Eden in Winter
Page 19
Jaw clamped against the pain, Adam husbanded his speech. ‘Could be anything. But if our sources set us up, the Taliban would have watched to see where we went. The guys we killed were amateurs.’
Branch considered this. ‘Fucking shepherd,’ he said under his breath. ‘Didn’t help they sent us out in daylight.’
Adam said nothing. Edging along the ravine, he peered down into its depths. He already felt weakened by the strain of keeping the S.U.V. from plummeting over the side. Each jolt from the road caused a stabbing pain; the compress was soaked with blood. Adam wondered how long he could keep driving.
He stopped talking altogether. As the sheer, rugged terrain closed around them, he kept shifting with his damaged arm, steering with the other. A feverish sweat dampened his forehead.
The S.U.V. reached the summit again, began creeping downward with Adam shifting and breaking. Still they saw no one. Perhaps an hour passed. Though his shoulder screamed in protest, Adam forced himself to keep driving. If they could make it to Camp Chapman, they would be safe. The idea of sanctuary began merging with an image of Carla Pacelli.
His shoulder started freezing up, drained of feeling – at once a mercy and a warning. He was still losing blood, and the harrowing descent through the stark mountains showed no sign of ending. ‘Shoulder’s done,’ he told Branch. ‘I’ll tell you when to shift.’
Adam gave an instruction. Rifle cradled in his left arm, Branch shifted with his right. This worked for perhaps a mile. ‘Enough,’ the Seal said. ‘My turn.’
Adam did not argue. He was too faint, and his arm felt dead, a limp appendage.
He braked again, stopping the car. Stepping out, he felt his legs buckle. Inhaling deeply, he sucked in the chill air of late afternoon, its bright blue sky slowly fading. He seemed to walk from muscle memory.
Branch began driving. Window cracked open for air, Adam kept looking to the front and back, A.K.-47 in his lap. Each turn of his head produced wrenching pain.
At last the road began flattening out. In what seemed like a mirage, Adam saw the village where the herd of goats had stopped them: their fatal moment, most likely. He tensed, finger on the trigger of his rifle. But they passed the mud wall without seeing anyone.
Taking out his cell phone, Branch called the number they were given for emergencies. When someone answered, he said, ‘We’ve had to abort mission. My partner’s hit. We need medical assistance at Chapman.’
Branch listened intently. Adam knew what they were asking – ‘How bad?’
‘Pretty bad,’ the Seal answered. ‘A through-and-through wound to the shoulder, and he’s lost a lot of blood.’ He paused to listen, then said tersely, ‘Yeah, he’s still conscious. Don’t know about walking, but he could an hour ago.’
Adam forced himself to detach, keep looking for potential danger. In a tone both angry and resigned, Branch told his listener, ‘I hear you,’ and got off.
‘Hope you’re up for a drive to Kabul,’ he told Adam, biting off the words. ‘In their infinite wisdom, you’re not bad enough to jeopardize the security at Chapman. They reminded me they don’t know us.’
Adam felt hope yield to resignation – this was what he had expected. ‘There’s more medical supplies at the room in Khost,’ Branch went on. ‘We’ll have to go there, alert the other guys.’
Adam grimaced. ‘And anyone else who sees us.’
Glancing around at the broad open plain, Branch stopped the car. He got out swiftly, using the butt of his rifle to knock out the remaining glass in the shattered rear window. Getting back in, he said, ‘Now we won’t look so bad. Except for you.’
Adam’s shoulder was throbbing again, and he was afraid of passing out. He could think of nothing to say. All he felt was a primal desire to survive.
Carla, he thought. A formless prayer for something he could not define.
Pushing this away, he resumed his taut vigilance out the windows.
*
On the outskirts of Khost, they passed the same Afghan labourers making bricks from mud and straw and clay. To Adam, it was as though nothing had happened in the hours since he had first seen these men stooped over their work – a reminder of how Afghanistan swallowed foreigners without a trace.
