by John Sweeney
Stunned, the young Syrian had no choice but to grip the outboard’s tiller and head west for Europe. The process repeated itself: each set of refugees thought the smuggler would guide them the whole way across; each smuggler jumped overboard some yards out, leaving the refugees to fend for themselves. It was, of course, good business: five hundred people paying $1,200 a head meant $600,000 for a night’s work. The inflatables were around $500 each; paying off the Turkish police and coastguard was the most expensive cost – around $50,000 to look the other way. But, still, more than half a million dollars for one night’s work: there was more money in shifting people than shifting heroin.
Once out in the Kos channel, the refugees were on their own. The wind grew stronger. Practised sailors would have checked the weather forecast and seen that a storm was forecast. The refugees were not practised sailors.
The thin man and his family were at the head of the queue for the second boat, and Jameela and Ham thought it smarter to let them go ahead. But that meant they lost their place in the line. Not only that, but every subsequent boat they waited for seemed dangerously crowded. In the end, they realised they had been too choosy, because the last and seventh boat was more overcrowded than all the others. It seemed cursed from the moment they stepped aboard: water was lapping over the sides into the bottom, making the cardboard soggy. Already an old lady had vomited into the bilges, someone was crying, a man was loudly intoning his prayers. Someone’s phone rang, and broken fragments of a surreal conversation could be heard in Arabic: ‘No, I swear to God . . . I’m on a boat . . . Hear that? That’s the sound of the waves.’
Jameela hugged Ham as closely as she could, trusting that their life jackets would save them if the worst came to the worst. She was wrong about that: the jackets were packed with the cheapest foam the smugglers could buy. If you relied upon them to help you swim, you’d end up sinking.
Around her neck she had a plastic purse, in it three thousand dollars, given to her by Rashid, wrapped in cling film to prevent the cash from getting soaked.
The sky had become less black, was now a dark purple. Jameela and Ham waded towards the boat and clambered over to the stern of the inflatable, squeezing themselves in to find a perch on the very end of the port tube, just by the transom where the outboard was fixed. Their position on the boat was precarious, but it meant they got a better indication of the next disaster. Less than thirty yards out, the smuggler at the helm of the outboard backflipped into the sea and there was a great splash. Rudderless, the inflatable bounced around in the waves until a hapless Afghan took over the motor. The Taliban had burnt his village down because it was thought to be too friendly with the Americans. Reason enough to flee his homeland, but his country was landlocked. He’d never in his life been in a boat before, never mind made a sea journey. Panicking at the wholly unexpected responsibility of playing skipper, he turned the outboard’s tiller hard to steer the inflatable back to land, back the way they had come. A man sitting next to him, from Iraq, yelled at him in Arabic: ‘Listen, idiot, we lose our money if we don’t head to Greece.’ The Afghan didn’t understand a word – Arabic and Pashto are as alike as English and Finnish – and in the watery darkness, with sea spray flying this way and that, the two men fought over control of the motor. The inflatable beat a crazy path, first heading to Greece, then racing back to Turkey. Each time it turned side on to the waves, seawater spilled over the inflatable’s sides until it became more and more waterlogged, slowing its progress. Finally, the Iraqi punched the Afghan hard, took full control and, once again, they headed towards the lights of Kos. The wind’s force grew, the sea tossing the boat around, causing the people to murmur, then cry out loud. The fear of making a noise and being caught by the Turkish police and coastguard had been replaced by a much bigger terror: that they might never make the sea-crossing alive.
A big wave sideswiped the inflatable, drenching everyone. Some people swore in Arabic, then in English, using phrases that would make gang members in Chicago’s South Side blush – while others prayed out loud, the mix of cries all-too-accurately reflecting the dysfunction of religious and secular Syria. Jameela hated the mess her country had become. Her father had been a colonel in Zarif Senior’s air force, but he and especially her mother had never been blind to the nature of the regime: corrupt but not grotesquely uncomfortable if you rolled along with it; a closed fist if you opposed it. But now Syria had become a byword for a religious fanaticism that had sucked in the dross of the world to kill in the name of a perverted and sick abomination of Islam.
