by Dan Mayland
“Maybe next time,” Hannah would say. “I have to study tonight.”
“You need to get out more, sister.”
“I know.”
When the attack came, it was almost as sudden as the bombing had been. Hannah had no chance to run, no chance to really fight, although she’d always imagined that if faced with such a situation, she’d be a fighter.
The man clamped one hand on her mouth and another on her neck. He jammed her lips into her teeth and dug his fingers into her neck.
She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even cry out. When she tried to knee him, she wound up kneeing air. When she tried to bite his hand, he pressed his palm down so hard that it felt as though the top of her jaw would separate from the bottom.
It was dark. She couldn’t see. She managed to suck a bit of air in through her nostrils, but it wasn’t enough.
The last thing she remembered, as she was struggling to remain conscious, was the feel of his wet breath in her ear.
chapter 37
When the sky began to lighten, someone distributed weak tea and almond shortbread biscuits. A man from the Aleppo City Medical Council announced that ambulances to transfer survivors to the M2 would be arriving soon.
Sami cut away a melted polyester abaya robe that had fused to a woman’s leg and smelled of burnt fat. He elevated the woman’s leg, covered the wound with sterile plastic wrap, then administered morphine and an IV bag of Ringer’s lactate. Noting the rigidity of her burned thigh, he made an incision through the leathery brown skin, cutting all the way down to the fat so that the wound could swell without cutting off circulation.
As he was readjusting her IV drip, a woman who had once specialized in dermatology but now, like him, performed general surgery, said, “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That,” she said.
Sami concentrated, and this time he heard what he thought might have been a muffled, high-pitched scream.
Other people were staring.
The dermatologist began walking toward a hallway opposite the staging area. “There,” she said. “There it is again.”
She began to jog toward the sound. Sami followed her down the hall and out the back of the building where a large young man with sunken cheeks and infected sores on his face was laboring to carry what looked like a pink carpet over his shoulder. A pair of baby-blue sneakers protruded from the carpet, and they were kicking in tandem, like a horse bucking.
Sami, recognizing those sneakers, was about to intervene when two of the white-helmeted rescuers tackled the man.
Hannah rolled off her abductor’s shoulder and hit the ground with a thud as her head connected with a rusted car fender. As the gash on the top of her skull began to bleed, Sami unwrapped her from the pink carpet.
He quickly pressed his hand against her head.
“Relax,” he said. And then, yelling to the men who were pummeling her abductor, “I need bandages!”
chapter 38
Regime-held Aleppo
Rahim had been searching for her for over a year, ever since seeing that photo of her passing through the Maqam Gate checkpoint.
At times there had been leads. In January she had been seen passing through a checkpoint in Bustan al-Qasr, in May through a checkpoint in Sheik Saeed. But her schedule was seemingly random, and when she had been observed, the people doing the observing had been unable to pursue her without exposing themselves as regime spies.
Until yesterday.
Until a young man with a father in the Aleppo Central Prison had inspected Hannah Johnson’s Syrian identity card, and—placing his father’s well-being above his own—had abandoned his post and followed her to a medical clinic in the Nayrab Gate district.
The plan had been to bring her to safe house that lay not far from the point of abduction. The whole operation should have taken less than ten minutes. But three hours after Rahim had given his final approval, he had still heard nothing.
At eight thirty in the morning, as he sat at his desk on the third floor of military intelligence headquarters, his cell phone chimed.
Instead of his man in rebel Aleppo, it was his daughter Zahra calling from Beirut. She wanted money. Or rather, his wife wanted money but had charged Zahra with obtaining it.
Rahim agreed to send what he could that afternoon and to increase the amount he sent her each month. He suspected that God was testing him, and that a show of generosity on his part would soon be followed by good news regarding Hannah’s capture.
It was not.
By late morning he was exasperated. And angry—angry at the rebel spy who was supposed to have abducted Hannah, angry at his daughter, his wife, the rebels, the war, and himself.
A few minutes before noon, his secretary Aisha knocked on his door then poked her head in without waiting for his response.
“Abu Halabi still waits, Major,” she said, referring to a prominent accountant who was under investigation and whom Rahim had instructed to arrive at eight in the morning.
He tapped a finger on his desk. “Keep him here until four,” he said. “Then reschedule him for eight tomorrow morning. Inform him that I am reviewing new information regarding his case.”
Aisha closed the door.
Rahim picked up a pen that lay on his desk, threw it across the room, and then, because he could think of nothing else to do, opened the last text message he had received from his spy in rebel-held Aleppo. Attached to it were several photos of Hannah. Rahim had already studied them at home before arriving at his office, but he did so again now.
There she was straining to lift a computer monitor and helping to lead someone to safety at the clinic that had been bombed. There she was securing a patient to a hospital bed.