As they drove into town, a haunting call to prayer issued from bin Laden’s mosque. Suddenly the streets were crowded with pedestrians and beat-up cars rushing to heed the summons of Islam. The S.U.V. crawled to a stop amidst the traffic – its rear window missing, its sides pocked with bullet holes, its passenger’s shirt covered in blood. Their rifles were beneath the seats again, harder to reach. Now and then, an Afghan stopped to stare.
Hurriedly, Branch called Hamid, asking him to be at the guesthouse. Under his breath, the Seal said, ‘We look like the last survivors of a massacre. Sure don’t want to linger.’
The clutter in the streets thinned at last, as though vacuumed up by the mosque. The S.U.V. began moving again. When they reached the guesthouse, the Toyota they had driven to Khost was parked in front, and Hamid had left the main door open.
Adam followed Branch upstairs, the last steps appearing distant, as though he saw them through the wrong end of a telescope. When Branch knocked twice, Rotner opened the door, murmuring, ‘Shit,’ as Adam stumbled past him. Then he grabbed a first-aid kit and tossed it on the bed. ‘Want me to do this?’
Adam shook his head. ‘I will.’
Inside the kit was a hypodermic needle, lidocaine, and a vial of antibiotic powder. Adam poured the powder into the lidocaine, then sucked the murky fluid into the needle. Pulling down his trousers, he stabbed himself in the thigh, hoping to ward off infection. His shoulder hurt so much he barely felt the needle.
Awkwardly, he stripped off his bloody shirt and put on the fresh one Rotner gave him. On the balcony, Branch was throwing their gear down to Hamid. ‘Let’s go,’ he barked at Adam.
Quickly, Rotner changed Adam’s compress. ‘There’s morphine in that kit,’ he said. ‘But you can’t take it, no matter how bad the pain. You need to be functional, and with the blood you’ve lost already, lowering the pressure means you’ll die. So don’t.’
Mute, Adam nodded. Rotner and Hamid had risked their lives by being here. He would do his part.
They hurried down the stairs, Rotner grabbing Adam’s good arm, each step jolting his shoulder. When Adam got in the Toyota, Branch gunned the engine and began speeding through the primitive streets, making Adam grit his teeth against the pain. ‘Those two are going separately,’ Branch said. ‘We’re on our own.’
Eight hours, Adam thought.
Leaving town, they crossed creeks swollen with rushing water, then began their ascent into snow-capped mountains: warlord country, the redoubt of Pasha Khan and others like him, who might kill or sell them to al Qaeda or the Taliban. Adam’s wound was leaking through the compress, dappling his new shirt with blood and rendering their cover story useless. With fresh anger, he absorbed the pointlessness of their mission.
As they climbed, Branch stopped the S.U.V. at vantage points overlooking the terrain, allowing him to scan the road ahead for checkpoints. Then night fell, and they could see nothing, their headlights – a necessity – a telltale beacon of their presence. Rocks the size of baseballs shook the car, each fresh surge of agony sapping Adam’s consciousness. Without morphine, his only relief would be blacking out, an abandonment of his duty to keep himself and Branch alive.
For minutes and then hours, he forced himself to focus on his pain, the only antidote to sleep. Their headlights illuminated a vast, daunting emptiness – ravines, snow, mountains, an endless black sky barely silvered by a quarter moon. Patches of ice ground beneath their tyres.
Pushing Carla from his mind, Adam forced himself to keep staring out the windows through half-closed eyes. An infinite night enveloped him.
*
‘Fuck,’ Branch spat in the darkness.
His voice jerked Adam from some bottomless netherworld. Through the windshield, the twin beams o
f their headlights seemed to conjure three men whose outlines grew clearer. They moved to block the road, their motions almost ghostly in their loose pants and flowing shirts, the steel barrels of their rifles dark against white clothing.
‘No choice this time,’ Branch said. His voice was even now, the years of training and discipline kicking in. It struck Adam that this might be the last minute of his life.
‘None,’ he concurred: a signal that he was ready.
Branch eased the Toyota to a stop. As the Afghans stepped forward, both men lowered their windows. Drawing their enemies’ attention, Branch opened his car door and raised his left hand in a placating gesture. Adam gripped the door handle.
