The Dutchman nodded.
“The yank”
Malik cocked his head gently to one side.
“Well, bleach is not good, it is ok if the object really needs to come out, but he will scar, alcohol is better, gin, but I’ve seen it done with wine, honey, sugar, gunpowder even”
He went back to his business and the Dutchman sat on the end of the bed. The medic certainly had witnessed more than he knew.
“Tell your friend to see me if he will”
The Dutchman nodded and said that he would.
After they had eaten breakfast one morning the kid was sitting on the dusty chairs at the back of the mess hall with a young British serviceman, talking about everything and nothing, when the American walked across to them.
“Hey”
The kid nodded and the American sat next to them but said nothing though the kid could tell there was something he wanted to say that was on his mind.
“What?”
The American finished the coffee in his mug and set it down on the edge of the table. He spun the mug around under his palm.
“I got news for ya, good and bad” he said looking up to meet the kid’s gaze.
The kid cocked his chin out to him.
“Go on”
“I’ve been in there with your boys, they’re gonna help you out some. They got a flight outta here in a few days to an airbase, some outpost in Egypt, in the Sinai, they’ll let you onboard. There ain’t no treaties with Egypt but they’re letting them RAF engineers land a bird there as part of some aid agreement”
He stopped spinning the mug and looked at the kid.
“So this opportunity ain’t coming up again”
The kid smiled.
“Excellent news, you need to let me know who passed this, we gotta thank them”
“Well” the American started, “the other part of that is, well, we ain’t coming with ya, we’re staying on here, at least for a while yet”
The kid’s smile faded from his face but he had known that the day would come eventually and he knew that he had been blessed to have the chance to travel even one day with those men and he also knew full well that without them he would not be there and of that he was sure.
He nodded.
“OK, well I got it from here I think” he smiled and the American did too, “what are you going to do?”
The American said that he had no home anymore and that there was no place for him to go and, though they had pushed relentlessly across the continent together, he admitted that this had been for the Dutchman’s sake as he was sure that his family were waiting for him somewhere. He said that the Dutchman had made contact with his brother in Germany and that they were indeed safe and that his parents were with them too and that in a few weeks they would meet again”
He picked up the empty coffee cup and looked inside and glanced over to the kitchen but the hatch was closed and he put the cup back on the table.
“We’re gonna help these guys with what they’re doing here, these are good people and there’s things we can do here to help, we got a part to play. There’s guys here who’ve lost what I’ve lost and we can make a difference now. It’s what we gotta do”
The kid said that he understood and he was happy for the American and that he was happy for the Dutchman too for making contact with his family and more over he was happy that he would be taking one more step closer to finding Abi.
The young serviceman who had been sitting with them excused himself and nodded to them both and left across the open hall.
Soldiers and airmen and men in plain clothes and some in Omani National Guard uniform zipped through the building all around them, coming and going, set to task and duty. The kid watched them for a moment. He finished his coffee.
“It’ll be weird not having you both around, it’s been a long time”
The American nodded.
“We’re fighting against apocalypse, but we’re gonna make something of this, it ain’t over yet”
“It really ain’t” the kid replied.
“You go find your girl and we’ll meet again, there’s a bar out there someplace with our names all over it”
The kid smiled and nodded and they caught each other’s eyes for a moment and the kid felt sad and he hoped he would indeed find his girl and he hoped they would indeed meet again and he hoped also that there was a bar out there someplace with their names on it, but he doubted all three.
The command at the base had access to some single internet transmitters and, though most of it was down and servers around the globe were not operational, they granted by appointment a very small amount of usage to the servicemen there.
The kid had checked his emails a couple of time since their arrival but he had received nothing more from Abi or from his family and he had nothing more to send until then.
He waited for an opportunity to log in to one of the terminals and opened a new mail.
Angel
I’m in Muscat but I’m going to Egypt, I don’t know where, the Sinai somewhere.
I’m coming to Saalbach for you, don’t leave.
I hope you get this
I love you
He entered her email address in the box and clicked send and stood and left.
When the Dutchman found him sitting outside on the small stone wall at the front of the building, staring into the sun, his eyes were blank.
The Dutchman sat next to him and the kid slowly turned his head to face him and closed his eyes to let the light balance and then opened them again slowly.
The Dutchman smiled flatly.
“You found your family” the kid said to him, “that’s incredible”
The Dutchman nodded and looked to the sky.
“I did, they got out of Dordrecht about three weeks after impact. They were evacuated to Poland and then Germany and spent nearly a month in a shelter outside Munich before they got message to my brother. He drove there and found them”
The kid smiled. There was hope out there.
“And you don’t want to go to them?” the kid asked.
The Dutchman shrugged.
