The Outside Man

by Don Bentley

  Zain shrugged. “I told them to pick a cardinal direction. There’s a three-in-four chance they will miss. You must learn to trust Allah, my friend.”

  Once again Benny’s laughter prevented me from replying. I’d heard that Israelis have a great sense of humor, but this was going too far. Maybe I could file an interagency complaint form later. To be fair, I wasn’t all that sure there was going to be a later, but I’d burn that bridge when we came to it.

  After freeing herself from the handcuffs, Virginia uncuffed Benny next. The Israeli smiled his thanks. He tried to take a step on his own and nearly collapsed.

  “Easy there, Benny,” I said, slipping his right arm over my left shoulder so I could keep my gun hand free. “Let me help.”

  I thought Benny was going to object, but he gave a quick nod instead. Given the severity of his wounds, I was amazed he was still standing. Even so, the adrenaline that had gotten him this far seemed to be rapidly fading. He wavered on his feet, and then Virginia slid beneath his other arm.

  “Come, come,” Zain said, beckoning us forward. “We don’t have much time.”

  Another round of explosions shook the building, the detonations closer. The overhead lights extinguished, plunging the hall into darkness for a second before they flickered back to life.

  “All right,” I said, shifting my grip on Benny. “Lead the way.”

  Zain didn’t need to be told twice. He took off down the hall, and Virginia and I did our best to follow.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Wait here,” Zain said, bringing our ragtag band of misfits to a halt on the threshold of yet another T intersection.

  Benny mumbled.

  “Absolutely,” I said, sliding past the Israeli as I edged up behind Zain to see what the holdup was.

  “What did he say?” Virginia said.

  “No idea,” I said.

  The Israeli had become increasingly lethargic as we’d wandered down the never-ending hallways, and he had taken to muttering in Hebrew. The strain of his injuries was definitely taking a toll, and he’d begun to hallucinate. He needed rest and a doctor’s care, but I had no idea when we’d find either.

  Sliding forward, I touched Zain on the shoulder. “Why’d we stop?”

  “We must wait, my friend.”

  “For what?”

  “The ending.”

  Zain’s answer had an ominous ring that I didn’t much care for. Before I could ask for clarification, Benny interrupted with another stream of Hebrew.

  “If you want to curse, at least use a language I can understand,” I said.

  “Not cursing,” Benny said. “Praying.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” Virginia said, struggling under Benny’s weight. “What do you think, Matt?”

  “I’d like to understand what Zain meant by the ending,” I said.

  Zain switched to Arabic.

  “The finish?” I said, translating on the fly.

  “The finale,” Benny said.

  “Yes, finale,” Zain said, pulling a cigar from his pocket and placing the unlit stogie in his mouth. “We must wait for the finale.”

  “Like at the end of a fireworks show?” I said.

  “Yes. That.”

  Between Zain’s passable English and my passable Arabic, our conversations were usually pretty straightforward. But every now and again, talking with him made me feel like a hamster running on an exercise wheel. Sometimes these points of confusion were genuine, and sometimes my asset hid behind linguistic ignorance because he didn’t want to elaborate. I was preparing to dig into this particular misunderstanding but didn’t get the chance. Mostly because at that moment, a bone-jarring blast hurled me into the far wall like a pinball launched from a rail gun.

  The next several seconds were a bit touch and go. My ears were ringing, and the world seemed kind of fuzzy. When my eyes finally focused, I found myself blinking against the sudden onslaught of daylight. What moments before had been a solid cinder block wall now offered a breathtaking view of the rest of the compound.

  “Fuck,” Benny said from somewhere to my right. “Fuuuuuccccckkkkk.”

  I wanted to make a smart-ass comment about how the explosion had drastically improved Benny’s English, but didn’t. The traffic between my brain and my major muscle groups seemed a bit snarled. However, I took the now-familiar urge to vomit as a good sign. My brain might have been banged up, but it was still functioning. Grabbing hold of a chunk of wall, I pulled myself to my feet.

