Exiles

by Cary Groner

  There were three of them—not two, as they’d been told—an American and two Australians, and they were in bad shape. Peter examined the first guy as Alex and Devi stood by. There was a bulge in the right pants leg. Peter felt it gingerly, and the guy screamed.

  “Compound fracture, right femur,” Peter said. He felt for a pulse at the ankle. “The artery’s intact. We won’t try to set it here.” He told Alex to start an IV, then hang a bag of saline and a morphine drip. When the morphine had cut in, he’d come back and splint the leg.

  The American had broken a forearm and a foot in the fall, and his fingers were badly frostbitten. The other Australian had acute mountain sickness with pulmonary edema, and possibly cerebral edema as well; it was hard for Peter to gauge the source of his disorientation, given everything he’d been through in the past day. He would be dead within hours if he didn’t get to a hospital.

  Peter gave the one with mountain sickness a shot of a diuretic, then got them all on oxygen and started IV rehydration. The villagers helped carry them to the chopper. Peter was supposed to ride with them, then catch a lift back to pick up Alex and Devi the next day. But the three stretchers took up the whole cargo area.

  “Is there some way to squeeze me in?” he asked.

  Krishna shook his head. “Too much weight,” he said. “I will return for you tomorrow.”

  They secured the doors and got out from under as Krishna revved the engine and lifted off. He headed across the river, then climbed the ridge and continued up before banking sharply southeast.

  A fine needle of white smoke shot up with a hiss from the trees near the top of the ridge, in the wake of something fast and metallic. As Peter watched, the glinting dart converged on the chopper, which exploded in a brilliant orange burst. Alex screamed, and the villagers were suddenly shouting and running. People were pulling at them insistently, speaking fast in Nepali. Peter looked back toward the ridge. Tiny pieces of metal, some of them still burning, spiraled down into the trees.

  Devi yelled that the guerrillas had come. Peter grabbed Alex with one hand, Devi with the other, and hauled them back toward the village. A man came up to them and pointed to the hill behind the town. Peter nodded, and the villagers led them up a trail to a small cave, then got them inside and ran back down the hill. Peter and the girls hunkered behind some rocks at the cave’s entrance. Alex was weeping with fear, and Devi just lay there by her side, her eyes big, watching. Soon they saw movement in the trees.

  The guerrillas appeared out of the jungle, carrying rifles and grenade launchers on their shoulders. They waded the shallow river and approached the town. There were maybe twenty of them, men and women both, dressed in camo and T-shirts, one or two in jeans, wearing boots or running shoes or even flip-flops. They were young—most of them looked sixteen or seventeen—and they appeared to be in no hurry. They laughed and called back and forth to one another as they sloshed out of the water and onto the bank.

  Peter understood now why Krishna had flown the way he had. Even so, it hadn’t been enough.

  Down below, the guerrillas talked to the villagers. Soon they started up the hill.

  “Should we try to run?” Alex said.

  Devi shook her head. “They will shoot us if we do,” she said. “Better to wait and see if we can talk to them.”

  “Devi, get chummy, then,” Peter said. “Let them know you’re local. Alex, you do not speak a word of Nepali, understand?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I want them to say whatever they want around you. Keep your eyes down and don’t give anything away. You’re the only way we’ll have of getting information.”

  A couple of minutes later, a grim-faced girl about Alex’s age stood at the entrance to the cave and leveled the barrel of an AK-47 at them.

  TWENTY-THREE

  They hauled them down the hill to one of the houses and ransacked their packs. They took Peter’s wallet and watch, Devi’s flashlight, Alex’s water bottle and Luna bar. One of the boys patted Peter down and went through all his pockets. He seemed happy to get the Swiss Army knife, a special promotional model given away by Pfizer that contained a corkscrew, a no. 7 scalpel blade, a folding reflex hammer, and a tracheotomy tool. The knives had prompted speculation among Peter’s colleagues about the proper order for using the tools (most favored starting with the corkscrew) as well as sarcastic consternation over the omission of a Lexus key.

