Levon's Time

by Chuck Dixon

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  Levon’s Time

  Levon Cade Book 6

  Chuck Dixon

  Levon’s Time

  Kindle Edition

  © Copyright 2019 Chuck Dixon

  Wolfpack Publishing

  6032 Wheat Penny Avenue

  Las Vegas, NV 89122

  wolfpackpublishing.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, other than brief quotes for reviews.

  eBook ISBN 978-1-64119-944-5

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-64119-945-2

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  If you liked Levon Cade you might like: Retribution, by Brent Towns

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  About the Author

  Special thinks Jaye Manus and Michael Hutchison for their always able assistance.

  Levon’s Time

  1

  Dirya had been walking for years. At least, that was how it felt.

  The asphalt under her feet was cold, even with the sun high in the bronze sky. Despite her felt-lined boots, her feet were numb. The boots were tight as well. When they had left Aleppo years before, she was a little girl with a little girl’s feet. She was a young woman now, or so her mother would tell her. Her feet had grown as she grew older, and were swollen from the many kilometers she had walked.

  Ahead of her and behind stretched a miles-long column of people walking north along the Gaziantep Highway toward the refugee camp at Islahiye. Men and women wore layers against the cold, and were pulling or pushing carts loaded with goods. Walking singly and in bunches, they strung out to the horizon. The smallest children were carried or rode the carts. The older ones walked as Dirya did, not with the springy step of the young, but with the steady trudge of the aged.

  The progression passed EkoPet and TurkOil petrol stations every ten kilometers or so. These were guarded by sullen men standing under hand-painted banners that read TURKS ONLY in Turkish and Arabic. Dirya looked with longing at the coolers of juice and soda visible through the windows of the stations.

  Also spaced along the road were army trucks with Turkish soldiers watching the endless parade. Sometimes they waved the walkers along with harsh words and insults. For the most part, they simply glared at the Kurds, Circassians, Yazidis, and Arabs heading to the north along the right lanes of the highway. The soldiers were there to keep them to the path. Anyone who attempted to leave the road, to rest in the shade of trees to the east or west, could expect to be beaten, or worse.

  One man stopped to relieve himself in a ditch out of sight of the others. The soldiers hauled him back up onto the asphalt, clubbed him with rifles, and scattered the goods that spilled from the pack on his back. The man rejoined the caravan, whimpering and moaning. No one looked at him or offered to help. Dirya and her mother picked up their pace to leave him behind, both pushing their cart loaded with colorful Carrefour bags to join the next group walking ahead.

  The cart they pushed contained all they owned in the world, a collection of clothing and kitchenware and a few packets of family photographs. Buried deep in a bag at the bottom of the heap was a sack of jewelry. It was all that remained of the rings, bracelets, tiaras, and earrings they’d taken from her father’s jewelry store at the Shahba Mall in Aleppo. The sack had been heavier when they left. Her mother had had to pay out many of the pieces to get them this far, some of it even to her father’s brother in A’zaz, who owned an olive farm and had agreed to keep them until the civil war was over.

  But the war had not ended. After two years, her uncle wanted payment in exchange for their board. In addition to the payments, Dirya and her three brothers had to work in the groves. She never wanted to see another olive again. The smell of them turned her stomach.

  Armed men from Rojava, a militia opposed to President Assad, came to the farm and drafted all the men, including Dirya’s father and brothers. The youngest, Tofan, only eleven, was loaded, shrieking for his mother, into the back of a truck. When the militia had left, her uncle said that she and her mother could no longer stay with him. They began the long hike to the Turkish border and the refugee camp beyond. They could do nothing but survive and pray for the war to end. And wait to be reunited with the men of the family.

  The caravan reached a crossroads at a town called Altınüzüm, where there was a collection of trucks and canopies set up by aid organizations. Men and women handed out bottled water and sealed cardboard boxes to a crowd eager to have them. A blonde woman in a red parka gave Dirya and her mother a bag of bread and a small cloth sack of rice, along with a gallon jug of clean water. The woman spoke Arabic with more confidence than skill. Dirya understood little of what she said, but nodded and returned the woman’s smile.

  Soldiers stood at the blockades guarding the roads that led into the town and smiled as well. They were fixed smiles, empty of good will or humor, but pasted on their faces for the cameras of the media people gathered at the aid stop. There was a dusty van with a satellite dish atop a tower on the roof. Western men and women with serious faces snapped pictures and asked questions through translators. The refugees flocking around the tables of goods being distributed either nodded mutely at the questions or ignored the reporters entirely. These foreigners with their cameras and their questions would be safe in their homes in Belgium or Sweden this time next week. The refugees had to remain, and to speak to outsiders meant drawing attention to themselves—the attention of the watching soldiers.

