A Vision of Fire (18 page)

PART THREE

CHAPTER 25

B
en heard the soft buzz of his phone, reached for it, and grabbed air.

That potted plant wasn't his night table and the smell in his nose wasn't—

This wasn't his bed. In the dark, he saw the contour of a woman's bare shoulders and strands of hair.

He remembered . . . Caitlin . . . last night . . . as his phone buzzed again.
Where the hell did I leave it
. . . ?

He sat up carefully to avoid waking her and looked around, then down. The back pocket of his trousers on the floor was pulsing blue-white. He leaned over for it, snuck his phone from the pocket with two fingers, and sat in the bed so as to shield Caitlin from the glow as he read two texts. The first was sent at 3:02 a.m.:
Hangout asap.

The second came a minute later:
Under fire now.

The sender was Ignacio de Viana, a friend of Ben's from ­Uruguay—
­a civilian who, for the last year, had been one of the hundred UN personnel in Jammu, India. “Hangout” did not mean “let's hang out” and “under fire” was literal, no joke.

Ben texted
back:
60 secs.

He pulled on his trousers and eased out of Caitlin's room. Her
apartment was chilly and dim, with the kind of hopeless illumination from streetlights through sheer curtains that made it seem like the night itself was drained, tired. Ben stumbled through the unfamiliar terrain, located his bag, and placed his tablet on the now-familiar dining table. Luckily he had only put the computer to sleep instead of shutting it down, so it was a quick jump to Google Hangouts. While signaling Ignacio for a video chat, Ben used the brief delay to turn on a program that would record the face-to-face call. He quickly pulled his earphones from his bag as well, to prevent sounds from traveling down the hall. Shivering, he threw a nearby afghan over his bare shoulders.

As the call connected, Ben jacked in. Machine-gun fire exploded in his ears and he jerked backward, his stomach in his throat. It took him a moment to realize that it was from the earphones, not the room.

Ignacio appeared on-screen but the camera angle was skewed, only showing part of his face and someone's living room. Gray smoke was spreading across afternoon sunlight. Ignacio was shouting in Urdu over his shoulder, “Get away from the window!” Someone shouted something back that Ben didn't quite catch. He would play it back later, enhance the sound.

When Ignacio finally brought the camera to his face, Ben saw that one lens of his glasses was gone and the other fractured. The young man's typically well-groomed hair was wild and matted on one side with blood. There was a red sheen on his scalp that indicated the wound was fresh and still flowing.

“Jesus Christ,” Ben exclaimed. “Where—”

“Raghunath Bazaar,” Ignacio yelled over the pounding of intermittent gunfire. “I don't know who showed up first, Indian soldiers or Pakistani, but they're
all
freaking insane, Ben. They're shooting civilians at random.”

There was a loud pop outside the room and Ignacio dropped from the bottom of the screen. Ben heard shouts from the left and right
sides, different voices, angry voices. There were more pops, then silence. Were they hit? Or had they just taken cover?

Ben watched anxiously as pictures fell from the wall across the room. Then the shock of a grenade blew into his ears. He recoiled and his hands flew up to yank the headphones from his ears. After a second, catching his breath, he replaced them.

“Ignacio, are you safe?” he shouted.

After a troubling delay, Ignacio called, “Yes.” He repositioned himself on the screen. “I'm across the street from the fighting, up the stairs. It's all across the street. Ben, you have to tell the assembly this is happening! It's like we're in bloody Afghanistan. No rule of law here. None.”

“Where are the rest of the peacekeepers?”

“The main body is about ten miles away. Ten of us were making a routine tour when a bomb went off.”

“Hold on,” Ben said.

“I'm not going anywhere, trust me.”

Ben texted Ambassador Pawar. Within a minute he had added the diplomat to the video chat. Ignacio's camera angled steeply as he stood up, keeping it in his hand. There was a glimpse of the silks of a sari, a woman pulling at his arm.

“Ignacio, I've got Ambassador Ganak Pawar, can you see him?”

“Yes.” Ignacio coughed. “I'm told we have to go, the smoke in the room is getting thicker.”

“Mr. de Viana, can you get to a safe place?” said the ambassador.

“The woman who lives here says they are going out the back, to the main road, where people are forming caravans.”

Ignacio's camera swerved again and Ben heard a woman shout in Urdu, “The floor, the floor!” The camera dipped; Ignacio must have kneeled for cover again. A window came into view, showing the pockmarked onion domes of temples and shattered rooftops. Then the lens dropped to the retail shacks in front of the temples and the wide street. They looked as though they'd been toppled by an earthquake—
splintered, crushed by stone from an adjacent structure. Ben counted five bodies, wide, dark stains of their blood on the street, and others who were still crouched, wounded and screaming, in the doorway of a cinema. Six soldiers ran through the area, guns at their hips, ready to fire in an instant. One of them jerked to a stop, spun around, and shot his gun at second-floor windows above a shop.

“Pakistani and Indian soldiers both came in,” Ignacio said. “Now they're shooting at each other.”

Ben glanced at the ambassador's face in the corner of his screen; it was frozen with horror.

Out Ignacio's window, a pedestrian suddenly broke and ran for an alley but shrank in terror halfway, cowering next to a food stand as a soldier's gunfire shredded bowls of nuts and dried fruits just above his head. A bilious yellow cloud of spices flew into the air. Ben jolted as another bomb exploded in his ears. A section of a temple roof shattered before his eyes, blasting fragments and black smoke. The explosion had come from the inside. Terrorists, most likely—local instigators blowing up their own home so they could kill outsiders.

“My god,” Ganak breathed.

