by Tom Crown
Katia watched her, muscles tense, waiting for the next move. She’d fought over so many things in her life. Herself. Food. Shelter. Money that wouldn’t do her any good, but the lack of which could do her plenty of bad. She could fight, if she really had something to fight for.
Jenny didn’t look like a fighter at all.
“So where does that money come from?” Jenny asked defensively. The tone of her voice had softened, but Katia wasn’t about to gamble her future on that.
“Where do you think?”
“I think you took it from the van!”
Ryan and Steve had appeared in the doorway. Katia looked at the two, then back at Jenny, and tried to gauge what would happen next, but she couldn’t read any of their faces. They stepped in and went to opposite sides of the room, taking in the situation, the bag, the money, analyzing all the facts in their own way. She couldn’t tell if that was good or bad for her.
And she wouldn’t gamble.
She spun around and ran out of the room into the hallway. She headed for the front door, but grabbed the keys to Steve’s Land Rover from the kitchen counter as she passed it. Looking back, just for a split second, she still saw no one behind her.
She pushed the door open.
“Hey wait!” Ryan called out, but by then she was already out the door and slipping on the gravel outside. The door slammed shut behind her.
She ran around the corner and saw the Land Rover parked behind the house with its front facing toward her. The key was in her hand. She kept running, pressing the buttons on the key until she heard something bleep and thought she saw the lights blink in the hard sunlight. She pulled the driver’s door open and got inside. The step up was higher than she had expected, and she almost fell backward, but then pushed herself up and sank down in the driver’s seat. Every mirror was wrong and the myriad of controls was incomprehensible. She looked at the key. Even that was an electronic device of some sort, not anything resembling a key at all. But it had a distinctive shape, so it would have to go into a slot somewhere on the instrument panel in front of her. No, not even that. There was actually a start button, and all she had to do was push it. The engine started with an effortless whirr.
No one had followed her yet.
She released the parking brake and shifted into first gear. The vehicle lurched forward.
Without the money, she could no longer run. She had to make Ryan believe in her again, and to do that she had to go back to where she had come from.
She had to go back for the others.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
RYAN BOLTED AFTER Katia, but he only made it outside the front door before he felt the ground give way. He stumbled on the steps with buckling knees. His shoulder hit the steps first, and then he tumbled left, rolled, and landed hard on the ground.
Steve appeared above him, moving his head left and right, frowning hard. “You all right?”
Ryan tried to get up, but almost vomited from the effort.
Steve kneeled by his side. “That was an ugly fall. I think you might have a concussion. From earlier today.”
“Yeah?” Ryan felt nauseous, but he hadn’t had a concussion since he’d tried out for the wrestling team in junior high. He pushed against the ground to get up, but he couldn’t push himself up even a single inch. It was like wrestling all over again, all right, but passing out wouldn’t do. He tried to push himself up again, but still didn’t get anywhere. An inch perhaps, but nothing Steve couldn’t counter with a light touch of his fingers.
“Do you have a history of these things? Did you pass out a lot, I mean, in Afghanistan?” Steve was suddenly receding, his voice moving about somewhere farther and farther away.
Ryan remembered passing out for hours, maybe days, and he realized now he had likely suffered multiple concussions during that time. He wondered if that would make him tougher now, if some part of his head or brain would be physically stronger, but it didn’t feel like that at all. It felt the exact opposite, as if his head were more prone to these new damages now.
He didn’t want to black out. He’d been running after Katia, and he didn’t want her to leave like that, alone with her anger and fear. He struggled to open his eyes. Steve was still hovering above him, looking increasingly concerned.
“Yeah,” Ryan finally whispered. “I think I’ve passed out before. Yeah, I did.”
Steve nodded. “I thought so. I know a thing or two about concussions. We’ve had our share of horse-riding accidents in my family. Treacherous grounds where we live.”
“Hey!” Jenny called out from inside the cabin. “She’s taking the car!”
Steve stood up and turned around.
Jenny’s voice sounded as if it came from far away. Perhaps because of the actual distance, Ryan thought, but also because he felt the world receding from him again. Jenny was still in the bedroom. She had to be, if she could see Katia leaving in the Land Rover from the back of the cabin. She was in the bedroom. With the money. The same money Katia had left behind. He decided to remember that one fact. This wasn’t about the money. Not for Katia at least.
The thought made him feel momentarily better, and he tried again to get up. His balance was still off, but at least this time he made it to his hands and knees.
The powerful engine roared, revving up and down, and he caught a glimpse of Steve bolting around the corner as he pushed himself fully to his feet. Then his field of vision swayed. It blackened. Blacked out.
“You’re going to miss me,” she said with a teasing smile. Natalie. The Kandahar sun shone behind her, filtering through her hair.
