“Did you think he might?”
He grimaced, refusing to look at her again, even in the mirror. “Yeah, well, one of my few moments of wishful thinking.”
She held up her hand. “I know, last thing you want to talk about, right?”
This time his head jerked and his black eyes pinned her gaze. “You haven’t exactly been forthcoming about your secrets, either, so don’t play the hypocrite with me.”
It hurt—more than she thought it would. It was the truth, but not for the reasons he believed.
He made an impatient sound, grabbed the pouch and moved out of the bathroom. “I have to eat,” he said.
She followed him into the kitchen
As he studied the inside of the refrigerator, she pushed the hot words out. “It’s not that I won’t tell you. It’s that I can’t. I don’t remember anything before I was about twelve. At least I think I was about twelve. You have to understand, Caden, I’m not used to talking about it. To anyone. The few times I ever tried to explain, it changed things. People wouldn’t treat me the same afterwards. So I stopped telling people.”
He glanced at her. Then he looked back into the fridge. His eyes caught hers again before he let his gaze skitter away. The hand holding the fridge door tightened its grip. “Me, too,” he said at last. “Until today.” He took a breath. “Until you.”
She nodded. “I’d trade you stories, Caden, but honestly....” She spread her hands. “I don’t know how to tell it.”
He reached for the bread and pulled out two slices. “Hold out your hands.”
She held them out, puzzled.
“Palm up.”
She flipped them. He laid a slice of bread on each hand, reached back into the fridge, slapped two slices of cheese on them, reached back into the fridge again, pulled out the remainder of a pepperoni sausage, reached for his folding knife and sliced off thin layers, which he laid on the cheese. He reached into the fridge again, topped the two sandwiches with another layer of bread each and shut the fridge. He took one from her hand. “That’s yours,” he said, pointing to the other one on her hand. He took a huge bite out of his and leaned back against the counter, chewing.
“I figure we have maybe an hour before we have to clear this place,” he said. “Do you have more cash?”
“A little.”
“It’ll have to do until we can get to your car again. That could be interesting, too.”
“I should pack some stuff.” She looked towards her office. At the very least, she was taking her computer. She’d stay barefoot rather than leave it behind.
“What happened when you were twelve?” He took another bite of his sandwich, as if he’d casually asked what the time was.
“I found myself wandering the streets of Khafji when the Iraqi army invaded, during the Gulf war.” She forced herself to take another bite, fighting for casual, for cool. “I just walked around, trying to figure out what I was doing there and who I was. Then I ran into an American soldier, called Vinnie Dela Vega. He was a US Ranger. He was just as puzzled about me as I was, but he said I spoke English like an American and I remembered a lot of American things. The first thing I asked him for, when I knew he was from the States, was if he had a Pepsi. I wasn’t able to tell him anything about myself except that I remembered an explosion and losing someone and that I had been wandering the streets for days. Vinnie told me that since I spoke English like an American, he was going to say I was American, especially as I liked Pepsi so much. So he removed all his rank and insignia and sneaked me across the city to the last operational base the Rangers were holding before they pulled out.”
* * * * *
It was the second day of their odyssey across the fragmented streets and mounds of rubble that made up most of Al Khafji. Vinnie had long ago discarded his shirt and helmet and torn the stripes off the sides of his trousers and untucked the hems from inside his boots. He’d told her that it was too hot for the additional layers.
Much later, Montana had learned that he’d been trying to smuggle her past two alert armies and a dozen different guerilla outfits without drawing fire. If they could pass as civilians, there was a chance they could reach safety. He’d also taken the risk of burying his rifle in the same alley in which he’d found Montana. He was traveling with one handgun concealed in his pocket.
Vinnie was dark haired and sun-tanned. With his tee-shirt and dark trousers, he could pass as a middle-aged native. He’d coaxed Montana into putting back on the dirty dishdashah she’d worn over her jeans and wearing the hijab again. She hated the headcloth with a passion but at twelve years of age, she was old enough to understand that blending in with everyone else was necessary for survival.
Just after morning prayers, when the mosque bells had fallen silent, they’d edged up to a bombed-out field of stones and rubble. Bent piping and steel clawed at the sky. Whole slabs of wall lay at mortal angles while disquieting evidence of human habitation drew the eye—a shower stall, the rings still in place and a plastic curtain hanging from the last, wallpaper still clinging to bricks, a kitchen chair with a missing cane bottom perched atop a pile, looking very ordinary and domestic.
The detail that held Montana’s gaze was a colorful poster of Janet Jackson. It hung from a chunk of cinderblock by one corner, lifting a little as heat vapors stroked it. Who owned it? Were they the same age as her? Were they still alive? What had happened to them?
From here, they could smell the sea, too. It was rich and thick with salt.
“There we go,” Vinnie said, settling onto his stomach as he studied the way ahead. “Look, ‘tana. See on the other side there. See the glittering?”
She dragged her gaze away from Janet Jackson and looked where Vinnie pointed. Something was glinting in the harsh sun. “Field glasses?” she guessed and glanced at him.
“Right on, sweetheart. Look just behind that glitter. Look hard. What do you see?”
