by Ben Coes
In retrospect, perhaps he should have gone back to Sembler Station, called over to Chasvur and let them handle the whole affair. By the time the people at Chasvur realized their horse and rider had gone missing, it would have been too late to do anything. Maybe an earlier call from Dewey would have let them get a decent-sized search party out before all visibility was lost. Then again, maybe the fact that Dewey hadn’t encountered a search party meant the horse was alone and the rider was safe. That’s at least what he hoped for.
The odd thing was, the more overwhelming the odds of finding someone, the more convinced Dewey became that someone was out there.
He thought back to his training, first Ranger school, then the year and a half he spent training to be Delta. Survival, they taught you, was about perseverance, calm, and self-reliance. Outsiders always thought that being Delta had to do with what you were capable of doing with a weapon and a team. It was the opposite: being Delta was about what you did when you had nothing.
If you think you have nothing, then you do, and that’s when you’re defeated.
Day one at Fort Bragg: Dewey and twenty-nine other young, carefully selected GIs were assembled in a windowless conference room.
“Welcome to Delta,” a man in plainclothes he never saw again said. “Put everything you have in your locker and be at the tarmac in five minutes.”
An hour flight in the back of a Hercules to south Florida, dropped into the Everglades, separated from the others by miles of gator and snake-filled swamp, armed with a knife and nothing else.
Twelve of the thirty recruits in Dewey’s class had to be rescued. One got bit by a cottonmouth snake. Another broke his femur trying to get away from an alligator. One of his classmates drowned. Of the ten who made it through, four more dropped out the day they got back to Fort Bragg.
Dewey spent the week in the crotch of an eucalyptus tree, staring at alligators. During the day, he speared the occasional fish with a harpoon he’d carved out of a branch. By day four, he was so hungry and tired that he would eat sunfish, mullets, and shiners raw. At night, he’d tie his wrist to a branch with one of his shoelaces and try to sleep; the lace acted like an alarm clock, waking him up if he started to fall off the tree branch into the dark, alligator-infested water below.
Then, as now, it wasn’t about stratagem. It was about buying time and hunkering down.
A huge lightning strike exploded in the sky, turning the black air into white light. To the left of him, he saw the edge of a giant slab of gray, black, and white rock.
Was it the north side of the butte that he’d passed so many hours ago?
He pushed Deravelle forward as blackness returned.
The lightning exploded again. He looked at the ground. For a moment, he saw the same empty plot of land, the lifeless plain of mud dotted with small green shrubs as far as the light allowed him to see. Then, it all changed. As if in a dream, a small, white ghostlike apparition arose in a hillock just a few feet in front of Dewey and the horses. What he saw caused him to jerk backwards in his saddle. There in front of him, less than ten feet away, was a body lying on the muddy ground.
Dewey climbed down from the saddle. He stepped toward the body, then got down on his hands and knees. He crawled, sweeping his hands along the ground as the rain poured down on top of his back. He felt the heel of a boot, then a small, thin leg beneath wet denim, bare skin above the waist, a thin T-shirt, then the back of a head. It was a young girl, long hair, facedown in the mud. Dewey turned her over and brushed the mud from her face. She was cold to the touch.
“Atta girl.”
She had to be dead, yet despite that he spoke again.
“It’s gonna be okay.”
Lightning hit again, a distant strike. In the light he saw the face of the young girl. She had a long, pretty nose. A deep gash cut across her forehead, down to bone.
He felt her neck for a pulse. There was nothing there. He moved his ear to her chest; then he heard it: the faint rhythm of a heartbeat.
He unzipped his coat, reached down, picked up the girl, and pulled her against his chest. For several minutes, Dewey remained on his knees, clutching the cold body against his chest, trying to warm her.
He had to think. She needed help. She needed the kind of help Dewey couldn’t provide out here. She needed a hospital and a surgeon. Yet Dewey didn’t even know where he was or what direction was home. He knew he needed to go east, to the coast. But if he guessed wrong and went west, any chance of saving her would be lost.
