Authors: Amber Green
Khyber Run (11 page)
But a man in a sanitized camo uniform and a shemagh like Mike's was leading Mike's overladen gray gelding daintily among the power cords and clusters of newspeople. And Oscar, who had shed his red vest, was pointing his face at me, jerking his head in a way that probably didn't mean
my neck is stiff.
I swung up into the saddle, tossed my red vest into the crowd, and followed Oscar around the back of a CNN trailer, trusting Mike to extract Echo, and leaving the Canadians to handle any prizes or interview requests.
We rode between clusters of horses and riders, enough to fill the day with five-minute mini-matches. I heard the CIA faceman's voice. The OGA men were flashing ID at a group of riders with stunned, disbelieving faces. The riders were all officers, though, and should be able to take care of themselves.
Oscar startled me by heading down a tight alleyway, one built for ambush. His mare broke a trot.
I could follow, or I could head back into the crowd and look for Mike. Given the number of uniforms, shemaghs, and horses, the chances of finding Mike and Echo were pretty slim. So I put my heels in the mare's flanks and leaned forward.
We emerged from the alley at the edge of a bazaar.
Sullen, deeply lined faces looked up at us from the closest booths. Not a hand showed. A metallic rattle punctuated by many hard
clacks
echoed off the scarred buildings, safeties being taken off dozens of unseen weapons.
Our mares slowed to step carefully, avoiding insult and assault by what felt like a breath here and a few inches there. The wind whistled through ropes and cables and up my sleeves and down my collar, finding all the sweat from the game and chilling it.
I shivered and didn't bother to hide the fact. I was too busy watching for the slightest signal, the rise of a leader who would cry for the death of the infidel, the foreigner, the invader.
Two horsemen waited at the far edge of the bazaar: Mike and Echo. We joined up without a word and stopped half a mile later to rearrange the baggage. Then we quietly rode east to rendezvous with Golf and his trailer.
Only after we stopped in a parking lot did I notice Echo's reins tied loosely and lying on his lap. His gun hand was fine, but the other had swollen so much his fingers looked like meat balloons. The two on the pinkie edge of his hand stood out at the wrong angles.
"You did have the option of requesting medical attention at any time,” I scolded.
"Yeah.” He dismounted gingerly, holding the hand out. “Can you still fix it?"
Rapid swelling was a bad sign, but some of it might be attributable to his excitement level. I pulled down my medical kit. “Did you feel or hear anything snap?"
"No, sir."
Sir
? He was in pain, then. He hissed as I touched each finger, feeling out the injury, but didn't jerk away. I couldn't be certain with this much swelling, but it felt like a simple dislocation of his pinkie and ring finger. A little jab of morphine would help, but I didn't know if any had been packed, did I? And every moment's delay would increase the severity of the swelling, the chance of complications.
"You're not going to yank on it, are you, Doc?"
"No. I'm going to assume you're an adult and can cooperate in your own treatment. Pull very slowly and smoothly against my pull, okay?"
I laid his hand across my thigh, took a grip, and pulled the digits straight out, stretching the tendons to maximum and using my other hand and thigh to press the butt ends of the two dislocated bones into place. One slid smoothly into place but the other gave a little snap.
"
Fuck
!” He spasmed against my shoulder.
I held pressure a moment, for pain control, then eased up. I'd never done two fingers together before, but the most cooperative patient wasn't likely to hold still twice.
Out here I couldn't send him through ultrasound to make sure everything had gone back in place, and that no bones had chipped or cracked lengthwise. But from what I'd seen, the degree of swelling he maintained tomorrow would be a reasonably accurate indicator.
If he couldn't use the hand tomorrow, I'd send him home for surgery. I may not be a physician, but I'm a doc, and I can do that.
Meanwhile, there were consequences to address, and if that medical kit didn't have some splints at the very least, it wasn't worth carrying. I moved Echo's hand to his own lap. “Don't move."
Mashallah
, splints of all kinds. I selected two glorified Popsicle sticks and a roll of self-adhesive stretchy tape. Another section of the kit had ibuprofen, Decadron, and Tylenol#3 along with the forms to document each tablet of that last. “Have you ever had an adverse reaction to a painkiller or to any medication?"