She peered, searching. She glimpsed red and struggled to pull it into focus, to make out details. Red, and something. Stripes...
“It’s a flag! An American flag!!” She gripped Vinnie’s arm, unable to say more. The excitement that gripped her took away her ability to vocalize.
He grinned and reached out to pull the hijab from her head and tousle her hair. “That’s the base, ‘tana. We’re nearly there. Take the dress off, darling. You’re an American, now.”
She struggled out of the cotton dishdashah and threw it away. Vinnie tossed the headcloth on top of it and took her hand.
“We have to be sneaky for a while yet,” he told her. “You’re going to want to start running, but you can’t. Not till we get much closer, okay? We’ve got a lot of open ground to get across and the fence to climb at the end. And see those buildings up there?” He rolled over on one shoulder and pointed to the apartment blocks behind them. “There’ll probably be snipers up there, watching the station, waiting for a chance to pick off the soldiers. So we keep out of any sight lines they might have. Remember what I said about sight lines?”
She remembered vividly. In the last six days, through hard experience, she had learned how to stay out of sight of the tops of buildings and other high places where someone with a good rifle might be waiting. Vinnie had formalized her learning and given her a vocabulary to describe it.
For the next ninety minutes, they stole through the rubble field, sliding around heaps of debris, wriggling through holes in the wreckage, always aware of the high aeries at their backs, the possible observers.
Vinnie, ahead of her, held up his closed fist and Montana froze obediently. Then he beckoned her to come to him, to keep low.
She wriggled forward to his side.
“There. That’s home base, honey.”
A shining, new and very tall fence marked the edge of the rubble field. Behind the fence, suburbia took over. The suburban streets looked completely untouched, but it was an illusion. The buildings still stood, but they were unoccupied, the residents long since fled as refugees,
heading into untouched areas of Saudi Arabia.
In one of the buildings close to the edge of the field, US personnel had set up a forward station for field command.
“Can they see us, Vinnie?”
“Probably, honey. They’ll have a sniper tucked up somewhere out of sight, keeping an eye on things. He’s probably been watching us for a while now, trying to figure out what we want.”
“Let’s go, then.” She was mad with impatience. There was barely a hundred yard between them and the nearest whole building. She felt like she could sprint there in two heartbeats. So close, so close. “They’ll have Pepsi, right?”
Vinnie laughed. “The base will have Pepsi,” he told her. “You bet. But there’s a tiny problem.”
“What?”
He nodded ahead. “No more cover. D’you see how it’s all flat ahead? We have to go along that roadway to get to the building where the base is. The road is wide open.”
“We run?”
“Not straight away. But it may come to running, ‘tana. If it does, you run like hell and you don’t stop. And you zigzag. Remember how I told you?”
She nodded and Vinnie clambered into a crouch again, looking over his shoulder.
They crept along the side of the road, hugging the chunky, broken off lumps of concrete. Montana could feel the skin on her back prickling painfully. Being shot at had taught her to fear being exposed this way.
The base drew closer, inch by inch.
Finally, Vinnie squeezed her hand. “Now, we run,” he said. “Are you ready?”
She bit her lip and blinked up at him, sudden tears hurting her eyes, tearing at her throat. “You’ll stay with me, after, won’t you?”
“I’ll do my best,” he promised. “But the world is a strange place, remember? You lasted this long in hell’s outhouse...you can live with anything else that comes along. You’ve already proved it. Right?”
“Right.” Vinnie had said this often over the last couple of days, but she still didn’t really understand it and wouldn’t for another decade.
“Let’s go.” He took off running. Montana had always been good at running and took off fast. Very fast. No preserving energy for a long haul. Speed was all she needed. She was nearly home. Nearly safe.
Vinnie got the drop on her, but she was lighter and faster. She passed him and kept going. Ahead, she could see a soldier half-concealed in a doorway, waving her on. Excitement thrilled through her and made her even faster. There was a high singing wind in her mind. She reached the fence, rattled it with her hands. The soldiers on the other side were waving her on, encouraging her to climb over. Shouting to her.
Then she heard the shots from behind them and the excitement instantly congealed into fright. She risked a quick glance over her shoulder. Vinnie was coming up behind her, running like crazy, but behind her...and closer to the snipers on the rooftops behind them.
She turned back to him.
“Move it!” he hollered. “Get your ass up that fence!”
“Hurry up!” she screamed.
That was when the bullet ripped through his chest. She saw it emerge, saw the blood and flesh explode out around it, tearing the tee-shirt apart.
Amazingly, he kept on running. Another bullet hit the tarmac right next to her foot and whined away into the rubble.
Vinnie reached her. He was screaming at her as he grabbed her and threw her up into the air. High up. She soared.
At the top of the fence, many hands grabbed her, pulled her over, handed her down to others, below.
“Daddy!” She turned back to the fence, but Vinnie was lying face down on the ground on the other side. She tried to go back, but more bullets were cracking past them, making the soldiers around her duck and try to drag her backwards.
A sob tore at her throat as she turned and sprinted for the building where more soldiers in fatigues stood waving her on.
Zigzag! She jumped left, then right and with each switch in direction, her heart leapt higher and harder.
