The Girl in Green (43 page)

‘Please get up. I'm shot, too. I can't carry you.'

‘I'm trying.'

‘They're landing. It's a nice sound. I've hated the sound of rotors for a long time.'

‘Me, too,' Benton says.

The doors to the antechamber and the outside are wide open. As the helicopter lands, the sheet metal slams repeatedly against the old stone walls.

‘Come on, there's a war on the way,' Arwood says, ‘and you don't want to be here for it.'

‘You mean the military is coming?'

‘Well … I think there's a lot of interest in this place right now.'

‘Who did you write to?'

‘I called in an old chip with the Peshmerga. We go way back.'

Arwood, his own leg also shot, uses his upper body to heave Benton to a semi-standing position. Together they have two good legs between them, and with cooperation they make that work for them.

‘Why aren't you in as bad shape as me?' Benton asks as they hobble into the wind toward the courtyard. He can see a large black man, who must be Herb Reston. He is stepping down from the aircraft, wiping vomit from his shirt.

‘I'm American,'Arwood says. ‘We're upbeat by nature.'

‘You're exhausting, is what you are.'

‘All right, Ferris. Here we go.' And with that, Arwood walks them out, arms around one another, shoulder to shoulder.

Outside, three men stand around the helicopter. Abu Saleh, the one they call Larry, is holding his headscarf against the wind and is looking displeased. Benton does not look at Abu Saleh as they pass him, but Arwood does. With his arm still around Benton's waist, he jerks them both to a halt for a final word with his former captor and torturer.

‘You're gonna lose,' Arwood taunts him. ‘You know that, right? Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but very soon and for the rest of your life. You know that, right?'

‘No, we will prevail,' Abu Saleh says.

‘No you won't. And I'll tell you why. Because groove is in the heart.'

A woman Arwood hasn't seen before hops out of the sliding back door of the aircraft, and helps Adar and Jamal inside. She has thick black hair and a great arse. It's a pity he's not planning to get on the chopper with her.

Benton waves half-heartedly to Märta and Tigger. Herb has lifted Jamal into his arms and is climbing into the helicopter with him. Tigger joins Benton and Arwood, immediately placing a pressure pad against Benton's leg, and raising him higher to further relieve the pressure. For such a skinny man, he is surprisingly strong.

‘How did you convince them to let us go?' Benton yells to Tigger.

The fortress has never known wind of this kind. The people around Benton look blurred and shapeless through the fog of dust, unleashed and upended by the tumult from the rotors. It is as hard to see as to hear.

‘Turns out they fear the devil,' Tigger yells above the wind. ‘And, as it happens, Märta has his phone number.'

Tigger does not introduce Benton to Elise Garcia, and instead releases him into her care. She is small but steady, and sure on her feet. She smiles at him as her hands work expertly to strip off his trousers and reposition the pressure pad. She prepares an IV.

‘Can I have some water?' he says, seated and grateful.

She opens a bottle and rubs his face wet before allowing him small sips. ‘You are severely dehydrated. If you drink too fast, you'll vomit. The IV will help most.' She touches his forehead and says, ‘You'll feel a little better in a moment.'

Out in the wind, Tigger braces to help Arwood over the steps into the cabin. But Arwood does not take his hand or step inside.

‘Did you see them?' Arwood asks Tigger.

‘Who?'

‘Outside the walls. Did they come? Did you see them?' His eyes are pleading for an answer.

‘Yes.'

‘With the scar?'

‘Yes.'

‘He's close?'

‘Yes. What's going to happen when we leave?'

‘Thank Märta and Herb for me,' Arwood says. He does not shake Tigger's hand. He does not look at Herb, who is inside the helicopter, tending to the girl. He does not even meet Märta's gaze; she is trying to make sense of the conversation she can see but not hear.

Alone, he starts to limp across the courtyard to the first tower, which housed his first cell and leads beyond the walls to the Kurds.

As Arwood limps away, Tigger yells to him, ‘You've lost your mind.'

‘I said the girl was alive, and she was,' Arwood replies. ‘I said we'd save the girl, and we did. I said everyone would be themselves at the moment of truth, and they were. I'm the sanest one here.'

‘It's not the same girl, you know,' Tigger says, above the whirr of the blades.

Arwood Hobbes looks over his shoulder through the sandstorm at Tigger. He can see the girl through the window of the helicopter. She is not looking at him.

‘Oh yeah?' he yells. ‘What's not the same about her?'

Tigger is the last inside, and he nods for Herb to close the sliding door of the EC155. He does, and climbs into the copilot's seat to strap himself in. Spaz looks at him, and Herb nods, to indicate they are as full up as they're going to be. Spaz looks back into the seating area, and watches the blood from the two injured men drip onto his floorboards.

Benton shouts, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute. Where's Arwood? We can't leave without Arwood.'

‘He's not coming,' Tigger says, as Spaz increases the rotor speed, and they lift off the ground.

‘If he's not coming, it means he's staying, and he's obviously not staying.'

‘There are people outside the walls,' Tigger says. ‘People waiting for him.'

‘What people?' Märta asks, as the helicopter climbs to fifty metres, and then to seventy.

‘Some kind of Kurdish assault force,' Tigger says. ‘They took my gun. It's why I was late coming in. I thought it best to keep this to myself, given the company.'

Märta unhooks her seatbelt and rushes to the front between Spaz and Herb. She taps Spaz on the shoulder and yells, ‘Take us south, past the tower and the walls over there. I want to see what's there.'

‘North is safer. It's where we came from,' Spaz says. ‘It is where we are going.'

‘You can go north afterward. I want to see what's over those walls, and you're going to do it now,' she instructs. Her voice makes it clear this is not a request.

