The Somali Deception (Cameron Kincaid Book 2)

by Daniel Arthur Smith

  Jenner and I were the only two out in the compound. Jenner, another Brit, was the only other woman on the security team apart from June. She was easy going, tall, athletic, not that hard to look at. Five of the scientists including the Doc were women, so they requested a couple on the security team to ease down on the testosterone.

  Agroland was a scientific outpost, which made the place western for the most part. There were a few uptight workers, but the Muslims running the show were laid back. Things were what you would expect. There wasn’t any open drinking and we had to watch our language, same as any straight job. Except that after hours, there was definitely some undercover action going on. The head of hydroponics, Adama, was some kind of academic celebrity. All of the women in Agroland melted anytime he walked into a room and rumor was, he was tapping both of the Brit gals on the hydroponics team. Back in Iraq I had heard about Sunnis having vacation wives. Max told me vacation wives were something different and that the Muslims in Agroland were like anybody else, keeping busy. That was Jenner and me, keeping busy. We weren’t an item like Tak and June, but we had spent some playtime in the showers and out in the gazebo in the back of the Agrofield.

  I was waiting for Jenner outside of the med hut. Not because we were going to hook up. My turn had come to babysit the stranger. I paced in front of the door until the last possible minute. When the time came for me to open the door of the med hut, I did. I consciously kept to the side of the room opposite the two hospital beds. I was relieved. The stranger was hidden behind a privacy curtain. He’d already had enough exposure to the sun. In the corner, as far as she could be from the bed, was Jenner. She raised her green eyes slowly, silently sighed, and then with a hand on each arm of the chair, raised herself. She gently lifted her weapon, hoisted the strap over her shoulder, and then walked over. She flashed her eyes toward the yard, a gesture for me to follow.

  Out in the open, clear of the door, she spun back to me. She shirked her shoulders high. I heard a shudder escape her lips and imagined a tremor in her spine. Her spine must have quivered, because she pulled her shoulders back and arched her waist outward to counter whatever she was feeling. Her stretch thrusted her breasts toward me. She was not wearing her sports bra and those pert nipples punctuating that cotton tank top should have switched on a few familiar gears. The sinking look in her eyes killed any of those type of thoughts.

  Jenner had that same distant intensity that June had at the gate.

  She pressed her lips together and then absently peered over my shoulder, out past the fence. I hadn’t heard anything. I don’t think she heard a sound out there either. She turned her head back to me, closed her eyes tight, opened them, and then squeezed her eyes tight and opened them a second time. I recognized what she was doing, self-calming. “That guy creeps me out,” she finally said. Jenner’s Brit accent was very proper except, unlike Gareth, the tone didn’t make her pompous. She raised her hands to warm her bare arms. I said nothing. I should have because Jenner tilted her head and hit me with a leer that said she wasn’t a nut.

  “Yeah,” I said, catching on. “I’m creeped out too, and I haven’t even been in there yet.”

  She nodded and scrunched her face in agreement. She rubbed her arms a bit harder, and then began to turn back and forth toward the fence in an attempt to keep warm. “I know it’s not that cold,” she said, and then she gave me a schoolgirl grin, “but I kind of got the chills.”

  I returned her smile and then said, “No, I think it’s cooling off at night now, fall and all. You remember, hot all day then,” I shook my head side to side. “Sorry, I’d offer you my shirt.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. She was quick to recoup, a soldier after all. “I’ll head to the caf. I know where there’s a stash of hot cocoa mix.”

  “There you go,” I said. “They’re all in there. Expect Tak and June.”

  Jenner’s eyes widened. “Gazebo?”

  I gave her a shy nod. “Gazebo.” The gazebo across the Agrofield was the only private place in Agroland.

  “Well, I don’t blame them,” she said, nodding her head. “A distraction could be due right about now.” She shot me a smile. “Anyway, I wanted to touch base before…”

  I cut her off. “Yeah,” I said. “I get it.”

  Jenner began to step backward toward the cafeteria. “Okay, maybe I’ll see you after your shift then.”