When he tried to enlarge the photographs, he was unable to make out any of the details. Partly because the pictures had been taken at night, partly because his phone, which he had bought before the war, was of poor quality.
It occurred to him that now that he was at work, he could transfer the photos to his desktop computer and view them on the monitor.
When he had, that was when he noticed, in the back of one of the grainy photos, on the periphery of where light from the rescue effort dissolved into darkness, a man who made him suck in a quick breath and clench his fists.
He dipped his head closer to his computer screen and squinted just to make sure. Then he leaned back and looked at the man from a different angle and punched his left palm with his right fist as he recalled being told by a doctor at the University of Aleppo Hospital that Dr. Sami Hasan had been shot dead on Castello Road while trying to flee to Turkey. When he had come back to the hospital a week later to investigate further, the head of human resources at the hospital and three of the nurses who had worked on the orthopedic ward had also sworn that Dr. Hasan had died, offering his shuttered nearby clinic as evidence.
Deceivers, every one of them, thought Rahim.
Because there could be no doubt. There he was, the doctor who had killed his son and lied about it, standing—as alive as could be!—next to the American girl.
chapter 39
Rebel-held Aleppo
Nauseous and with a persistent ringing in her ears, Hannah crouched in the back of a pickup truck, trying to steady herself while applying pressure to the bandaged wound on her head.
Upon reaching the M2, where soldiers were busy reinforcing the entrance with sandbags, she was led to the green triage zone, given a prayer mat to lie down on, and told to wait.
From time to time, she saw Sami, surgical gown stained with blood, pulling people out of the red triage zone as though he were some faith healer choosing those worthy of being saved. She refused to bother him—he had more important things to do than tend to her—but four hours after arriving at the hospital, he noticed her and did a double take.
“
Why are you still here?”
“Where else should I be?”
“I told Dr. Wasim to bring you to the doctors’ quarters!”
She shrugged. No one had told her not to be here, so what did he expect?
“Look at me,” he said, as he crouched down on his haunches.
She did.
His surgical mask had fallen around his neck, revealing a face peppered with stubble. The features of that face—his eyes, nose, mouth—seemed unnaturally large as he leaned into her.
“Your pupils are fine,” he announced. “Are you nauseous?”
“Some.”
“Headache?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“At the hospital.”
“What hospital?”
Hannah knew exactly what hospital she was in, but . . . This was ridiculous, she thought, because at the moment she couldn’t remember what they called it.
Before she could answer, Sami asked, “What day of the week is it?”
Hannah couldn’t answer that question because she was still trying to answer the first.
He briefly lifted the bandage from her head and examined the wound. “There is residual bleeding, but not enough to be of concern. I will tend to you when I can. Until then, you need to rest.” He leaned into her ear again. “The doctors’ sleeping quarters are in a basement next door. It will be safer there.”
He led her down a flight of stairs, through a tunnel, and into a small room where a dozen mattresses had been thrown on the floor in front of shelving packed with medical equipment and supplies.
“You may use that one,” he said, gesturing to one of the cots as he shut the door behind him. He opened a cabinet and shook out two pills. “Tylenol. For the headache. Take them, then wait here until I come back. It may be hours, so I suggest you lie down. Let your brain rest. I suspect a mild concussion.”
“Why did you bring me here?”
He looked at her as though she had completely lost her senses. “Because you are an American, of course! Which means you are worth money. That is almost certainly why someone tried to kidnap you. So, you will stay here until I treat you, and then you will call your people and return to Turkey and never come back.” He opened another cabinet. “There is bread, bottled water. Some sweets. Have what you wish.”
Despite the nausea, Hannah forced herself to drink half a liter of water and eat a handful of chocolate-covered wafers. Later, as she lay down and listened to the voices and beeps and clatter of the hospital operating at full tilt, it occurred to her that the pillow smelled like Sami did. Then she noticed that, propped up on the sill of a ceiling-high window blocked with sandbags, was a photograph of Sami, two young children, and an attractive dark-haired woman. The woman was leaning into Sami, her head resting on his chest.
Hannah woke that afternoon to the sensation of a nurse rocking her shoulder. Her headache had subsided, and she was hungry.
“Dr. Sami is ready for you,” said the nurse.
The nurse led her to an operating room, but instead of mounting the table, she was told to sit in a wingback chair, one that looked as though it had been plucked from a dining room. Dr. Sami sat behind her in an identical chair.
“I need to inspect the wound,” he said, and without waiting for her to respond, began unwrapping the bandages. He announced that he would need to shave and disinfect a small portion of her scalp prior to suturing the cut with ten or so stitches.
“The top of the skull is not a particularly pain sensitive region,” he added, “but I can offer you a limited amount of local anesthesia should you require it.”