Ignacio flipped his tablet to face himself but before he could speak his hands wobbled and the camera swung wildly, hitting the floor. Ben gasped. Had he been shot? But the picture remained, showing Ignacio crawling away from the window. He reached a woman lying nearby, grabbed her under the arms, and, still on his knees, dragged her jerking body through an arch into the living room. The woman was screaming, her stomach heaving, blood gushing from her mouth onto her yellow sari. They could see the red stain spreading over one side of her chest. Ignacio crawled back into the room and then he was facing the camera, yelling: “Get the UN forces here
now
! I don't have the authority—get the damned UN to order them to
move
!”

Then in the distance, another explosion. The picture dropped and the feed cut off.

Ben closed his eyes. He was perspiring, shaking as though he had
a high fever. Globes of light were exploding behind his eyelids—­physical memories of bombs at night high over Bangladesh in 2001. He heard his name from a distance, opened his eyes, and there was Ganak calling to him.

“
Ben . . . ?
”

“Yes,” he said. “I'm here.”

“I only recorded my portion—”

“I'll send you the full recording.”

“Thank you. We must meet at once. Can you come to my office in half an hour?”

“Of course.”

The men ended the chat without courtesies. The ambassador would already be moving to contact military officers. Ben e-mailed the video, then sat and shook, wiping moisture from his brow and eyes. He wanted the whole goddamned thing over there to end,
every
madness humans inflicted on themselves to go away.

• • •

Back in the bedroom, Caitlin jolted awake.

She swung her legs out of bed and only then remembered that her old friend Ben had been in that bed all night.

She pulled on a bathrobe and padded down the hall, pausing outside Jacob's room in case he was awake early. She heard nothing and continued to the living room, where she saw Ben sitting with his hands on the top of his head, huddled under her afghan in utter despair.
Is he regretting last night?
she thought, but then she noticed his tablet, his Google account open, and a blank video chat window.

“Ben,” she said, and placed one hand on his shoulder. His breathing was deep and ragged as he forced it into a rhythm, trying to control himself.

“Jammu,” he blurted. “Attack on a shopping center.”

“Oh no,” Caitlin said, sitting next to him.

“Sorry I woke you,” he said.

“You didn't. Anything I can do?”

He shook his head and stood, dropping the blanket. “Another bump to the body count,” he said harshly, and shoved his tablet into his bag with sharp, angry movements. “I've got to meet the ambassador. This thing is beyond out of control.”

He hurried back to Caitlin's bedroom, miserable and urgent.

She gave him his space. She knew this side of Ben—this side of the work they did. She picked up the afghan and wrapped it around herself, trying to focus on anything other than what Ben had just told her. She had not heard from Gaelle since she left Haiti. Whenever she called, she got the Anglade Charter voice mail. And Maanik—Caitlin was barely keeping a handhold on the cliff of
that
trauma. She almost envied Ben's having a target to focus on: territorial carnivores fighting over land and ideology. What the hell was
she
battling? The session with Maanik had taunted rather than informed her. It was like she was searching for something cunning, cagey, that did not wish to be seen.

If I want to help these kids, if I want to sleep again, I need more information.
Ben was dealing with his crisis by running toward it. She had to do the same.

There was another teenager Caitlin had not been able to contact yet. She brought up her phone's browser and searched for Atash. It took some time but she discovered an article written the day before about self-immolation in Iran. It referred to the boy who set himself on fire in a library. He was, it said, in critical condition at a Tehran hospital.

Still alive
, Caitlin thought with a rush of exhilaration.

Ben came charging into the living room.

“I'm sorry.” He glanced at her. “I'm sorry I'm handling this so—so crappy.”

“You're not,” she replied. “It's been a helluva few days.”

He agreed with a grunt as he grabbed his coat and thrust an arm into it.

She struggled with herself, knowing that if she said anything now it was probably going to be seen as wrong—but it had to be said before she lost him to this crisis. “Ben, I know the timing couldn't be worse but I need your help.”

“With what?”

“I have to get to Iran as soon as possible.”

Ben's hands dropped from the coat zipper he'd been trying to close. He looked sad but when he spoke he sounded ferocious. “What are you
talking
about?”

“The boy who burned himself—he's alive.”

“Okay—and?”

“You saw last night what we're up against. I have to see him.”

“I need
you
to be alive, not kidnapped and imprisoned and God knows what. I'll find you a translator and you can call him.”

“There's no guarantee the boy can talk. And, Ben, I can't see a nonexistent breeze over the phone.”

“If he can't speak, if he's that badly burned, the likelihood of getting
anything
from him isn't worth the risk.”

“You can't know that. I can find a way to safely navigate Iran if I have UN help.”

“Not through me, Caitlin.” Then, as though the sun had risen early, understanding washed over his expression. He turned to face her. “And not
from
me, either.”

“Sorry?”

“You're running away from me.”

She was surprised. “Ben, I swear to god, I'm not. I have to see this boy
now
. He may not live—”

“I said no,” he snapped, giving up on the zipper, not meeting her eye as he grabbed his bag.

“Ben, listen. Last night I understood—no, I
felt
what could be possible with you. I felt the ability to hold more with you, to be stronger because it's more than just me now.”

“Not buying. You're punching out like I'm an appointment.”

“Please listen—”

“
No!
I will not help you go to Iran, Caitlin.”

He left the room and headed through the foyer to the front door. She called after him, “I'm going, Ben. I'll find another way.”

There was no reply but the sound of shoes on hardwood and the door shutting.

Caitlin strode to the dining table, picked up her cell phone, and called Director Qanooni of the World Health Organization.