by Dan Mayland
chapter 76
Sami was pulled from the overcrowded group cell back to the cell where he and Rahim had met earlier in the day. The burns on his back and face were weeping. His knee had swollen tight.
“In exchange for the information you gave me about my son, I am prepared to show you mercy,” said Rahim.
Sami sat on the floor in the same place he had that morning.
Rahim stood over him. Sweating. Trembling.
“You are ill,” said Sami, momentarily forgetting his own travails as he observed Rahim the way he might a new patient.
“You will not be going to Turkey,” Rahim said. “You know that.”
Sami looked at the ground then up to Rahim. “Yes.”
“Are you ready?”
“Give me your phone,” Sami demanded. “So that I may send a message to my children.”
Frowning, Rahim looked flustered for a moment, but then he handed Sami his phone. “Be quick.”
Sami sent Hannah an email but addressed it to Adam and Noora. He told them that he loved them, that if there was one thing he wished for them it was that, despite all they’d been through, they would find a way to be happy and kind. Given the pain raging throughout his body, it was an action that felt more dutiful than genuine, but he hoped Adam and Noora would not perceive it that way. For a moment, as he held the phone, his thoughts turned to Tahira. He allowed himself to remember her bouncing baby Noora on her hip, her gold bracelets jingling on her wrists, and the smell of laurel in her hair when she had stood on her toes to kiss him. He wished he could send a message to her too.
He handed Rahim his phone. “Thank you.”
“Do you wish to stand?” asked Rahim.
“No.”
Rahim unholstered his Makarov pistol, stepped to the side, and took aim with his extended arm.
“Stop,” said Sami, scoffing, facing Rahim. “From the front. If you shoot where you are aiming, you risk penetrating only the frontal lobe. I have treated patients who have survived such a shot, and it is not a fate I wish for myself. From the top of the forehead aiming down. And shoot twice.”
“I would prefer not to face you when I do this.”
“And yet you must.”
Rahim raised the gun again, quickly aimed, and pulled the trigger.
The shot entered Sami’s head through his forehead and exited near the brain stem. Bits of his bone and blood spattered the wall behind him. As instructed, Rahim fired a quick second shot into Sami’s temple.
From the end of the hall, he heard one of the guards cry out in alarm.
Sami slumped to the ground. Before the guards could arrive, Rahim sat next to him, placed the pistol in the doctor’s right hand, slid the doctor’s lifeless index finger onto the trigger, and then pointed the barrel at his own chest so that it was positioned over his heart.
“Forgive me,” he said, speaking only to God. His family, he hoped, would hear that he had been killed by a prisoner. Which in a sense, he thought as he pulled the trigger, was true.
chapter 77
Rebel-held Aleppo
It took Hannah all day to stumble back to the M2.
Adam and Noora grew sunburned and hungry. Upon arriving at the hospital in the late afternoon, she collapsed near a withered chestnut tree that still stood not far from the entrance.
The next morning, she woke up on a cot in the basement, surrounded by other patients. An IV drip led into her arm.
“Where are the children?!” she cried, panicked, trying to stand. But from under her bed Adam and Noora appeared.
Later, she checked her phone and read the email from Sami.
She stayed in Aleppo. Not because it was the wise thing to do—although she thought it might have been, given the relentless battles raging on either side of the Ramouseh gap—but simply because to risk capture again was unthinkable.
Two weeks later, the gap closed.
In September, the regime bombed the M2 and the M10 on the same day. By then, Hannah was working as a nurse, and the children were sleeping at the M2 with her. After the bombing, they fled to a nearby clinic established to temporarily replace the M2.
In October, when chlorine gas from an attack on an adjacent building wafted into the clinic, and Noora’s eyes began to burn, they ran all the way back to the M2 which by then had been patched together yet again. Hannah had trouble keeping up because of how much the child inside her had grown.
In November, the regime dropped all pretense of not targeting medical facilities and bombed the M2 and M10 out of existence with bunker-buster munitions. Grains of dust blasted through the hallways like buckshot. It was only by chance that Hannah, Noora, and Adam survived.
In December, as the air turned cold and people burned plastic bottles and the clothes of the dead to stay warm, the last of the remaining food rations were distributed. Thousands of people who had nowhere else to go began to starve.
The regime and their Iranian and Russian allies pushed closer. The end, Hannah thought, was near. People burned their valuables—not for warmth, but so that the regime soldiers would not get them.
And then the Red Crescent announced that a deal had been struck.
They did not look like victims as they poured out of the bombed-out buildings at dawn on that December morning. Most of the women wore black, and although their sunken cheeks suggested death camps and famine, their robes were clean. They carried handbags and had dressed their children in puffy winter coats and rubber boots. A few held bright umbrellas to shield themselves from the cold rain.
Hannah had used a fork to comb Adam and Noora’s hair and, with the help of a cracked mirror, her own. She’d cleaned their faces and fingernails with water from a puddle in the street, so determined was she that they not see her broken.
Then word spread that the Iranians had scuttled the deal, that there would be no buses to take them to rebel-held territory outside the city. Pride gave way to fear and desperation as the shots rang out and the artillery fire resumed. They ran back into the abandoned building where they had been taking refuge and huddled in a bathtub as the sky darkened with smoke.
