Right of Thirst (17 page)

Her face stayed with me all the way through the village, and the resentment of the crowd, and the shouts of the children, emboldened, who followed us. Rai did his best, and walked slowly, but it was an undignified retreat nonetheless.

I thought of Homa's brother, so lean and tireless, gliding up the hillside from the village, giving nothing away, and I thought of the others—those men knocking snow off the tents, un
touched by the bitter cold, and how they had gone silent at my approach that day. How little I understood them, and even now they watched us, through the tiny windows of their houses, or from a distance in the background. Only the youngest followed.

Just as we left the confines of the village, and began the slow ascent back along the river, something stung me on the back of the neck. My first thought was a fly, or a wasp from the orchard. I winced, and slapped the spot, and turned around, and suddenly there was a shout of triumph from the children in our wake.

It was a stone.

They came that night. I must have been very deeply asleep. Rai shook my tent, and called out. He had a flashlight, which he rarely used, and shone it at the door, printing a circle of light on the nylon and filling the tent with shadows. Elise was with him.

“What is it?” I asked, trying to wake up, my thoughts coming with difficulty. I unzipped the door.

“You must get up,” Rai said. “Please get dressed.”

“Why? What's going on?”

“I will explain,” he said. “But you must get dressed.”

“The army is here,” Elise said.

I struggled into my clothes, and crawled out of my tent, and stood up. I could see the dining tent, lit from within, glowing in the darkness.

“The army?” I asked, dumbly.

“Yes,” Rai said. “I am being relieved.” He said it without expression.

“What army?”

“Our army, of course,” Rai replied.

I blinked in the light, and then he turned it away, and began walking toward the dining tent. We followed him, in single file, and only then, I think, did I become fully awake.

“I'm sorry,” he said, over his shoulder. “But I did not want you to hear them and come outside. I did not want any mistakes.”

“What do you mean you're being relieved?”

“I will explain everything in a moment,” Rai said, in a tone that suggested further questions would be unwelcome. So I said nothing else, and simply did as I was told, and followed the bobbing light in his hand. It was a clear night, dark in the absence of the moon.

There were armed men standing in the darkness. Two or three, I think, beyond the light from the dining tent door. Rai called out to them as we approached, and they murmured in reply. They appeared to be facing away from the tent, but it was difficult to see them well. They were not standing at attention, as best I could tell, but neither were they fully at ease.

“Why are they standing out there?” I said. “Why aren't they in the tent?”

“It is unnecessary, I think,” Rai replied. “But they are keeping their eyes for the dark.”

His phrase struck me.

There were two men in the tent, both seated at our table, both drinking cups of tea. Ali was there as well, serving them. As we entered, they looked at us, and only then, slowly, did they stand in welcome.

The older of the two wore a green wool sweater, identical to Captain Rai's, and a dark red beret over his weathered face. The obligatory mustache, also, beginning to go gray. He looked fifty, but I suspected that he was younger. He was a large, imposing man. He looked far harder than Rai, far more ruthless, stern and wintry, and I instantly realized that he had little of General Said's charm. Perhaps he was more intelligent than he appeared, but he had none of Rai's spark, none of Rai's alertness. He looked like a guard.

Rai saluted casually, and made the introductions.

“This is Colonel Raju,” he said. “He is the commander of the regiment.”

I shook his outstretched hand.

“Yes,” the man said. He nodded at Elise, but did not offer to shake hands with her.

Colonel Raju said something to Rai.

“The colonel does not speak English as well as he would like,” Rai said, translating carefully. “He hopes that you will understand.”

“Of course,” I said. “But there is no need for him to apologize. I don't speak his language either.”

Rai translated, and the man replied.

“He is not apologizing,” Rai said.

There was a pause. I looked at him, and managed to smile. The man spoke again.

“He says he is apologizing for the fact that you will have to go down in the morning, however.”

“Ask him what is going on,” Elise interjected.

Rai looked at her, clearly regretting that she had spoken, but then did as she asked. The colonel listened, and glanced at Elise. But he replied calmly enough.

“He says the situation has become complex. Beyond that he cannot go into details. But he says it is not necessary for you to be here any longer, and that tomorrow you must go down.”

The other man stood, watching. He was about the same age as Rai, and similar in build and coloring, although his features were more classically handsome.

“Who is he?” I asked, gesturing to the man.