  A couple of girls gave Alex and Devi the same treatment, but they didn’t have much on them except a few spare rupees, which were immediately confiscated.

  Peter and Alex sat on the dirt floor untended, then, while the guerrillas took Devi into the back room and grilled her. Alex whispered what snippets she overheard. The guards had been coming downriver to take food from the village when they saw the RNA chopper come in. They figured the village was harboring soldiers, so they sent a couple of guys up the ridge with a rocket launcher.

  “They were ready to shoot everybody as collaborators when they came into the village,” she whispered. “Devi is explaining why we’re here.”

  The guerrillas who were waiting joked around with one another and appeared to hold the villagers in vague contempt. They found a boom box in one of the houses and started an impromptu dance outside in the dusty square. Two or three of them seemed to be drunk. Others were directing the villagers to prepare a communal dinner.

  The interrogators finished with Devi, brought her back into the main room, then went outside to join the others.

  “They’re not going to kill us,” Devi said, but she was paler than Peter had ever seen her.

  “Did you tell them who was in the helicopter?” Peter asked.

  “They said if the pilot was RNA, they just did their jobs,” she said. “They figured the American and the Aussies were stupid to be out here in the first place.”

  The woman who owned the house came in to get some food for the meal. She and Devi exchanged a few terse words, then she left.

  “These guys are eating all their food, and the boom box is using up the batteries they need to get the weather report,” Devi said quietly.

  Peter gathered that the guerrillas faced the classic dilemma: What do you do if your Popular Front is unpopular?

  A half hour later, when dinner was ready, they herded everyone into the square so they could eat together. An older boy, apparently the squad leader, took the opportunity to hold forth loudly and at length on what Devi reported to be the glories of the revolution. A couple of the older village women used the distraction to whisper to her. When they discovered that her uncle was the cousin of someone’s now-deceased stepfather, they started sneaking extra food to all three of them. The guerrillas either ignored this or didn’t notice, because they were partying like the teenagers they were. A couple of them fired their rifles into the air, until the leader—whose name was Ramesh and who looked three or four years older than the rest—scolded them about wasting ammunition. As the evening wore on, though, Ramesh kept making eye contact with Devi, and Peter began to nurse concerns.

  They were put in a small hut that night, overseen by a guard who apparently spoke enough English to keep tabs. Devi said that the guerrillas expected the RNA to come looking for their pilot, so now that they’d stuffed themselves and filled their packs, they’d be leaving before dawn.

  “Unfortunately,” she said, “that includes us.”

  “They’re taking us with them?”

  “Their boss is back up in the mountains, ten or fifteen miles from here, and he’s sick. They want you, mainly.”

  | | |

  The first couple of miles, they marched upriver through icy, knee-deep water so they couldn’t be tracked. Ramesh led the way with Devi’s flashlight; someone else brought up the rear with another light. The banks were steep and covered in giant rhododendron bushes ten or twelve feet tall.

  Shortly before sunrise, when the sky was just turning light, they left the river and started up a steep mountain trail to the north.
At dawn, the sun ignited the high peaks and sent reddish light flowing down the snowfields like lava. This triggered a flood of frigid air, which convected down the valley and blasted them with a cold wind, bitter and lip-cracking dry. Around 8:30 they stopped to rest. Peter kept expecting to hear the whop-whop of chopper blades from down the valley, but it never came. They’d left in such a hurry that Krishna might not have filed a flight plan, and if Franz didn’t remember the name of the village, no one would know where to look for them.

  Alex shrieked. She’d lifted her pants leg to scratch and found her calves and ankles covered with leeches.

  They all had them, but the guerrillas viewed them as a minor occupational hazard and laughed at the American girl’s dramatic revulsion. They picked them off one another and started back up the mountain.

  “Nobody seems to be searching for us,” Peter said quietly to Devi. “Any idea what’s going on?”

