Quickly, Matt took the thick, warm wool blanket and tucked it in around Hadi the best he could. “I’m going to stabilize your ankle,” he told the boy gruffly. Shedding his ruck, Matt had the boy’s right ankle splinted in no time. He gave him a syrette of morphine to deaden the pain he knew Hadi would have when he carried him back to the cave. Hadi’s body was continuously jumping and jerking; he was suffering from deep hypothermia. Matt wrapped the boy’s entire lower leg in a removable cast to try to keep the break beneath the swelling from becoming even worse. Soon, the morphine began to take hold. The boy’s long, narrow face started to relax, but his teeth continued to chatter.
Matt decided to place his M4 on the back of his ruck. It would be unreachable should he need it, but he figured he was about three-quarters of a mile from the cave. The moonlight disappeared, more clouds floating overhead. It grew dark, but there was still gray light, and he could see where he was going. Shouldering the ruck, he knelt down on one knee, studying Hadi’s face. He was almost unconscious from the morphine.
“I’m taking you to a cave,” he told the boy, moving his hand across his damp, stringy black hair. “You’re safe. We’ll help you.”
Scooping the boy up, he found Hadi weighed next to nothing. His head lolled against Matt’s shoulder limply. He was barely conscious and probably weighed seventy pounds at the most. Even through his gloves, Matt could feel the kid’s ribs sticking out. He knew the harsh reality of Afghan life in these mountains; few children survived to adulthood because there was so little food.
Moving steadily, he headed around the copse and pushed as fast as he could to get the boy to the cave before he died from hypothermia. Matt’s heart broke, because this was a child near death. Never mind that he had a broken ankle. He was sure his parents in whatever village he lived in were worried sick over his whereabouts.
But Hadi would not be the first goat herder to disappear. It happened all too often. Children lived precarious lives at best out here in Afghanistan.
No matter how carefully he moved, the boy moaned. Matt was grateful the morphine was taking the worst of his pain away, but there was no way to make this an easy trek for Hadi.
Matt’s breath shot out from his nose and mouth, and his arms ached. His thighs were tight and stiffening. He was now carrying a sixty-five-pound ruck and a seventy-pound boy. Matt himself only weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, so he was carrying close to his own weight.
The snow was slippery and more times than he wanted he skidded, nearly falling. Each time, Hadi moaned, his thin arms curling, his grayish fingers opening.
As Matt neared the cave, he heard the bleating of the sentinel goat. He halted just below the lip, gasping heavily for air. At nine thousand feet, this kind of weight took a toll on anyone, even him. The moonlight scudded out between two clouds, lighting his way up a few rocky steps. He heard the clatter of hooves, the sudden bleats of the frightened goats.
Getting into the cave, he knelt down on one knee, gripping the kid to his chest. Matt was dizzy and had to rest a moment. What he needed now was oxygen. He waited for thirty seconds before shoving off and staggering to his feet, holding Hadi tightly in his arms.
Looking down, he saw the boy had either fainted or gone unconscious from the morphine. Good, he thought. At least he wouldn’t feel any more pain for a while.
The goats’ floppy ears moved back and forth, their gold eyes curious, and they moved closer to Matt as they smelled their goat herder in his arms. They crowded around him as he carried Hadi quickly past them and made a right turn to go up into the tunnel. The goats stopped at the base of the tunnel, wary of small, enclosed spaces.
Matt turned and saw the moonlight cascading down through the crack in the ceiling. Dara was sitting on the sleeping bag, dozing. She snapped awake.
“It’s me,” he rasped, his breath tearing out of him.
Dara gamely struggled to her feet and moved off the sleeping bag. “You found him!”
“Yeah,” he managed to say, kneeling down and gently depositing Hadi on the sleeping bag. “Hypothermia. Broken right ankle.” He straightened, making sure Hadi’s airway was open. Quickly, he pulled the top of the sleeping bag over him, trying to keep him warm. Matt’s legs were shaking and so were his arms as he stood and shrugged out of his gear. “Dara? Can you open my ruck? There are several pairs of clean, dry socks in there. I need you to put socks on his two hands and one on his left foot. Can you do that for me?”
“Of course,” she murmured, giving him a worried look. “Are you okay?”