Ryan smiled back at her, admitting the obvious. He turned over in the bed and squinted the sleep from his eyes. He let an arm fall toward the floor, and his gaze landed on a set of photos he’d taken the day before. The first shot showed a pack of stray dogs scattered about on a freshly paved asphalt road, their bodies riddled with bullets. Resurgent Taliban fighters had attacked a highway construction site. The stray dogs hanging around the site looking for scrap food had been caught in the crossfire between the Taliban and a US Army Apache helicopter. The human bodies had been removed by the time Ryan got there, the Taliban and the construction crew, but the dogs had been left in the sun. The imagery had been powerful, the scrubby fur, the fresh blacktop, the signal red of the impact wounds, all against that bright blue sky. Stark colors. And an awful smell.
Ryan picked the photos up from the floor and rolled back into bed. He shuffled the photos in the back to the front. The motive was very different, but in a sense similar. It showed a crumbled wall, damaged in recent fighting, and in the background a taller structure damaged during the Soviet war. The fresh scars in the foreground were sharp, bare, rocky, while the older ones were soft, gentle, integrated into the landscape. He often photographed that contrast, the new and the old, the ancient and the timeless.
Natalie watched him, her smile still halfway there. A sweet patience. It was as far as her mood ever traveled from her trademark teasing playfulness.
“We always knew one of us would have to leave,” she said. “Before the other.”
Ryan kept looking at the photos. He should say something, but nothing came to mind. The images didn’t help.
“I’m the one who’ll worry,” she said. “I’ll be in New York, and you’ll still be here.”
“I’m safe here,” Ryan said and finally put away the photos. He sat up and pushed a pillow against the wall. “I don’t feel threatened at all when I’m out there. People like to have their stories told. They want the world to see what it’s like here.”
“I know. I have to go back, though.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m going to miss you.”
“Come on,” she said playfully. “You’ll be doing Thursday nights with the humanitarians in no time.”
Ryan grunted. The parties that the Kandahar Westerners held every week was where they could drink beer, talk about their hardships, and plan their moves out of there. Those gatherings were something Natal
ie and he had both intentionally stayed clear of, which in turn was part of the reason why they’d met in the first place, each deciding to explore the city on their own.
“New York,” Ryan said. “At least, it’s not that far from Boston.”
Natalie held his gaze for a long time. He was thinking long term, his Boston, her New York, and she apparently liked that line of thought.
Ryan had done everything in his power to make sure that day turned out spectacular, and in the end, late at night, Natalie had decided to stay for another month. Two weeks into that timeframe though, she had disappeared. Ryan never thought she had been abducted, not really, but it had been a possibility that first day. When she still had been traveling to Doha, Paris, New York, it had still been possible she hadn’t simply upped and left. Of course he hadn’t hoped she had been taken against her will, but he had hoped she hadn’t just left.
She finally sent an email from New York. By then, he had already made a habit of checking out their regular places, waiting for her to turn up, or a friend of hers, someone who could tell him more. But it wasn’t her friends that eventually showed up when he roamed the streets. It was the other guys.
“Concussion,” he heard Steve say above him. Ryan opened his eyes and saw Jenny with a guilty look on her face. She looked that way all the time now.
“She’s gone?” Ryan asked.
“Yes”, Jenny said. “She’s gone.”
He realized he couldn’t see the open sky behind her. Instead, he was looking at the living room ceiling.
“You passed out,” Jenny said.
He grabbed the surface beneath him with his hands and felt his fingers dig into the fabric of the sofa. He looked around and saw the passport Katia had left behind on the living room table. He sat up and reached for it, and only stopped turning pages when he reached Katia’s own photo, showing her at sixteen with an easy smile Ryan had never once seen since he met her. He studied the details, her full name, her birthday, then turned the page. He noticed a stamp stating when she had entered Italy two years before. Milan was a long way from home for a Ukrainian high school girl.
It made him remember how some of the older NATO and UN troops in Kandahar had described the Russian girls they’d met in Bosnia and Kosovo, where those men had had the wildest times of their lives. Kandahar was apparently a whole lot more orderly, and a whole lot less fun.
He tried to imagine how those girls from Russia and the Ukraine had ended up in Bosnia and Kosovo. He’d read about it, networks of traffickers moving girls from East to West or wherever the best market was, and had heard about it on the news as well. The corruption among the peacekeepers and aid workers rang a bell as well. He remembered an article about Western contractors, maintenance personnel working for a NATO base in Kosovo, buying girls and keeping them locked up in their off-base apartments.
He felt a surge of anger when he thought about it all now. He hadn’t really reacted before, beyond the automatic reaction of any civilized being, but now his imagination was mixed with his own experiences, and both took him into much darker territory. He had seen so much of what people could do to each other, and yet he knew he was barely scratching the surface.
“The passports?” he asked and stood up, almost losing his balance again. He took a deep breath. “From Katia’s bag. Where are they?”
“In the bedroom,” Jenny said. “Where she left them.”
“Why?” Steve asked, as he lowered himself down in an armchair. “What are you thinking?”
“That it’s time to make some sense of all this.”
“Yeah? You think you’re ready?”
Ryan shrugged and took a step toward the bedroom, realizing instantly he was barely able to walk straight.
He wasn’t ready for anything, but that hardly mattered.
He took a deep breath.
It was time to go deeper.
It was time to make a stand.