“Of course. Of course I do. I will go there to them, but I have a duty to help people, that is what I do, and there are many people here that need all the help they can get. I know my family are safe there and I will see them again. I can sleep well now”
The kid said that he understood and he told the Dutchman that he was a good man and that it was rare to find somebody in the world so selfless and that he commended him.
The Dutchman shrugged it off and said that on their travels together he had seen on many occasions the compassion of man and that the kid himself should know that without the selfless acts of those many strangers, their journey would have ended long ago and they would not be sitting on that wall together there in the hot sun knowing what they knew.
The kid agreed but said that the Dutchman was one of those men nonetheless and the Dutchman smiled.
That night at just after midnight when the place was dark and the flickering lights had flickered off and a veil of quiet had floated over the place they were woken by an announcement over the loudspeakers requesting that all active servicemen report.
The kid sat upright in his blankets and watched the Dutchman rise in the dark and open the door to the little security office in which they slept. They pulled on their shirts and their boots and followed the rushing crowd into the terminal, where stood a crowd of soldiers and airmen and state police, all just woken.
It was announced to them that there had been storm in the hills and a fire at the Sumail Central Prison some distance south into the desert and there had been an outbreak and that many guards had been killed and that there were prisoners escaping into the mountains in all directions. The soldiers were grouped and briefed and each made his way to the door and left into the night. The English serviceman who had befriended the kid rushed past and informally saluted to him and smiled a dry smile of resignation and the
kid saluted back with a single finger.
An older Omani sergeant appeared behind the waiting men.
“Are you falling in gentlemen? We could use you in one of the birds, you experience could be vital in the storm”
They turned and the American looked to the Dutchman quizzically and the Dutchman shrugged.
“Yes sir” the American said to him, “though we haven’t been briefed yet”
The Omani captain nodded and told them to head to the vehicles and report in to the officers at the door.
As they headed to the entrance, the Dutchman put his hand across the kid’s chest.
“This isn’t your fight”
“I can help” the kid said, pushing his hand down.
“No. You’re not trained, and it’s not safe. I’m sorry, I won’t see it happen”
The American agreed and told the kid to have coffee ready for their return and he clapped his hand on the kid’s shoulder and they hurried off and within a few moments they had all left and the kid remained standing there in the dim light with only a few other men.
He walked slowly back along the line of check-in desks, all dark and disused, and followed the aisle past the bureau de change and the old posters from the tourism board showing crystal seas and families on camelback, now dusty and cracked and in such painful contrast to what was and the kid hung his head and pushed open the door to the security office at the back of the hall and went in and sat down on his blankets and stared into the dark until morning.
He was sitting alone at the edge of the departure lounge drinking black coffee from a paper cup when a lieutenant of Welsh origin crossed the hall and stood at the side of the table. He was tall and broad and wore his beret backwards so it looked like a gentleman’s flatcap and he had a tattoo of something fading on his forearm. He walked with a limp he seemed accustomed to from some battlefield injury acquired in a past life.
“Bore da lad, how goes it?”
The kid forced a smile and nodded.
His voice was soft and his accent warm.
“OK, thanks. How are the boys getting on at the prison, they’ve been gone hours?”
“Ah, they’re ok I hear, there’s a lot going on down there, there is. Most of the prisoners didn’t make it too far, there are no roads you see, they were all just running around the mountains like lost hens, I don’t see them being there too much longer. It’s the wind in them hills that’s messing things up for them, not really flying conditions if you know what I mean”
The kid nodded.
“You’re on the Hercules though this morning, are you then? I’m sure that’ll have no problem, it’s quite the machine”
The kid frowned.
“Sorry?”
“You’re on the Hercules, no? To Bir Gifgafa?”
The kid just looked at him. The Welshman could tell he wasn’t being clear enough.
“Egypt lad”
“This morning?” the kid said, putting his cup down on the white plastic table.
The Welshman nodded.
“Nine hundred”
He placed a set of papers down on the table and pushed them towards the kid and the kid took them without reading them. He said that he didn’t know that the flight was due to leave that morning and that nobody had told him but that he didn’t exactly have anything to pack and could be ready in a moment and was exceedingly grateful for the opportunity to do so.
He asked the Welshman the time and he said it was a little after seven and the kid thanked him again and the Welshman told him he should leave from the south side of the hall through the double doors and follow signs to gate 4 where the thirteenth Royal Air Force would be waiting and that he should announce himself on arrival to the airman at the gate.
He went back to the security office and looked around him for anything he could call his own amongst their borrowed bedding but there was nothing there. He stood for a while in the pale fluorescent light and thought back to leaving the reserve in Thailand with a rucksack full of clothes and a hat and the camera his father had bought him and a folder of paperwork and toiletries and, when he looked down at himself, he realised he wasn’t even wearing his own clothes. The only thing on him that he had left London with were the battered brown boots he still wore and they were overdue their disposal.
