The 13 th tribe if-1

by Robert Liparulo

  “What?” he yelled, glaring over his shoulder at the man with the gun.

  The man looked like a lumberjack: long-sleeved flannel shirt, worn workman boots, a shaggy mess of hair that flowed into an equally shaggy beard.

  “ What do you want? ”

  The man set the pistol on the terrace and kicked it away. “I’m sorry,” he said, walking forward. “I saw the destruction at the gate. I didn’t know who you were in the dark.”

  “Stay away,” Jagger said.

  The man stopped ten paces from them. He said, “I’m a doctor. I’m here to help.”

  “You’re not from the clinic,” Jagger said.

  “My name is Owen Letois. A man called me. He had a head injury, and the monks had taken him in.”

  Jagger thought it through quickly and decided it made sense. If this Owen guy was one of the attackers, why would he come back? If the woman had meant them further harm, she’d had the opportunity and no doubt the constitution to do it herself. He turned around, and Owen hurried to him.

  He dropped to his knees, reached into a pouch on his belt, and pulled out a penlight. He examined the wound. “No air. I don’t think the bullet struck a lung. Heavy blood flow, but it’s not pulsing out, so his major arteries are intact.”

  “But there’s so much,” Jagger said.

  Owen stood and offered a weak smile. “I’ve seen worse.”

  Beth grabbed Owen’s arm. “So he’ll be okay?”

  Owen frowned. “He could still bleed out, and I can’t know what organs may have been damaged.”

  Beth covered her mouth again and shook her head.

  To Jagger, Owen whispered, “What’s his name?”

  Jagger told him.

  The man leaned close to Tyler, took the boy’s head in his big hands, and gently turned it toward him. He ran his fingers over Tyler’s skin, along his forehead. “How are you feeling, Tyler? Sleepy?”

  Tyler nodded.

  Owen spread open Tyler’s eyelids and flashed the light into them. “I need you to stay awake, okay? Can you do that?”

  Another nod.

  “Do you feel sick, like you have to throw up?”

  Tyler’s eyes drooped shut.

  “Tyler?” Owen said, slapping his face lightly. “Wake up, son.”

  “Thirsty,” Tyler said.

  “We’ll get you some water soon.” Owen ripped open the boy’s khaki shirt. Buttons popped and tinked onto the terrace. He ran his hands over Tyler’s chest, stomach, neck, into his armpits and down each side. “No exit wound. The bullet’s still in there. If we move him too much it could do a lot of damage.” He turned to Beth. “Go get a bed, one of the little ones the monks use. Not the-”

  Gheronda and two monks appeared at the top of the stairs. Owen snapped his head toward them.

  “You?” Gheronda said.

  “A bed!” Owen yelled. “I need a bed, just the board, not the mattress or frame. Now! ”

  Gheronda spoke to the other monks, and they hurried down the stairs.

  “And blankets!” Owen yelled after them. Gheronda repeated the call, then started toward them.

  Owen said, “Do you have any saline or blood expanders-Hetastarch, Voluven, Pentaspan…?”

  “No,” Gheronda said. He waved his arm. “Only the basics. Ointment, gauze-”

  “Get them,” Owen said. “Meet us out front at my helicopter.”

  “Helicopter?” Jagger said. “That was you… coming in?”

  “I was in a hurry.” That seemed to remind him of something, and he looked back at the retreating monk. “Gheronda.” When the old man turned he said, “Creed called me. Is he-?”

  Gheronda shook his head, then continued away. Owen lowered his face.

  “What are we doing?” Jagger said. “We have to do something.”

  Owen’s eyes snapped to his. “We need to stop the bleeding and get him on a board to keep him as immobile as possible.” He reached into his pouch. “I have a blood-clotting gauze…” He pulled out an empty wrapper, crumpled it, and tossed it away. “I did have it.” He shook his head, said, “It’s fine.” His hand went behind him and reappeared with a wallet. He flipped it open and pulled out a credit card, which he pressed against the hole in Tyler’s back. “This will form a better seal over the wound than a compress alone. Ma’am, could you push that material over this?”

  Beth looked at the sweater. “It’s… drenched.”