"Not allergic to nothing, Doc."
Mike's shadow fell over him. “Zulu."
"Sorry. Zulu."
I kind of liked Mike for not fucking with the kid until his fingers had been fixed. And I took a perverse pleasure in signing the controlled substance sheet
Zulu.
I made Echo eat a squirt-pouch of cheese over a retort brownie so the pills wouldn't hit an empty stomach.
Then, while Echo played with something he found extraordinarily funny on his computer, I learned my way around the rest of the medkit. It was nonstandard in all the right ways and good in every other way, except there was neither morphine nor any effective equivalent. I guess having to track and account for a narcotic would probably ratchet the paperwork to a higher level than anyone wanted to deal with.
I had also inventoried and rearranged my assault pack by the time Golf arrived with his horse trailer.
Chunks of the road had broken away every few yards. To anyone who insisted on staying in one lane, the road would be impassable, at least without doubled tires or treads.
Golf soldiered on, driving on the left here and on the right there, sometimes driving down the middle while Toyotas and bicycles and donkey carts swerved left and right around him. He recited
zaboor
—psalms—in English under his breath the whole way, so quietly only two or three words at a time reached me in the sweaty center of the backseat. Beside him, Mike held a pistol on his lap and his rifle between his knees.
Golf swerved to pass a troop of camels bearing rolls of carpet, with a heavily robed woman in purple riding atop each stack of carpet rolls. Some of the women shouted at him as he squeezed past. One urged her camel into a trot to intercept us, then flung a dish of fresh sloppy-wet dung onto the windshield. Golf hit his wipers and his horn and blasted through.
Camels don't drop turds that wet. Nor does any healthy animal I knew of. Low-tech biological warfare. From Golf's white-lipped face, he knew.
In the backseat I clenched my teeth and waited for an explosion or a bullet through the glass. Or a scream from the trailer saying a bullet had found one of the horses.
Echo bounced in his seat. “How long was she carrying that fresh shit, waiting for someone to pitch it at? You got to wonder."
"Shut up, Echo."
"We could have ridden this far by horseback in half the time, I bet. Why didn't we, huh?"
Mike half turned in his seat. “What the fuck is wrong with you?"
"I just wanna know why!"
Golf circumnavigated another crater. “Von Steuben said what makes an American soldier different is the need to tell him why. In some of the districts we've passed through, NATO horses would have been shot, if not hamstrung by some bleeding ankle-biter in the street."
Then he went back to his verses.
Late in the afternoon, we'd finally navigated all the way across the green farmland on the other side of the river. At the khaki foot of the mountains, Golf let us unload.
For a man who said he wasn't afraid to be out after dark, he was gone with a quickness.
We rode on while the sun set behind the mountains, and kept going even after the lingering sky glow faded, to find a caravansary Mike and Oscar knew of. We found it with the scent of peppers, garlic, cinnamon, and tomatoes cooking. The two eastern corners of the structure had been reduced to rubble, along with the wall between them. What was left was a shallow
U
shape with two partial walls facing one another and a whole wall connecting them.
There was a fire near the southwest corner, with five men about it, and horses were clustered in the middle of the west wall.
Mike pulled a small scope from a belt pouch and studied the men about the fire.
They'd seen us. One man was reaching for their horses, and three of the others were reaching for guns. Only the white-beard remained sitting cross-legged by the fire.
Mike raised his voice in cheerful greeting. “
Asalaam aleikum
!"
The response was the Kalashnikov
clack
—the next was going to be a gunshot.
So they weren't Pakhtuns.
I flattened against my mare's neck and called out in Arabic, “In the name of God, give us water!"
As I spoke, Mike's gelding jumped, then gave a couple of crow-hops. He kept his seat, though, and spoke soothingly until the gelding quieted.
The wind picked up, scattering sand across rock with a sound peculiarly like a stirred fire shooting up a scatter of sparks. One of the tethered horses snorted.
The wind died. In the lull came the resigned voice of a believer. “
Aleikum ‘salaam
."
