The Devil's Waters

by David L. Robbins

  Doc fired up his own flashlight to illuminate LB kneeling beside the cot, inserting an IV into the boy’s hot arm. He injected one milliliter of morphine to ease pain and anxiety. Because the kid was septic and the morphine could lower his blood pressure even more, he plugged in a bag of lactated Ringer’s to maintain fluids. Last, he piggybacked both antibiotics, penicillin and clindamycin, to slow the march of gangrene up the boy’s leg. LB rested the plastic bags on the boy’s chest. Doc held up the boy’s leg under the knee so LB could fast-wrap the ankle and calf in gauze. The boy whimpered, breaths fast and shallow, then clamped his jaw bravely.

  LB walked outside, gesturing for Doc, the teacher, and the boy’s father to join him. In sunlight, the father behind the beard appeared much younger than he did in the hovel. His eyes glowed, raw with tears and worry.

  “Tell him,” LB said to the teacher, “his son is going to lose that foot and some of the leg. We won’t know how much till we get him back to the hospital. The doctors will do the best they can.”

  The teacher did not look into the father’s face while he said this.

  “Tell him his son’s going to live. But we have to go right now. Make sure he knows he’s coming, too.”

  With urgency, the teacher repeated this.

  Doc said to LB, “Let’s just lift him on that cot and carry him down.”

  “Good.”

  When the teacher finished translating, the boy’s father whirled in his long coat for the open hut door. Inside, he told the family what was happening. The women wailed until he shouted them silent.

  Doc rested a hand on the teacher’s shoulder. “What do you teach?”

  The man smiled shyly at the attention. “Reading and writing.”

  “Can girls come to your school?”

  “No. They have a separate school.”

  “Is it any good?”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  Back home in Vegas, Doc had four daughters, a wife, and a female dog.

  LB turned the teacher by the arm. “Come on.”

  Inside the hut, the father stood ready at the head of the cot, the women pressed into a dim recess. The teacher moved to the father’s shoulder. LB and Doc bent to hoist the foot of the bed. Doc lent only one hand to the cot; the other supported the IV bags.

  “Up.”

  The four maneuvered the cot out the door. The boy, like his father, shed years outside. He was no more than eight, smooth skinned with long black lashes fluttering under the morphine. The women filled the doorway, sniffling. The daughter’s veil had gone crooked from her crying; her mother reached to straighten it over the girl’s puffy face.

  “Hang on,” LB said. “Set him down.”

  The men lowered the cot to the rocky path. LB walked back to the hut, curling a finger for the teacher to follow. The father trailed.

  The women retreated in the doorway. The mother hurried to obscure her daughter’s face.

  “Wait,” LB said, holding up a palm. “Wait. Teacher, tell them to stand still.”

  The man spoke for LB. The women did not disappear into the house.

  From behind, Doc called, “What’s up?”

  The father rushed forward, in front of his wife and daughter. He bellowed, waving LB and the teacher back from them. LB held his ground.

  “Tell his daughter to take down the veil. I need to see her face again.”

  The teacher rattled his head. “This is not possible.”

  “Make it possible. Tell Pops here she might be sick. We need to check her out.”

  The women watched the discussion from the doorway, with the father blocking the way. While the teacher spoke, the father waved his arms more, raising his voice in ire and pointing at LB.

  The teacher faced LB with shoulders down. “He will not allow it.”

  “Then tell him to look. Look at her hands. Her feet and ankles. Face and neck. He’s gonna see they’re swollen.”

  The father rejected this before the teacher had finished translating.

  “He says she is with child. This is natural.”

  Doc piped up. “Ask him if she ever has seizures. Ask if she shakes, do her eyeballs roll up in her head.”

  The father shouted over the question. He aimed a leathery finger at the boy moaning on the cot.

  “C’mere.” LB pinched the teacher’s coat to draw him close. “Ask Mom.”

  “I cannot speak to her.”

  LB let the teacher go. He stuck his tongue in his cheek, considering what to do. He shrugged at Doc, who shrugged back.

  Doc set down the bags to put his M4 into his hands. He moved between the father, the teacher, and the women. Doc spread his legs and set himself. The two Afghan men raised their voices and hands, but neither advanced on the stolid Doc, who held both at bay.

