Shadow Hand

by Sacchi Green

  So much for those moments of peace. “In about an hour,” Cleo said. “Just a three-hour layover. No time to leave the airport.”

  “Then we should be flying over Greece soon.” Ash stared intently ahead through the small window. “If that wing weren’t in the way, we might be able to see the coast already.”

  Cleo reached automatically for her arm, then pulled her hand back.

  Ash grabbed the hand and squeezed it. “Ha. You were afraid I was going to move the wing.”

  “Just a reflex. If you’d really been about to try that I’d have felt it.” Cleo bent across Ash’s lap to stare out the window herself. “Look! An island, and a hazy coastline.” She leaned back and reached for the in-flight magazine in the pocket of the seatback in front. “There’s a map in here…”

  “Greece?”

  “Just about, or the southern tip of Albania. Nearly Greece now.” Cleo riffled through the pages. “Says here there’s a small museum upstairs at the Athens airport with a few statues and things they dug up when they built the place.”

  Interest flashed briefly across Ash’s face, then faded. “Dug up?”

  “Good point.” Cleo shivered even though the air was warm. “I guess we’d better focus on one goddess at a time.”

  The land seemed to flow toward and then beneath them. Ash sat upright, absorbed in the panorama. It was only natural for Ash to feel some bond with the country, Cleo figured, even though she’d never said much about her Greek heritage, and disliked her given name of Athena. Cleo would like to explore Greece sometime, too—who wouldn’t?—but she sat back in her seat and didn’t interrupt Ash’s concentration.

  After a while, Cleo looked over at Mac, Ash turning from the window to follow her gaze. Mac still slept, her face now more set than sorrowful. She didn’t have the luxury of any peace at all, Cleo thought. Her Nisreen had attempted another daring mission, too daring, and now she was a prisoner who could not be ransomed, only kept alive for possible high-profile exchange.

  As if she’d caught them thinking about her, Mac woke suddenly. She saw them looking at her, blinked, and arched her eyebrows. “Well, what? Did you have a question?”

  “We just wondered,” Ash said quickly, “how long we’ll have in Lebanon.”

  “Not long at all. Certainly not long enough to explore the delights of the famous casino there.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of that,” Ash said, so defensively that it was clear that she had been.

  “Just as well. The Casino du Liban has a strict dress code. Formal dress for women, suits for men.” Mac smiled wickedly. “Too bad I left my blue dress behind. You wouldn’t have filled it out quite the way the designer intended, but you’d have got by.” Her smile widened. “See, Cleo’s imagining you in that dress already.”

  “Let’s just say,” Cleo retorted, “that I’m imagining someone in that dress, and let it go at that.”

  Mac laughed out loud. Ash looked from Mac to Cleo and shrugged. “Well, since there won’t be time anyway, I’m spared the painful decision as to whether it would be worth wearing a dress for the sake of twiddling yet another roulette ball.”

  “Seriously,” Mac said, “we’ll be doing well to meet Colonel Khider in Beirut in time to catch the flight to Erbil. Very few airlines fly to Kurdistan, and there are only six flights a week from Lebanon.” She checked her watch. “Looks like we’ll be on time in Athens, anyway, so we should get to Beirut with enough time to spare for a Turkish coffee with baklava while she updates us on plans, but not much else.”

  The colonel was there to meet and greet them, and steer them through customs. In a café a cut above most airport food vendors, they revived on pita, tabbouleh, and lamb kebab.

  “You must all call me Razhan,” she said over Mac’s promised thick dark coffee and sweet, sticky baklava. “You are all on first-name terms, and so should I be. Our forces do not pay so much attention to titles; in fact, they tend to refer to whoever is leading them in action as ‘Commander,’ and simply by name in informal situations. Also, it would be better that we do not appear to travel together on military business.”

  “I was about to suggest that,” Mac said, and Cleo and Ash agreed. It was a relief not to have to bother with titles.

  Before their next flight, Razhan had papers for them, with new identities. “You, Ash, will be a journalist for a women’s magazine in the States. Our female soldiers get quite a bit of attention from journalists. Cleo, are you willing to be the photographer accompanying her? Or would you two like to switch roles?”