He thought about the American and the Dutchman and he wondered when they would be back and whether or not he would see them before he left as they also didn’t know he was due to leave and he thought that if he didn’t see them that morning, he would likely not ever see them again.
He had no watch and he did not know the time and he had no idea how long he had stood and stared into nothingness and he left the security office and glanced back at the blankets and pillows strewn across the floor like they somehow embodied his friends.
He passed through the broken baggage machines and the x-ray scanner and into the departure lounge, past the black and silver chairs and the boarded-up stores and the closed café where an old woman swept the floor and picked up the discarded paper cups onto a tray and he followed the yellow sign towards his gate like a solitary traveller on a voyage to a place unknown.
The power was off in the corridors and there were no windows and he walked in the darkness burdened only with his thoughts and after a few minutes a dim light showed at the end of the walkway and he entered the boarding gates.
There was nobody there to greet him but he knew he wasn’t a scheduled passenger and this wasn’t a scheduled passenger flight and he peered out of the high tinted windows to where the Lockheed C-130 Hercules sat beyond on the tarmac.
He stood for a moment and walked through the open doorway and along the bridge and followed the metal stairway down to the exterior door and into the hot morning. The storm was blowing sand and dust in from the west and he held his hand to his face to stop it blowing in his eyes as he walked across the tarmac towards the aircraft. Three servicemen in uniform stood by the steps and watched him as he approached and they nodded to him and he nodded back and they asked him if he was their cargo and laughed and he smiled and said that he was and they showed him aboard.
The plane was carrying supplies and equipment and most of the hold was blocked off and accessible only from the rear doors but there were eight seats in the front cabin behind the cockpit which were cushioned and insulated and he chose one of them at the back and sat down. Two other servicemen were already seated and smiled to him as he boarded though they were in conversation with each other about their lives and the things they had seen.
Two of the three guards who had been waiting outside the aircraft saluted and left and headed back into the terminal and the third climbed aboard the hulking plane and greeted the passengers and took a seat at the front and buckled his safety belt.
The pilot started the engines and a low rumble reverberated around the otherwise quiet morning. The yellow dust swirled in the air.
The kid let his head fall back against the soft seat and he thought of home and of Abi and he thought of Saalbach and as he was staring into nothingness through the grey panelled interior of the cabin he noticed in his peripheral the airman standing at the front turn to look out of the open door.
The man called to somebody outside the aircraft but the kid wasn’t listening and he didn’t take notice until he heard him speak again.
“English? Yeah, here”
The man turned and looked at the kid and the kid snapped from his thoughts and met the man’s eyes.
The serviceman looked back out of the door.
“Be quick soldier, we’re out of here”
The kid watched the door and heard boots coming up the metal stairs and then the blonde deadlocked head of the Dutchman peer into the chassis.
He smiled.
“After all this you’re leaving without saying anything” the Dutchman joked.
The kid unfastened his belt and went to the open doorway and he and the Dutchman embraced.
The American was nowhere to be se
en.
“Just you?”
The Dutchman nodded.
“He’s, well, he was heading south. In a chopper. Those prisoners got into the desert and the storm’s come in, and he’s… Go on, you should go, they’re waiting”
The kid looked him in the eye for a moment and detected something more from his tone.
“I only found out a couple of hours ago I was leaving, I had no way of reaching you out there”
The airman spun his finger around in the air to hurry them.
“Go”
He felt emotional at leaving a good friend and he felt unease at what was not being said.
The Dutchman nodded and put his hands on the kid’s shoulders.
“Send me something to tell us where you are, I’ll be here waiting for it, we’ll meet again my friend”
The kid nodded and said he would without doubt and that there were more times for them to share ahead.
“Sure. Go”
He spun the kid by the shoulder and clapped his hand on his back and turned and walked back down the metal steps to the tarmac.
The kid watched over his shoulder and the Dutchman looked back and smiled again and the kid held up his palm and the Dutchman nodded to him.
The airman pulled the door closed and the Dutchman stood and watched the Hercules slowly taxi away to the runway knowing that a sad goodbye with a dear old friend was no time to mention the helicopter crash in the desert.
Chapter Sixteen
Muscat to the desert outpost of Bir Gifgafa and to Port Said
He slept in the big cushioned airline seat and when he woke they were heading towards the Red Sea north of Medina and the sky around the plane was yellow. He spoke to the two young servicemen on the other side of the aisle, still not more than nineteen and with keenness and excitement in their bright eyes. They talked about the things they had seen and the kid told them of his journey and they told him of the mission that had placed them on that flight. They said they were tasked by a joint Royal and United States Air Force operative in assisting the Egyptian military with the rebuild of one of their key command posts in the Sinai and that they were to spend three weeks there fixing and reinstalling the equipment necessary for the base to operate fully. In return, the forces would be granted use of that base for bringing aid in and out of Europe to the east.
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