Storm’s Gift
a Night Stalkers CSAR story
M. L. Buchman
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About This Book
The most dangerous mission of all: CSAR—Combat Search and Rescue.
Combat Medic Arin Amin will forever disappoint his family. Medic rather than MD. And no “nice Indian wife and many babies” in his foreseeable future.
When a super-cyclone casts him up on a Bengali shore, his path crosses with Dr. Datta Jhanvi. Her vacation? Now a nightmare, treating the wounded and helpless in the storm’s aftermath. Until she finds a helping hand she never expected.
1
“No way can I tell Mom about this mission.” Sergeant Arin Amin couldn’t tell his family about most of his missions as a combat search-and-rescue medic flying with the Night Stalkers.
But that was for security.
The 160th SOAR specialized in black ops missions, their 5th Battalion D Company more than most.
“Why not? This is humanitarian aide, not some secret shit.” Captain Trisha O’Malley leaned against the stern railing of the USS Peleliu’s hangar deck as if it was a lounge chair. The old helicopter carrier wasn’t throwing a rooster tail, but it was racing ahead hard despite the brutally rough seas.
He’d come up at dawn for fresh air, only to bump into O’Malley enjoying the rough ride.
Arin mimicked the sing-song tone of his mother’s voice, “Go to India. Find yourself a nice respectable girl to marry.”
She laughed, “Sounds like good advice. I found my boy-o in Somalia, even if he was from Vermont.” Another story he hadn’t heard about “Fireball” O’Malley—an irrepressible redhead who stood all of five-foot-two. She’d married six-two of one of the silent warriors of Delta Force.
The Peleliu itself had a lot of stories that couldn’t be told. After the US Marines had finished with the ship, the 5th Battalion D Company of the Night Stalkers had taken her over as a clandestine floating military base. Their highest security missions made even being seen at a particular military base inadvisable.
“This isn’t the 1900s for crying out loud,” he skipped over asking about her story that she probably wasn’t allowed to tell him about anyway. “At least she’s stopped trying to arrange a marriage for me, like it was still the 1800s.”
For a lifetime he’d refused to go visit the “homeland.” As teenagers, his grandparents had left along with the British Raj in 1947. As for his parents, it was unclear if either of them had ever actually visited India. Yet Mom had some fixation in her head that her only son must marry a good Indian girl and make good Indian babies. Maybe if his sister hadn’t married a Wyoming rancher…
Suddenly he was here. India was just fifty kilometers away and he could feel its looming presence.
His mother would be far too happy, for all the wrong reasons.
Finding a “nice respectable girl” hadn’t brought him to India.
Instead, it was Super Cyclone Devesh (another name for Lord Shiva “The Destroyer”), and the storm had certainly lived up to his name. It had striven to achieve a more destructive status, even though there was no rating for an Indian Ocean storm worse than “super.” A super began at the same level as a mid-sized Category 4 hurricane in the Atlantic Basin. There was no nastier word for the strong Category 5 Devesh had unleashed upon the Indian Coast.
The Peleliu hadn’t even hesitated when Devesh exceeded “extremely severe cyclonic storm” status. The ship’s Delta Force and Ranger teams had been nearby, very quietly working the never-ending problem of opium production in the Golden Triangle of Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand. At the storm’s call, they’d extracted all of their teams and steamed north at full speed—close on Devesh’s coattails.
From Puri (the Hindu center where some branches of his family probably still existed) in the west, clear through West Bengal, and all of the way across Bangladesh had been inundated—in some places up to a hundred klicks inland. Eight hundred kilometers of coast, the distance from the Tex-Mex border to New Orleans, was hammered. Twenty-five million people lived in the two main cities Kolkata and Dhaka, less than nine meters and four meters above mean sea level respectively, despite being fifty and a hundred kilometers inland. Millions would be homeless or at least without safe food and water.
The 1970 Bhola cyclone had killed well over half-a-million people here—in a single storm.
But the Peleliu wasn’t headed up into the throat of the damage path.
He crossed his arms on the aft rail and rested his forehead against them.
“Hey, you okay? Should I call a doctor? No, wait, you are a doctor. Should I call you? Hey, Arin! Quick! You need a doc!” Trisha was clearly enjoying herself too much, never happier than when she was teasing someone.
“I’m a medic, not a doctor. Just ask my mom.”
“Army medic. One doing combat search-and-rescue for the Night Stalkers. Bet you do shit that no doc at Mass General ever had to deal with. Let’s fire an RPG—” she pronounced to Ah-P-G with her heavy Boston accent “—in his operating room and see how he does next time he’s chopping on someone’s hemorrhoids.”
“Still just a medic.”
She nudged his arm with a sharp elbow, unerringly nailing the long head of the biceps brachii a hand’s breadth below his shoulder.
“Ow, shit!”
“Simple solution. Do it. Just to spite her. Find a beautiful local girl and marry the crap out of her.”
“You’re a big help. Besides, we’re headed to the wrong kind of place.”
“What do you mean?”
