Читать книгу Anasazi Exile - Eric G. Swedin - Страница 16

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Brenda lay on the hospital bed with an IV in her arm, an oxygen tube running under her nostrils, and a breathing tube coming out of her mouth. The room smelled of disinfectant and the low hum of machinery gnawed at the edge of Harry’s hearing. The floor nurse was a large woman, with a face that had seen too much of life, yet a sunny disposition. She explained somberly but hopefully that the young woman had come out of surgery only an hour ago, her prognosis was positive, with good blood pressure, but that the surgeon had decided to keep her in a drug-induced coma so that she could heal better.

Harry had some medic training from the Special Forces and struggled to ferret out what the nurse’s words really meant. The only person he had ever known who had been kept in an induced coma was a college friend who had hit a jackknifed semi-truck in her car. She had broken over a dozen bones; the coma had been induced to let her heal and to allow her brain recover. He swallowed and his vision turned blurry: that friend had died.

“Are they concerned about neurological damage?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” The nurse tugged at her sleeve as if to draw reassurance from the green cloth. “The doctor should be able to tell you more, but he’s operating on another emergency case right now.”

“When will they take her off the machine?” Harry asked.

“Couple of hours. The anesthesia has to completely wear off before she can breathe on her own.”

“Can I stay with her?”

“Is there any family?”

“Not yet. I’m the only person who knows her.”

“The rules say that a person can stay as long as the family agrees, so I guess it’s okay.”

“Thank you. Where can I put her things?” Harry held up the backpack.

“In the cupboard under the bed stand.”

Harry slipped into the chair next to the bed, placing the backpack at his feet. He reached out and wrapped his fingers around Brenda’s hand. She felt warm, for which he was grateful; he had anticipated her feeling cold.

He dug out her cell phone and turned it on. Good, no password. The screen was already open to some text and he started reading. After a few moments of scrolling he realized to his astonishment that it was a romance novel. Everyone has their secrets, both trivial and important. He certainly had his own secrets.

He found a phone database with Mom listed. No, he shouldn’t phone in here, it might disturb her. A part of him knew that she was probably completely unconscious, but what if she wasn’t and she heard him describe her wounds to her mother? That would be disturbing, wouldn’t it?

Giving her hand one more squeeze, he crept from the room, trying to be as quiet as possible. The five-story hospital of white-painted concrete was the best medical facility short of Albuquerque and the intensive care unit occupied part of the fourth floor. The nurse sat at her station, tapping at the keyboard, and she barely glanced at Harry as he passed her. Her name tag said “Helen, R.N.” and her brown skin and broad cheekbones indicated Indian heritage.

Harry went to the end of the hall near an outside window, where reception would be better. Taking a deep breath, he composed himself and thought about what to say before placing an earpiece in his ear and selecting Mom.

The phone rang four times before being picked up.

“Hello.”

“Is this Mrs. Finnigan?”

“Yes.” Her voice was wary and he recognized the familiar tones that made Brenda’s voice interesting.

“My name is Harry Deacon. I’m working with your daughter Brenda in Chaco Canyon.”

“You’re the retired soldier.”

That surprised Harry. He had never supposed that Brenda might have talked about him to her family. “Uh, yes.”

“Is Brenda okay?”

“We’ve had an incident at the dig. For some unknown reason, men attacked us and Brenda was shot.” He spoke more quickly to preempt her questions. “Brenda is okay and is recovering from surgery right now.”

“Oh, my Lord,” Mrs. Finnigan exclaimed. “Can I talk to her?”

“She is still recovering from the anesthesia and they want to keep her sedated.”

“We need to come out.” It was not a question, but rather an assertion of intent.

“That would be a good idea,” Harry agreed.

“We’re on the island right now and we might not be able to get a boat today.” He had forgotten that Brenda’s family left their Maine home every summer to live on an island off the coast in a home that the family had owned for generations.

Brenda’s mother talked to herself, as if Harry was only a spectator. “Maybe Tony will take us. I’ll have to call you back. What number can I reach you at?”

Harry gave her the number for his cell phone. After a few more words, the conversation ended and he thumbed an end to the connection. He wiped his damp palms on his jeans and struggled to control his trembling.

He needed to get outside, away from the bland beige paint of the corridors, the smell of disinfectants and other fleeting odors with no name, and the oppressive sense of sickness and demise.

Down three flights of stairs and out through the glass front doors, and he was outside.

* * * *

Harry looked up at the sun. It was only midday but he felt punchy, that curious feeling that he remembered from many times in training or combat, when he hadn’t slept for a couple of days.

Across the street from the San Juan Regional Medical Center was a strip mall containing a café, a Payless shoe store, a video store, and a place called L&J. Here in the high desert of the West—a place that the imagination wanted to be forlorn and dusty, full of ghost towns and characters exotic enough for a novel—was only suburbia. A Budweiser sign in the window, garish with neon colors, advertised what L&J offered.

He didn’t care for Budweiser—too bland—but just looking at the sign brought the bitter taste of a dark brew to his tongue. Deep in his soul, he craved a beer, even a Budweiser, or something stronger. Just one, or maybe two, not enough to dull his senses, but enough to take off the edge.

Stepping from the curb, he glanced both ways down the street. No cars. He started across, but his steps grew shorter until he had drifted to a stop midway. What were the words? “My name is Harry and I am an alcoholic.” He hadn’t been to AA for three years, back when he had gone to a chapter that met every night in the multi-use room of a Presbyterian church in Salt Lake; he didn’t need to go any more; he had whipped it.

