by Jan Coffey
“You and Rahaf were both here during the chemical attack, weren’t you?” he asked, dreading the answer.
She nodded, looking straight ahead. “Including my parents, Rahaf and I lost twenty-six relatives that day.”
He took her hand. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She didn’t immediately answer. Austyn didn’t know if it was helpful or not thinking of another loss right now. But that was where the root of Rahaf’s cancer lay. He looked at her, wondering, wanting to know more. He was fearful to think the same illness could haunt her, too.
“Halabja was already battered by war when the chemical attacks came. Iranian troops and Kurdish Peshmerga guerrillas backed by Tehran had taken over parts of the city. The two days prior to it we had suffered attack by planes and shelling by the Iraqis. The noise was horrendous.” She gathered her knees into her chest. “We were still in mourning because of my brothers. So there was nothing being done about Norooz. There was going to be no celebration of the new year, the first day of spring, that year.”
Austyn said nothing, trying to visualize the situation she and her family had faced.
She continued. “That was March 16 in the Christian year 1988.”
There seemed to be no tears left in her. She rested her head against the rug, still looking into space.
“I remember it was Wednesday morning. Because of all the bombing, no one was going to school. We heard planes going overhead, but there were no blasts afterward. It seemed strange that they’d dropped no bombs. Rahaf and I went out. I counted seven, but Rahaf kept swearing that there were ten Iraqi planes overhead. They were dropping smoke bombs and pieces of paper.” She took another tissue and wiped her face. “We didn’t know that the Iraqis were checking which way the wind was blowing.”
Austyn gathered her to him, and she leaned against him willingly.
“But it wasn’t long before they came back?”
“Yes. It was around noon. Maybe a little after noon,” she croaked. “Other children were amused by those little pieces of papers, but my parents forced Rahaf and me to stay in a shelter that my father and brothers had built in our dugout basement maybe ten years before that. There were no windows, no clocks. My mother kept coming down and checking on us. We just assumed there would be more bombing like before. We never thought…never even imagined…the Iraqis were going to drop chemical bombs on us.”
Austyn remembered reading that the Halabja attack involved various chemical agents including mustard gas, the nerve agent sarin, tubin, VX, and hydrogen cyanide. The most authoritative investigation into the Halabja massacre had been conducted by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. They had concluded that Iraq had been responsible and not Iran, as the US administration had wanted reported. According to Iraq’s report to the United Nations, the know-how and material for developing chemical weapons had been obtained from firms in the United States, West Germany, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Egypt, Netherlands, and a Singapore company affiliated with the United Arab Emirates.
There was plenty of blame to go around for supplying the gun, but Saddam Hussein and his henchmen had been the ones to pull the trigger.
“They came back,” she continued. “It wasn’t too long after that we heard the thunder of Iraqi planes overhead again. But again there was nothing. No missiles, no shattering explosions, no screaming…just silence. I remember Rahaf saying that maybe they were spreading more paper over the city.”
“How long was it before you suspected something was wrong?” he asked.
“Not long. Minutes, perhaps. I remember spending the entire time arguing with Rahaf, trying to convince her not to go up, to wait for our parents to come and get us. But then, shortly after the bombing, we started hearing the sound of people shrieking and wailing. We stared at each other. We didn’t understand. Then, just as abruptly, the noise of voices just…stopped.”
“Did you two go up then?”
She nodded. “I still remember fighting with Rahaf. I had this feeling that something horrible had happened. But despite being younger, she was bigger than I was. She went up there, and I had to follow.”
Fahimah closed her eyes. The tears weren’t too far away. Austyn wanted to tell her to stop talking about it. He’d seen pictures of streets littered with the dead. Men, women, children. So many children. Many victims had a grayish slime oozing from their mouths, their frames contorted, fingers grotesquely twisted in pain. Most of the victims probably died within minutes. For those affected by nerve gas, death was instantaneous; their breathing stopped so abruptly that people simply dropped to the ground as if frozen. They were the lucky ones.
He had seen the pictures, and that was horrifying enough. Fahimah had been there.
“We found our mother in the kitchen. She’d been cutting beets. She was dead. Our father was sitting in the doorway. His face was frozen in a scream. There was a sweet smell in the air. I got gas in my eye and couldn’t breathe. Rahaf started vomiting. It was green.” She grabbed a couple more tissues, blew her nose, rubbed away the tears. “Rahaf and I and thousands of other refugees fled the city that day. We were not there for the burial… not even the burial of our parents.”
The tears overwhelmed her.
“I’m so sorry,” he said once again.
She looked up at the ceiling, and they sat for a few minutes in silence. A few more tears escaped, but she dashed them away. Austyn could see her slowly regaining her composure.
“No more,” she said finally. “I cannot cry anymore. I have cried enough. I need to pull myself together. I need to be strong for Rahaf. We will see each other tomorrow.”
Forty
VA Medical Center, Maryland
In his entire life, David had never been checked as thoroughly as he was in this hospital during the first twelve hours. Blood test after urine test after physical. All done twice by two separate teams of doctors, each checking the same things, asking the same questions. Having an endoscopy while he lay there awake, though, was a bit much. He hoped he only had to go through that once.