The rain fell in horizontal sheets. He glanced at his watch. One A.M. He was more than five hours away from the first light of day.
He held the child’s damaged head against his heart, her wispy torso pressed against his big chest, trying to warm the young girl’s body, trying to think.
For the next twenty minutes, Dewey cradled the young girl in his arms, covering her in the folds of the wax coat. She now had a faint pulse and was breathing, but she was in deep shock. Her body felt lifeless and cold.
The rain continued to pour down. With each lightning strike, Dewey searched for a landmark in the distance, but saw nothing to guide him. In every direction, the quick snapshot the lightning allowed was shrub-covered flatland and the tall butte looming over them.
He knew staying there wasn’t an option, not if the little girl was going to survive.
“Think, goddamn it, think,” he whispered to himself.
The lightning struck again. This time Dewey looked behind him, searching for something, anything, to help guide him. Instead of looking at the valley this time, Dewey found himself studying the tall stone butte. He stared at it as the lightning faded. He realized what he needed to do to save the girl.
Dewey climbed back on top of Deravelle, holding the girl tightly against his chest with his left hand. He pressed his boots into Deravelle’s side. They moved forward until, a few minutes later, in the ambient light, Deravelle stopped just inches from the edge of the butte. Looking up, Dewey saw a wall of craggy rock in the dim light.
He climbed down from the stallion. Holding the girl against his chest, he knelt down and searched along the base of the butte for a place to put the girl. He found an overhang, big enough to keep water from falling onto her. He took off his coat, wrapped her inside it, then placed her on the ground. It was raining more heavily than it had all night.
A furious smash of lightning tore across the sky and Dewey’s eyes shot up. He surveyed the side of the rock; gray and black, craggy, reaching up into the black sky. Then darkness came again, followed by a low, loud thunderclap a few miles away.
Dewey placed his right hand out in front of him and felt the rock face. He found a short seam in the granite a couple of feet above his head. He put the fingers from both hands into the seam, and with his right boot felt for a hard edge. He found one waist-high, a couple of feet to the right. He stepped onto the edge while he lifted himself up with his fingers. He stood on the small edge, all his weight on his right foot, holding the seam of rock with both hands. He removed his left hand and searched for a higher crack in the rock to grab on to. He found one a foot and a half directly above the first seam. Then he felt with his left boot for another hard edge. He found a small cut-in and put his left toe on it. He took another step up the rock face as water poured down. Standing for a moment on his left foot, holding himself aloft with his left hand, he searched with his right hand. He found a sharp piece of rock jutting out like a dull knife. He tested the rock to make sure it would hold. He lifted himself up the rock face yet again.
He didn’t think about the butte. He didn’t think about how tall it was, how much farther he had to climb, how long it would take to climb, or how he would get back down. He didn’t even think about the little girl, dying a slow death inside his Filson wax coat. He thought only about the next step, the next hard edge, the next foot and a half up the rock face.
Methodically, Dewey ascended the jagged wall of rock. His arms and legs burned. His fingers became raw.
But he ignored the pain and moved up the rock face, knowing that one slip and he would fall to his death, knowing that a little girl’s life depended on him.
Foot by foot, he moved higher until he could hear, somewhere above him, a different noise; it was the pattern of rain splashing on rock. The lightning struck and he looked down. He was at least a hundred and fifty feet up the cliff face. He had a surprising moment then, not of fear, but rather pride at the accomplishment.
He glimpsed Deravelle and the mare, the small dark bundle, then it went dark. At some point, as he went to reach and lift himself higher, the rock wasn’t there. He found only empty air. He’d reached the top of the butte. Dewey pulled himself up. He crawled several feet, then collapsed on the ground. Every inch of his arms and legs burned. He was breathing as fast as if he’d just gone for a ten-mile run. After a minute, he sat up. Other than the flat area within a foot of where he sat, Dewey couldn’t see a thing. But he waited. The first minute turned into a second minute, then a third, then a fifth, until eventually he lost track of time, waiting.