Pride turned his feet around. A stone bench in the shade of a tree provided a place for him to slump, his face slack and his eyes focused in a thousand-yard stare.

Sometimes a man can force himself to forget, and other times he can never not remember, regardless of how hard he tries. Through an act of pure will, Harry had forgotten the name of the village in Afghanistan, but he remembered everything else. The village was near the Paki border, high in the mountains, and the Pashtuns in the village openly sympathized with the Taliban. Harry found it amusing, in a cynical and ironic way, that the villagers considered the Americans their mortal enemies, yet felt safe enough to not hide their Mullah Omar and Taliban posters.

Harry’s team rode into the village on two Hummers and a six-ton truck, carrying twelve American special operators and six troops from the Afghan army. The team leader, a National Guard captain from Tennessee, found the tribal elders and went into the standard negotiating spiel, drinking sweet tea, offering money for information, and proposing to bring in heavy equipment to grade the road that snaked down from the village to the nearest large town. The captain also bluntly told the elders that they would search the mosque.

Harry took half of the guys to the mosque, where they removed their shoes as a sign of respect, and went through the building, arms at ready, covering each other. They were a scruffy-looking bunch, with unkempt beards, uniforms and combat webbing modified with personal touches, like the baseball cap that Harry wore and the Puerto Rican flag he had sewn onto his shoulder.

They found the weapons cache that intelligence had predicted: two 12.7mm antiaircraft guns with nine boxes of ammunition, and six hand-held rocket launchers with thirty projectiles. There were also seven boxes of dynamite and a box of detonators, just the recipe for making IEDs. The Americans and their allies hated IEDs, those improvised dealers of mayhem that blew off legs and arms if they didn’t kill you. The real treasure, though, was a bottle of vodka with a Russian label. Did the liquor date back to the Russian occupation or had it been smuggled in more recently? Harry didn’t care. Their base camp didn’t even have beer and they hadn’t been to Bagram Air Base for two months, where at least a man could sip some smuggled suds. During a moment when other eyes were distracted, the bottle went into his backpack.

The captain ordered the weapons cache carried outside the village and blown up. Everyone, even the women in their burqas, came out to watch. Harry wrapped blasting cord around the boxes of dynamite as the rest of the men stacked the other weapons nearby. They found cover behind a nearby rise and made sure the villagers were far enough away. When he twisted the igniter, Harry made a big enough boom to alert half the country that another weapons cache was no more. Because it was so late, the captain decided to bed down rather than risk a night ambush, and the tribal elders agreed that the mosque could be used.

The stars came out and Harry slipped out of the mosque to watch them. His fascination with the sky was a well-known quirk and no one questioned this. Of course he went fully armed: M4 assault rifle on a strap, 9mm Beretta in a holster, trench knife on belt, three fragmentation grenades, two flash-bang grenades, and a red smoke grenade. He found a small ridge near the village and hunkered down, pulling his jacket tight around him. Even in summer, the nights were cold. That was what made the stars so extraordinary, cold mountain air and no pollution. This was how people used to see the sky—as a great swath of white, the Milky Way, and thousands of distant stellar fires—before they learned to disturb the night sky with fires, lamps, and electricity.

Harry looked at the stars, but brought out of his pack the real reason that he wanted solitude. The vodka burned his throat and he felt the pleasant buzz that came over him like a familiar friend. After two drinks, it occurred to him that the Taliban could have filled the bottle with poison and left it for the next dumb American who came along. You could put a lot of different types of nasty stuff in vodka and no drinker would notice a difference in the taste. Harry felt a jolt at the thought, but already his mind was muddled and he consoled himself with the knowledge that liquor was not uncommon among the Arab fighters that flocked from the Gulf States to fight with the Taliban. It was as if being a warrior for God exempted them from the restrictions of the Koran.

He swallowed more vodka. Then came another boom, not as big as the one he had made earlier that day. So shit-faced that he could barely walk, Harry stumbled back down to the village, tripping over rocks and shrubs. The bottle slipped from his fumbling fingers and spilled its eighty proof alcohol into Afghan soil.

A bomb buried under the mosque had been set off by someone in the village. The villagers stood around, stony faced, not rushing to get their personal weapons, but not doing anything to put out the fire either. Harry found two other men of his team who had been on patrol and were still alive.

The three of them drove away in a Hummer, Harry’s head pounding with a hangover, wondering why he was alive. He had been saved by his alcoholic addiction, but if he had not been so obsessed with getting a drink, would he have noticed something to tip him off that the mosque was a trap? Would he have overheard a villager say something? Or noticed some clue, like fresh mortar or a depression in the floor, where the bomb had been located?

A man can never know the answers to such questions.

Harry decided to not return to the village later that day, when the Rangers rolled in, recovered the bodies of the dead, drove the villagers from their homes, and used a pound of C4 on each house. They left only rubble behind. It wouldn’t turn the villagers into allies, but it made the soldiers feel better.

With a loud sigh, almost melodramatic if anyone had been watching, Harry wiped at his eyes and looked out at Farmington, New Mexico. He had only bought one more bottle of liquor after that. A bottle of vodka in North Carolina. At Fort Bragg, there was a grove of trees east of the grassy parade ground where tradition demanded that each fallen Special Forces soldier have a tree planted in his honor, next to a plaque with the soldier’s name and unit on it. The never-ending War on Terror was turning the grove into a forest.

Harry walked through the trees, leaves rustling in the breeze, and poured a bit of the vodka before each tree. Just a little, since he was not sure if too much alcohol would harm the saplings. Fallen friends, one last toast, never to drink again. He vowed to never let down a friend again.