  Dirya and her mother pushed their cart into the shade of some cypress trees to open the boxes given to them by the aid workers. There were sewing kits, washcloths, toilet paper, combs, pens, and small pads of paper, as well as packaged cookies, crackers, and dried fruit. Each of the two boxes also had hand-written notes in western languages. One featured a child’s crayon drawing of a dog and a house under a yellow sun. The girl had yellow hair. Her dog was pink. Dirya found it funny that there was also toothpaste and toothbrushes, in addition to the boiled sweets. She said so to her mother as they leaned against their cart, enjoying this brief respite from their march.

  As they munched cookies and shared a bottle of water, Dirya watch
ed the news people walking along the line of waiting refugees, poking cameras and microphones at them. Cameramen trotted along the column, recording the suffering for the entertainment of an audience thousands of miles away. Each cameraman had someone moving with them, holding a padded microphone on a pole suspended overhead.

  The men and women wore the costume of journalists the world over: vests crammed with gear, sunglasses, ball caps with their channel’s logo on them, stylish hiking boots or sneakers, and pleated khakis from the best suppliers. All moved with an urgency that belied the fact that this had been years and years in duration: a slow-motion human catastrophe being hyped for a two-minute segment on the evening news, if it didn’t get bumped for a celebrity divorce or a political controversy.

  One man was apart from the frantic activity of the others. Dirya noticed him standing in the shade of a canopy slung off one of the aid trucks. He held a steaming mug to warm his hands. He wore a lined fatigue jacket over a faded work shirt, and battered boots with worn soles were visible under the hems of his ACU trousers. A frayed backpack with a Canadian flag stitched on it rested at his feet.

  He was a big man with broad shoulders. The canopy’s shadow hid his face, but it was clear from his posture that he was watching the column before him, his head turning to regard the trotting cameramen and hectoring reporters. He was a Westerner, but not a reporter or an aid worker. Dirya did not know how she knew this. She was certain this man was here in this place for reasons all his own.

  Her attention was drawn away by the arrival of a black SUV that pulled to a stop on the opposite side of the highway. Men in black suits over starched white shirts exited from all four doors. Their jackets were open, revealing holstered weapons on their belts. One of them carried a camera in his hands. This frightened Dirya more than the guns. She’d seen so many men with guns. The black suits walked quickly to the reporters and camera crews working the line. The soldiers by the blockades either looked through them or turned away.

  The leader of the new arrivals was a big man with a shaved head. He spoke to one of the journalists, who began to argue with him. It was too far away for Dirya to hear the words, but she could see the younger man’s face turning red. The bald man took his hand as if in a friendly grip. The younger man paled, his lips tight, as the bald man leaned closer to speak into his ear. The rest of the men from the SUV stood in a tight row to block the others from recording the scene or hearing what was said.

  Dirya turned to where the tall man had been standing in the shade of the canopy. He was gone.

  2

  “Your closet makes me sad,” Sandy Hamer said.

  “You only say that ’cause my clothes are too small for you to borrow,” Merry Cade said. Sandy was a couple of years older than Merry. The divide felt like an eon at times like this.

  They were up in Merry’s room on the second floor of Uncle Fern’s house. Sandy was bored enough to do an inventory of Merry’s wardrobe. She plucked a pair of denim overalls from the closet and dangled them in front of Merry, who was lying on the bed with a paperback.

  “Please tell me these are for Halloween.” Sandy sighed.

  “What am I supposed to wear to clean out stalls? You don’t exactly look like the cover of Elle when you’re shoveling shit for your mom.” Merry’s gaze returned to the pages of her paperback. Mike Hammer was recovering from a blow to the skull. That was when he did his best detective work, woozy from a concussion.

  “Well, I don’t dress like a farmer!” With grunts of disgust, Sandy rifled through more hangers. She plucked out clothes to waggle in the air before putting them back. “Ugh. Ick. Loser. Tomboy.”

  “I know I need new clothes. My daddy can take me shopping when he comes back.” Merry turned a page.

  “When’s that?” Sandy dropped beside her on the bed.

  “Soon. I don’t know. He’ll be here before Christmas.”

  “And what? Take you to Walmart? Buy you some more stuff in the boy’s department?”