“Come on,” he whispered into the driving rain.
Finally, the lightning struck. In the brief seconds he had, Dewey searched the horizon in every direction. In the distance, he saw a landmark: the coast. He made out the bulbous outline of treetops and a cluster of lights. That was all. But it was enough. It had to be enough. He memorized the location and charted the direction from the butte in his mind.
The light faded and a thunderclap detonated somewhere to the west. Dewey crawled back toward the edge of the butte, feeling his way with raw fingertips through the darkness.
7
YAGULUNG
By sunset, the villagers of Yagulung had cleared the bodies from the café.
The dead villager, a man named Artun, was carried to his small wood home, where his wife prepared him for burial.
A debate had ensued as to what to do with the corpses of the soldiers. Should they be buried? Cremated? Should they carry the bodies to the far side of the mountain and throw them into a crevice? But calmer heads prevailed. It was decided they would hand the dead soldiers over to the Pakistani Army. But they would not do anything until the Northern Command arrived.
The entire village, about one hundred people in all, was gathered in the dirt road in front of the café. A sense of shock, and fear, reverberated through the denizens of the small village.
As the bodies were being cleaned, Aquil-eh saddled up the village’s only horse to ride south toward Pullu.
One of the village elders came to Aquil-eh.
“Where will you go, son?” the old man asked.
“South. Along the Shyok. In Pullu there is an army camp. There will be soldiers.”
“Hunder is closer.”
“From Hunder I will have to ride again. In Pullu there will be soldiers.”
“Perhaps in Hunder they will have a radio and you can call the camp,” said another villager.
“Perhaps,” said Aquil-eh. “That would be nice.”
The old man reached into his pocket.
“Here,” he said. He handed Aquil-eh a large leather swatch of material with black markings on it. “This is the chart of the stars. And there,” he said, pointing to the leather strip of material, “is Khardung. Pullu is just south of Khardung. You will be traveling at night. You must be careful here, and here. This is where the mountains have the great invisible crevices. You must go around them. I have traveled to Khardung. When I was younger.”
“Thank you, Father,” said Aquil-eh.
Aquil-eh smiled calmly. But he knew it was a race against time now. He had more than sixty miles to travel. It was a clear night, and he would be able to move beneath the stars. Still, it would be slow going. He felt perspiration start to bead on his forehead but tried not to show his nervousness. The entire village stared at him in silence as he prepared to move out.
He smiled one last time as he glanced at the hushed gathering of villagers. He pressed his boots into the side of the horse and sent the small mare galloping down the gravel path. He had to reach Pullu, and soon. He had to reach the camp before the Pakistanis found their dead.
* * *
By 8:00 P.M., twenty-nine miles to the north, at the Pakistani Army Base at Skardu, the topic of the missing patrol had consumed the regional ranking officers of Pakistan’s Northern Light Infantry Regiment, or NLI as it was referred to. The soldiers out on patrol had not responded to repeated efforts to reach them on handheld radios, nor had they attempted to report back in. They had left on patrol more than seven hours before, a regular north-south patrol along the Line of Control that separated the Northern Territories of Pakistan from India-controlled Ladakh and Kashmir.
The ranking officer at Skardu was named Mushal. He was a brigadier in the Pakistan Army, forty-seven years old, a Baltee who grew up in Khaplu. He had worked along the Line of Control for more than two decades. Mushal knew that even the smallest incidents along the LOC needed to be dealt with, that tensions were so high between Pakistan and India that small accidents could quickly spiral out of control.
Three separate wars had been fought between Pakistan and India since the British decolonized and left the region in 1947. The most recent full-scale war occurred in 1971, but there had been countless deadly skirmishes along the Line of Control. Kashmir Territory sat at the northern reaches of India and was surrounded by Pakistan, India, and China. All of it should have been Pakistan’s by heritage, by culture, and by religion. At least that was the way Pakistan saw it. But the British left the decision of which country to affiliate with to the ruler of what was then called Jammu and Kashmir, and despite the fact that Kashmir was predominantly Muslim, he chose to throw his allegiance to India. Ever since then, tensions had repeatedly flared over the region.
