The Girl in Green (41 page)

The helicopter pad is little more than paint on dirt at the edge of the refugee camp. It is surrounded by a thin fence to fend off the curious: usually children who seem attracted by nature to anything that spins.

Louise, his boss, walks out to meet him. Following her is a large black man in blue trousers and a T-shirt white enough for an imam.

‘Good morning,' she says.

‘OK.'

‘You are going to be sharing airspace today with the Iraqi air force and probably a lot of bullets and missiles. Also an American named Herb Reston.'

Spaz looks at Herb. He can tell that Herb was once military from the way he stands.

‘OK,' he says again.

‘Where did you learn to fly?' Herb asks Spaz as he opens the door and climbs inside the EC155.

‘Chechnya,' Spaz says, handing the completed paperwork to Louise and opening the cockpit door.

‘Repenting?' Herb asks, climbing in.

‘Depressed economy,' he answers. Turing to Louise, he asks, ‘We have a flight plan?'

‘No.'

‘When does shooting start?' he asks, about to put on his headset.

‘It's started,' Louise says, ducking her head as the rotors spin up. ‘I have to go — my hair can't take this. Herb Reston, meet Elise Garcia,' she says, nodding to the woman in the medical vest. ‘She's a former combat medic from the Colombian army. She's been on the frontline against FARC. Whatever might come into the back here, she'll deal with.'

‘If you don't secure us a flight path, we'll be shot down by everyone,' Herb yells to her as the rotors reach full speed.

‘That's right,' she says, as she turns away and jogs off the helipad toward her Land Rover Defender.

Louise starts the diesel engine and radios back to Farrah at her desk as she watches the helicopter prepare to depart.

‘Farrah, can you hear me?'

‘I'm here, Ms Louise.'

‘Get me flight-safety assurances. It's all on you and the national staff now. I won't be back in time. It's begun.'

Farrah takes tea in the morning. She brings it in a thermos from home, because people from outside Iraq, though they try, don't understand the making of a proper cup of tea. Hers is perfectly sweetened and, so as not to insult her employers, she drinks it when alone, and leaves two fine glasses in her drawer for the purpose.

Farrah rises from her desk, thermos in hand, and removes one of the small glasses from the top drawer of her steel desk. She is fastidious; Ms Louise has teased her about this quality by deliberately rearranging objects in those drawers in the most incongruous ways.

She enjoys working with Ms Louise. She finds her boss sociable and kind, and she knows that Louise respects her team and trusts them. This has not always been the case with foreign managers. Some people — usually men — treat her and the other local staff as though they have not been working this job longer than they themselves have. They ask no questions, and so grow no smarter. They leave in two years, and tell war stories about ‘the field', and become promoted for the jobs they had, not the jobs they did. For Farrah and her colleagues, this is not ‘the field'. This is home. The jobs they do are all that matters.

Farrah wants to make Louise proud. She wants to make her own family proud. She discussed her job only months ago with her father and her imam. They entertained long discussions about humanitarian action in light of the fatwa issued by Tahir-ul-Qadri condemning suicide, suicide bombing, terrorism, and violence — six hundred pages of legal interpretation and analysis shared throughout the Muslim community. Her father and her imam agreed that her work is indeed Allah's work, and that her concern for others is the correct performance of God's will. ‘It is actually quite simple,' said her imam. ‘The Prophet, peace be unto him, clearly said that, “none of you believes until he wants for his brother what he would want for himself.”'

Farrah has always backed away from praise, and insisted there was nothing divine in her efforts. Surely kindness and decency were too simple and obvious to be the product of the One who made the entire universe.

Her father shrugged when she said this. He would be proud of her either way, he explained, whether the will was hers or Allah's.

Her imam, meanwhile, raised his eyebrows in surprise at her declaration of modesty and her theological analysis, and she laughed at him.

‘You always raise your eyebrows in wonder,' Farrah said.

‘It is true,' said her father, ‘that they go up. But is it his own will, or does Allah pull them up from above?' And they all laughed.

Her father makes excellent tea. He taught her how to make her own. She still leaves a glass for him in her drawer to remember him.

For now, though, time is pressing, and there is work to be done.

She walks past Louise's empty office, past the broken colour printer no one knows how to fix, past the poor excuse for a coffee maker that the Europeans and Americans use, and into a room with six cubicles. There are four men and two women, all Iraqis like herself, and from different backgrounds — Shiite, Sunni, Kurd, Assyrian Christian, Marsh Arab, Turkoman. They look up when she comes in. She bids them a good morning, in Arabic, and they mumble the same in response. They are tense. They know what is happening.

‘We have an emergency flight from here to the Sinjar Mountains,' she says to them in a voice soft enough for poetry. ‘I am placing the coordinates on the board.' She walks to the whiteboard and raises a green marker to write down the numbers. ‘It is a helicopter flight with a ceiling of eight hundred metres, and therefore subject to small-arms fire. We therefore need flight-safety assurances from all parties. Muhammad, you liaise with the government and military. Alim, you have the Kurds. Atef, you have the Sunni tribes and, through them, those who do not yet speak to us. Abdullah, you have the Shiites near Tal Afar. Akeem, please talk to the police in Sinjar. And Nasira, you will remain in contact with Spaz throughout the flight so he may adjust his approach according to circumstance. I will negotiate any disagreements between parties. You all have the numbers and group-messaging established. Start now.'