An older man's voice came from another angle. A third voice translated to English. “In the name of God are you granted shelter, fire, water. But as you value your tongues, keep the holy words out of your infidel mouths."
Mike made a show of motioning Echo and me to dismount and follow him. Oscar...Where was Oscar? His saddle was empty.
Echo leaned his head toward me. “Dude. You totally have to teach me the magic words."
"Later.” I know only a few lines in Arabic, and they're all magic. How to pray. How to avoid getting shot. How to bargain for ass.
Regardless of how fervently I might pray, opening that last book of knowledge up here would likely increase our chances of getting shot.
Speaking of ass, where had Oscar gone?
I could guess
when
he'd gone. When Mike's gelding had suddenly and so briefly become an attention-getter.
My mare and I picked our way over broken rock where the rubble was only knee high. Echo followed, towing his mare and Oscar's with his good hand, whistling something that sounded suspiciously like “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?"
"Shut up, Echo."
Mike solemnly shook hands with every man there, and then I did, and then I took the reins so Echo could. Oscar followed Echo, leaving me holding his horse and wondering exactly when he'd rejoined us.
The western wall was lined with stalls, each big enough for a few men to build a little fire and stretch out around it. The Arabs had the southwest corner, so we took the northwest. Three empty stalls between us wasn't enough for either group to pretend the other wasn't there, but it wasn't space that would protect us. If anything did.
Mike sat on a handy block, his rifle across his knees, pointedly playing the elder statesman role while Echo built a fire. Oscar and I unloaded and brushed down the horses.
By the time we'd finished the horses, Echo was toasting
murghal
spices—cardamom, cinnamon, clove, and pepper—in the bottom of a pot, raising an unexpected and mouthwatering scent in the rapidly chilling air. As Oscar and I washed up, he stirred in a retort pouch of chicken and four of brown rice, crumbled in a mashed-up muffin, and added a squirt-tube of ginger.
Bismillah ir Rahman ir Rahim
. I could smell why they put up with Echo. It tasted just as good.
When Echo wiped out the pot and put a cup of water in it, I got the image of him getting his bandage wet and insisted on doing the dishes for him. Any moisture that got in under the edge of that waterproof tape would stay there. His skin was going to macerate enough from sweating through the hot afternoon.
Oscar watched me with an odd expression as I washed the dishes and then spread Echo's bedroll for him. What? Wasn't he used to a doc doing what he could to prevent reinjury? I didn't expect to be coddling Echo after tomorrow, if I did tomorrow, but he needed a little healing time.
I woke before dawn, my muscles as stiff as slabs of jerky, and lay there listening to the Arabs pack up by flashlight. They'd done us no harm, so I wished I could find a prayer in my heart for them. But they belonged here no more than the Americans did. As they quietly left, the height of fellowship I could reach was a sincere hope we never met again,
alhamdulillah.
I caught a glitter and turned my stiff, aching neck to see a... I guess a visual heaviness, an impression of something man-sized crouching there in the night. The Arabs’ flashlights reflected faintly in one eye. He could be Mike or really even Echo. But my money was on Oscar.
With that thought, I went back to sleep.
In the morning, I took a moment facing Mecca while Oscar and Mike took turns disassembling and cleaning their weapons. Echo moaned, so I doled out another set of pills to work on the pain and the swelling, but warned him not to take them until he'd eaten enough to buffer his stomach.
He popped them in his mouth instantly, and swallowed with a hearty suck on his water tube.
I glared at him, but I couldn't very well make him unswallow them. I turned to clean my weapon under Oscar's annoyingly close supervision and then watched while he disassembled and cleaned the SAW under Echo's fretful but obviously unneeded directions. I egged Echo on a bit, letting him give Oscar a little more of what Oscar had given me.
I stopped when Mike sighed. “Play
nice
, children."
That might have been my grandfather's voice.
I hurried to pack up my gear and help Echo pack his. The water bladder in his pack was half-full, while mine was nearly empty. I changed them both out, and warned him to drink more.
"We're eating on the road,” Mike said and took Echo's reins.