He ran into Craig in a waiting area. They had quarantined a section of the hospital just for the five of them. They were told the rest of the people on the boat were in this same hospital, but they were on a separate floor. David had spoken to Sally. She was allowed to join Josh. Their son was doing just fine, and his only worry was David.
“How did you make out?” Craig asked.
“Okay,” he said. “I hope I don’t have to do another one of those plumbing checks again…ever.”
“Is it that bad?” Craig asked. “I have to go in for it next.”
“No, not at all,” he lied. They hadn’t had time to do the proper fasting. David could feel the cramping aftereffects of that now. “But when the scope popped out of my ear, I told the doctor I thought he’d made a wrong turn somewhere.”
“Great,” Craig replied with a wan smile. “Well, that coffee is for us, if you want it. And we can use that computer to check e-mail or whatever.”
“Did they say how long they’re going to keep us here?”
“No. I really don’t think they have any idea,” Craig told him. “Just reading the headline news, though, it’s a mess out there.”
“More outbreaks?”
“They’re not sure. There were so many calls to 911 in all the major cities that they’re saying the emergency system is breaking down. There are some people who think they have the disease. Others who think their neighbor has it, or their dog or cat. There’s even an idiot or two out there calling and taking responsibility for it. It’s total chaos.”
The nurse came out to get Craig. He pointed a finger at David.
“Stay away from headline news. It’s not worth it…I’m telling you.”
Sally said she’d talked to Jamie and Kate. They were both doing fine. He knew where Josh was. There was no reason for David to check the headlines.
There was also no point in calling the office in the middle of
the night. Knowing his secretary, she’d already answered all the calls and made whatever decisions needed to be made. He decided to check his e-mail instead.
Grabbing a cup of coffee, David settled into a chair in front of the computer, hoping that the doctors and nurses were done with him for a while.
He had over four hundred e-mail messages.
Browsing through the list, he deleted a ton of spam. Despite the company security filters, junk e-mail still managed to get through. Of course, some important e-mail—like family news or forwards from his daughters—never got to him.
As he started thinning out the list, David started seeing the notices.
Death in the family. Death in the family. Death in the family.
One of their sales people in Arizona was going to be out next week because of a brother’s funeral. Another similar notice sent out from the Washington, D.C. office where the fiancée of a sales rep there had passed away. Two more like it. None of the e-mails mentioned the cause of death.
What Josh had told him as he’d left the boat flashed in his mind. Philip had strep. He picked up the phone and dialed his wife’s cell phone. Sally answered right away.
“Is Josh sleeping?” he asked.
“Are you kidding? He’s wide-awake.”
“Can I talk to him, honey?”
“Is everything okay?” she asked, sounding worried. “Do they have any of the results back?”
“Everything is fine. I just need to ask him something.”
David looked at the e-mail again. He jotted down the names of the four sales reps who’d lost a family member. He read each e-mail again to make sure he’d written down the names of the deceased, in case they had a different last name.
“Hi Dad,” Josh said from the other end. “Everything okay?”
“Everything is great. How are you holding up?”
“This is easy. Hospital room, watching TV with mom. I’m a pro at this.”
“I have a question for you, Josh.” He googled Lenny Guest’s name.
“What is it?”
“Did you ever use the Strep-Tester I gave you on the boat?” David asked. His heart climbed into his throat as he read the screen. Lenny was one of the victims of the NFI outbreak.
“No, I didn’t,” Josh said. “By the time I got back to the cabin, the tester was all dirty, and I thought it’d be worse if I—”
“It’s okay that you didn’t use it,” David said quickly. The answer to his next search on Leo Bolender made him break out in a sweat. There was something terribly wrong here.
“What’s wrong, Dad? You sound upset.”
“No, I’m not,” he lied. “What did you do with it?”
“I threw it in the trash in the cabin.”
“Good.”
The other two names on the e-mails didn’t show up as NFI victims, but after doing a couple of more searches, David realized not all of the victims’ names had been released yet. Most of the outbreaks had occurred over this past weekend. There hadn’t been enough time to notify some of the families.
“Remember when you were leaving the boat, you told me something about Philip having strep. How did you know?”
“When I went down to get the camera, I realized I still had the Strep-Tester in my pocket. It was ruined, so I threw it away. That’s when I saw Philip’s tester.”
“But you didn’t touch that one, did you?”
“Of course not.”
“Good boy. What did you see?”
“The Strep-Tester he used was in the trash. It had turned blue. I knew that meant he had strep. Didn’t you say that’s what the blue meant?”
David slumped back in his chair and gazed at the monitor. He’d brought up the online ad for the Strep-Tester. He stared at the screen, watching numbly as the pink circle turned blue.
“Yes, Josh. It turned blue because he had strep.”
Forty-One
Kermanshah Airport, Iran
“Have you ever flown into Kermanshah Airport?” Austyn asked.