At her command, and inaudible to the wider world, six voices, with six accents, with six inflections, call to their tribesmen, their kinsmen, their allies, and their enemies, and speak with humility and directness to make possible what is impossible:
Assalamu'alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh
… ‘Peace and mercy and blessings of God be upon you. I call from the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, and recall our obligations under both the laws of God and the laws of man …'

Märta and Tigger hear distant artillery fire as they follow Abu Saleh up the street, past their Land Cruiser, farther west half a kilometre, and down a rocky and ancient stone path with boulders rising high on either side, shielding them from view. Tigger points the Webley at Abu Saleh's back. He does not walk too close. Bullets can close the distance as needed.

‘Is that necessary?' Märta asks him. ‘We have an agreement.'

Tigger blows a characteristically French noise through his lips.

‘How old is that gun, anyway?'

‘It was used recently. I can smell it.'

They hear three consecutive and evenly timed bursts far off to the north, but close enough for the sound to carry and echo through the canyon.

‘That's artillery fire,' Märta says.

‘I heard helicopters, too. And some jets,' Tigger says.

‘Herb didn't tell them about this place, right?' Märta asks.

‘No. Of course, who is to say whether it might be on their list of targets anyway. Either way, a drive home is now impossible. I think Farrah is going to play it close to the chest as well. One trick she sometimes uses to confuse the government is to create a flight path that exceeds the actual destination so they don't know where we're going to set down. It is clever and has worked before.'

‘The faster we get out of here, the better,' Märta says, walking behind Tigger, who follows their guide.

‘I feel as though we are being watched. Do you feel that way?' Tigger says.

‘I've been saying it for an hour.'

‘It is too quiet here,' Tigger adds.

The path widens again. Into view comes the hidden entrance to a daunting fortress. There is a vehicle beside a steel door set into sandstone. There are no guards.

‘Where are your friends?' Tigger asks Abu Saleh. ‘Why's no one guarding the door?'

Abu Saleh says nothing. Once down the hill and at the fortress door, he bangs on it with his palm. The sound it makes is dead and empty. He announces himself, and no one responds. Eventually, he calls on his phone, and a man unlocks the door from the inside. Abu Saleh says something, and the two men disappear inside. Märta makes to follow, but Tigger holds his ground.

‘Not coming?'

‘Something is wrong.'

‘They shot a man in front of us. We watched him die minutes ago. Our nerves are frayed. I can't read the situation. All I know is that if they wanted us dead, we'd be dead by now, and that little gun of yours wouldn't matter. I'm betting Abu Malik was convincing,' Märta says.

‘That's not it. This whole event here is not playing out as I'd expect. I would have thought there'd be guards, and they'd take my gun, and they'd try to intimidate us until the moment they let us all go.'

‘I'm happier like this,' Märta says.

‘I prefer predictable to unpredictable,' Tigger says.

‘I'm going in,' she says, and steps inside without him.

Tigger lowers his pistol to his side, having nothing to point at.

This is not the land in Provence. There, he knows all the sounds of the earth in each season: the hum of the insects in the lavender fields; the cicadas basking in the warmth of a summer day, and their startling and even comedic silence when the clouds pass overhead. He knows how, for the duration of a breath, all the sounds of all the creatures under the sun north of Vence will sing in unison as when a symphony stops warming up and strikes that first deliberate chord together to become the voice of God.

Not here, though. Here he is an alien. He does not know what it is supposed to sound like. He cannot measure the distance from the expected. He does not know the proper proportions of light to sound. But surely, even here, it is supposed to sound like
something
? Something must live. If it does, though, it does not breathe at all.

Tigger scans the mountains and hills and nearby boulders.

Alone, he exhales.

As he turns back toward the door to join Märta and the hostage-takers, he is only half surprised to find himself looking down the barrel of a rifle.

Charlotte pulls into the driveway of her family home. The door to their house has been drained of colour in the downpour, but it still manages to beckon. The brass knocker is shaped like a fish. As she turns the key, it occurs to her that the knocker is a cod. Strange not to have noticed this before.

Her mother is in the kitchen, preparing PG Tips with sugar and lemon.

‘You're wet,' says Vanessa, who is dressed in grey slacks and a black-buttoned top, and is barefoot.

‘It's on account of the rain,' Charlotte says, taking off her shoes and jacket, shaking out her shaggy hair, and immediately setting up the laptop.

‘Are you really planning to put that on the coffee table first thing?' Vanessa asks.

‘The congestion was awful. I don't understand why the rain is always a shock to drivers. We're scheduled to hear from Miguel any time.'

Charlotte launches the software and sees his name. It is marked not green, but yellow. He is away, but has sent a message: ‘Must delay meeting. A helicopter has been deployed to collect your father. There have been complications on his journey. I will inform you when the helicopter lands. I will take you to the helipad to greet him. Stay close to the computer and send me your telephone number. They say we are not to use this software for emergency calls. I wonder if this is what they mean.'

Charlotte stares at the message.

‘Tea?'

‘No, thank you,' she says.

38

There is a pause between the instant Tigger sees the bore of the rifle and the moment he overcomes his shock enough to speak. When that moment does arrive — whether it was a second or a full cycle of the moon, he cannot be certain — he is able to utter a few words: ‘Please don't shoot. We have an agreement with your commander.'

The rifle is lowered, but only to Tigger's chest. It does not make him feel safer, but it brings the rifle-holder's face into view. The man has a scar along the left side of his face, from his eye down to his chin.

‘Not my commander,' the man says, in an accent that is from here but is not the accent of Abu Saleh.

It is a face with blue eyes, and not brown ones. It is a voice that seems present and prepared for conversation. It occurs to Tigger that, perhaps, he was not about to be shot a moment ago.