  Cleo suppressed a smart-ass reply but couldn’t resist a sly grin. She answered sedately enough, “I’m fine with being the photographer. I don’t have much experience with cameras, but I’m good at figuring things out.”

  Mac had grinned, too. Now she nodded. “Good. At first, as we go high into the mountains, it will make more sense to say you’re from a travel magazine, or something like National Geographic, but with luck, up there we won’t have to say anything to anyone.”

  Chapter 12

  The second plane’s route took them over terrain so much like the desert they’d known that Ash had an odd sense of coming home. From the way Cleo squeezed her hand she knew the feeling was shared. Much as they’d often been desperate to get away from not just the war but also those arid expanses, that same land was part of them now, part of who they were together. The mountains, though, as they came nearer and nearer—line after line of abrupt ridges with shadowed canyons between—drew them with the promise of new sights, and possibilities, and challenges. And new dangers.

  The Zagros range rose from plains made fertile by the rivers running down from its rocky heights, Razhan told them. “The plains that lie between the Tigris and Euphrates are known as the cradle of civilization,” she said. “But the mountains are the source of all irrigation water, so really they are the lifeblood of humanity.”

  The international airfield was in the district capital city of Erbil. Razhan had arranged for them to be met by a truck driven by a very young woman in army fatigues, with a traditional keffiyeh scarf around her head and a square, determined chin still softened by youth. Razhan introduced Ariya, who responded with a grin that reminded Ash of Cleo. The Sisterhood of the Motor Pool, she thought.

  Their luggage was stowed in the back among sacks and supplies for their mountain trek. Cleo was provided with a padded case containing a high-tech camera so she could study the instructions along the way. Razhan warned that they had hours of travel ahead before their first stop, so they’d better make use of the airport restrooms and grab lunch to carry along.

  In spite of her apparent hurry, Ash noticed that Razhan had Ariya drive them in a wide circle around the central city, where streets of centuries-old structures were interrupted by stark modern buildings, some with petroleum company logos on their facades. There was also a wide, elegant park, its expanses of grass still green in early winter. Fountains rose and fell over reflecting pools and along the sides of the park walls, which were made up of graceful open arches echoing those of the ruins of El Ukhaidir, where this journey had begun.

  Razhan spoke proudly of a great elevated plateau of ancient buildings called The Citadel, thought to be the oldest continually inhabited settlement in the history of humanity.

  Cleo, squeezed close to Ash in the middle of the truck’s back seat with Mac on the other side, leaned across to take her first photo. She murmured in Ash’s ear, “Such a great tour guide! We should tip her well.”

  Ash, who had been on the verge of making the same teasing comment, dug Cleo in the ribs with her elbow. Mac, always able to hear anything meant to be private, elbowed Cleo’s other side and muttered, “If you haven’t already figured it out, in times of peace Razhan is a professor of Kurdish history at the University of Salahaddin in Erbil.”

  She really was a natural tour guide. Her love of the land shone through her fie
rce determination to defend it. Ariya, too, pointed out things of interest, her English less fluent than Razhan’s, but adequate. She soon pulled off her keffiyeh and shook loose her short brown hair. “Always cover to visit my grandmother in the city. You know how it goes!”

  Outside the city, the road wound through towns also mixing present and past, with the past predominating. They were often centered around one or more religious shrines of great beauty and antiquity. Farther along there were smaller villages surrounded by farms and orchards. Fertile land, well-watered. Cleo photographed farmhouses with fruit trees and trellised vines growing flat against their warm stone walls, and pastures where cattle and horses grazed.

  “Here,” Razhan said, “you would not think that war could reach, but we fight to hold it back. So far our enemies have little interest in farming, only in harvesting our young men for their armies and our women to be sold as slaves. They raid the villages farther south and southeast, and that is where we stand against them. Soon enough you will stand there with us.”

