Читать книгу Slim To None - Taylor Smith - Страница 14

Al Zawra: Central Iraq

Hannah pressed the light fob on her black army surplus watch. Nearly 3:00 a.m. The dial went dark again as she released the button—no telltale fluorescent to give away her position in the dark.

Sean Ladwell stood at the window, peering around the edge of the curtain, his M-16 rifle gripped in both hands. Nuñez and Wilcox kept moving from room to room, checking for trouble from alternate vantage points.

Ladwell glanced back at her. “Tell the old woman they need to hurry.”

“She knows,” Hannah said, watching the grandmother fumble through a drawer, withdrawing underthings that she handed to her granddaughter.

The house fairly hummed with tension, and for good reason. The eastern sky would lighten soon. Roosters would crow in backyard coops. With the electricity down, neighbor women would rise early to start cooking fires to make breakfast for their families. Soon, the whole town would be stirring, including the warlord Salahuddin and his troops in their compound, which advance intel said was behind the mosque, near the town center. If the team was going to head back to the hills for their rendezvous with the chopper without being seen, then they were going to have to leave very soon.

“Why don’t you guys wait out in the front room?” Hannah told Ladwell. “These ladies won’t want to get dressed in front of men. I’ll stay and speed things along.”

The team leader glanced at the woman and girl, who were shyly folding clothing on one of the beds. Nuñez arrived in the doorway, back from his circuit of the house. The young ex-marine was short but solidly built. A high school wrestler, Hannah thought. Nuñez had to be at least twenty-one, because that was Brandywine International’s minimum age for its contract security forces, but in spite of his flak jacket and armaments, he still looked like a kid playing at soldiering.

“Wait out in the front room,” Ladwell told him. Then he turned back to Hannah. “They can’t bring much. Tell them that.”

“I think they get it that this is no luxury cruise we’re offering.”

“They should pack only what they can carry themselves. We’re going to be moving out at a brisk clip and there’s no such thing as chivalry here. No one’s going to carry their stuff. We’ll be busy enough trying to keep them alive till we get to the LZ.”

“I’ll make sure they understand.”

Ladwell grunted and headed out of the room.

Hannah turned to the woman and girl and switched back to Arabic. “The men will wait in the living room. You should hurry and get dressed now. We have a long walk ahead of us, and we don’t want to be running into anyone.”

“We are walking to London?” Yasmin said.

“No, just into the hills to the west of here. It’s about two kilometers. We’ll be picked up there and flown out. I’m sorry,” Hannah added to Zaynab. “I wish we didn’t have to make you walk, but it was too risky to drive in case of roadblocks.”

“No matter. I am strong,” the old woman said. “We both are. Come, Yasmin, hurry. Here are your things.”

An ornately carved wooden bureau stood between the two narrow beds. Hannah set her flashlight down on top of it, pointing it toward the large oval mirror hanging above to add a dim, red-tinged light for Zaynab and Yasmin to see by. The mirror was gilt-framed and, like the ornate bureau itself, said something about the comfortable and relatively privileged life that this family had once lived. At the same time, the mirror’s silver backing was crackled. This, like the peeling blue paint on the walls and the chipped and broken ceramic tiles on the floor, was mute testimony to years of declining family fortunes. In a country where the average annual income wouldn’t cover an American family’s cable TV service, these people had obviously been among the country’s small, educated elite, part of that group who should have helped this ancient and cultured nation move into the future. Such people, however, were just the type to attract the attention of a paranoid dictator.

Yasmin turned her back modestly as she lifted her faded nightdress over her head. Hannah caught a glimpse of birdlike shoulder blades and a pronounced rib cage, the bones jutting too sharply to indicate anything but malnutrition. This child had lived almost her entire lifetime under the sanctions mounted against Saddam’s regime after the Gulf War of the early nineties. The dictator and his cronies had kept themselves amply fed, clothed and entertained throughout that time, Hannah thought angrily, but Iraq’s children hadn’t been so well provided for. Things could only have gotten worse for poor Yasmin after the death of her parents, despite her grandmother’s best efforts.

“Here,” she murmured to the grandmother, who’d been pulling clothes from the bureau, “let me fold these while you get yourself ready. You won’t be able to take much, I’m afraid.”

“We have little enough.”

The old woman shut the drawer, then turned to a tall armoire. When she opened it, the scent of cedar wafted through the room. Hannah caught a glimpse of a man’s dark suit on a hanger—the dead son’s, no doubt—and of two black abayas, or burqas, draped on hooks at the side of the closet.

Zaynab caught her looking at the black shrouds, and she fingered the fabric. “My mother used to dress in full hijab, but in my lifetime, only peasants and uneducated women still did. I never used to wear one of those—my late husband never demanded it, thankfully. I dressed modestly, always wore a kerchief on my head, but I saw no reason to stumble around half-blind. After they killed my son and his wife, though,” she added bitterly, “it was the only way to go out safely into the streets. Even Saddam’s hooligans and this latest bunch, Salahuddin’s men, will not generally harass a woman in hijab. We are invisible. I made Yasmin cover up, too. Not even a child is safe these days.”