The next morning, they were told the deal was back on. Hannah washed the children again, and this time, with thousands of others, they boarded a green bus—one of many in a convoy.
Fourteen hours later the bus began to move.
At the first checkpoint, just past Ramouseh, a soldier said they were welcome to get off in regime territory, and if they did, they would be treated well. Some people laughed. No one got off.
In the rebel-held city of Idlib, they got off the bus and were given food and shelter. But the next day, Hannah and the children began walking to Turkey.
“There is no reason to go,” people said. “The border is closed.”
That wasn’t quite true. An ambulance here or there would be allowed to pass. Or the occasional humanitarian convoy. But for the vast number of refugees huddled at the border camps—for the farmers and schoolteachers and electricians and bakers and imams and electricians and doctors, and for their children—for them it was true.
People said they should stay in Idlib.
“Will you help us get to the border anyway?” Hannah asked.
People did.
A ride, a glass of water or black tea. An extra jacket for Noora from a woman who had lost a daughter. By late afternoon they had reached the outskirts of one of the camps.
The mud Hannah had remembered from prior trips was worse than ever. It soaked into their sneakers and chilled their toes, but the children walked onward without complaint. Step by step, past bikes with bent tires, and sewage ditches, and a collection of ragged blue-tarp tents where the human spillage that had bubbled out of the overflowing main camp had collected.
Shooting pains rose up Hannah’s leg with every step she took.
As they sta
rted down the final strip of road that terminated at the border, the three of them reached for each other’s hands, forming a human chain.
They knew how to do this.
“You should turn back,” said a barefoot boy who was kicking a deflated soccer ball against a wall. “They will not let you through.”
Whitewashed walls marked with graffiti and topped with chain-link fencing funneled them towards an arch. The sign that read Syrian Arab Republic had been removed. A small, pentagonal gatehouse stood to the right of the arch, but no one appeared to be inside it.
Beyond the arch was a large traffic sign. Against a blue background, the sign displayed the red and white Turkish flag and a single word: türkiye. Beyond the sign stood a white gate, more Turkish flags, and Turkish soldiers.
Hannah and the children kept walking, under the Syrian arch and right up to the border where Turkish soldiers ordered her to stop. They wore camouflage pants and body armor.
You may not pass, they told her.
But I am an American. As you can see, I am pregnant, and these are my children. You have to let me through.
You have to.
They asked to see her passport. If she had an American passport, then yes, they would let her and the children through.
She explained that she did not have her passport, but if they would just call the American embassy, it would all get sorted out. She spoke in English, to prove she was an American, and she said she had a Swedish friend who was working with the American embassy in Ankara. She had spoken to him yesterday, and he was trying to arrange for asylum for the children in Sweden, and he might even be waiting for her on the other—
They began to shoo her back toward Syria.
Go, they said. No passport, no passage. One tapped his gun.
You have to leave.
She refused. “We have come so far,” she said.
“Others have come so far as well. To let you all in is impossible. Now go.”
And then, from far behind the border, a voice. “That’s her! That’s her! Hannah!”
Hannah turned to the voice, which sounded familiar. Standing next to a gatehouse inside Turkey, were four men. Two were Turkish soldiers and two were civilians wearing suits.
The taller of the two civilians was a bald man with a beard. In his hand he clutched something that was blue and roughly the size of a small paperback book. He was leaning forward and being restrained by the two soldiers. She didn’t recognize him.
“Hannah!” the bald man yelled again. “It’s Oskar. I have your passport!”
the end
acknowledgments
This novel was more of a collaborative effort than any other I have written. At the top of the list of contributors to thank are those who lived in Aleppo, or contributed to the relief effort, and shared their stories with me.
Mahmoud Hallak was barely a teenager when the Assad regime tortured and murdered his father, Sakher Hallak, a prominent, highly esteemed doctor who practiced in Aleppo. In the year after his father’s death, Mahmoud helped organize anti-regime protests in the city. Early sections of the novel were influenced by his experience.
Hani Hamou was working as a waiter at the tony Club d’Alep in downtown Aleppo, living in an apartment with a beautiful view of the Citadel, when the war came. A married father of three, he and his family endured deprivation in wartime Aleppo before hazarding a dangerous crossing from Syria to Turkey. Hani, his wife Yaldiz, and his children—Daryn, Kamber, and Mohamed—helped me better understand what it was like for a family to live in a city at war. The wonderful meal Yaldiz prepared after our discussion made its way into the book as well.
Dr. Zaher Sahloul, a former med-school classmate of Bashar al-Assad who now practices as a pulmonologist in the Chicago area, made many trips into rebel-held Aleppo in order to lend his expertise to the afflicted. He helped me better understand what it was truly like to undertake the harrowing journey along the Castello Road, and for what it was like for a doctor to practice in the horrific conditions of wartime Aleppo—particularly at the M10 hospital. Dr. Sahloul served as the president of the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) from 2011–2015, and currently serves as the president of MedGlobal, an organization, “dedicated to a world without healthcare disparity.” I encourage anyone interested in supporting medical relief efforts in Syria and other countries to consider contributing to either of those organizations: www.sams-usa.net, www.medglobal.org. A portion of the profits from of this novel will be donated to relief organizations.