He nodded toward the bow behind him. “Don’t you understand where we’re going?”
Trisha shrugged. “Find out when I get there.” They-ah.
“Ever hear of Cox’s Bazar? Kutupalong? The Rohingya?”
At the last one, she finally nodded. “They’re the folks that Myanmar were trying to kill off a couple years back. Right?”
Arin didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Instead he turned to stare back off the stern and wish that was the way they were headed, even if it would be India rather than their mission in Bangladesh. If Trisha took even just one step forward, he could be the last person to arrive.
“You ever been to a refugee camp, Trisha?”
Her shrug was uncomfortable enough to say that she had.
He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “Cox’s Bazar is a smallish city of a quarter million, if you don’t count the million Rohingya in the two big refugee camps plus those that can’t even get into the camps. Guess what major city is the most densely populated on Earth.”
“I dunno. One of the Indian places. Kolkata, right? That’s just over there somewhere.” She waved a hand to port.
“Wrong by a factor of two. New York too.” He turned to lean back against the rail and stare up the length of the shadowed hangar deck. Devesh’s trailing clouds still cast a heavy gloom over the turbulent sea. The rows of the 5th Battalion D Company’s helicopters were lost in those hangar’s shadows. A maintenance shop near the bow was in full swing, but at eight hundred feet away, he could barely hear it over the deep roar of the ship’s big engines, racing near their limits.
“The main camp is called Kutupalong, and it’s the most populous refugee camp in the world. Over six hundred thousand Rohingya, effectively incarcerated in a fenced prison with too few hospitals and inadequate everything else. Over a hundred thousand people per square mile. The only place close in density is Manila in the Philippines, but they’ve got lots of high r
ises. This place is filled with overcrowded, one-story barracks and thatch huts. The storm will have collapsed buildings, created mudslides, killed hundreds, maybe thousands. That’s where we’re going.”
Trisha was actually silent for a while.
It was so unusual for her not to have a quick comeback, that he glanced over at her.
At his notice, she shook herself as if shedding any deep thoughts.
“See? A Mass General doc doesn’t have a patch on you. Besides…” and her grin went sideways, “…maybe there’s a seriously cute woman there looking for Mr. Medic Boy. That should make your Mom happy.”
“You’re a lunatic, Trisha.”
“Ha! Been told that a few times.”
2
As she emerged, Dr. Datta Jhanvi blinked at even the pale light of the storm’s aftermath.
Where could she possibly begin?
Cox’s Bazar lay at the head of the world’s longest sand beach. It had become a resort town in the 1800s and mostly thrived ever since. Luxury hotels lined its shore.
Or they had when she’d arrived a week ago.
Datta had cowered through the two days of the storm along with everyone else, crowded into windowless service spaces in the Le Grand Bazar Hôtel de Luxe. Which was a ridiculous name as the French had never occupied this area and their menu was a strange mash-up of Bengali traditional and American wood-fired pizza. At least it wasn’t Le Grand Cox. Captain Hiram Cox was a Brit who had rehabilitated the area as a refugee center in the 1700s for an earlier wave of displaced Arakan—predecessors of the Rohingya.
Now, there was only shattered glass on the hotel’s seaward side. Entire seaside stretches of bamboo and date palm—and more than a few beach chairs and the like—had been uprooted and shot through the hotel’s lower stories like great spears. The crashing seas had inundated the first two floors and the spray had soaked all six stories of the upper floors.
The city of Cox’s Bazar itself lay mostly in the flood zone. While the inland areas had been protected from much of the wind, the water had not been stopped until the wooded ridge behind the city.
When Datta finally reached her aunt’s home, she was glad that they’d been renovating during her visit. She’d missed the hominess due to them all staying in the hotel but riding out Devesh in the house would have been too dangerous. Now the long-planned “renovation” would be started with a bulldozer.
Along with everyone else who was ambulatory, she pitched in wherever need was the most desperate. The first day and night, while the storm still lashed them, was mostly about following the cries for help through the blinding rain and gusts that could still heave dangerous projectiles.
Her skills as a doctor had come in extremely useful. Even with minimal supplies, she made bandages from sheets and found a supply of threads and needles in a shattered tailor’s shop.
The second day was grimmer. Triage was rapidly shifting from those needing help to those needing a fully equipped emergency room.
By the third day, when helicopters began racing ashore to deliver aide, she was barely coherent enough to notice.
3
Arin felt like some sort of sniffer dog.
The trail had been barely a suggestion at first, but once he noticed it, the pattern became clearer and clearer.
The town had been so badly hit, that the Night Stalkers set up first at the airport that ran close along the back side of the beach. At just twelve feet above mean sea level, any planes that had remained were destroyed, as was the terminal building. An engineering team focused on getting the runway serviceable for more than helicopters. As the Peleliu’s crew assembled and manned a full-medical tent clinic, he noticed a pattern.
The majority of the people who came for help were typically the more lightly wounded, those who wouldn’t have been swept up and treated by the first tier of normal triage. There was some setting of bones, sewing gashes, and applying lots and lots of antiseptic. But for many, it was about checking them over, handing them a fresh water bottle, and giving out instructions to come back for antibiotics if infection set in.