  LB stepped around them to the mother. She positioned herself in front of her pregnant daughter, both with veiled faces and frightened eyes. They did not retreat, though the father hollered and pointed for them to do so. Doc kept the man back not with his weapon but with a raised, warning finger. Neighbors came out of their own stone hovels to investigate.

  Quickly, LB pantomimed what he wanted the mother to do, lift her daughter’s long frock to show her ankles.

  The wrinkles beside the mother’s eyes deepened as she looked at LB. After more loud objections from her red-faced husband, she nodded and spoke.

  LB called to the interpreter, “What’d she say?”

  “Her daughter sometimes shakes. Her hands and face are swollen, and her feet. She does not need to show you.”

  LB returned the mother’s nod.

  “It’s called eclampsia. It’ll kill the baby, and maybe your girl here. Her blood pressure’s too high; we’ve got to treat it. We can fix it in Bagram.”

  LB held out an arm, inviting. The mother waited for the teacher’s translation, then took her daughter’s hand from atop the girl’s belly. She left the doorway, towing her daughter. Leaving the hut, she shouted behind her into the dark.

  Inside, deep in the shadows, what LB thought had been a pile of clothes shifted, rose, and ambled forward. An old man, grooved and pitted by decades of mountain wind, scuffed into the light past LB without a glance or a word. He passed the cot, patting the boy’s head.

  The angry father finally closed his mouth when his wife and daughter strode past him without deference, heading down the hill. Doc slipped his M4 back over his shoulder. The teacher, father, LB, and Doc hoisted the cot. Carrying his corner, the father sulked, conflicted, until his eyes fell again on his boy, soon to lose a foot. This was not a bad man.

  LB freed a hand to press the push-to-talk on his unit radio. “Juggler, Juggler. Lima Bravo.”

  “Go, LB.”

  “Leaving the village now. Came for two. Bringing back five.”

  A pause, then, “Typical. Roger.”

  The cot slowed them on the path. LB grew breathless headed down from the village, just as he’d been going up. The old man and two women arrived first at the copter. They waited outside the reach of the idling HH-60’s slowly turning blades.

  The four men carried the cot close to the copter’s open door, easing the boy down. Quincy and Jamie hurried to tend to the women and the old man, who looked to have taken his longest walk in years. The father and teacher intercepted the two PJs.

  Wally stepped to LB, lips pursed and skeptical, eyes masked by his reflecting shades.

  “Where we gonna put ’em?”

  Wally was right to ask. There wasn’t room in the HH-60’s bay for the five-man PJ team plus this whole Afghan family. Pedro 1 had dumped only enough fuel to evacuate the father and son. The two women and the old man were unexpected, another four hundred pounds of load at eleven thousand feet. The chopper couldn’t spill fuel while on the ground. The purge valve was located right below the jet engines. If the exhaust didn’t ignite the fuel puddled in the dirt, static electricity from the whirling propellers probably would. A fuel dump had to be done in the ai
r. The alternative was a fireball.

  Wally cocked his head. “You ever think things through before you do them?”

  Wally motioned for the chopper’s engineer to hand down the Stokes litter. Reaching to his vest, Wally flicked the comm switch to Pedro 2’s frequency. The copter flew a bone pattern, a slow oval above the valley miles off. Framed between peaks, the storm line crept closer.

  “Pedro 2, Pedro 2, Hallmark.”

  When the copter answered, Wally informed the pilot to come in for a pickup. Dump five hundred pounds first.

  He turned to LB. “All right. Let’s load your folks up. Me and Quincy’ll wait for Pedro 2. These are your patients, LB. You go with them.”

  LB loosed a sigh. That had been his exact plan, to wait with Quincy for Pedro 2. Wally had leaped to it before he could say anything.