  “I pick out my own clothes.”

  Sandy huffed out her deepest sigh.

  “You can’t wait that long. Not only is your crap lame, but you’re outgrowing it.” Sandy plucked at the cuff of one of Merry’s jeans legs.

  “Not that it matters. Who’ll ever see me?”

  “And that’s another problem. You’re either here, or hanging with my mom. No one ever sees you. Are you ever going to school?”

  “I’m homeschooled,” Merry said.

  “By who? Your uncle? What’s he teaching you? How to be a hillbilly?”

  Merry sat up with a mock-angry face and delivered a playful punch to Sandy’s arm. Sandy stuck out her lip in an exaggerated pout, then leapt from the bed. She skipped back to Merry and yanked the paperback from her hand.

  “Come on! Let’s go shopping! You and me!” Sandy pulled car keys from her purse, which was hanging on Merry’s bedpost. She dangled them before Merry’s face.

  “In Haley?”

  “Sure, in Haley. You have any money?”

  “My daddy left me some,” Merry said. She thought of the shoebox on the shelf in the closet and the two coffee cans buried behind Uncle Fern’s truck farm, and the one up in the eaves of a stall out in the barn.

  “Let’s go!”

  “Now?”

  “Right now! Right this damned minute!”

  “It’s okay with your mom?”

  “Sure. She’s at the Clarkes’ farm. They have two mares ready to foal.” Sandy’s mother was Jessie Hamer, a long-time friend of Merry’s father and the one-woman proprietor of Riverstone Veterinary.

  “Well, okay. Go down and tell my Uncle Fern what we’re doing, and I’ll be right down.”

  With a yip, Sandy tore from the room and down the steps. Left alone, Merry stood on tiptoes to slide the shoebox from its place above her clothes rack. She set it on the bed and removed the lid. Inside were thick rolls of bills, five in all, bound with rubber bands. She was slipping the bands from one of them when she heard Sandy’s booted feet on the stairs.

  Merry shoved the shoebox under her pillow. She turned back to the closet to jam a whole roll into the pocket of the parka hanging on a hook on the back of the door.

  “First thing we do is replace this ratty old thing,” Sandy said, fingering the faux fur lining the parka hood as Merry slid her arms into it.

  “Wendy’s is on me, okay?” Merry said.

  “Sounds like a plan. This will be fun!” Sandy beamed at her.

  3

  Gunny Leffertz said:

  “Sometimes doing the right thing is the wrong thing.”

  Her mother complained of stomach cramps. Dirya suspected the raisin cookies from the aid package. They hadn’t eaten anything richer than rice and dried peas for almost a week. Her mother leaned on the cart, face pinched in pain.

  “There are toilets,” Dirya said.

  There were three porta-potties set up behind one of the aid trucks.

  “There is a line,” her mother protested.

  “You must go.”

  “I cannot leave you alone.”

  “And I cannot leave the cart.”

  Her mother suggested going into the copse of cypress that stood beyond the road, but Dirya dissuaded her. The soldiers were watching.

  “I will be fine here. There are people everywhere,” Dirya said. She gestured at the cameras and reporters.

  Her mother nodded once, took the packet of toilet paper from the aid package, and joined the line of two dozen people waiting for the toilets.

  Dirya sipped cold tea and watched the parade of refugees file past her toward the impromptu aid station at the crossroads. Her gaze avoided the man in the black suit snapping pictures of new arrivals. He paid particular interest to men of military age, making some of them stop their progress to allow him to get a better shot of their faces. The soldiers stepped closer to give his orders weight.

  The journalists were finally satisfied with the footage they got and packed themselves and
their equipment into their van and drove off. Dirya looked at the line in front of the toilets but could no longer see her mother there. The column of approaching refugees was thinning now. The day was coming to an end, the shadows getting longer. In this flat, featureless country, sundown was a sudden event. The winter moon was already visible on the horizon. Many had stopped to make camp on the road verge.

  She started as she saw the shadow of someone approaching her—the man with the camera. He was smiling, the camera held up and clicking. He was clean-shaven and younger than the other men who had climbed out of the SUV. He might have been handsome but for a mouthful of crooked teeth exposed by his grin.

  “You are a Kurd,” he said.

  Dirya understood enough Turkish to understand him but feigned ignorance.

  “You are a guest in my country, see?”

  She turned away.

  The Turk grabbed her arm, his smile gone.

  “And how will you repay that generosity?” His grip tightened.