Fahimah shook her head. The pilot in Halabja had told them that the airport was northeast of the city, and that they could easily find a cab to take them to the hospital. It was amazing that Ashraf had been able to manage this flight in such a short period of time. Fahimah knew the rest of arrangements would be up to her. She looked down. They were approaching the airport.
“My only time here was when Rahaf and I were staying in Paveh. On one of the school trips, they brought all the students to Kermanshah to see some of the historical monuments. Some of those sites date back to the Achaemenid and Sassanid eras.”
“What was the favorite place that you saw?” he asked as they descended.
“Rahaf and I were both impressed with a place called Taghe-e-Bostan. It was there that one of the Sassanid kings chose to have beautiful reliefs carved into the rock. There is a sacred spring that gushes down from a mountain cliff and empties into a large reflecting pool. We were there in the spring, and the entire place was clouded in mist.”
Fahimah closed her eyes for a moment and evoked that image in her mind. She’d replayed that scene so many times when she’d been in prison. She could use some of the discipline she’d exercised during those days now. She wouldn’t allow herself to be weepy when she met Rahaf.
“Was there a place you didn’t get to see and wanted to?” he asked.
She knew what Austyn was doing. He was trying to keep her mind busy. She smiled at him in appreciation. She’d never imagined that he be the one she would lean on during this time of sadness.
“I wanted to see Darius the Great’s inscription at Behistun. But the site is thirteen hundred meters up into the mountains, and there was no time to go there. That day, Rahaf and I promised each other that someday we’d come back and hike up there.”
He reached over and took her hand. “Perhaps someday you will.”
Fahimah leaned her head back against the seat as the plane’s wheels chirped and settled onto the runway. She wasn’t willing to give up hope. She wanted Austyn to be right.
The plane taxied toward the terminal. They were the only passengers. She had no clue what kind of customs or immigration restrictions they would face. The documents Matt had collected for her would have been good enough if they’d crossed the border at Halabja, but she had no passport. She hoped it was the same thing at the airport. Much more so than herself, she was worried about Austyn. She didn’t want to imagine what the complications could be if they decided his passport was fake and that he was an American agent.
She began to hyperventilate just thinking about it.
The plane came to a stop near one of the doors. She looked out the window at the long building of sand-colored stone and glass as they unbuckled their seat belts.
“Please let me do the talking,” she told him.
“I’m not nervous. You shouldn’t be, either. Not about me, I mean.”
Fahimah looked at his unshaven face, the kind blue eyes. It scared her how attached she was beginning to feel toward him. It was terrifying.
“Let’s go,” she said quietly. Ashraf had given her a shawl in Halabja, and she now draped it over her head. The pilot had the door open for them. There were no formalities. They each only carried a duffel bag. He pointed out the door they had to walk to.
An Iranian policeman opened the door for them as they reached it.
“Khosh amadeen,” he told them.
She was about to tell Austyn that the man was welcoming them.
“Motashaker,” Austyn replied to the officer.
Fahimah looked at him, surprised. The policeman directed them toward the line where they had to go. Inside, the terminal area was crowded with people. She hadn’t realized until the pilot had mentioned it that flights from all the major cities in Iran came into this airport.
Other policemen were standing around, but the line moved freely. There was no checking of passports. The realization came to her suddenly.
“This is not an internation
al airport,” she whispered to him. She didn’t have to say more, and he understood.
He looked straight ahead and she followed his gaze. People ahead of them were leaving the terminal through double doors.
Fahimah was relieved. Luck was on their side. She couldn’t believe that arriving in Iran could be as easy as walking out on the street and getting a cab to the hospital.
“Now, don’t look at anyone, especially the policemen,” she told him. “Please don’t act like a tourist.”
“Baleh, Dr. Banaz.”
She sent him a quick look. He’d been practicing a few Farsi words.
“If anyone asks anything, don’t answer. I will do the talking.”
“Is my accent terrible?” he asked, smiling.
“Dreadful,” she whispered back. He was still smiling, so Fahimah figured she hadn’t hurt his feelings too badly.
The line of people was moving. Straight ahead, she could see the doors leading into the brightness of outside.
She was wearing a raincoat that reached her knees. Ashraf had told her that the coat and the shawl she’d used to cover her hair served as what was called a ropoosh in Iran. In the pocket of the raincoat, Ashraf had given her some toman. Fahimah needed to use that money for the cab ride to the hospital.
They were close enough to the door that she could see the line of cars waiting by the curb.
“Dr. Banaz.”
Fahimah practically jumped out of her skin. She turned to the man who’d called her name. One of the policemen was moving across the floor toward her. She should have known things wouldn’t go this smoothly.
“Baleh,” she nodded.
“Ba man biah,” he told her flatly and started moving away.
“He wants me to go with him,” she told Austyn quickly. “You go to the hospital, and I’ll meet you there.”
“No, I’m coming with you,” he said under his breath.
“You are not,” she stressed. “You must bring no attention to yourself, remember?”
“I’m not leaving you here alone with them.”