  This was vintage Wally. The man had a nose for credit, what would get him noticed and promoted from captain to major fastest. Staying on the ground in unfriendly territory to assist the evac of a local family would make a nice little act of selfless courage, good reading in the paperwork afterward. LB was a first sergeant, not bucking for more. PJs weren’t officers; CROs were. LB was going to stay a pararescueman. He wanted to wait for Pedro 2 so he could stretch out for the ride back, that was all. But now that Wally had laid claim to the second chopper, LB made a plan. He considered it a game, like chess, to thwart Wally. Not because the man wouldn’t make a respectable major. Wally was a stickler and too good-natured by half, but a fine officer. Wally had guts and skills. LB just liked opponents, and Wally so often made himself one.

  Jamie and Quincy herded the family under Pedro 1’s accelerating prop. The pilots intended to take off the instant everyone was on board. Turbulence from the squall was already cascading down the mountains towering above Rubati Yar. The teacher stayed back with the village elders and others who’d gathered by the stream. They grabbed their hats as the winds from the storm and copter built.

  The valley grew noisy as Pedro 2 neared. High above, Ringo 53 droned, circling. Both copters were going to need refueling soon. Pedro 2 closed to a hundred yards from the stream and slowed, showing its belly, waiting for Pedro 1 to clear.

  Because the boy would be taken off the chopper first at Bagram, he needed to be loaded in last. LB pointed for the father to climb on. Jamie and Doc followed, to help the mother and pregnant daughter climb on. Concern for his two sick kids and the approaching storm had convinced the father to make an exception for these American soldiers touching his females. Last, Jamie lifted the old man into the bay by himself.

  LB shouted, “Start strapping ’em in,” and Jamie and Doc began strapping gunner’s belts around the Afghans to anchor them to the floor.

  “Quincy, get on the other side of the basket. Wally, we’ll hand him up to you. Start tying the kid down.”

  Wally jumped into the copter.

  On the count of three, LB and Quincy lifted the boy. Wally grabbed the head of the Stokes litter to guide it onto the HH-60’s floor.

  LB indicated the IV bags for fluid and antibiotics lying in the skins beside the boy. “Hang those up.”

  “Got it.”

  The copter’s engineer found a fruit roll-up to lay on the kid’s chest. LB tossed it back, explaining that the kid was headed for surgery and couldn’t eat.

  The rotor spun faster, ready to go. The engine whined to a higher pitch, and the copter bounced, eager to be airborne.

  With Wally focused on the IV bags, LB pointed to Doc, then at the kid. Doc nodded.

  LB slammed shut the HH-60’s door. Grabbing big Quincy’s sleeve, he ran past the cockpit, knocked knuckles on the cowling, hauled Quincy out of the prop wash.

  With no hesitation, the blades whirled harder, the chopper’s wheels growing light on the bare earth. Inside, Wally framed himself in the large window of the shut door, leaning across the Stokes litter and the kid in it.

  Wally’s gloved palms flattened on the impact glass. He eyed LB from the rising copter.

  Wally didn’t order the HH-60 to set back down and let him off. He knew the gangrenous boy had to get to Bagram fast. Both choppers hung on the edge of the chasing squall. Like the good officer he was, Wally assessed the situation. He took the appropriate action and did nothing.

  LB waved up from the fading ground. Wally mouthed the words that had given LB his call sign years ago.

  You little bastard.

  Chapter 2

  Today

  Gulf of Aden

  3 miles off the coast of Qandala

  Somalia

  Yusuf Raage lifted his arms as if he might catch the falling treasure.

  He stood alone atop the superstructure beside the radar arrays and quiet smokestack. Below him and all around the freighter, on top of containers, dozens of his men watched his gesture of triumph. They raised their own fists, weapons, voices, at the parachute drifting millions of dollars down to them, and at their clansman and captain, who’d made it so.

  Beneath Yusuf’s boots, from the wheelhouse, came cheers also from the MV Bannon’s crew, seventeen Malay ratings and five Indian officers celebrating the white cask splashing down. When the chute collapsed into the blue water, the crew stamped their feet, pounded the steel walls, to ring in their freedom.

  In the brilliant afternoon, a single-engine plane flown by white men in sunglasses banked low, keeping an eye on the transaction. Yusuf lowered his arms to his hips to stand like a king on a hill, a warrior king who had taken this hill, not one born to it. For six months this steel behemoth had been his prize. He’d captured it on the open sea, brought it here, dropped anchor three miles offshore from his home village. He’d made the ship a fortress, then priced it and sold it. The lives and possessions on board had been under his hand. At times he’d threatened the captives, claimed at key points in the negotiations that he would sink the Bannon with all hands if his ransom demands were not met. In the end, he’d hurt no one, as was his intention. The price paid after half a year was the amount he’d asked for after three days. The barrel of money bobbing on the ocean freed Yusuf, too. He did not need to stand here any longer.