“I didn’t like it. It was hot,” Yasmin said.

“You won’t need it where you’re going,” Hannah told her.

Zaynab pushed the robes aside. “Good.” She withdrew a long gray skirt and flowered blouse from the armoire, then headed back to her bed to get ready.

Hannah busied herself folding the clothing on the bureau—a few pairs of thin socks and underthings, a child’s sweater and T-shirt. Yasmin came over and shyly added her folded nightgown to the pile. Hannah gave her a smile.

The girl had on a white cotton blouse and dark pleated skirt that had seen better days. The blouse was clean, but worn and patched, and a little small for her. The skirt had obviously been let down at least a couple of times, by the look of the fold lines at the hem. Even so, it ended an inch or two above her knee, shorter than girls in this part of the world normally wore. Hannah doubted it was a fashion statement. Yasmin’s outfit looked like a school uniform that had been worn long past its serviceable time, after being subjected to all the abuse that children everywhere put their clothes through.

She thought of Gabriel, her son, and the many knees he had taken out of pants, crawling around with his cars when he was little, and later, tumbling off bikes. These days, it was his skateboard that put rips in his clothing and beat down the treads in his sneakers. But Gabe never had to wear pants that had been patched or rehemmed. At eight years old, in fact, his wardrobe cost more than Hannah’s, outfitted as he always was in trendy fashions from the upscale children’s boutiques of L.A.’s Westside and the Beverly Center. Gabe couldn’t care less about style, of course, but it was important to Cal that his son be as much a credit to him as his trophy wife, so Gabe’s stepmother kept him turned out in relentlessly preppy fashion.

“Can I take my pictures?” Yasmin asked, pulling a small, leather-bound album from the bureau’s top drawer. From the way she clutched it in her thin arms, Hannah could only guess at the memories it contained.

“Absolutely,” she said. The girl looked relieved.

Zaynab finished buttoning the cuffs of her long-sleeved blouse. Then, she picked up a brush off the bureau and pulled it gently through her granddaughter’s wavy black hair. “We are lucky that Mumtaz sent for us,” she said quietly. “Yasmin hasn’t been able to go to school this past while.”

“You lost your teachers?”

“No, but when Salahuddin took charge, he banned school for girls.” She grimaced. “I’ve known him since he was a boy, you know. I knew his parents. His mother died in childbirth. The father was a brute, and Salahuddin turned out to be a lout just like the old man, drunk and stupid. Then he went to prison and found Allah, they say. Nonsense, I say. Holy warrior—feh! Then he comes back here, calls himself ‘sheikh’ and starts issuing fatwas. I’m surprised he didn’t close the school altogether, because even the littlest boys are smarter than he is.”

“Ouch, Grandmother!” Yasmin protested. “Too hard!”

“Oh, sorry, little one,” Zaynab said, setting aside the brush she’d been wielding like a rake. She kissed the top of the girl’s head. Then, she glanced back at Hannah. “Even before he outlawed school for girls, it wasn’t safe for Yasmin. People! It wasn’t enough that she’d lost her mother and father. At school, the children, even the teachers, some of them…” The old woman shook her head bitterly. “The things they said. The things they did. That’s what thirty years of Saddam has turned my countrymen into—cowering pack dogs who tremble before the leaders, then turn around and bare their fangs at the weak and defenseless. We have become a nation of cowards.”

“Are we ever coming back here?” Yasmin asked Hannah.

Hannah shrugged. “I don’t know. That will depend, I guess. I think everyone hopes things will get better here one day.”

The grandmother looked around, as if the finality of what they were about to do had suddenly hit her. “This used to be a beautiful country, you know.”

“I know,” Hannah said.

“I don’t want to die in a foreign land. I want to be here, in my home. I want to be buried near my husband and my son.” She sat down on the edge of the mattress. She looked as though she might be changing her mind.

“The future is for the children,” Hannah said quietly. “For Yasmin here, and for those two grandsons in London you’ve never seen. All we can do is what’s best for them. What’s best for Yasmin now is to get her to a place where she’ll be safe, have enough to eat, go to school and become the young woman her parents would have wanted her to be. That’s the gift you can give her. And Mumtaz, too. Your daughter must be frantic to have you and Yasmin safe with her.”

The old woman’s eyes teared up, but she nodded.

“Do you have a small bag we can put your things in?” Hannah asked.

The old woman’s forehead creased in thought, and then she turned to her granddaughter. “Your old school satchel will hold everything, I think. It’s in the other bedroom. Run and fetch it. It’s under the bed, I think. Or…no, on top of the wardrobe.”

“I’ll help you get it down, Yasmin,” Hannah said, grabbing her rifle and flashlight.

“Ready?” Ladwell asked as they emerged from the bedroom.

“Yup,” Hannah said. “Just getting a bag to put their stuff in and then we can hit the road.”