CHAPTER TWENTY
KATIA TURNED OFF the engine and moved her feet off the pedals. She had stopped on a dirt road deep in the sparse forest, which seemed to stretch forever around her. In the winter, it would be a dangerous, depressing place, but this was summer, and everything was green and bright. It was a beautiful forest, she had to admit, a majestic cathedral of towering spruce.
The drive from Steve’s cabin had been exhilarating once her adrenaline had subsided and her plan had formed. She had never driven such a perfect machine before, but far more important, she had never in her life driven alone. Now she felt like she could go anywhere. It wasn’t exactly true, she knew that, but the feeling was a good one, better than good, and she hadn’t experienced many of those lately. Driving was something she enjoyed, and something she wanted to do more in the future.
She held her breath, almost her heartbeat, before she let that last thought end. She hadn’t considered what she’d want for her future in a long time. She hadn’t wished, or hoped, or wanted anything. She had consciously isolated her present from her future and her past, but it was all starting to come back to her now. Perhaps it was her survival instinct kicking in, trying to stir thing up inside her one final time. And perhaps it was working.
The displays on the instrument panel were all off now, but she remembered the fuel tank had been half full when she started. Such a large vehicle probably had a large tank, but at the same time, it couldn’t possibly be very fuel efficient, so half a tank still wouldn’t take her very far.
She opened the door and got out. The scents of the forest washed over her, the musk of the spruce and pine, all stronger than the last time she had been here. The bird song seemed louder too, and the sound of a slight wind moving across the top of the trees. It was a sunny day, and the wind hardly moved the smallest leaves of the birch trees around her. It was her senses that were so acute, letting her hear and see what she normally wouldn’t have.
Her heart pounded hard in her chest, and the peace she had felt momentarily was slipping away. It was a beautiful place, but beauty wasn’t why she was here. She had come for its secrets and its darkness.
She took a deep breath and went around to the back of the vehicle. Steve had left a lot of equipment in his car, a laptop computer, several cameras and their objectives in padded bags, tripods, and plenty of camping gear. She reached for the camera that had the longest zoom and balanced it in her hand. It was heavy, almost too heavy for her to handle, but the weight would only make it easier to keep it steady, and she’d be lying down on the ground anyway. It was the right choice.
She grabbed a bag for the camera, a camouflage coat, and a green hat many sizes too big. She put on the clothes over her dress and looked at herself in the nearest window. The hat looked funny sloping over her half-made makeup and her gaunt face, but she didn’t smile. Instead, she smeared the makeup until it looked like war paint. She looked mad. Outright dangerous. And she liked it.
With the camera slung over her shoulder, she headed into the forest. She felt like a commando, like some American soldier marching in the Vietnam jungle. That place had always been a movie setting to her, so far away, and so strange with the rain, the snakes, and leeches. It didn’t seem real at all. War to her took place in barren landscapes, in deserts, and mountains, like when her grandfather had fought in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion in the late seventies. She hadn’t even been born then, her own father had been a teenager still, but that war had always hung over the family like a dark thundercloud expected to give off lightning at any moment. Her grandfather had always grumbled about it, especially after drinking too much, but since Katia’s parents hadn’t approved of his habits those moments had thankfully been far and between. Still she remembered him, sometimes talking with great pride about the relationship between the Soviets and Afghans and the support the countries had given each other over the years. Other times he had been bitter, and the Afghan war a trap set by the Americans to give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam. She hadn’t understood all of his ramblings, but her interest in hist
ory had made it possible for her to at least grasp parts of it. And she had experienced firsthand the side effects of war, the ripple effects that seemed to keep slamming into anyone even remotely connected, generation after generation.
The winter had always been the worst time of year for the family, with the memories of the Christmas of the Afghanistan invasion, and the darkness that sunk deep over Ukraine. Without Christmas, the winters would have been unbearable. But, in the end, even the holidays had been tainted.
She pushed the memories aside. Her childhood was far away, and thinking about it would do her little good now. She wasn’t even sure Kherson itself was still standing. Perhaps all of Ukraine was gone. But no, Alex would have told her, with a gleeful smirk on his face.
She had walked for several minutes and gone as far as she could. She found a good spot to lie down and train the camera past the trees to see a nearby field through the greenery. Knowing the terrain, she swept the camera back and forth until she found a small cluster of buildings. She quickly focused on the barn where she had spent most of her time this past winter. It was painted in a rusty red, like many buildings here, with a gray roof and a symmetrical line of windows just below it on the second floor. The ground floor was dominated by a pair of doors tall enough for a tractor to drive through.
Alex stalked into her view, searching his surroundings as he moved across the yard, and Katia instantly shrank down. Watching him move about, with her entire body frozen, she realized he was different than she remembered, his shoulders slumped, his pose no longer intimidating. Perhaps that was how he looked when he thought no one was watching. She felt her finger move to the shutter button. It felt good to be in control, knowing that she was the one watching, and he was the one being watched.
He looked off toward his right, and she carefully moved the camera and followed his gaze. It took a couple of seconds, but then she saw the white van appear just on the forest edge across the field.