  I gave her a wave. “You bet,” I said, and then she was gone and I was alone in front of the med hut.

  I dropped the M16 from my shoulder, left the door open, and went directly to the corner of the room where I had found Jenner. I spun and planted myself down with my weapon across my lap, no differently than a thousand times on duty, no differently than when I was a kid hunting back home.

  I fixed my eyes on the two feet of floor between me and the end of the bed. The odor of the ointments Doc had rubbed on the stranger made me want to puke. I could remember the smell of salves when I had stuck my head into the med hut the first time, but in the corner, up close to the bed, the stench was overwhelming, a twisted mix of antiseptic and baby’s ass.

  I began to breathe through my mouth. My eyes followed the floor toward the open door. I sucked my chest full and then relaxed and tried to focus on the outside.

  That was a mistake.

  Between the bed and privacy curtain was a small dim lamp. Enough light for my peripheral to catch the forearm on the side of the bed, a dark shadow against the cream white of the sheet. The same thin forearm from that had been flashing through my mind since the stranger arrived.

  I couldn’t help myself but to look again.

  Doc had fastened an IV drip to the stranger. I could not imagine how she had found a vein in that thin rail of an arm.

  The side of my neck tightened to force my eyes back toward the door. Instead, my eyes shifted up to the dark, naked shoulder. Ointments and low light lessened the leathered wooden texture, yet the thinness of the emaciated shoulder could not be hidden, darkened skin taut against sinew and bone. I am not sure how long I locked onto the shoulder. Time slipped. At some point, as if the limb released them, my eyes moved across the flattened chest up to the wick of a neck, and the gaunt skeletal head of the desert survivor. Draped long to the sides of his face, fine white hair that glowed brighter than his pillowcase, blonde hair bleached from the sun. His narrow jaw jutted from what at one time must have been a strong profile and his cheeks sucked in high toward the hollow sockets of his eyes. His eyes were captivating crystal blue pools, lucid, clear, pure, shocking large white orbs that peered out over the bed and into my own. I stared at the man for quite some time. Not until he spoke did my brain kick in. The stranger was peering at me. He was awake, and from the bloody remnants of his lips, a cadence flowed.

  “So many, not enough. So many, not enough.”

  * * * * *

  FIVE

  The med hut became a full house. I’m not sure why I dozed, must’ve been the fumes from the ointments and salves slathered all over the stranger. He had woken while I was on watch and I’d sat there staring at him for I don’t know how long. When I realized what was happening, I hopped on the two-way and bam, I had the full brigade.

  Doc, Max, Gareth, and Alfie were in the med hut with me and the rest of the camp was outside the door. Alfie was the Jordanian scientist in charge. His real name was something complicated so everyone called him Alfie. He was older than everyone else in Agroland, always smiling, not at all condescending like Gareth. Gareth bullied his way in to represent the Brit contingency, I guess. Max was security of course, Doc was the Doc, and me, I was still on watch.

  Max, Alfie, Gareth, and I were huddled at the foot of the bed. I was confined between them and the wall. We were all uncomfortable. Not one of us wanted to be in the presence of this abnormally ill man.

  We watched Doc do her thing at the stranger’s bedside. She flashed a penlight above his eyes and in an elevated voice she asked him, “Are you okay, sir? Can you hear me?” He k
ept on peering forward and in the same soft raspy rhythm, kept repeating the same phrase. “So many, not enough. So many, not enough.”

  Gareth was the first to say something, “How long has he been saying that? That phrase?”

  “Since he woke up,” I said. “He sounds British, like Tak and June said.”

  “The dialect,” said Gareth.

  “East African,” said Max. “I’d say Tanzanian or Kenyan.”

  Alfie adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses and held up the small browned card that had been found in the stranger’s pocket. “That’s what this card says. Shame he has no other papers. They must have been lost. I’m surprised he was still dressed at all.”