She ran straight into the soldiers’ arms and even when they picked her up and carried her inside the building, even when she knew she was safe, she couldn’t get her legs to stop running. It took a medic’s sharp jab with something on her thigh for her legs to stop twitching. Whatever it was stopped the twitching, stopped her screaming, and stopped her tears. Stopped her mind playing back the moment the bullet had burst out of Vinnie’s chest. For a while, anyway.
She didn’t get to drink Pepsi that day.
* * * * *
Montana took another bite of Caden’s slapped-together sandwich, but her mouth was dry from talking and it tasted like chalk.
Caden was staring at her. Then he rolled his eyes. “Vinnie-too,” he said.
“Vinnie-too was the first present his widow, Drusilla, ever gave me. She gave it to me the day she told me she intended to adopt me.”
“So you grew up as Montana Dela Vega.” Caden ate the last of his sandwich, deep in thought. “Why ‘Montana’?”
“The state Vinnie was born in. He couldn’t pronounce my name and said Montana sounded sort of like it.”
“You know your real name?”
“Montana is my real name. It’s the only name I’ve ever used.”
“But you were called something else, once?”
She nodded slowly. “I remember flashes of things. Lots of sounds. People talking. I remember being called Mastaneh. That’s what they called me. Whoever ‘they’ are.”
“Mastaneh.” He tried it. “Doesn’t sound very American to me.”
“And Caden is a fine Canadian name, too.”
He grinned.
She stepped closer to him, until her finger touched his chest, right over his heart. “That’s where Vinnie was shot. I saw the bullet go through him.”
Caden pulled up the too-small tee-shirt and looked at the scar there and the little square of gauze next to it. After a moment, he pulled the tee-shirt down again. “That explains a lot,” he said. He looked up again. “One day I’ll tell you the story of that scar.”
He straightened up and she stepped back again. “Do you remember why you were wandering the streets of Khafji at all?”
She shook her head slowly. “Not at all, but sometimes—” She felt her cheeks heat and slid her gaze away from him. “Sometimes I think I can’t remember because whatever happened, I was afraid of it. I was a coward. I blocked it out because I didn’t want to keep remembering it. So I conveniently forgot it.”
“You keep calling yourself that. Coward.”
“I am. I...I’m not good with people, with emotions. A computer I can handle, and the people on the other end of that computer. But put us in the same room and I...just can’t handle it.”
“You’re a diplomat.”
“Consular official and not a very good one, or they would have promoted me long ago. Nelson said—”
“What?”
“He said a lot of things, most of them not very nice. I’m not sure what I can believe about what he has said.”
“Including what he told you about me?” Caden guessed.
She grimaced. “Time to go,” she pronounced. “I’ll need twenty minutes to pack some stuff.”
“You get ten. I’ll help you.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
There was a bus bound for Margaret River, leaving from the Westrail terminal in East Perth at eight p.m. In the time between, they stopped at a late-opening chemist and while Caden waited outside, Montana bought him a pair of running shoes and an outrageously priced sweatshirt with a West Coast Eagles logo on it.
They caught the light rail train to the terminal in time to buy tickets. Because the bus wasn’t leaving the state or crossing any borders, they weren’t asked for ID.
The bus journey was a slow five hours. Caden slept for the first hour and ate enormously at every rest stop along the way. She knew without explanations that he was doing both to fully recover from the insulin shock as fast as possible. Comforted by the big b
ody next to her, she spent the first hour thinking and dozing.
In Mandurah, they stopped briefly along the main street to pick up more passengers and in the window of an appliance store, a series of TVs were all playing the same channel, showing the late evening news.
Behind the news anchor, photos of wrecked buildings, distressed people, death, injury and carnage flashed upon the screen. Then a map of North America, with an arrow pointing towards the top.
“Christ on a pony,” Caden breathed, twisting his head to watch the store window as the bus pulled away from the curb. As the bus picked up speed, he swiveled back in his seat and looked at her. His eyes were wide.
“What is it?”
“Edmonton, Alberta. I couldn’t see enough to get details. Something has happened there. Something big enough to hit the news in Australia.”
She gripped his wrist. “Nelson said something about Canada’s priorities changing.”
He shook his head. “Next stop, we see if we can get a paper, something that’ll have details. Meantime, forget it.”
But there was a light in his eyes, a look, enough for her to ask hesitantly; “Edmonton was where you were born, wasn’t it?”
He took a breath. “Yeah, but I don’t remember the place. I’ve never been there as an adult. Forget it for now, or you’ll chew up juice you could use for better things.”
She settled back into her seat, her tablet PC open on her lap to the code module she was working on, but her interest had dwindled. She sighed and slid the stylus away. Who was she trying to fool?
She felt more than saw Caden’s quick glance at her. “Could I ask a question?” he asked softly. “If you had to name a single quality about Nicollo that makes you admire her so much, what would it be?”
Even though she recognized the question as Caden’s way of distracting her, Montana gave a small laugh and answered him truthfully. “Hell, that’s easy. Nicollo was the ultimate influencer. She moved friends and associates to act despite a complete lack of personal power.”
“Is that how you feel? Powerless?”
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