She thought of Timur, the jihadi fanatic who’d grown sick of killing. God knows how he had gone back to being a human being again. He had been extraordinarily brave, releasing Rashid, her and Ham from their cages. Rashid had been in a bad way, his muscles palsied after days inside the cage; his arms, legs, face and neck horribly bruised after he went in spasm while under attack from the Taser. Timur had given them water, some bread to eat, showed Rashid some stretching exercises so that he could begin to recover some power in his muscles. Then Timur had hidden them under the four dead men in the truck, so they would not be gassed.
After their escape from the mountain, Timur left the three of them in an ancient catacomb in the Valley of the Tombs for several hours, returning in the dark on a motorbike. He brought with him scissors, glue, a vast beard shaved off some other poor soul fleeing ISIS, and all the accoutrements of a Hisbah: white tunic, calf-length trousers, black waistcoat, Kalashnikov. He was so fastidious about making her look exactly right. They were going to have to cross the battlefront and no woman, as a woman, could do that. Worse, not only could Rashid not walk on his own, but his arm muscles had become so atrophied he couldn’t even hold a teacup to his mouth unaided. There was no way he could drive a motorbike at speed across the front line. So Jameela had to look like a man, and she had to drive the bike with Rashid, helpless, in the middle, and Ham on the back making sure he didn’t fall off.
The moon came out, basking the city of the dead in a ghostly, silvery luminescence. Timur cut her hair so that she became a young Hisbah, not too long but not too short; he’d spent further time snipping and shaping the beard to her face so that by the end she looked so utterly convincing that Rashid pretended he was afraid of the Hisbah – of him/her. Timur said that he would glue the beard on two hours before sunrise, when they planned to cross the line.
Meanwhile Rashid lay flat on his back on a gravestone, luxuriating in twiddling his toes and patiently explaining the night sky to Ham, mapping out Mars, Venus and the pole star. Soon Ham fell asleep and Timur laid a blanket over him, and the fake Hisbad guided the invalid Rashid along the avenue of ancient tombs. As ever, Rashid and Jameela bickered, gently; as ever, the arguments helped them dance around the depth of the love they held for each other.
‘You’re a fool, Rashid,’ she said, loving more than anything to goad him. ‘Fancy thinking you’re such a big shot that you could have got away with negotiating with ISIS. You’re nothing more than a jumped-up butcher, not a diplomat.’
‘So I’m the fool? I’m not the one who came running to Raqqa to save a foolish doctor.’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I didn’t come to Raqqa to try to help you.’
‘You didn’t? Then I am crushed.’
The moon suddenly hid behind a cloud and the night darkened, and just as suddenly the cloud passed and its light seemed even more powerful and surreal as the tombs cast long shadows. In the distance, a dog howled. They were walking arm in arm, him limping badly. If she let him go, he would fall down. She found the reversal of their normal physical dynamics – because he was much bigger and far stronger than her – strangely exciting.
‘So why did you come to Raqqa?’ he teased.
‘For the shopping,’ she said, deadpan.
‘The shopping?’ repeated Rashid, relishing the absurdity.
‘I was misinformed,’ she said.
‘You are the maddest woman I have ever met, ever. You were mad when
I first met you in Aleppo, back in high school. Mad then. Mad now.’
‘But that’s why you love me.’ The naked truth of her statement stunned him for a second, and then he turned and tried to grip her face in her hands, but he was too weak to do so and so she smiled and helped him lie down on a flat tomb and they kissed, hungrily, passionately, with the intensity that only doomed lovers can enjoy. Afterwards, they lay staring up at the moon, Jameela nuzzling his hands with her mouth.
‘If we make it across the front line and get to the free side’ – the patchwork of land held by the Kurds and the rebels, neither Zarif nor ISIS – ‘alive . . .’
‘That’s a big if . . .’