  A long skiff raced to the cask a hundred meters off the starboard beam. Yusuf’s cousin Suleiman dragged the barrel out of the water. He cut away the chute. In the slow-circling plane, one of the insurance company’s Frenchmen snapped photographs. Yusuf was not concerned that his picture was being taken. It served his purposes to be known.

  Barefoot, Yusuf stood before the cask. The barrel rested on the long chart table in the Bannon’s sun-bright bridge. He wore a ceremonial ma’awis sarong, a loose silk khameez blouse, and an embroidered taqiyah cap. Acting like a priest, he laid hands on the cask.

  Beside him, Suleiman held a handgun on Ashwin, the Bannon’s captain. Another younger cousin, Guleed, pointed a rifle at Chugh, the first mate. The Indian and Malay crew were lined up in front of the long wheelhouse windshield. The remainder of Yusuf’s team, two dozen from his Harti subclan of the Darood, waited around the ship; still too soon to put down their guns and grenade launchers. Five live goats had been ferried on board for the final feast. Somewhere on deck, cutthroat knives were being sharpened, fires readied. The Frenchmen in their plane circled and photographed all this.

  Yusuf raised his head as if from a depth to open his eyes on the Bannon’s captain, Ashwin.

  Yusuf held out an onyx-handled blade. In English, he said, “Come, Captain. You do the honors.”

  The Indian, smaller than Yusuf by a head and a hundred pounds, stepped forward. The man had handled himself and his crew well during the ordeal of the ship’s hijacking and long negotiations. They’d surrendered the ship quickly; only a few had been fired upon by Yusuf’s pirates. In captivity, the discipline of Ashwin’s men’s had rarely wavered; they’d offered no resistance nor chicanery and had kept their ill opinions of their Somali captors largely to themselves. No one jumped overboard. Why would they, three miles from a lawless coast into shark- and seasnake–infested
waters?

  For twenty-seven weeks, Yusuf saw to it that the hostages were well fed, though the captain seemed too distressed to eat. Every Sunday the crewmen were allowed to contact their families by satellite phone. The trouble was made not by the seamen, who had no interest in anything beyond their liberation, but by the ship’s European owners, who poor-mouthed their ability to pay. After this, his sixth hijacking, Yusuf knew well all the ship owners’ ploys. The longer they allowed the pirates to hold their ships, the better their payouts from their insurance. The owners always waited until the economics shifted in their favor before settling up.

  In front of the audience of his captive crew, the little captain held out a brown hand for the knife. Privately, Yusuf was sorry to see the weight Ashwin had lost.

  Yusuf bent to the man’s ear. “Understand. You will open this barrel. If there is a bomb or anything unpleasant inside, it will surprise you first.”

  The captain smiled wanly, beaten down by his imprisonment. Ashwin snipped the plastic straps. Yusuf retreated, motioning for the captain to crack the lid. Nothing emerged from the white barrel but the reflected glow of green.

  Ashwin folded back the cask’s top. He did not step away but stayed rooted in front of the money. Yusuf, done with the captain now, retrieved the knife and shunted him aside. Suleiman walked the short man away on the end of his pistol, as Yusuf planted his broad palms on 3.7 million American dollars.

  A rush charged up his arms, expanding his chest. He exhaled slowly through his nose, for everyone on the bridge to hear. The Indians and Malays watched him over Guleed’s leveled Kalashnikov. Funny. Of all the things Yusuf had held hostage—this weathered ship, three thousand cargo containers, the owners’ schedules and profits—these little brown lives were what the money had bought back. His gaze fell into the cask to the banded stacks of bills, sheaves of dollars. How wonderful to be worth this.

  Yusuf considered his own two cousins and his clansmen, waiting. He knew their poverty because he’d shared it, and he’d ended it. Today, they had this value too.