  Soon enough? Ash chafed at moving away from the war zone rather than toward it. She’d been aware for some time of pressure from Ishtar, goading her toward battle, but much of the impatience was her own. Soon enough for Razhan’s captive sister? For Mac’s…close friend? She understood, from a military viewpoint, that those who knew the terrain and the people and the ways of the enemy had to be the leaders, even as it was getting harder and harder for her to tolerate anyone else being in charge. At least she recognized the dangers of that influence and that attitude, and had managed to keep them suppressed. So far.

  By late afternoon they began to climb into the foothills. Plateaus and wide valleys there were still farmed, and there were hollows with stands of oak whose copper leaves still clung to their branches. Gradually, the slopes became more suited for grazing than for tilling.

  After dark, they stopped for the night in a town on the banks of a river rushing down through a chain of valleys to join the mighty Tigris. They were welcomed into the home of Ariya’s aunt, whose daughter was away fighting with the troops. Ash and Cleo slept on separate pallets in a tiny upstairs room overlooking the river, and next morning Ash watched at first in amusement and then with a twinge of envy as Cleo roamed about shooting photos of the river, the distant line of snow-topped mountains, the flocks of sheep and goats brought down from higher pastures for the winter, and details of the village and people right down to a cat snoozing on a window sill. When the cat’s owner, a young girl on the verge of adolescence, spoke to her shyly, she took her picture and then called Ash over.

  “Here’s someone interesting to interview, Ash, for that magazine article.”

  Ash managed to string together some human-interest questions for the girl, with Ariya to translate. How did she like living in a village with such a lovely view? What animals had she besides the cat? Would she like them to mail her photographs of the cat and herself after they got back to America?

  “Oh yes, please.” She gave her mother’s address, but went on to say, “in five more years I will not be here, but with the soldiers, like Ariya, fighting our enemies.”

  Ash had understood most of what had been said without translation, although it seemed wiser not to say so. Her years in the Army had given her a bare-bones familiarity with everyday Arabic, and the people here spoke a mixture of that and their regional Kurdish dialect. But she could scarcely keep from blurting out, “Oh, no, the fighting must stop long before that!” before Ariya finished translating.

  “Don’t you wish you really could write a magazine article about that girl?” Cleo sat beside Ash on a rough stone bench beside the river, eating a late breakfast of pita, tabbouleh, fruit, and strong coffee.

  Ash didn’t want to think about that child going to war. “You’re having way too much fun with that camera,” she said, evading the question.

  There was a momentary distraction when a motorcycle pulled noisily up in front of the house, and several voices were raised, but they were in no hurry to give up their relative peace.

  “It turns out that shooting with a camera is pretty much like shooting with a gun,” Cleo said, “except that nothing gets destroyed and something gets preserved. Focus is everything. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get a real National Geographic gig someday. How about a photo spread of you making boulders float in midair?”

  Ash glanced around to make sure no one was watching, stood, moved back a step, and suddenly one end of the heavy bench tilted high enough to make Cleo slide off, struggling to hold onto both camera and coffee mug.

  Just as the bench settled back into its customary position, Mac appeared around the corner of the house. The look on her face stripped away any trace of their playful mood.

  “Bad news?” Cleo asked, taking a step toward Mac.

  Mac strode on toward the riverbank without replying, then swung suddenly back to face them. She jerked her chin toward the bench. “How far could you throw that damned thing instead of just fooling around with it?”

  “I can’t tell until I try.” Ash tested the bench just enough to make it shift an inch. “Across the river, at least, farther with enough adrenalin.” She stood tensed and ready for whatever Mac wanted her to do.

  “Not now. That’s what we’re going into the mountains to figure out. Soon. Sooner than we’d thought.” She slumped down onto the bench in a most un-Mac-like manner. Ash and Cleo perched precariously in the scant space at either end, ready for whatever support they could give.