In a single fluid motion, Branch’s right hand came up and through the window to fire his A.K.-47. Adam jumped out of the car, rolling sideways. Sickening pain tore through his shoulder as he aimed and shot. The second Afghan fell to the ground, his mouth gaping open in surprise. In the headlights, the survivor fired at Branch. As his bullet pinged on metal, Adam shot him in the forehead.
The Afghan crumpled to his knees, pitching forward. Branch walked into the light, firing one bullet into each man’s skull.
The shots echoed in the vastness. Adam used his right hand to push himself upright, watching Branch hastily throw corpses down a ravine for the second time in hours. Rushing back to the Toyota, Branch said tensely, ‘Least I can do is get you back alive. So hang on tight.’
Branch began driving. Adam’s last reserves of strength were gone. Already the firefight felt like something he remembered from being stoned, uncertain of what had happened. For miles he struggled to stay upright as consciousness slipped away. With mild curiosity, he wondered if this was dying, then ceased to wonder at all.
*
Adam fought back through darkness, disoriented. For an instant, he imagined waking on Martha’s Vineyard. Recognizing Kabul, he wondered why he was there. Then the pulsing in his shoulder helped reality kick in.
‘Sorry,’ he told Branch.
‘No worries. You used yourself up back there. All I needed was for you to keep on breathing, so there’d be some point to this.’
They stopped in front of the guesthouse where they had met in Kabul. ‘They’ve set up a makeshift surgical ward,’ Branch informed him. ‘Don’t want us anywhere near an army base.’
Arm around his waist, Branch dragged Adam up the stairs. Inside the dimly lit room was a crew-cut medic with an operating table and I.V.s. The medic helped Branch lift Adam on to the operating table, then stripped off his body armour. ‘Judging from the dent in the back,’ the medic remarked, ‘that round would have pierced your spine, heart, and lungs. Comparatively speaking, you got off light.’
The pounding in his shoulder made Adam want to vomit. ‘Give me the morphine, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Not yet. Lie on your right shoulder while I clean this wound.’
Grinding his teeth, Adam turned on his side. Alert now, he watched the medic fill a turkey baster with salt water. Stepping behind Adam’s back, he took off the compress and pushed the baster into the open wound. As Adam stifled a cry of pain, the medic shot the contents through him.
Blood and salt water trickled down Adam’s chest. ‘Twice more,’ the medic said.
Grabbing a sheet, Adam bit down. To distract himself, he looked at the heart-rate monitor on his watch. He winced at the second spurt of bloody saline, then bit down again for the third.
More salt water dribbled from the front of his wound, clearer now. His shoulder felt like ground meat. ‘My heartbeat is okay,’ Adam said tightly. ‘Give me the fucking morphine.’
The medic hesitated, looking hard at Adam, then hooked up a morphine drip. ‘Now,’ Adam snapped, and the medic jabbed the needle in his arm.
As the medic swathed his wound in a compress and bandages, Adam felt warmth spreading through him. He had never felt so grateful to lose control.
*
A cosmic trembling all around him snapped Adam awake. Hearing the crack of incoming fire, he groped blindly for a gun, his mind foggy in the semi-dark.
At the foot of his bed, Branch popped up. Grinning, the Seal enquired, ‘Was that as good for you as it was for me? The earth sure did move.’
Staring at him, Adam realized that he was feeling the last tremors of an earthquake. ‘Fucking Afghanistan,’ Branch complained. ‘You’d think this shithole would cut us a break.’
It was the funniest thing Adam had ever heard. He kept on laughing until tears welled in his eyes.
Branch watched him with a half-smile of comprehension only they could share. ‘Yeah,’ he said softly. ‘Good to be alive, isn’t it?’
TWELVE
Two days later, they flew Adam to Dubai for treatment and recuperation.
The agency put him up at the Dubai Hilton, with tall windows looking out on the phallic competition of empty high-rises thrusting toward the sky. The surroundings added to his sense of the surreal, and of himself as suspended between an escape he remembered in freeze frames and a future he could not envision. Branch had remarked on his nervelessness. Perhaps it was his training; perhaps it began when Benjamin Blaine had held out the example of Ted Williams, then drilled him in the virtues of coolness under pressure. This was another strand of his tangled legacy; in those few moments, Adam had felt nothing, and did not know how to feel now.