  She snorted. “The RNA puts on a good show, but everybody knows how disorganized they are,” she said. “Their communication system is worthless.”

  By what he guessed to be about 10:00, Peter was winded and getting tired, and it occurred to him that they were probably up near fifteen thousand feet—about the same as the summit of Mount Whitney, as high as he’d ever climbed. He was by far the oldest person here, and he felt like it. He knew what the dangers were, of course. The water almost certainly contained a terrifying array of microbes, amoebas, and protozoa, but there was nothing else to drink. He could develop mountain sickness, as could Alex, though Devi was probably safe since she’d grown up nearby. He could, if he was really unlucky, have a heart attack or pop a hole in his lung.

  After another couple of miles Peter was stumbling and finally had to sit down. The guerrillas eyed him scornfully. His shirt was soaked and he was panting, but nobody else had even broken a sweat. He told Devi to explain to them that if they wanted to help their leader, they might want to be sure he arrived alive, which meant going slower.

  They held a brief conference and decided that most of them would continue on. Ramesh was willing to bring them himself, Devi whispered to Peter, but another guard insisted on staying as well. There seemed to be some sort of rivalry between the two men, and although Peter couldn’t gauge exactly what it was about, he hoped it didn’t have anything to do with Devi or Alex. In any case, the second guard brought up the rear, and the small band soon set out to guide Peter and the girls to the camp, which lay six miles ahead and two thousand feet up.

  They came out of the trees and rhododendrons at about noon and, despite the altitude, it was hot. They stopped in the shade by a stream and picked off more leeches. Ramesh opened his pack and brought out a piece of flatbread, which he smeared with goat butter and passed around. The other guard broke Alex’s Luna bar into five pieces and handed them out. Peter was about to dunk his head into the water when Ramesh waved him off.

  “He says if you do that you’ll end up with leeches in your ears and nose,” Devi said. “They’re tiny until they start sucking.”

  Peter shuddered, remembering the girl at the clinic. And the clinic, in turn, reminded him of Mina—who, he realized, expected him to be on the chopper, and who would now assume he was dead. Depending on how this went, she might end up being right.

  They pressed on toward the pass as thunderheads grew in a clear afternoon sky and heat lightning flashed inside them. Low, rumbling booms echoed among the ridges. An hour later, without dropping any rain, they dissipated.

  Devi walked up ahead, speaking with Ramesh in Nepali from time to time. Peter couldn’t tell what their connection was, but she was smart, and he trusted her. They crossed the pass in mid-afternoon and started down. A couple of hours later they came to a village compound tucked in among trees and cliffs. It would be almost invisible from the air, Peter realized.

  There were maybe a hundred and fifty guerrillas, most of them as young as the group that had been on the raid. Cattle and goats dotted the small terraced fields outside of town, and smoke curled from chimneys in the early-evening light. Devi said that this had been just another village before the local Maoist leader had appreciated its strategic location and taken it over. Most of the original inhabitants had fled, but those who remained had been put together in three or four small houses so they could be watched.

  On small peaks and rock outcrops surrounding the town stood batteries of machine guns, rocket launchers, and even a couple of small surface-to-air missiles, which must have been hauled up the mountain with considerable effort. Almost everyone carried a gun—M-16s, Kalashnikovs, and Belgian submachine guns they’d captured from the RNA.

  Peter and the girls were paraded through town, but Peter sensed more curiosity than hostility. There were probably people here who had never seen a Westerner before, and Alex was drawing considerable attention from the young men. She wrapped her arms around herself and walked with her eyes on the ground ahead of her nervously. They passed a crude mural on the side of a building that showed the outward-gazing faces of five men: the Nepali guerrilla leader Prachanda, along with Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao—a sort of communist Mount Rushmore.

  At the base of a hill behind town, Ramesh and the other guard handed them off to four men, all of them with Kalashnikovs, who led them up a steep path. They came to a modest house with a sweeping view of the valley. The guards gestured for them to take off their shoes and go inside. The house was just one big room, with a kitchen area in the back and windows overlooking the village. There were a couple of bookshelves, a few chairs, and kerosene lanterns hanging on hooks, but otherwise it was spartanly furnished.