  In one quick motion Owen grabbed the back of his collar and yanked his flannel shirt over his head, revealing a green, long-sleeved undershirt, as stained and tattered as the button-down. He handed it to Beth, who pressed it against the credit card.

  Owen removed his belt and wrapped it around Tyler’s torso and over the balled-up shirt. He cinched it tight.

  Beth removed her hand. She stepped up to Tyler’s head and began stroking it. “You’re going to be fine, baby,” she whispered.

  Tyler’s eyes rolled to look at her, and he tried to smile.

  “What about the clinic?” Jagger said. “It’s in town, just a mile.”

  “He needs more than it can offer,” Owen said. “We’ll take my helicopter to Sharm el-Sheikh. We can be there in forty minutes.”

  Forty minutes, Jagger thought. They’d already wasted… He clicked off the chronology of events since the woman had shot Tyler: his distress, Beth’s arrival, Owen’s, the monks’. He realized that what had seemed an emotional eternity and at least twenty real-life minutes had been no more than five. Five minutes of agonizing, soul-searing torture. But another forty? How many heartbeats was that, as Tyler drifted toward some point of no return? He felt as though he were standing on a shore watching currents carry his son toward a plunging waterfall while someone ran off to find a life rope.

  He saw Tyler looking at him while Beth stroked the bangs off his forehead and whispered in his ear. A patina of sweat slicked his face. Even in the scant light from the terrace’s single bulb, Jagger could see the gray hue of Tyler’s skin. The muscles under that skin continued to tremble, the way a puddle vibrates as something huge approaches. His lids closed and opened, closed and opened. But what frightened Jagger the most was the missing sparkle in his eyes, that indefinable reflected glow of his spirit.

  The two monks returned, stomping up the stairs and across the terrace, carrying a board between them, blankets draped over their shoulders. Owen beckoned them with an urgent hand, like a flagman signaling a plane. He touched Tyler’s cheek and smiled at him. Then, in his excitement, he grabbed Jagger’s collar.

  “We’re on,” he said. “Let’s move!”

  [51]

  Using a wad of gauze clamped in a hemostat, Toby dabbed at the bullet hole in Phin’s right cheek and the much larger exit wound in his left. “Man,” he said. “And I thought you were ugly before.”

  Phin moaned. His hand came up to strike Toby, but dropped back to the vinyl bench seat in the rear of the helicopter’s cabin.

  “Why’s he falling asleep all the time?” Alexa said, reaching over her seatback to touch Toby’s head. He was crouched between the bench seat and a row of captain’s chairs, where she and Nev sat. In front of them, Ben occupied the copilot’s seat.

  “Pain,” Toby said. “Head wounds hurt, and the bullet really messed up his mouth, tongue, and teeth.”

  “And his face.”

  “It’ll heal.” Toby taped squares of gauze over each wound, pushed a syringe of an analgesic-sedative cocktail-morphine, bupivacaine, and dexmedetomidine-into Phin’s thigh, and returned to his seat beside Nevaeh. He slapped her shoulder. “So what’s this?” he said. “You shot a kid?”

  She glared at him. “I’ll shoot you if you don’t shut up.”

  “Like, how old was he?”

  Nevaeh ignored him. Ben turned in his seat to look at her, then at Toby. “Tobias,” he whispered, “our pilot’s fidelity has already cost a king’s ransom. Your mouth will make it two… if not unpurchasable at any price. We will sort everything out on the plane.�
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  Toby glared into the back of the pilot’s head. “Don’t you think he heard the explosion? What about all those emergency vehicles we just flew over? The El Tour Road looked like a jeweled snake.”

  “Everyone has a line they won’t cross.” Ben returned his gaze to Nevaeh, who said, “It was an accident.”

  Toby waited for Ben to tell her what he’d told Toby a million times: We don’t do “accident,” but the older man simply turned in his seat and stared out the windshield at the dark desert below.

  [52]

  The helicopter Owen called “his” was an Egyptian Air Force Mi-8MB Bissektrisa — his for the evening, he’d told Jagger, at a cost of 50,000 LE-roughly $9,000-and “the calling in of long-forgotten favors.”

  “The Egyptian military owed you favors?”

  “Only some of the top brass.”