But his wound was clean, with no complications. A week after the shooting, he could do the breaststroke in the hotel pool. This became his routine; now and then he would leave a small trickle of blood, but no one saw it. He never spoke to anyone except to order room service.
He slept well enough. Sometimes he would wake up with a start, look around in the darkness before recalling where he was. But he began to accept that Dubai, however strange and artificial, was an island of safety. Afghanistan felt far away, fleeting glimpses in the slipstream of a car. To his surprise, he had no dreams of death.
Days passed. One morning, he came back from the pool and found an email from Carla Pacelli, whose face was commingled in his mind with images of killing and flight. ‘It’s been a while since you’ve written,’ she said. ‘Are you okay?’
A good question. But at least he was alive to seek the answer.
*
Placing the groceries on Carla’s kitchen table, Teddy Blaine saw her mother’s rosary beads. Hesitant, he asked, ‘Does that really work for you?’
Carla gave him a thin smile. ‘We’ll find out, won’t we? As a child, I was taught that you’re not supposed to ask for God’s favours so concretely, like wanting a new dress for Christmas.’ Then she recalled praying for her father’s death, and added, ‘But sometimes I did. Now I pray for other people – your brother, and my son.’
Teddy raised his eyebrows. ‘Nothing for yourself? There must be a dress you want.’
Carla shook her head. ‘What I want for myself can’t be hung up in a closet. For me, prayer and reflection are an end in themselves.’
Teddy opened the refrigerator and began putting things away. Over his shoulder, he asked, ‘Did you ever discuss this with my father? A godless man, if there ever was one. He insisted that any particular religion was a function of its followers’ ignorance and superstition, quickly cured by one semester in a comparative religion class.’
Carla took an apple from his hand, placing it in a bowl of pears and oranges. ‘It does sound familiar, actually. I did politely point out to Ben that, at its best, religion also teaches kindness, personal responsibility, and the grace not to judge someone by the worst moment in their lives. And that the forgiveness of others might be something he could use.’
Teddy glanced at her. ‘You’ve got that right.’
Turning, Carla focused on a beam of sunlight that burnished the mahogany table. Again, she experienced the discomfort of wondering whether this man, so surprisingly considerate of her, had murdered his own father. Evenly, she said, ‘You still loathe him as much as Adam does, don’t you? Perhaps more.’
His voice softened. ‘You weren’t there, and I guess in the final months he gave you something different. I don’t mean to stomp all over that by singing sad songs for myself; family is tough for a lot of people. But there’s no understanding Adam unless you grasp what the father of your child was like as our father.’
The ironic formulation reminded Carla of a painful truth – that Adam’s tortured relationship with Ben, whatever its causes, could damn anything they might have. Quietly, she asked, ‘Do you and Adam ever talk about this?’
‘More lately.’ Teddy’s voice held resignation and regret. ‘But another gift from Dad is that he made Adam a cool one. When we were kids, Adam was fundamentally sweet-natured – even though he was my kid brother, when it came to our father, he did his best to stand up for me. Even now I can feel the kindness I remember – God knows, he still looks out for me. But after he broke with Dad it was like seeing that person behind protective glass, impossible to touch.’
But for fleeting moments, Carla thought, she almost had. ‘Do you know why he left the island? All I get from him is the sense it involved someone other than Ben.’
Closing the refrigerator, Teddy sat across from her, regarding her with kindness and perplexity. ‘You really do care about him, don’t you?’
Carla rested her folded hands on her stomach, a rueful reference to their circumstances. ‘Call me silly, if you like. My track record the last few years is pretty miserable.’
‘Join the party.’ Teddy gazed past her, as if pondering her question. ‘Adam refuses to talk about why he left; all he says is that he got fed up. That’s bullshit, obviously. But all I can tell you is that the Blaines weren’t the only people Adam left behind.