  Almost at once Mac straightened. “Yes, bad news. Not that the news is ever good. Worse than usual this time. A captive just ransomed with funds from American kinfolk reports that Nisreen is being kept bound and drugged and accused of witchcraft. We’ve seen this sort of thing. A woman who manages to escape and yet returns to fight is often accused of some type of demonic possession, and there’s no limit to what they’ll do to her, short of killing her. They know Nisreen’s military history and value for exchange too well for that. I thought…she hadn’t contacted me…”

  “She’s alive, though.” Ash was sure even before she spoke that Mac would know that. Just as she was sure she would know whether Cleo were alive, no matter where she was, and Cleo would know the same of her. They had even communicated mind-to-mind in a few times of extreme danger, mostly Cleo warning, “Guns! Down!”

  “Yes.” Mac looked from one to the other. “What I said about not being exactly a mind reader is true, but in this one case, I come close. Nisreen speaks to me, however far away she may be. I’m not much good at it, but I can at least let her know when I’ve heard her. When I didn’t hear, I thought that there might be someone among the enemy who could sense it if she spoke to me mind-to-mind, so she didn’t dare to do it at all. We’ve discussed that possibility before. But drugging her... Why? So she can’t use their imagined witchcraft against them? Or to escape?”

  That rhetorical question had no answer, so Cleo steered in a different direction. “How did you two meet?”

  Ash glowered at Cleo—this didn’t seem like a good time to invade any more of Mac’s privacy—but Mac didn’t seem to mind.

  “I wasn’t kidding when I told you, Cleo, that I had plenty of irons in the fire. One was as Army liaison with the women’s forces of the Kurdish and Yazidi Peshmerga. Still is, in fact—one of those under-the-radar, ‘these are your orders but we’ve never heard of you’ deals. A year and a half ago I was already doing the bird-dogging bit for the PsyCorps, also nominally under the radar, but not so much so that I couldn’t reveal it in a pinch. People anywhere enjoy a good laugh at the US Army looking for psychics.”

  “So you bird-dogged Nisreen.”

  “I was absolutely flattened the minute I met Colonel Nisreen Khider. For a while I couldn’t be sure the power I sensed wasn’t an illusion, ignited by infatuation. I still don’t know—even she doesn’t know—how much of her strategy and leadership in battle is due to supern
ormal abilities. Some of her feats are legendary among the soldiers.” She sighed and rubbed the back of her neck. “Who knows whether Julius Caesar, George Washington, hell, maybe even Rommel, had powers beyond what’s considered normal? But I do know that Nisreen can communicate at any distance with me. Except that now, she can’t.”

  Suddenly Cleo stood, looking past the house as though she heard something, and seconds later the others heard the truck’s engine start. “Grab your gear,” Mac said. “We’re hitting the road again.”

  They’d already packed what little had been unpacked. They went through the house, picked up their things, and once outside, with a glance around to see that they weren’t watched, Ash made their bags blink out of their hands and appear sedately nestled among the other bundles in the truck bed.

  “Can’t resist, can you?” Cleo teased.

  “Gotta flex those non-muscles every once in a while.” Ash climbed into the truck and claimed a window seat. It went without saying that Mac would get the other, Cleo between them. Razhan would sit up front with Ariya.

  Cleo made a face, but Ash knew perfectly well that being squeezed in between her and Mac wouldn’t be much of a hardship. Their last stop was at the town’s only gas station, where they filled several big gas cans and cushioned them with their bundles.

  Yesterday Razhan hadn’t talked much except about the country they passed through, and its history. Now everything was more urgent. She pressed Ariya to drive faster even though the road got rougher, and twisted around in her seat to talk with those in back.

  “We won’t go as far as I’d planned, and there is not much time for training. You know already that our target is a walled city, though to call it a city is not entirely accurate. It was utter rubble for hundreds of years, and only recently partially rebuilt as a fortress by the enemy. But the walls of stone are strong enough for their purpose, and land mines have been planted for a kilometer or more in every direction, leaving a narrow route, changed often, for vehicles to pass through only if they have a guide to show the way. Escape by individuals is impossible. A direct attack is also impossible because of the mines, and launching rockets into the city would endanger the women inside. Those about to be taken away to be sold are kept nearest the inside of the walls, so bombing those would also endanger them.” She turned away to ease her back and shoulders from the unnatural position. The tension in her whole body was apparent.