  Jagger suspected that Owen’s chitchat-while carrying Tyler on the makeshift stretcher to the helicopter, waiting for Gheronda’s meager medical kit, even checking Tyler’s vitals and the compress’s effectiveness-was intended to distract Beth and him from dwelling too long on how all of this might end. Little good it did: the possibility of Tyler’s not pulling through was a black pool of stinking, noxious muck at the bottom of a pit with sloping, crumbling walls. No matter how hard Jagger tried to climb away from it, he always tumbled back in.

  Between the far back seats and the pilot chairs was an open area that accommodated the stretcher with room to spare. Tyler lay on his side with Jagger’s folded shirt under his head. Jagger felt naked in a black tee, his prosthetic arm fully exposed. But of course he would spend the rest of his life wandering through cities truly naked if in some truth-or-dare version of the universe it meant saving his son or even merely granting him some measure of comfort and peace.

  While they carried Tyler to the helicopter, Beth had rushed back to their apartment for her purse. Now she and Jagger crouched near Tyler’s head. Jagger kept a grip on Tyler’s shoulder, partly to comfort him, partly to hold him still as the helicopter banked and maneuvered through gusts of wind. Beth stroked his face and hair, whispering words of comfort or prayers-although she would argue they were one and the same, Jagger had never been so sure as now that they weren’t. But he wouldn’t begrudge her-or Tyler-access to the one they thought was a loving God. His disagreement was between himself and God.

  Owen spun out of the copilot’s chair and knelt beside Tyler. He slapped a palm on Jagger’s back. “The pilot’s called ahead. He’s cleared to land on the hospital’s roof, and they’re prepping an OR. Sharm International, very modern with all the latest technologies and world-renowned doctors. He’ll get the best care.”

  The hospital’s credentials didn’t surprise Jagger; Sharm el-Sheikh was a ritzy playground for the rich and famous. What did surprise him was Owen’s timely appearance and their ability to transport Tyler so quickly… “quick” only in relative terms: traveling the single road from St. Catherine’s west to Dahab, then south to Sharm el-Sheikh would have taken a bumpy, excruciating three hours, not counting the innumerable checkpoints. He might have said both Owen and the transport were miracles, blessings, but wasn’t the God who doled out such blessings the very one who had caused their need for them?

  Deep inside, he feared that his anger would cause God to withdraw the blessings part of the equation: the helicopter would malfunction; the hospital would be missing an essential supply or piece of equipment or physician; or worse, Tyler wouldn’t hold on long enough to receive the care he needed. That would be consistent with the God Jagger knew: to offer hope, only to snatch it away.

  He let loose with a mental scream. This was the kind of thinking that would tick off the Guy Upstairs. If he couldn’t thank him for Owen and his helicopter, then it was best not to think of him at all.

  Just take each thing as it comes. It’s a world of defeats and victories, of counterbalances. Things happen, they just happen.

  Then Owen started praying. This gun-toting doctor with a penchant for grungy clothing and lax grooming, who racked up favors with Middle Eastern nations and had “seen worse” than Tyler’s gunshot wound, laid his hand on Tyler’s head and chest and prayed. He spoke softly, just above a whisper, but the sincerity and passion some televangelists tried to achieve through fervor and volume he evinced with a surety of words and a tone Jagger could not recall hearing before. More than anything, it spoke of relationship, a connectedness borne of time spent together, of battles won and battles lost, of pleasure and pain, grief and joy, and everything in between.

  Jagger was awed by the seeming effortlessness of Owen’s faith. He had slipped into prayer without preamble or apology, without the rolling-up-the-sleeves attitude of so many believers as they approached their time with God. He had flashed the penlight into Tyler’s eyes, smiled, and said, “You’re doing great. You’re a brave young man,” then started praying, as simply as checking a pulse.

  A part of Jagger wanted to give Owen a solid shove, scream at him, Don’t you know you’re wasting your time! But a more powerful part said, Yes! Do it! After all, he’d accept help for his son from anyone, anything. He tried to push away the thought that from Owen’s mouth came the words Jagger should have been saying, a heart-aching plea for Tyler’s life. He closed his eyes, clamped his teeth together.