  “Benny,” I said, coughing through the cloud of choking dust.

  “What?”

  “Next time you get the urge to pray—don’t.”

  “Fuuuccckkkk,” Benny said, elegantly summing up the situation.

  “Everybody else okay?” I said while I closed my eyes against the double images and painfully bright sun. “Virginia?”

  “Here,” Virginia said, her East Tennessee drawl thick enough to spread on biscuits. “What the hell was that?”

  “Finale,” Zain croaked.

  Reaching down, I grabbed Virginia’s hand and pulled her to her feet. Then I staggered across the rubble-strewn hallway like a drunken sailor toward Zain. Hooking the Syrian beneath his armpits, I hoisted him up. Half a dozen cuts were weeping blood, turning his face into abstract art, but the stone fragments seemed to have missed his eyes.

  Maybe old Benny wasn’t so bad at praying after all.

  “Is there another finale?” I said, looking at the camp through the gaping hole in the wall. “Like, an encore?”

  “No,” Zain said, working his cigar out of the rubble and placing it back into his mouth. “Just one. My supply of cruise missiles was limited.”

  “Fantastic. Wait— Did you say cruise missile?”

  “Yes—the American Tomahawk version. I acquired the warhead several months ago. This seemed like the right time to use it.”

  As usual, Zain’s response provided more questions than answers. Small arms and even crew-served weapons were fairly easy to acquire, but a cruise missile’s one-thousand-pound warhead wasn’t on any arms trafficker’s menu.

  At least not until now.

  Before I could ask a clarifying question or two, something caught my eye—a white ambulance with red trim. A crimson crescent graced the hood of the vehicle while twin red crosses were painted on the side panels. The red-and-white light bar on the roof was strobing, but the ambulance wasn’t heading toward the front of the hospital.

  It was racing toward us.

  “Get ready, folks,” I said. “We’ve got company.”

  “Not company,” Zain said, craning his head around my shoulder. “Our rescue.” Stepping past me into full view, he waved his arms over his head, and the ambulance flashed its brights in return.

  “See?” Zain said. “Rescue.”

  As recognition signals went, flashing headlights and flailing arms weren’t one of the techniques taught at the Farm. Then again, hanging out in the prison-hospital until one of the Quds Force operatives or Hezbollah fighters discovered us didn’t seem like such a good idea either. I had no idea what had happened with Zain, but I’d take my chances with him over ending up in a cell with Benny any day.

  Flashing headlights and flailing arms it was.

  The ambulance slid to a stop in a cloud of dust, and two men dressed in scrubs hopped out. The driver ran to the back of the vehicle and opened the rear doors while the passenger sprinted over to Zain. The Syrian stopped him with a burst of Arabic and then pointed at Virginia. With a quick nod, the passenger scooped the chemist into his arms and carried her to the back of the ambulance. I expected a string of twangy curse words, but Virginia croaked a simple “Thank you” instead before sagging against the man’s chest.

  “Don’t worry,” I said as her eyes found mine. “Your first concussion is always your worst. It’s all dow
nhill after this.”

  Virginia didn’t reply. Instead, she let a slender middle finger do the talking as the two men helped her inside the ambulance. I took the gesture as a sign that my favorite scientist was well on the road to recovery.

  “Help,” Benny said. “Please.”

  I turned toward the Israeli, but the smart-ass comment I’d prepared died on my lips. His right arm was hanging limp, and his pants were soaked in blood. After hoisting him into a fireman’s carry, I jogged toward the ambulance.

  Or at least tried to.

  My head pounded in time with my steps like each footfall was rattling my brain inside my skull. I’d been dangerously close to exploding ordnance before, but never had the pleasure of experiencing the blast wave generated by a cruise missile’s massive warhead.

  Yet another item I could check off my bucket list.

  I waited for the passenger and the driver to exit the rear of the ambulance before dumping the Mossad officer onto an empty stretcher. Then I helped Zain inside. Finally, it was my turn. I climbed into the blessedly cool interior and slammed the doors shut behind me. As soon as I was settled, Zain pounded on the partition separating us from the driver, and the vehicle surged forward.