Only now, unlike the wars of 1947, 1965, and 1971, both India and Pakistan possessed nuclear weapons.
At 8:15 P.M., Brigadier Mushal dispatched seven separate patrols from Skardu Base. Each patrol had two soldiers, either in a jeep or on motorcycle, each armed with high-powered Kalashnikov semiautomatic rifles. There were about twenty villages within a fifty-square-mile radius, including Yagulung and a few others that were in India-controlled Kashmir. Mushal told the search patrols to move across the LOC if necessary to search the villages, but to do so quietly, quickly, and to not get caught. He doubted the missing patrol had ventured over the LOC, but he had to know for sure and so he allowed the patrols to go.
In the meantime, one of Mushal’s lieutenants contacted NLI general command in Gilgit, to the southwest, notifying NLI’s top leadership of the missing soldiers. This action, in turn, established a “Black Flag,” so called because it involved the LOC. An alert was sent electronically across the army’s chain of command. It was the twenty-third such Black Flag this year. Typically, there were at least a hundred Black Flags annually, most of which amounted to nothing. Still, at 8:44 P.M., the Black Flag went out electronically, reaching the fax machines, desks, cell phones, computer screens, and PDAs of more than eight hundred senior ranking officers in the Pakistani Army.
* * *
By 11:00 P.M., Aquil-eh had been riding more than five hours. The night was clear. There was a sharp half-moon, and the stars seemed like candles in the sky above him, so close to the ground.
He paced the small horse along the banks of the Shyok River. The sound of the water rushing by guided him.
He had traveled this far south once before in his life. When he was six or seven, he had traveled to a town called Diskit to see a doctor. But this was the first time he’d seen the peaks and valleys of the Ladakh Range at night, under the stark, beautiful illumination of the stars. He never forgot how amazing Ladakh and Kashmir were, but sometimes, like tonight, its beauty astonished him. The moon cast unusually strong light down from above. It framed the mountains at each side of the plateau. He felt as if he were riding on the moon.
Aquil-eh sometimes wondered what the world was like outside of Kashmir. But to
night he focused solely on his duty to his family and town, and his fear. He felt a constant, gnawing sense of fear as he pushed the horse along at a good pace; a chemical uneasiness at the realization that everything in his world had just changed, forever. He couldn’t forget the terrible incidents of the day. He hadn’t seen Arra being assaulted, but he had watched Tok destroy the man’s skull and had stood less than a foot from Artun when he was shot through the chest.
At a small pond he stopped to let the horse drink. With a match he examined the leather map. He was more than two-thirds of the way to Khardung, if the old man’s etchings were drawn to scale and accurate. Twenty more miles. The army camp at Pullu would be a short trip from there. In a mile or two, if the map was correct, he would pass Hunder, another small village. He remembered the words of the old man; he would stop in Hunder and ask if they had a radio.
* * *
The two Pakistani soldiers parked the jeep and walked, one in front of the other, up the steep path to the village. On their helmets, Petzl headlamps cast a bluish glow for twenty feet in front of them. They each carried their Kalashnikovs aimed in front of them as they marched, safeties off. They were more than ten miles across the LOC; they’d done it before—it was part of what they were trained to do—but even so, both soldiers knew they could be shot on sight if they were discovered by the Indian Army.
“There,” said one of the soldiers, turning to the man behind him. He nodded at the path. “Yagulung. We’re nearly there.”
The soldier in back took a radio from his belt and depressed the sidebar.
“This is field unit two,” he said. “We’re at Yagulung. We’ll report back.”
The soldiers each pulled a set of ATN night vision goggles from their combat backpacks. They pulled the goggles down over their helmets and flipped the switches on. The goggles gave each soldier a clear view up the gravel road toward the small village. The outlines of the low-flung homes, clinging to the mountainside, were illuminated for the soldiers in apocalyptic orange.