She followed Yasmin into the bedroom on the other side of the sitting area and reached up to retrieve a blue nylon backpack that was sitting on top of the armoire. The wardrobe stood opposite a double bed covered in a pink chenille bedspread. A ruffled white lampshade topped a pink-striped ginger jar lamp, while a woven jute rug just next to the bed was designed to protect bare feet from the cool, decoratively tiled floor. As in the rest of the house, the impression here was of a middle-class family fallen on hard times. And yet oddly, Hannah thought, this room looked more decorated than the one Yasmin and her grandmother had been using.

By the odd, crumpled look on the child’s face, Hannah guessed that this must have been her parents’ room. She put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “All set?”

Yasmin pressed her lips together and nodded, starting for the other room. Hannah was right behind her, but stopped short as the beam of her flashlight fell on something behind the door. “Hold up a second, Yasmin.”

On a chair hidden by the open door sat an expensive-looking hiker’s pack with a North Face embroidered patch on the flap. A bright blue Nalgene hiker’s water bottle hung from a carabiner hooked on one of the pack’s carrying loops, and a tan, multi-pocketed jacket hung on the back of the chair. When Hannah shone her flashlight on it, she spotted an L. L. Bean label inside the collar.

She frowned. “Where did these things come from?”

The girl’s shoulders gave a hesitant shrug. “They’re not ours. We’re just…I don’t know how it got there,” she said, suddenly fearful. “We should go now?”

“Hang on.” Hannah tucked the flashlight under her left arm and patted down the jacket pockets. Encountering resistance, she fumbled until she found a hidden inside pocket which she unzipped, withdrawing the object she’d felt through the fabric. It was a blue passport with a gold eagle and the words United States of America embossed on the cover. She opened it by the light of her flashlight. The young woman’s smiling face on the inside photograph seemed vaguely familiar. When Hannah read the name of the passport holder, she understood why.

“Holy smoke.”

She hung onto the jacket and passport as she bounded out of the room.

“What the hell…?” Ladwell muttered behind her as she flew across the sitting room and into the bedroom on the other side.

“Zaynab,” Hannah said, holding up her discoveries, “how did these get here? And that pack in the other room?”

“I don’t…” The old woman hesitated, as if trying to guess what the right answer might be. It was a common response among people who lived in countries where the wrong answer could mean torture or death.

Hannah amped down her excitement. “You know Amy Fitzgerald,” she said gently, telegraphing the message that there was no wrong answer here.

The old woman nodded. “She was renting the room of my son and his wife. I didn’t like to take money, because really, she is a guest and it was good that she had come here to help the people. But Amy insisted, and it allowed me to buy better food for Yasmin and other things she needed, so in the end, I let her pay me.”

“What the hell is going on?” Ladwell asked coming in behind Hannah. “We need to go, Nicks. This is no time for a bloody gabfest.”

“I found this in the other room,” Hannah said, switching to English. She held up the L.L. Bean jacket and the passport. “You’ll never guess who they belong to. Amy Fitzgerald.”

“And who’s that when she’s at home?”

“Daughter of Patrick Fitzgerald, whose family owns half of Boston or something? Amy Fitzgerald’s a doctor. She was working in-country for the Red Cross/Red Crescent when she was kidnapped a week or two ago. I read about it on the flight over here.”

“And that is significant to me why?”

“Because she’s a hostage, and we’re here, and there’s a million-dollar reward for her return.” Before Ladwell could reply, Hannah turned back to Zaynab and asked in Arabic, “Do you know who took her?”

“Salahuddin’s men. People said there were wounded men in his compound.”

“And they’re holding her at this compound?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Aha.” Hannah turned back to Ladwell and translated. “She says there’s a chance Amy’s at the compound of Sheikh Salahuddin, here in town.”

“I don’t give a toss if she is. It’s not my concern. We’re being paid to get this woman and her granddaughter out safely. Now, get them ready and let’s get the hell on the road.”

“We can’t just walk away and leave, now that we’ve discovered where she is.”

“Allegedly is. She could also be in Syria or upcountry or dead by now.” Ladwell passed a finger across his throat. “Beheaded like those other poor sods.”

Still, Hannah held back. “Sean, listen, this is worthwhile. Think about it. A million-dollar reward. We could radio the chopper to pick us up at the LZ tonight and take the day to check this out. One day, that’s all. I can dress up in one of these burqas in here, scout around and see if I can find out if they’re still holding her in the compound in town. If we could get her out…”

“Not a chance. That’s not what we were sent in to do. There will be no compromising this mission on my watch.”

“Just let’s—”

“No. We’ll report what we learned after we get these civilians safely out, but that’s as far as I’m willing to go. End of discussion. If you want to get paid for your part in this mission, Nicks, you’ll put your ass in gear right now, or I swear to God, I will leave you behind and you’ll get sweet bloody zip. Now, move it!”

Hannah hesitated, but she knew when she was beaten.