  We were all pretty banged up, but Benny was far and away the worst. He’d been in bad shape before, and the explosion hadn’t exactly done wonders for his injuries. Rummaging through the cabinets built into the ambulance, I found a pair of trauma scissors and got to work on his pants. Since the Mossad officer was breathing without trouble, Triage 101 dictated that I needed to locate and stop the source of his bleeding before addressing any of Benny’s other wounds.

  After removing both pant legs, I found the problem. A piece of shrapnel had torn a gaping hole midway up Benny’s thigh. His femoral artery was untouched, but he was still bleeding like a stuck pig.

  “Hey, Benny,” I said, breaking open a packet of QuikClot gauze, “how you doing?” In situations like this, shock was often far more dangerous than the initial wound. Keeping the patient talking was one way to mitigate its effects.

  “Benny,” I said again as I stuffed the gauze into the wound and then wrapped the excess around his leg. “Can you hear me?”

  “Unfortunately, yes.”

  His voice was slurred and his cadence sluggish. Shock was definitely setting in.

  “Good,” I said, grabbing Benny’s hand and placing it on the gauze. “’Cause I need some help. Put pressure on this while I find a bandage. Also, would it have killed you to wear underwear today?”

  “Sorry. I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

  I found a pressure bandage and applied it directly over the gauze. The bleeding had already begun to slow as the clotting agent did its work, but I wasn’t taking any chances. If the combined bandages didn’t work, the next step was to tourniquet the leg. But first, I needed to push fluids to compensate for his blood loss.

  Whoever had stocked the ambulance had done their job well. A series of IV kits was laid out on the shelf next to me. Choosing the nondislocated arm, I applied a tourniquet, readied the catheter, and promptly blew through the vein I was targeting.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Goddamn,” Benny said, flinching as the needle bit through his skin. “Have you done this before?”

  “On goats,” I said. “But they didn’t bitch as much. Also, they were a lot better hydrated. You should drink more water.”

  “I’ll take that up with my Iranian jailers.”

  “Maybe angle the needle a bit,” Virginia said. “That’s how they do it on TV.”

  “Or don’t push as hard,” Zain said.

  “Either of you want to do this?” I said, glaring at Zain and Virginia.

  “Nope,” Virginia said.

  “You’re doing a fine job,” Zain said.

  “Then shut the fuck up,” I said, targeting another vein. This time, I slid the needle in like I’d been starting IVs my entire life. Ten seconds later I had the catheter taped down, the IV tubing attached, and saline flowing through the line.

  Success.

  “Tell me, Benny,” I said, setting the valve controlling the fluid-flow rate to the maximum, “did you ever imagine that you’d end your captivity strapped half naked to a stretcher with your junk hanging out in the breeze?”

  “No,” the Israeli said. “I thought I’d be executed.”

  “Well, then you must be pretty happy with how things turned out.”

  “I’m not sure. The day’s not over.”

  Truer words had never been spoken.

  FORTY

  So, now might be a good time to explain why you betrayed me to the Devil,” I said, eyeing Zain. Once I’d finished with Benny, I’d taken a seat across from the smuggler, but not before drawing the Glock. It wasn’t exactly pointed at Zain, but it wasn’t exactly pointed away from him either. As Dad used to say, fool me twice, and I’m not a smart boy. Or maybe that had been Mom. Dad’s folksy wisdom usually included an abstract reference to the pope.

  “Good idea, my friend,” Zain said. “We should be safe for at least the next fifteen minutes.”

  The thing about being a smart-ass is that it’s damned hard to pull off when there’s more than one in the crowd. Except in this case, I was fairly certain that Zain wasn’t joking, which meant I had a different sort of problem altogether.

  “Start talking,” I said, reaching above my head to grab one of the canvas handholds dangling from the ceiling.

