the horrors visited upon the dispossessed. The stare of a dead child’s eyes, the stench of a corpse, the colors and textures of human organs, torn limbs, the feast of maggots on a decapitated human head, all were common experiences for them.
They were acquainted with evil.
As expected, they’d found no survivors among the several dozen victims of what was an attack by a fun damentalist extremist group of bandits. Many of the victims had been beheaded after they were tortured. “That is their signature,” the soldier said as they searched for documents and identifying items that would be recorded in a regional data bank at Riyadh. Even the camels, sheep and goats had been killed.
The toll was four men, six women and eight children aged two months to thirteen, according to the doctor’s estimates.
Bedouins were camel and goat herders, a vanishing people who, for centuries, had been nomadic from Af ghanistan to Sudan. Although some tribal vendettas carried for generations, this attack exceeded any perver sion of tribal law, sect or creed.
It was an unfathomable outrage, the American wrote in her journal.
By nightfall they had assembled the corpses and built a huge funeral pyre from the remnants of tents, bedding, handwoven blankets and camel saddlebags. The night was clear. Tranquil. The winds slept. Constellations wheeled overhead as the flames and smoke ascended into the eternal desert sky. The bodies burned with the putrid smell one never forgets as the Egyptian doctor recited a passage from memory.
“We only have the life of this world. We die and we live, and nothing destroys us but time.”
That night as the fire crackled and the group settled into their tents, the workers did not speak, or even attempt to comfort each other. The Egyptian searched for answers in the worn copies of his holy books. The Brazilian and the soldier played chess. The American wept in private until sleep took her.
In the morning, they rose with the sun as the winds resumed. Exhausted, the foursome said little to each other as they departed. They had driven for nearly three hours when the Brazilian squinted from behind the wheel of the Mercedes into the sandstorm. “It looks like something ahead. An animal.”
“A goat from the camp. A survivor,” the doctor said. “Let’s pick it up.”
“I’m not certain what it is.” The Brazilian radioed ahead to the soldier in the Rover.
The soldier reached for binoculars, trying to discern the small form ahead.
“That’s not an animal! It’s a woman!”
He shifted gears.
Oblivious to the trucks, the woman walked deter minedly, even as the trucks overtook her and braked in front of her. All four workers climbed out and stood in her path, staring at her. Only when she reached them did she halt.
She appeared to be in her thirties. From the quality and fabric of her tattered garments, she at first appeared to have been a shepherd’s wife. But the Egyptian doctor saw something more, saw the vestiges of an educated woman, a middle-class woman of standing, perhaps.
A woman who did not belong here.
Under her head scarf, they saw her face was bruised and scarred with dried blood. Her parched lips mute. Her blank eyes did not regard the workers. They did not regard anything.
“What is your name?” the doctor asked first in Arabic, then several other languages, including English and French.
No response.
“She is in shock and dehydrated,” he said, then to the woman, “You are safe. You are now with friends.”
At that, the woman collapsed. The soldier caught her.
“Let’s get her onto a stretcher,” the doctor said.
Wind-driven sand hissed and pelted the canvas of the Mercedes as the doctor and the American aided her, checking the woman’s vital signs, setting up an IV drip. Examining her, the doctor found she had cuts and con tusions from severe beating.
When they resumed their journey, the doctor watched over the woman in the rear, swaying with the truck’s rhythmic rocking.
She was semiconscious. Her vital signs were good. They had been traveling for nearly an hour; all the while the doctor wondered, Who was this sole survivor?
She was not a tribeswoman. She seemed misplaced in the region. She had smooth skin, almond-shaped eyes. She was beautiful. He tried to comprehend what she had witnessed and fathom reasons for her being here. Running a soothing hand over her forehead, he noticed an unusual protrusion within her clothing.
He discovered a hidden, zippered pocket cleverly sewn along a seam. He opened it, extracted its contents. Documents. He studied them carefully, absorbing her identification.
Samara Anne Ingram.
Her photograph. A nice smile. Dual citizenship. An Iraqi from Baghdad. A British subject. A certified nurse. Small photographs of a man and a little boy. Her husband and child? But they were not among the dead.
Why was she here?
An aid worker, perhaps?
An idea landed on the doctor.
“Change our course now!” he yelled to the front. “We must go to Yemen!”
“Yemen?” the Brazilian responded over the engine’s roar. “Why?”
“I know medical people there. Good ones. It’s better we take her there. Tell the others on the radio! We must change course now! Turn around!”
“But the guards at the border will make things diffi cult.”
“I can take care of that.”
“You’re the boss.”
Few people alive knew the Egyptian’s true identity and his role as senior recruiter for one of the deadliest networks in the world. The doctor touched his waist and his con cealed money belt. It was thick with cash, bribe money that would ensure entry into Yemen with no questions asked.
If that failed, he only had to put his lips to an ear, whisper a name, and all doors would open for him.
All doors.
He was oblivious to the radio’s chatter—the Italian cursing the GPS again—and the swish of petrol in the trucks’ many exterior storage containers as transmis sions ground and the trucks turned and headed off for the lethal zone of Yemen’s northern border with Saudi Arabia.
The Egyptian was oblivious to it all.
For he was no longer a doctor with the relief agency. Now, he was performing his other duty—one the others knew nothing of.
No one saw him slide Samara’s identity papers inside his boot.
His old friend would be pleased.
He had found a potentially powerful soldier.
A perfect soldier.