  “Has to be the only reason he’s alive,” said Doc. “You each had the training. He was wearing full pants, a vest, and a long sleeve button down. Without those, he would have died hours sooner in the heat of the summer,” she went on to say, “you can lose nineteen liters of water a day out there, a quarter your body weight. This time of year, five liters a day. The clothes slowed the dehydration.”

  Max tightened his jaw. “Thank you, Doctor. So by that measure, how many days was he out there?”

  “By his size, a healthy male, two meters height,” Doc pressed her lower lip up then added, “And we are near autumn. More than most I figure, four, five days max.”

  “Five days,” I said. I had been desert trained in the military, again, when I signed up for Agroland. I had been told what could happen with exposure.

  Max shook his head. “His brains must be pan fried.”

  Alfie read the card aloud, “Justin Caruthers, Professional Hunter & Photographer, safari & guide services, and there is an address in Nairobi, Kenya.”

  The stranger stopped chanting. Alfie peered over the rim of his glasses toward the man. “Justin Caruthers, is that you, sir?”

  The stranger stopped his chant. His large eyes rolled in their socket to meet Alfie’s. Alfie cleared his throat. “Hrum, Mister Caruthers, you are quite safe. You were found, or shall I say rescued, in the desert. We will arrange for transportation to a medical facility.”

  Still the stranger was silent.

  Max raised a brow toward Doc. “Is he coherent?”

  Alfie raised his voice an octave higher. “Do you understand, Mister Caruthers?”

  This time the survivor responded, his gravelly speech dragged, unsure of the word, “Caruthers.”

  “Yes,” said Alfie. “The card we found on your person reads Justin Caruthers. Are you Justin Caruthers?”

  As he scanned our faces, the stranger’s orbs appeared to swell and float into and then out of his sockets. “Yes,” he said, and then paused, struggling to gain control of his mouth. “Justin Caruthers, that is my name.”

  The stranger spoke naturally, raspy, without the cadence of the mantra. And yet there was nothing natural in his appearance. To watch him speak in his emaciated condition was ghastly. What had been hidden in shadow was exaggerated by light. His jaw was too gaunt and moved mechanically. His flesh was desiccated, ruined. Ulcerated blisters and sores seethed beneath the slather of ointment. He was not openly bleeding, yet with each twitch and word the blood threatened to surface from behind the taut veil of skin that once had been a face. While mindlessly wording his mantra, the stranger’s mouth had barely opened. To form the new words, he had to force what was left of his crepe paper lips up and away from his teeth. Teeth that, like his hair and eyes, were unnaturally white and appeared too long for his dried up head.

  Gaz and Wizard were in the doorframe of the med hut and relayed word back to the others close behind that the survivor had spoken. They craned their necks toward the curtain divider shielding their view of the bed.

  Doc placed her stethoscope against the survivor’s frail chest and began to speak to her patient. Her authoritarian Cambridge accent shifted in tone to soft and maternal. Her reassuring bedside manner was soothing even to me. “Welcome, Mister Caruthers,” she said. “Do you know where you are?”

  “No,” he said.

  “You are at a scientific research facility. You were found in the desert and brought here.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I remember, I was in the desert. For quite some time.”

  “I imagine you were. Can you follow this light, please?” Doc clicked her pen light back on and waved the beam left to right above Caruthers’ eyes.

  “I wandered and then there was a truck,” he said. “And two people.”

  “That’s right, Mister Caruthers, two people brought you here,” she said. “You are in very serious condition. We will have you airlifted out once you are stable.”

  “I see,” said Caruthers.

  Gareth stepped slightly closer to the bed. “Mister Caruthers?”

  Caruthers’ eyes darted past Doc to the foot of the bed.

  “Yes,” said Caruthers, appearing coherent.

  Gareth jumped right in. “My name is Gareth,” he said. “We need to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “I understand,” said Caruthers.

  The corners of Gareth’s mouth slipped up, a faint smile. He asked him straight out, “Do you remember how you ended up in the desert?”

  And Caruthers answered. He answered all right. “Yes, I believe so,” he said. “Yes, yes I do. I will tell you. First, could I please have some water?”

  * * * * *

  Agroland

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