“I'm Captain Singh,” the man said, in entirely fluent, British-accented English. “I'm the XO. Pleased to meet you.”

He took a step forward, and shook our hands.

It must have been Rai's radio call that did it, I realized—the flash I'd seen, the point on the hillside. They'd sent in the army. It seemed laughable, absurd, and yet there they were.

Rai was as unreadable as I'd ever seen him. He was attentive, that much was clear, but he did not seem afraid, as he had with General Said. At first glance, Colonel Raju was a more formidable figure, much more obviously frightening, yet apparently Rai knew something that I did not.

Just then I saw Ali, standing in the corner with his tray. He moved, and caught my eye. He was being as unobtrusive as possible, but the expression on his face was one of despair, as if he had heard the most terrible news. For the first time he looked alert to his misfortune, not dulled to it, and I wondered what it was that had upset him so much. But then I looked away, because the colonel was speaking again.

“He says it is best if we stay together in the medical tent tonight,” Rai said. “And to please not go outside in the dark. He does not want one of his soldiers to mistake you for someone else.”

“Who else?” Elise began. She was angry, and I could see it.

“Elise,” I said quickly. “Don't. Not now.”

She shook her head, and I saw tears in her eyes. She shook her head again, and looked away. In that moment I realized that I didn't want it all to come to an end. I wanted to continue as we had been, waiting for them to come, drinking our tea and talking together. Now these men had made it impossible.

They did not invite us to sit down.

“Well,” Rai said, finally, “we should go to the tent. There is much walking tomorrow.”

So we shook their hands again, because we had to, and then
they were done with us, turning away to their strategies and their weariness, snapping their fingers at Ali when their cups were empty.

Outside, in the open air, Rai called out to the guards once more. Beyond them, in the darkness, there was movement, and rustling, and footsteps. I realized that soldiers were passing, just out of sight. Every so often one of the guards would call out softly, and each time there was an answering reply.

Rai led us away.

“How many men are out there?” I asked, finally, when we reached Elise's tent.

“More than two hundred,” Rai said.

The number astonished me.

“Why so many?”

“It is a precaution only,” Rai said.

I laughed, despite myself.

“They sent hundreds of soldiers up here because we saw something on the ridge that we weren't even sure was a man. Is that right?”

“It is a temporary matter,” Rai said, more mildly than he might have. “They will only be here for a short time once it is clear.”

“Once what is clear?”

“That we are not weak,” Rai said. “That we will not tolerate their provocations. That there will be consequences for them if they violate our territory.”

“I am supposed to pack now?” Elise said, sharply, interrupting us.

“No,” Rai said. “Just your sleeping bag. We will pack in the morning. Tomorrow, it is important that we act the same. We will go to the dining tent early, we will eat breakfast, and then we will pack up our things and leave quickly. They do not know
our soldiers are here. The soldiers will be in the tents, and so they will not see them.”

“Why does it matter?” I asked. “I don't understand this. What are you trying to do?”

“These are my orders,” Rai said, calmly. “There may be some risk now. It is possible. So you must listen carefully and do what I say.”

“We should just call a helicopter,” I said. “And fly out like we came in.”

“This is too dangerous,” Rai said, ominously. “They might have a missile. An SA-7. They are light enough to carry and effective against helicopters. They might fire on the helicopter if they think they have been discovered. They have done this before.”

“In your territory? Wouldn't that be an act of war?” I asked, incredulous.

Rai laughed softly.

“What do you think this is, Doctor? A game we are playing?”

A deep anger came over me as he spoke. All of it, or nearly all of it, for nothing. I lay there in the dark beside them, wondering why I had ever listened to Scott Coles, when all along I knew that he was not fully what he seemed, that the promise he had offered was half a fiction all along, one that he had sold even to himself. He was out of his depth, and his organization was hardly anything at all. I knew better, and yet I'd fallen for it anyway. I'd come all this way for an empty tent city and a one-legged girl. A wind-scoured field of stones on the other side of the earth. The whole endeavor, as I saw it, had come to this; the whole attempt to start again. My plunge into the unknown, my step into this other world, where I hoped to lose myself in an abundance of need—and so few of my hopes had come true.
There was need, surely, there was need everywhere around me. But Homa alone had provided what I'd sought: redemption, the kind of clear personal triumph before which all the abstract questions recede. The rest of it, the cold roar from the heights, the absent refugees, the scraps of voices through static on the radio, all the questions of hierarchy and honor, the eagerness to spend precisely what they could least afford on conflict and war, to remake the struggle as one between men when it should have been one between hunger and food, between legs and stones—suddenly it infuriated me. I'd come for clarity, for Scott Coles's promise of a reduction to the essentials, because I'd assumed the two to be companions. Instead they were the most uneasy of bedfellows.