  Commandant Adhiraj sat at a table, eating dinner with a couple of his lieutenants. He was in his early forties and clean shaven, with graying hair. He had narrow shoulders but strong-looking hands and was significantly heavier than anyone else Peter had seen in the village. Someone, at least, was eating well.

  Peter had once seen a photo of the young Pol Pot and been amazed that a man with such kind eyes could have turned, over time, into a killing machine. He’d had a similar reaction to a picture of Stalin, who looked like a kindly uncle. He half expected Adhiraj to present in some similar vein, then, with at least a pretense of joviality, perhaps a warm welcome to join the dinner. Instead, the commandant looked up when they came in but said nothing. His dark eyes, behind wire-rimmed aviator glasses, were widely spaced, intelligent, and cool. He was deliberate and unhurried as he turned his gaze to the man on his right, then went back to his meal.

  He reminded Peter of a tough, pragmatic, and rapacious American businessman he’d once known. Adhiraj had similar eyes, distant and even slightly hostile, and his small mouth and pursed lips suggested impatience and the kind of temper Peter didn’t like seeing in someone with easy access to automatic weapons. He was probably an effective administrator, which was the last thing Peter expected from a man who was supposed to be instilling the masses with revolutionary fervor. This would, however, explain how he had, within ten years, helped his leader Prachanda build a movement from a ragtag band of juvenile delinquents and outlaws into a formidable force that had nearly overrun the country.

  When Adhiraj finished eating and his lieutenants had departed, he wiped his mouth and spoke to his guards. They brought Peter to the table and motioned for Devi to come over so she could translate. Alex sat in the corner and pulled a book out of her pack—the only possession they’d allowed her to keep.

  Adhiraj spoke to Devi. “He wants to know if you are really an American doctor,” she said.

  Peter nodded. “Ask him what the problem is.”

  Adhiraj responded impatiently that he’d felt unaccountably weak for some time. In the past few months he’d fall asleep in the middle of the afternoon, usually a couple of hours after eating. He’d also been getting sores on his feet that took a long time to heal.

  “Is it all right if I examine him?”

  Adhiraj nodded. Peter found nothing noteworthy except his heft; he was only about five-eight b
ut must have weighed more than two hundred pounds, which by Nepali standards was tremendously obese.

  “Is he thirsty?”

  “He says yes, he is thirsty very frequently now.”

  “How often does he urinate?”

  When Adhiraj heard the question he looked at Peter with vexation, as if it were in poor taste to embarrass him in front of the girl. Finally, he spoke.

  “Every couple of hours,” Devi said.

  Peter explained that he was pretty sure Adhiraj had diabetes. Devi translated, and the commandant appeared surprised. He spoke sharply to Devi.

  “He says this is ridiculous,” Devi said. “No one here has diabetes. He has heard of it only occasionally in people who move to the city and grow old. He considers it a disease of decadence, which is why so many Americans have it.”

  “Look,” said Peter. “Everyone in this camp is younger, leaner, and fitter than he is.”

  Devi’s eyes widened. “You want me to translate that?”

  “Tell him.”

  She spoke, and Adhiraj shrugged without taking noticeable offense. “He says he spends most of his time behind a desk now,” Devi said.

  “He’s gained a lot of weight recently?”

  “He says yes. Even three years ago he was much thinner than he is now.”

  “Tell him so many Americans have it for the same reasons he does,” Peter said. “It isn’t decadence, just too much food and too little exercise. His body can’t process glucose the way it did when he was younger and more active.”

  Devi spoke to him. “He says he really isn’t interested in all this medical theory. He wants to know what he is supposed to do.”

  Peter said it was simple: He should eat less and exercise. Beyond that, there were drugs available in Kathmandu that would help. “If he has someone there who can get them for him, that would be good,” he added. “I’ll give him the information.”