Hannah wanted to shout that of course she required it. Maybe the top of his head wasn’t sensitive, but hers sure was. It hurt now, in fact. But she also sensed that, above all else, Dr. Sami was a practical man, and he would not have offered her the option of going without anesthesia if he hadn’t thought she was up to it.
“Thank you, but that will not be necessary,” she said.
“Very well then. This will hurt,” replied Dr. Sami.
chapter 40
After making short work of suturing Hannah’s skull wound and ordering her back to the doctors’ quarters, Sami turned to his next patient, the woman with the burned thigh.
As with most burns, the damage was inconsistent. In places, the outer layer of skin peeled off when he pulled at it with tweezers, revealing the weeping red dermis beneath it. In other places, every layer of the skin had been burned to a leathery brown color. And in some sections, the burn had extended down through the fat and muscle, leaving the flesh mottled with patches that were either sickly white or charred black. The leathery brown sections he removed by slicing away the skin with graft knives, as though he were peeling an apple. The black and white sections, he cut out with scalpels and scissors, being as careful as he could to maintain as much of the original contour of the thigh as possible.
The wounds bled copiously, which was reassuring for Sami because it was indicative of viable tissue beneath. He was acutely aware that the M2 was short on blood, and he cauterized the bleeding vessels as quickly as he could. As he worked, the nurse who was assisting him—and who had not been in the room when he had tended to Hannah—gossiped about the American woman who had survived a kidnapping attempt and was still in the hospital. Had Sami heard of this?
In fact, he had, Sami said as he tried to compensate for a dull skin-graft knife by making extra-long slicing motions.
“Evidently the Mukhabarat,” said the nurse, “were the ones who tried to take her.”
“The Mukhabarat? Are you sure?” asked Sami, stopping for a moment to face the nurse.
She picked out a piece of burnt skin that Sami had just sliced off. “I was told they caught the kidnapper and questioned him.”
“I see,” said Sami, as he went back to slicing.
Upon removing the burnt tissue and washing the wound with saline, he harvested a thin layer of skin from the patient’s unburned thigh, perforated the harvested skin in a way that rendered it an expandable mesh, and sewed it in place on top of the wound.
Two hours after starting the operation, and after dictating post-operative instructions and donating a unit of his own blood, he returned to the doctors’ quarters to find Hannah sitting cross-legged on the floor. Watching her concentrate intently as she tapped away on a dented phone reminded him of how persistent, and sometimes annoying, she had been three years ago when advocating on behalf of her Swedish boyfriend.
“You have a connection?” he asked, as he retrieved a bottle of water from the cabinet.
“I did. But not now.”
Wireless networks that originated in southern Turkey had sprung up all over the rebel-held zone, and there was a thriving business in Turkish SIM cards. But the towers that handled the Turkish signals were frequently targeted by the regime, and the reception was inconsistent. The hospital used password-protected satellite Wi-Fi, so that they could consult with doctors in Europe and the United States, but he was not about to let her clog up that system with frivolous YouTube videos.
He took a long drink of water, feeling a bit weak from having donated blood.
“Thank you again,” she said.
Compliments always made Sami uncomfortable, so he usually ignored them, as he did now. “You were able to contact your people?”
“Yes.”
“When are they coming for you?”
“Tomorrow, I hope.”
“You know where you are now?”
She flashed him a tired smile. “The M2. But the day of the week remains a mystery. Not because of my head, I always lose track.”
“Wednesday.”
“I would have guessed that.”
Sami squatted down so that he was her level. “Let me see your eyes.”
She opened them wide for him and
leaned into his space.
Ordinarily, Sami’s proximity to a patient was not something he paid much mind to. If he needed to examine someone’s eyes, he got close enough to examine their eyes. If he needed to examine a shrapnel wound in their buttocks, he got close enough to examine their buttocks. There was nothing immodest or unprofessional about it, the occasional protest from deeply religious women—or their husbands—notwithstanding.
But he could not help, at that moment, being intensely conscious of how close her face was to his. So close that he could see her pores, and the downy hair on her cheek, and a small mole underneath her pierced ear.
“Still normal,” he announced awkwardly, standing quickly as he did so. “But I have bad news.”
He told her that he had heard that Mukhabarat had ordered her kidnapping and that people in the hospital already knew she was an American.
“How would the Mukhabarat even know I am here?” Hannah asked. “I never go to the regime side of the city.”
Sami shrugged. “They monitor the checkpoints. They have spies in our hospitals. I would be surprised if they did not have a spy here. But the danger to you now is not only from the Mukhabarat. The rebels here, many are Islamists. Al-Nusra. Nour al-Din al-Zenki. Some sympathize with ISIS. If it becomes widely known that you are an American . . .” He exhaled. “What I mean to say is, it would be best if your people came for you tonight.”