  Is that what you want from me? Are you crushing me so low that I have nowhere else to turn? Ain’t going to happen. I know how cruel you are. I know your games.

  He felt a tap on his back and jumped. He turned to see the pilot holding up five fingers. Jagger patted Owen. “Five minutes!”

  Owen nodded and continued to pray.

  [53]

  Nevaeh sat alone in the forward cabin of the Tribe’s jet, a Bombardier CL-601: six recliners as fat, soft, and white as marshmallows, arranged in two rows flanking a central aisle. The lights were dimmed to a soft glow, and the sacred music of Gioachino Rossini-at the moment, Tantum Ergo — whispered through the air. Despite enough comfort and ambience to lull a binging crackhead to sleep, she was far from relaxed. Simply being at Mt. Sinai again, the memories it conjured, would have keyed her up for hours of soul searching and memory sifting-but shooting the boy, she’d be up for days grappling with that one. An accident, yes, but she wondered if it could have been avoided. Had she jogged right instead of left to avoid the man’s aim, the boy would not have entered the bullet’s trajectory.

  Like a team of “cleaners” in a hit-man movie, sweeping in to scrub a crime scene of evidence, into her troubled mind marched her twin friends Justification and Rationalization.

  “The boy interfered,” said Justification, gruff as a police sergeant, sure as a judge. “That made him an accessory after the fact, equally expendable.”

  “Even if he was an innocent,” said Rationalization, always in the gentle teaching tones of her long-forgotten father. “You know unfortunate casualties come with the territory. All for the greater good.”

  “The greater good,” she repeated, liking the sound of it. “If I’d allowed him to steal the chip we couldn’t carry on, we couldn’t do our job.”

  “Given to you by God,” Rationalization clarified.

  “He was a meddler,” Justification said. “And he paid the appropriate price.”

  “I don’t know that I killed him,” she said.

  “All the better, if you didn’t,” intoned Rationalization. “We don’t need to be having this conversation.”

  She shook her head. “He didn’t look good.”

  “He should be dead,” said Justification. “He sinned when he stole from Phin. He sinned by trying to stop you.”

  “You did what you had to do,” said Rationalization.

  “Yes, only what I had to do.”

  “Our work here is finished,” said Rationalization.

  And with that the twins were gone.

  Feeling better, Nevaeh spun her chair around to gaze toward the rear of the plane. Against the walls, in line with the chairs, were two floor-
to-ceiling compartments, each containing two bunks. The doors were closed, and she had always thought of them as crypts, sealed off from the world, a place of rest, if only for a time. Toby and Alexa occupied the two bunks on the right. Phin lay in the other. They’d done everything they could for him, which amounted to dressing his wounds and drugging him into oblivion.

  At the end of the aisle, between the compartments, a door led to a galley, a bathroom, and storage closets. She considered going back there and changing out of her invisibility suit. Instead, she rose and headed for the cockpit. Normally Elias would be piloting, but with him sent off to Trongsa-and certainly back home by now-Ben was at the controls. She slipped into the copilot seat. Outside the plane, the black Mediterranean Sea sparkled with the reflected light of a billion stars overhead.

  “It’s a tomb back there,” she said without looking at Ben.

  “You’re complaining?”

  “Just saying. Our numbers are dwindling.” From the corner of her eye, she caught him looking at her and faced him. “Eight now, from forty.”

  “It was bound to happen,” he said.

  “We should talk to the ones who haven’t died, build back up to fighting numbers.”

  “They’re scattered,” Ben said. “Lost causes.”

  “Ben-”

  “Did you put the chip in the safe?”

  She wanted to talk more about rebuilding the Tribe, going after the ones they’d lost, but she knew Ben had said all he would. She sighed and unzipped a breast pocket. She reached in and pulled out the microchip container.

  “I’m not so sure technology is making our task any easier,” she said, thumbing it open.

  “Easier considering the size of our target. As you pointed out, we’re only eight now, can you imagine…”

  She stopped hearing his words. All of her senses narrowed into the container, which held a plug of polyethylene foam and nothing more. She used a fingernail to dig out the plug, examined it, peered into the empty cylinder. She patted the outside of her breast pocket, searched inside. She looked up and saw Ben watching her.