“Tell me,” I said, coldly, to Rai. “What is wrong with you people? Why do you do this? I'd like to know why I came all this way for nothing.”

“What is it that you would like me to say, Doctor? That we should let them take everything as they wish?”

“How many refugees could you have flown out of the mountains if you weren't airlifting hundreds of soldiers every time something sparkled on top of a ridge?”

“We are not like you,” he replied, tightly. “We have not stolen everything to be rich.”

“We didn't steal what we have. We earned it. And you're not even competent as soldiers. Any Western army would wipe the floor with you.”

“You have not earned it,” he said. “You are lucky, that is all. You have done nothing for what you have. We did not ask you to come here. And now that you cannot be a hero you are angry. You are trying to help yourself, not us.”

The barrage rumbled on.

Early the next morning, in the dining tent, I finally saw why they had come.

It was windless and clear, cold, without a cloud in the sky, and the whole of the valley remained in shadow. The barrage, for the moment, had stopped. We left the medical tent together, and walked across the few meters of open ground.

Rai called out softly as we approached, then opened the door halfway, stood to one side, and gestured for us to enter. There was a flicker of movement within the tent, the scuffing of boots, as a figure stood up and moved away.

It was a soldier. As Rai let the canvas flap close behind us, I saw that a hip-high wall of sandbags had been stacked on the ground a few feet back from the door. Rising above the sandbags, a spotting scope, heavy and black, stood on a tripod. I realized that the soldier had been watching the ridges through a crack in the door, as Rai and I had done.

At our table, beyond the line of sandbags, Colonel Raju sat with Captain Singh, drinking tea. There was a radio on the table, and several pairs of binoculars. Both men looked up at us and nodded.

But it was the final soldier who frightened me. He lay on his back on a green rubber mat, next to the tripod behind the sand
bags, staring at the ceiling, and he hardly glanced at us. Beside him on the mat sat a weapon—a heavy bolt-action rifle, with an oversized scope, its black synthetic stock scraped and battered. Two folding legs supported its thick barrel. It looked malevolent, functional; it had none of the elegance of General Said's ibex gun, with its tooled leather strap and varnished grains of wood. Directly in front of the weapon a firing slit had been prepared in the row of sandbags. They must have worked for hours in the dark, filling the burlap with gravel.

“What is this?” I said, sharply, my voice loud in the tent. Colonel Raju said something to Rai.

“Please,” Rai said to me. “We will eat, and then we will leave.”

“Why is there a sniper team in our tent?”

Rai's face tightened, and he reached out and grabbed my arm.

“You must keep your voice down,” he said. “It is important that you control yourself now. Both of you.”

Elise stood staring at the soldiers as I had done.

“I do not want to eat,” she said. “I want to leave this place.”

“Then we will pretend we are eating,” Rai said. “Ali will bring us our breakfast. We will wait here for a few minutes. Then you will go directly to your tents, pack up your things, and we will go. Do you understand?”

“Send them somewhere else, at least.”

“We cannot do this, Doctor,” Captain Singh said, from the table. “If they see movement in the other tents they will know others are here. But if they see movement in this tent they will not.”

“But where are the soldiers?”

“They are in the tents that are behind the others and more difficult to see from the ridge. They are lying down. They are
not moving. But you are asking too many questions. Sit down, please.”

With that, Captain Singh extended his hand toward one of the empty chairs at the table.

Rai turned away, opened the flap just enough to step through it, and began shouting for Ali. His voice was loud, designed to draw attention.

Elise and I looked at each other in bewilderment, then did as we were told, and sat down at the table. Raju ignored us.

Minutes passed, and with them came a rising sense of dread. The soldier reassumed his position at the door, eyes on the scope, sweeping it back and forth, patiently and slowly, again and again.

“If you shoot at them they're going to shoot back,” I said to Rai. “You're putting all of us in danger. It is unacceptable.”