In the case of the following two individuals, pseudonyms were used so as to not put that person or their family at risk, but their contribution to the book was substantial and must be noted:
In 2012, Qasim al-Noury graduated from medical school at the University of Aleppo and began his post-graduate training as a resident at the University of Aleppo Hospital. When the war broke out, he continued to practice at the hospital, and helped treat victims of the Khan al-Asal gas attack. In 2014, he crossed to rebel-held Aleppo via the infamous Maabar Almawet (Corridor of Death), and then braved ISIS checkpoints to cross into Turkey. Many of his observations were woven into the fabric of the novel.
When I met Yusuf Baştürk in Turkey in 2017 near the border with Syria, I think he was worried I was a spy, and I was worried he might be secretly affiliated with ISIS. But I needed a guide, and he needed a job, so we got past our fears—to my great benefit. Yusuf took me safely to the border towns and camps and shared with me his experience working as a logistics officer for NGOs operating on the Syria-Turkey border.
In terms of helping massage my inchoate ideas into a novel, no person deserves more credit than my agent, Richard Curtis. His sense of when to encourage me to run with an idea, and when to gently lead me away from literary pitfalls that I am blind to, was exceptional. I am eternally grateful for his guidance, honesty, encouragement, and friendship. His contribution to this book cannot be overstated. Indeed, it would not be a book at all without him.
My profound thanks to Rick Bleiweiss and the rest of the team at Blackstone Publishing, for believing in this novel and helping to bring it to a wider audience. Those thanks extend to my editor Peggy Hageman—not only for helping to refine the language, but especially for suggesting revisions that helped me see key characters and crucial early scenes in a new light. I’m also grateful to Duaa Alhou, for reading this novel with an eye towards ensuring that my portrayal of Syrian characters and culture was authentic.
The assistance I received from family members was also considerable. My wife, Corinne Mayland, read the earliest draft of this book and—thankfully—helped disabuse me of the notion that it was anywhere near finished. My cousin Dr. Alyssa Green specializes in emergency medicine and has participated in medical aid missions abroad; she helped me refine the medical sections of the book. My sister, Dr. Beth Mayland, also helped with the medical sections, in addition to providing excellent editorial advice. My mother, Nan Mayland, worked for many years as a nurse in a pediatric intensive care unit; she, too, helped with the medical sections and provided key advice in terms of the logistics of administering medicine in a hospital environment. My cousin Kathy McIntyre lived in Syria for several years; her experience as an American woman in Syria helped me shape Hannah’s character. My brother, David Mayland, read an early copy of the novel and provided valuable feedback.
In addition to the direct help I received from the people noted above, in researching the novel I turned to books by other authors. Of particular note: My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis by Diana Darke; The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria by Samar Yazbek; A Disappearance in Damascus: Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War by Deborah Campbell.
Databases and reports that were publicly available online and which informed the novel include: Mapping the Conflict in Aleppo, Syria, an analysis prepared by Caerus Associates with support
from the American Security Project and First Mile Geo; Illegal Attacks on Health Care in Syria, an interactive map and report prepared by Physicians for Human Rights; the PubMed databases made available through the National Center for Biotechnology Information; Forensic Architecture’s investigation into the bombing of the M2 hospital; The Lost Treasure of The Polychrome Wooden (`ajami) Interior of Ghazalyeh House, Aleppo, Syria, an examination of an Ottoman-era house written by Rami Alafandi and Asiah Abdul Rahim (Elsevier Ltd.); Aleppo Conflict Timeline, a report published by The Aleppo Project through the Shattuck Center on Conflict, Negotiation and Recovery at Central European University’s School of Public Policy; “It Breaks the Human”: Torture, Disease and Death in Syria’s Prisons published by Amnesty International; Deadly Detention: Deaths in Custody Amid Popular Protests in Syria published by Amnesty International; and Human Slaughterhouse: Mass Hangings and Extermination at Saydnaya Prison, Syria, published by Amnesty International.
Professional journalists and citizen journalists, too numerous to mention individually, also made an enormous contribution to my understanding of what was happening in Aleppo. I am indebted to them.
And finally, I am grateful to my wife Corinne, and my children Kirsten and William for helping inspire me to write this book. Much of this novel was informed by the people who experienced unimaginable loss in Aleppo firsthand. I have not, a condition for which I am grateful. But as I read of the tragedy unfolding in Aleppo, and then as I wrote this book, a near constant consideration was how profoundly and permanently broken I knew I would be were I to experience even a fraction of the loss that so many others have, and that those feelings would stem from all the love and worry and pride that’s wrapped up in my being a parent and a husband. And so it was that my own family, and my relationship to them, also became a part of this story.
about the author
Dan Mayland is the author of the Mark Sava series, spy novels informed by his experiences in the Caspian region and Middle East. He is also a professional geopolitical forecaster, helping nonprofit, private, and government organizations navigate a changing world. Raised in New Jersey, Mayland now lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and two children, in an old stone farmhouse he has restored.