In among, there were a few people who had gone through the first round of triage somewhere else—and had been expertly treated. A bandage so deftly wrapped that it had survived days of abuse. A broken arm reset cleanly and in a proper sling. A major wound stitched more neatly than one of his sister’s quilts. What first caught his attention was that the stitching came in a wide variety of bright colors. None of them were surgical thread.
Most Bangladeshi were Muslim, but some were Hindi like his own family. When he asked those who’d been specially treated, the Muslims spoke of a “Miracle Doctor.” But from the Hindi he began to hear stories of Dhanvantari Jhanvi—the god of healing come to Earth. Though he’d never heard the second part of the name before, Jhanvi meant the sacred Ganges River.
Based on the multi-colored thread of the stitches and the wide variety of bandages, in brilliant florals and paisleys that were once bedsheets, he knew that whoever was out there was running close to the ground. And by the patients’ descriptions, the Miracle Doctor was working without drugs of any kind.
By mid-afternoon, he was sure enough to act.
He grabbed his standard medic’s field pack, signed out an extra “emergency medications” satchel, and went looking.
Not at the waterfront.
Whoever it was had clearly been at a couple of the big beach hotels but moved along. His progress was slow as he treated more of the second tier of injuries without sending them along to the clinic. There were also the fresh injuries of those doing rescue work among the shattered ruins of some building or other.
Not long before sunset, Dhanvantari Jhanvi’s trail disappeared just south of town.
Arin was torn. Ahead lay more people in desperate need, but the trail he’d followed all afternoon had abruptly gone cold.
Behind him lay known territory leading back to the Night Stalkers clinic.
To his right the sea and the setting sun. The sky was mostly clear now and the waves were calming, though the surf still slammed loudly against the hard sand. A kilometer offshore, like a big gray lump, the Peleliu rode at anchor.
As he watched, a Little Bird lifted off the deck and came racing toward the shore. It swerved like a race car, carving each turn hard. Trisha O’Malley.
She was angling southeast rather than northeast to the city.
“Hey, O’Malley,” he called on his radio, following her track until he was left facing the only possibility. Dhanvantari Jhanvi had turned in inland.
“Hey, yourself! Did you find her yet?”
“Who?”
“Who? The love of your life, doofus. I thought that’s why we were here. Get on it. Command wants me to go check out that camp you were talking about.” She continued out of sight.
Kutupalong Camp lay in that direction about five kilometers out of town.
He hadn’t thought about that all day, though of course he’d been busy.
“Keep me posted,” he called after her.
“You, too, buddy,” and she was gone.
So he turned inland. There was only one road to Kutupalong.
He hadn’t gone a hundred meters past the edge of the city, before he knew he was on the right track.
A small girl limped along the road, herding a cluster of six goats, most as tall as she was. Her leg was fully encased in a brilliant blue-and-yellow patterned lotus flower cloth.
4
Datta didn’t remember stopping.
She didn’t remember lying down on the rough dirt beyond the muddy ditch.
Nor, in the backwash of his headlamp, did she know the man kneeling over her. But it had been days since she’d seen anyone so clean.
“Do you speak English?” His voice seemed kind rather than ready to attack her.
She nodded and ignored the slight sense of vertigo.
“Thank God. My Hindi sucks.”
“Bengalis speak Bengali, not Hindi. How long was I a
sleep?”
“Oh, right. Sorry. And since I don’t know when you went to sleep, makes that kind of hard to answer.” He offered her a good smile.
“I don’t know either.” She wasn’t even sure if it had still been light or not.
“Are you hurt?”
“No. I don’t think so.” She was still unsure quite where she was. The darkness didn’t give her any cues.
He was looking her over by the light of a bright headlamp that almost made him look alien. What she wouldn’t have given to have one, these last two nights. Or was it three?
She could see that he wore a black t-shirt and camo pants. Indian military? But if so, why would his Hindi suck? Perhaps deployed from some far state.
“You chose a curious place to sleep. But if you’re comfortable, I can leave you here.”
“No. No.” For one thing, whether she had slept or fainted, the sandy mud was caked in her hair and all down her side. “I have to keep going,” her voice cracked.
Before she could even ask if he had any water, he slipped a bottle into her hand. It was clean. She cracked the seal. And it was safe. It was perhaps the first truly safe water she’d had in days.
“Small sips,” he advised even though she wanted to guzzle it back.
“Right,” she knew that. It was simply hard to remember.
He held out an energy bar.
“I think I’m in love,” she took it with a nod of thanks. If she’d eaten anything since the storm, she couldn’t recall it.
The storm!
“I have to get moving.”
“Me, too,” and he turned to look up the road in the direction of Kutupalong.
That’s when she saw the red cross on his pack.
“A doctor?” she whispered.
“A medic,” his voice sounded chagrined as he looked down at the ditch he’d been standing in. It had placed his height close to her own sitting beside it.
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