  Whatever our driver lacked in skill, he made up for with urgency. He’d been taking turns hard the entire time, but the last one felt like we’d been up on two wheels. I’d expected the first couple of minutes to be a bit hairy while we were still navigating the confines of the Iranian outpost. An outpost under mortar fire by Zain’s men, I’ll add. All things considered, this was actually a pretty good rescue.

  So far.

  But perhaps I needed to reserve judgment until I heard Zain’s story.

  “Certainly,” Zain said, squaring his back against the ambulance’s pitching wall like he was a tribal storyteller sitting around a campfire. “But where should I start? Before I shot you or after?”

  “What?” Virginia said.

  The Israeli gave a dry chuckle from his stretcher as if nothing really surprised him at this point.

  I knew the feeling.

  “So, I’m assuming Zain left out a couple of details when he met you at the airport,” I said to Virginia.

  “You could say that,” Virginia said, pinning the smuggler to the wall with her glare. “He said that you were in trouble and needed our help.”

  “All true,” Zain said.

  “Except you didn’t mention the part about selling me out to the Devil?” I said.

  “How far is it to Tel Aviv?” Benny said, struggling upright. “I’m sure I could walk.”

  “You wouldn’t make it ten feet,” I said, pushing the Mossad officer back onto his stretcher before turning to Zain. “Why don’t you start with why you made a bargain with the man who wanted to kill me? Seems like as good a place as any.”

  “Oh, that’s simple,” Zain said. “The Devil came to me with an offer—betray you or watch as he murdered my family.”

  “He has that kind of power?” I said. “Even over you?”

  “Especially over me,” Zain said, his thin features stretching into a mask of anger. “I might run the largest logistics network in Syria and Iraq, but I’m still just a simple smuggler. The Devil’s influence extends far beyond just criminal enterprise. His tentacles reach from the slums of Aleppo to the Council of Representatives in Baghdad. His enforcers are former Iraqi commandos. His lunch guests are heads of state. The Devil doesn’t negotiate with a man like me. He makes demands, and I follow them or suffer the consequences.”

  Zain actually shuddered when he finished speaking, and the gest
ure spoke volumes. My asset and onetime friend was an opportunist, but more than that, he was a survivor. A survivor who’d scratched out a living in the midst of one of the bloodiest civil wars in history. The horrors he’d witnessed were unimaginable, and he’d grown numb to threats in the process. Seeing friends and loved ones murdered tends to have that effect. But even a jaded veteran like Zain reacted viscerally to a threat from the Devil.

  “Then why are you helping us now?” Virginia said.

  Zain shrugged. “Technically, I fulfilled my end of the bargain. I delivered my friend Matthew into the Devil’s hands.”

  “I doubt the Devil will see it that way,” Virginia said.

  Zain glanced at the chemist, but it was me his hard eyes found when he answered. “Maybe he won’t,” Zain said with another shrug. “But that does not change my responsibility.”

  “What responsibility?” I said.

  Zain gave an exasperated sigh. “Matthew, I am not naive about the nature of our relationship. You are my handler. I am your agent, and I provide you intelligence. In turn, you provide things of value to my organization. We are businessmen, you and I.”

  “That’s the same thing the Devil said,” I said.

  “The Devil is no more a businessman than Saddam Hussein was a diplomat,” Zain said. “He is a barbarian, plain and simple. A barbarian willing to use any means necessary to achieve his goals.”

  “Forgive me,” I said, “but from where I’m sitting, the difference between barbarian and businessman isn’t always readily apparent.”

  “I understand why you might feel that way,” Zain said. “But let me explain. I wasn’t being completely truthful a minute ago, Matthew. Perhaps at one time we were just businessmen, but that is no longer the case. You’ve broken bread at my house. You’ve met my wife and held my children. These things matter. For an Arab, one thing will always come before profit, country, or even tribe. Family. I’m sorry for what you went through, but you must understand that I would never have left you with the Devil. You are family, Matthew. I don’t betray my family.”

  “Then why hand me over in the first place?” I said.