‘What shall become of us?’ asked Jameela.
‘You are taking Ham to Germany and you will wait there for me.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m a surgeon. I’m needed in Aleppo. I have to go home, to help, to do my job.’
‘I hate you.’
‘I hate you back.’
‘Why can’t we ever be together?’
‘I’m not the one who left Aleppo and ran off to Los Angeles and had a kid with some rich American doctor.’
‘Dominic is not a doctor.’
‘You call him a doctor.’
‘He is not a doctor like you.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You save people’s lives.’
‘Not always. These days, hardly at all. In fact, I think it was the jihadi who saved our lives.’
‘Stop changing the subject.’
‘Jameela, I love you but I have got to go to Aleppo, to go home, to help as best I can. If I sit this thing out, I will have to watch our people rip each other apart and do nothing to help. I will have failed, as a doctor, as a human being, as a man.’
‘So you are a stupid man.’
‘And you are a mad lady.’
After a time, they walked back to where Timur was watching over Ham, still fast asleep. The moon sank below the horizon and soon it was time to cross the line.
They looked the part, no question: the Hisbah gripping the handlebars of the motorbike, surprisingly thickly bearded for one so young; the big man in the middle, a Kalashnikov on a belt hanging off his shoulders; the kid on the back, one hand steadying the big man, the other behind him, locked on to the bike. They saluted Timur, who bowed from the waist, and then Jameela gunned the bike and it clattered off, into the desert.
Timur had drawn them a map of how to drive north-north-west out of Palmyra, avoiding the ISIS checkpoints he knew about. He told her that twenty, twenty-five miles beyond Palmyra was the front line with the Kurdish forces, but it was fuzzy and porous and it shifted.
They almost didn’t make it. She didn’t use the headlights – that would have made them a sitting duck – but drove slowly, using the starlight and the murmur of brightness to the east to work out where was asphalt, where was desert. A twist in the road caused Jameela to slow down, almost to walking pace, and suddenly she saw the checkpoint, the black flags of ISIS drooping in the predawn calm. A man shouted, a Kalashnikov started to bark, and she twisted the throttle and gunned the bike and surged ahead, sparks flying to left and right as bullets missed their target again and again.
After running the ISIS checkpoint, a long, lonely ride began through an empty, reddening no man’s land, every shadow hiding a threat. In the distance, she made out the Kurdish checkpoint, a riot of flags, smoke rising from a chimney, some donkeys chewing grass to the side. She slowed the bike and it crawled towards the Kurdish Peshmerga, their baggy trousers flapping in the dawn breeze. Five Kurds – three men and two women – trained their rifles on them, their faces uneasy, cautious not to get too close lest this be another suicide bomb.
What happened next was the talk of the Kurdish battalion for weeks to come. Jameela rested the bike on its stand and ripped her false beard off with pained relish; the big man in the middle fell, like an oak tree, plumb in the middle of the road, landing in a guffawing heap on the tarmac, while the little boy got off the bike and did a step-perfect impression of Michael Jackson doing his moonwalk.
No one had ever crossed the line like that, ever.
‘Mom, I’m freezing,’ moaned Ham, bringing her back to the wretched here and now.
‘Shh, darling, shh,’ said Jameela. ‘We won’t be long.’ But she said that through chattering teeth. The level of the scummy water in the bottom of the inflatable was rising, fast. When she had first stepped in the boat, it had covered her toes, now it was washing around her ankles; sometimes when the inflatable hit a deep trough, around her knees.
They were halfway across the channel dividing Turkey from Europe when the electric motor cut out.
TROPOJË, NORTHERN ALBANIA
A phone call, encrypted, from Langley to northern Albania: ‘Any news of the Angel Moroni?’
‘No. The Russian said they found the corpse of the driver, but not him and not the Albanian cop, either.’
‘Yeah, I heard that too. So he’s gone AWOL in northern Albania. You can’t find him; the Russians can’t find him. But being who he is, he’s going to find your facility, isn’t he?’
‘That’s not a fact.’