So Spaz, who has served under worse commanders, turns the aircraft south, drifting over the castle walls to hover briefly over the rocky path that led to the door where Arwood and Benton and Jamal and Adar were first taken.

Still unable to see as well as she wants, Märta slips back into the body of the aircraft and slides open the window. She sticks her head out and looks down.

Standing, armed, are maybe one hundred men. There, before them all, is Arwood Hobbes and the man with the scar who smiled at her. She watches as the man hands Arwood a Beretta pistol, and Arwood caresses it and hugs the man, who hugs him back.

The helicopter is taking no one by surprise. It is clearly marked. Arwood, armed and with a new bandage on his leg, looks up and waves to Märta and the other passengers. Under the gaze of her disapproval, he motions the helicopter away and beyond harm as another man hands Arwood an M-16 assault rifle.

‘We have to go, now,' Märta says. ‘Spaz, signal to Louise that we've made the pickup and that we are officially on the way back. I don't want anything to implicate us in whatever happens next.

Quietly, seated and strapped in, she says, ‘Shit.'

Spaz presses left on the cyclic, twists the throttle, and raises the collective to turn them northward as the Kurds take their position by the doors. The insurgents are still unaware of what is planned for them.

As they pass over the northern wall and out beyond the mountain into the vast flatland of Ninawa, two Mi-24 military gunships approach and, without pause, pass them by like dragons before a swallow, leaving the unarmed aircraft to continue on its scheduled route.

They fly with the sun out the starboard side and slightly behind them, and hear the first barrage of mortars land in the ancient fortress. They will be the last ones to see it; the last to have been held there. By tomorrow it will be a ruin.

Herb watches what he can, craning his neck through an open window. The last he sees is a dozen or more men emerging with Russian-made weapons and black headscarves from the bowels of the fortress. What he cannot see he can surmise, because military tactics are grounded in engineering. From their elevated position, the superior Kurdish force will weaken the terrorist defences with mortars and RPGs to upset the key strategic positions of ISIL fighters on the towers, who have sharpshooters and machine guns behind defensive positions. The battle mounts were not designed to withstand such firepower, and once the towers have been neutralised, the Kurds will swarm into the courtyard, where they will fight at close quarters to take up the tower positions and use them to lay down suppressing fire. A squad will remain at the entrance to ensure it can't be used as an exit. Having trapped their enemy, the Kurds will drop grenades into all the rooms their enemies are hiding in, and will work their way downward, forcing their quarry to ground — to be shot, burned, or hacked to pieces. They will take no prisoners and give no quarter. ISIL wants a world without mercy; they will not live in it for long.

Benton lies back on the soft upholstery of the aircraft. His head sinks into the forgiving cushion, and the cotton soothes his neck. Elise permits him to drink another quarter bottle of water. He tries to sip it slowly, but cannot. She places a cool compress on his head and smiles at him, and returns her attention to Jamal's leg.

Benton does not picture the battle or construct the events from the fading sounds behind them. He only imagines Arwood hunting down Abu Larry as he hunted down the colonel. He can see him raising the Beretta to the man's head, free and alone this time, to make the choice least likely to haunt him for the next twenty years. Benton wonders what Arwood might say as he trains the weapon on his enemy.

Perhaps, for the first time in his life, he will say nothing at all.

40

Adar watches the hands of Elise Garcia, which flow with the expertise and confidence of the baker from her village.

She sits behind Spaz and Herb. Adar does not wear a headset, and cannot hear Tigger and Märta's conversation. She rests, unattended to, by the sliding door on a stool secured to the airframe by heavy steel bolts — a place for a doctor or second medic to perch on and work from.

She has never been in the air before. She has never been a bird, or seen the world from above. Through the massive windows, she can see more of the world than she has ever known.

The helicopter flies north-east, and she looks north-west, toward Syria, where she used to live. In school, they showed her maps of the border. She looks for it: for the straight and wide purple line that cuts through the mountains, hills, and desert, turning the one land into two places. It is not there. She cannot see countries or colours or tribes, or families, or even cities. She can only see a vast and empty expanse of browns and the glowing sand of the desert that is hungry for more blood. There are white-capped mountains in the far distance, and small explosions across the wasteland that prove man is below and that he is angry.

It looked so different when she walked from her village toward Domiz. She had left with her mother, her older brother, and two cousins — both girls a little younger than her. Her brother wanted to stay and fight. He did not know who to fight with or even for, he said. He only knew what to fight against. ‘Then you've already lost,' her mother said, and she would have no more of it, and she forced him to pack his belongings, and instructed him to protect the family. ‘The family is most important,' she'd told him. ‘More than Syria, more than the tribe.' He brought an old military knife with a handle wrapped in leather. The knife smelled bad. It had grown mouldy.

The man who marched them to Iraq took all their money before leaving. He did not even look into their eyes. He collected it and shoved it into a bag with a large zipper. He took their passports, if anyone had a passport. Adar did not. He walked them for kilometre after kilometre. Babies were terrified and unable to sleep, because their schedules were interrupted and there were no comfortable positions to rest in. They were passed from tired arms to rested ones, agitating them more. Eventually, they passed out from exhaustion.

They did not travel alone. There were other families. Some were going north to Turkey — they would risk boats to Europe. Others were going east to Iraq or Jordan. Some dreamed of Iran, but they were Persian and spoke a foreign language. No one knew if they would be welcome there.

Rumours formed and spread. They were going in the wrong direction; the leader was a member of the government, and they were going to be arrested or murdered; the children were going to be stolen from the parents, and their livers cut out and sold to the rich in the Emirates, and their bodies thrown into ditches in the desert. Information and freedom of choice were their only possessions, and to imagine not having either was to submit to powerlessness.