“Even if they are there, which we do not know, it is very difficult to see where you are being fired at from long range,” Singh replied, calmly. “It will be only one or two men, three at most. This is a prepared position and you are safe here, I assure you.”

“You assure me? Based on what? You have no idea how many men might be up there.”

Captain Singh smiled.

“We do not know if anyone is there at all,” he said. “Though I am sure Captain Rai was not mistaken. If he was, then we are making fools of ourselves.”

Rai looked at him, without expression, then turned to me.

“Please,” he said. “You must calm down.”

“We did not come here for this,” I said. “If you want to start a war, why don't you do it somewhere else?”

Colonel Raju spoke for the first time.

“You will be quiet, please,” he said, in English, his black eyes
meeting mine again as he took another sip of tea. I felt the chill that he intended, and did not reply.

Just then Ali appeared in the doorway with our breakfast, eyes darting at the soldiers. His hands were shaking as he set the tray down on the table. Rai spoke to him. He bowed and nodded, nodded again, then turned and left the tent as quickly as he had come.

“What did you say?” Elise asked, her voice steady.

“I told him to pack our food,” Rai replied. “I told him to be ready to leave.”

“Nothing will happen now,” Rai said, watching me. “This is a precaution only. You should not become carried away.”

But he was carried away as well—he was as tense and coiled as I'd ever seen him. I knew what he wanted, and how afraid he was that he had been wrong. Every so often he glanced anxiously over at the soldier, expectant, like a fisherman watching a lure on the surface.

Rai looked at his watch. The soldier studied the ridges, back and forth and back again.

“In a few more minutes,” Rai said, “we will go. But you should eat. There will be much walking today.”

I shook my head, and Elise said nothing at all. The minutes ticked on—five, then ten. Only a little while longer, I thought, and we'll be gone. But then the soldier shouted, and surprised us all, because none of us, I think, truly expected them to be there.

It was a single word, one I didn't understand, but in that moment, despite all my doubts, despite how I had questioned my own eyes, I knew what was going to happen, and then with a single liquid movement the soldier rolled over on his mat and took up the rifle in his arms, inching forward beside the spotter, eyes to the scope, chin on the stock, finger extended past the trigger, the muzzle easing out through the slit in the sandbags.

In a instant Colonel Raju and Captain Singh were out of their chairs and beside the spotter. Raju whispered to him, bent to look through the scope, then leaned back again as Singh raised his binoculars. Raju spoke quickly to Rai, who had also risen from his chair. Rai crept around the wall to the canvas door, and eased it open, just slightly, then slightly more, on Raju's command.

Raju paused, as if thinking, and spoke again. Rai answered, failing to keep his excitement from his voice, all of them unaware of us now.

“What is it?” Elise asked, her voice startling. “What do you see?”

Rai looked back at her from the door.

“Quiet!” Rai hissed at her. “Get down on the floor. In the back of the tent. Behind the position.”

I took Elise by the arm, and pulled her from the table to the ground a few feet directly behind the row of sandbags.

“Lie down,” I said to her, on my knees, looking toward the door. Raju knelt beside the soldiers, his elbows resting on the top of the sandbags. The sniper spoke for the first time, but Raju shook his head, and answered, clearly telling him to wait. Long minutes passed—two, then three, until I could tolerate it no longer. I stood, and moved quickly to the table for Rai's binoculars, and then I was crouching behind them, lifting the binoculars to the ridge. I swept the binoculars back and forth, until I saw them also.

They were far closer than they had been before, much farther down than I would have guessed. They had reached the base of a sheer cliff, on a rock slope high above the river; two men, carrying packs and rifles, traversing slowly across the shadows of the slope toward a steep gully that led back to the top of the ridge. They were dressed like villagers. A few meters above them,
where the slope met the bottom of the cliff, was an opening—a deep crevice in the base of the cliff, perhaps a cave; I could not tell in the darkness of the face. And as I watched, a third man emerged from the crevice, picking his way down, before following the others out across the slope. They moved steadily and deliberately through the shadows, and had I not known where to look I never would have seen them. But there was no doubt this time; there were men up there, and they must have thought they were safe enough, so early in the morning, in the deep shade of the cliff before the sun fell on the slope. They must have thought there was nothing to fear.

“Get down in the back of the tent,” Rai said to me, from the doorway, a look of triumph on his face.