‘You know what I’m going to say next, don’t you?’
‘That would be an overreaction. We have no idea where Zeke Chand—’
‘Don’t say his name.’
‘This call is encrypted, isn’t it?’
‘I’m superstitious. Anyway, we’re closing it down.’
‘No.’
‘We’re closing it down. Effective immediately.’
‘And the patients?’
There was a pause on the line.
‘What are you going to do with the patients?’
‘We’re sending a ship. We’re thinking North Africa.’
‘Listen, you’re overreacti—’
‘No, you listen to me. Our adversary is the most brilliant linguist in the Agency’s history. He’s not someone who runs away from this kind of intellectual puzzle. He lives and breathes to solve them. We don’t want to appear on the front page of the New York Times and nor do you. So, we close this facility down and we move elsewhere. You carry on doing what you’re doing. We just move. So start packing.’
The half-wolf sat on the bed looking down at Zeke, lying on his side, his breathing growing weaker by the second. His nose and lips were dark blue, his chest looked odd, unequal, as if one lung was bigger than the other, the veins on his neck bulging. Sotir lifted his head, his eyes to the side. The wind rose outside, spoiling the intensity of his concentration. Agim coughed and Sotir raised a hand, matted with hair, calling for absolute quiet. The wind softened and Sotir closed his eyes. Then he reached down to his belt and brought out a knife and slashed Zeke’s shirt in two. The left side of his chest was covered by a bandage, bloodied, covering some kind of entry wound. It was very small, not big enough to have been made by a bullet; more like a piece of shrapnel from the road or concrete from the culvert had pierced his chest. Gently, Sotir turned Zeke so that he lay on his belly. The exit hole was easily missed, no bigger than a musket ball, out of it bubbling a pink broth of blood and air.
Sotir went to a metal strongbox by the bed, opened it and took out a sheet of plastic and some sticky tape. He cut the plastic with his knife so that it covered the wound, and taped it up so that it was sealed at the bottom and on the two sides but not at the top. It allowed excess air to escape, but not to enter.
The moment the patch was on, Zeke’s breathing seemed less troubled. Within five minutes, his nose became a lighter shade of blue; within ten it was grey; within twenty, pink. After an hour had passed, both the veins on his neck and the shape of his chest had returned to normal.
Agim examined the half-wolf with wonder and said, ‘Doctor Sotir, I presume.’
The shepherd said something in the mountain dialect that Agim did not understand, and went over to the pot where a lamb stew was bubbling. A minute later, Agim looked over at him
again and saw that he was smiling. That was, Agim reflected, the strange thing about people, not just in Albania but everywhere. This man looked like a savage, his body and face covered with hair, he could barely grunt, and yet somehow he had learnt some proper medicine. He had saved Zeke’s life, and that wasn’t just strange, it was amazing.
In the morning, Zeke woke – hungry, thirsty but very much alive, the gap in his teeth and his wide-open smile offering the false impression that he was simple, but his eyes glistening with that piercing intelligence that left Agim not just in awe but sometimes a little frightened. Sitting up in bed, drinking a cupful of the lamb broth, Zeke started a conversation with Sotir in a language that Agim had no knowledge of. Astonished that his patient could understand him, Sotir gabbled away, twenty words to the dozen. Zeke shushed him to make him slow down, and then the two conversed for five minutes, ten.
Eventually Zeke turned to Agim and explained: ‘He’s a Vlach, the ancient people of southern Europe. His mother abandoned him and he was adopted by a nurse at the hospital. She taught him the essentials of first aid.’
‘He fixed the wound on your back, the one that was leaking air out of your lung.’
‘Yes, he told me. He also said that your security people beat him up. They were trying to get him to say that he had killed the men who stood out in the thunderstorms and got hit by lightning. He knows where the prison is. They drilled holes in the mountain to give them air and the men, they escaped out of the holes. He told me he had no idea what they did to these men, but to see them afterwards, electrocuted by lightning, it must be the devil’s work.’