“Don't kill them,” I said. “Please. You don't have to.”

“Get down,” Rai said again, his voice rising.

The spotter pressed a button on the top of scope, and a green light blinked, and then he spoke, and then the other man was turning the knobs on the scope of the rifle. I realized that the spotting scope had a laser range finder. I stepped back, as Rai demanded, dropping the binoculars.

“Don't kill them,” I said again, and for an instant I considered running out of the tent, shouting, waving my arms, but I knew they never would have heard me. It would not have helped them; they were out on the face, on forty degrees of rock, utterly exposed, with hundreds of empty meters in every direction, and nowhere to hide, and if they were going to be shot, there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

“You don't know who they are,” I said. “They could be villagers. They aren't wearing uniforms. They could be anyone.”

Colonel Raju spoke again to Singh.

“They have packs and rifles,” Singh said. “They are not villagers. They are the enemy, and they are in our territory. You
should not be here for this. But we are defending our country. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said, as calmly as I could manage, struggling to think clearly. “But if you're right they'll have radios. What if you miss? Then they'll call for help.”

“They are within range,” Singh said. “Eight hundred meters. They have no cover. Their radios will not carry far enough unless they are on the top of the ridge. And now you must hold your tongue.”

Rai crouched by the door.

Raju waited a little bit more. I ignored Singh, and raised the binoculars again, nauseated, unable to turn away. The third man was hurrying to catch the others, and each second he drew farther from the safety of the crevice.

“They were careless,” Rai said, softly. “They slept too low and too close. They were in the hole in the rock.”

“Maybe they're leaving,” I said.

“Then they are leaving too late,” Rai replied, for the benefit of the others, his hand tight on his fistful of canvas.

The soldier shifted the rifle against his shoulder, his left hand draped over the stock, close to his cheek, pulling it tight to his shoulder, and then he reached up with his right hand and worked the bolt.

Captain Singh tapped his fingers on the sandbags. Only Raju was at ease. They waited, letting them pass across the face, each step taking them farther from safety.

“You shouldn't do this,” I said. “You should let them go. They must know we're not a threat or else they wouldn't have come so close.”

Raju put his thick fingers in his ears, and gave the order to fire.

The shot was deafening, like the crack of an enormous whip,
the muzzle flash lighting up Rai's face. Instantly my ears began to ring, and then the soldier worked the bolt again, and I was looking through the binoculars once more.

They didn't realize at first. It took them many long seconds; the first shot missed, and the sound of it must have been muffled by the tent, because the men continued on across the wall as if nothing had happened.

The spotter pressed the button on the scope again, fiddling with the knobs, calling out the range, and then the soldier fired a second time.

Once more the blast lit up the tent, and the weapon leapt back against the man's shoulder, but this time I saw it, nearly a second later—a little puff of dust as the heavy round struck the rock wall a few meters below and behind the last figure.

“Ah!” Raju said, in fury, turning toward the man with the rifle on the ground.

For a moment I thought it would be all right, that they would get away after all, because they stopped, turning in unison to look down toward the camp, and then, a moment later, they began trying to run across the slope. They were fleeing for their lives, and a few seconds later they cast off their packs. The packs began to bound, little dark dots tumbling down the face toward the river below. The figures began to scramble and leap. But there were hundreds of meters to go, they were on a rock wall steep enough for ropes, with all that empty space beneath them, and running was impossible.

The soldier fired, and missed, for a third time—another puff of smoke on the rock, no closer than before.

Just then one of the figures stopped, and reached up for the rifle on his back, turning, lifting it to his shoulder, and I saw a string of flashes, and an instant later I heard the distant rattle of an automatic weapon.

“AK,” Singh said, with elaborate, forced calm. “From there it is whistling.”

But Raju swore, roughly, bringing his clenched fist down on the sandbags. He turned, shouting first at the soldier, then at Singh. Singh reached for the radio, and began to lift it to his lips.

In that instant Rai saw his chance. He left his place by the door, vaulted over the sandbags, and pushed the soldier aside. I watched in dismay as he lay down with the rifle, and brought up the scope to his eye, looked carefully up at the ridge, and twisted one of the knobs very deliberately, as if he had all the time in the world. The soldier stood helplessly for a moment, and then he took Rai's place at the door, and pulled it aside. Both Raju and Singh stared at Rai.