“Winded,” he gasped, kneeling down and pulling out splint material from the ruck she’d just opened. “I’m working on his ankle. It has to be set. Then we’re going to do everything we can to get this kid warmed up. I gave him a syrette of morphine, and before it wears off I want to get his bones aligned.”
“Okay,” she whispered, kneeling down and locating the socks. “Do you need help with his ankle?”
Shaking his head, Matt moved the boy away from the wall of the cave so he was lying in the sleeping bag between them. “No. I’ve got a stethoscope in there. Listen to his heart and lungs, and get me his blood pressure, okay? We need to know where his vitals are at.”
“Right,” she agreed, quickly placing a thick green sock on each of the boy’s small, grayish-looking hands.
For the next few minutes, Matt’s only focus was getting the break in the kid’s ankle realigned. It was a bad break, but the good news was it wasn’t an open fracture. Broken skin could mean all kinds of infection issues, which Matt didn’t need at this point. He glanced at Hadi, who was still unconscious. “What are his vitals?” he demanded, his voice rough.
“Sixty over ninety. Not good. His pulse is slow and thready, fifty beats a minute. Lungs are clear. That’s good news.”
He heard the grimness in Dara’s voice as she began to press her palms around the boy’s hands in an effort to try to warm him. “I’m going to set this,” he warned her, then made a quick snapping motion.
Hadi groaned, his lashes fluttering, but he didn’t become conscious.
“Good, he didn’t feel a thing,” Matt muttered, quickly working to stabilize the ankle. He saw many old and new scars across the boy’s feet. These kids wore sandals year-round, even in this damnable winter climate. Parents were so poor they couldn’t afford protective shoes for their children’s feet.
This made him angry and fueled his desire to get to work at Delos as soon as possible so he could start making a difference. No child should be this thin. Every child should have a decent pair of winter shoes for a fucking climate like this one. His blood burned with rage, but Matt kept it to himself. With the air splint, the boy’s ankle would start to heal, but bruising and swelling were there, too.
Matt placed the boy’s leg gently down on the bag and drew the cover over him. “What’s his temp?”
“Ninety-four,” Dara reported, giving him a concerned look. “He’s got a chance to revive.”
“Let’s keep cupping our hands to his hands and feet. God, I wish I had a huge heating pad right now.” If Hadi’s temperature dropped to eighty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, he would die. Matt had found him just in time.
Dara managed a rueful smile. “His clothes are wet, Matt. They need to come off. Do you have anything dry for him to wear?” She began searching through his rucksack.
“Yeah, get one of my black T-shirts out of there. I’ve got a pair of terry-cloth trousers, too. They’ll be big on him, but that doesn’t matter. Let’s go to work.”
In minutes, they’d stripped him of his soggy woolen clothes. They were so threadbare, they tore apart in Matt’s fingers. He clamped down on his anger. He’d seen too much of this in the world, but it was particularly bad here in Afghanistan. It wasn’t that parents didn’t want to provide for their children. They simply lacked the means to make money to buy such things for them. Goats were their main source of meat and milk. Matt didn’t know how they could survive without the hundreds of goats th
at each village had. They’d starve to death.
The crops these villages grew were dependent on the weather. The people had no wells to draw fresh water from, no water to irrigate their plants so they’d grow and produce a yield that could feed all the hungry mouths in the village.
Matt knew the Delos charities made a helluva difference in communities around the world. He wished they could work in places like this, but the volunteers who ran the charity would be murdered by Taliban as examples to frighten off others. And so, the children starved. If only the fucking Taliban would leave these people alone. The Afghans didn’t want them around. They were outsiders coming in to push their brand of Islam onto the villagers. Afghans tolerated them, barely—and sometimes not at all. But the villagers who refused to allow the Taliban to waltz in and take over were constantly attacked.
He feared for Turani, the village that welcomed Americans on this side of the mountain slope. Too many other villages in his years of deployment here had been razed. Taliban would drive in with white Toyota Hilux pickups, with five or six soldiers in each truck bed, armed with AK-47s, and they’d race up and down the dirt rows of village houses, firing into them, killing men, women, and children.
They’d kill the donkeys that were the beasts of burden. Then chickens. If anyone was lucky enough to have a cow, which was considered very valuable and wonderful by villagers, it, too, would be shot. And then the soldiers would go after the herds of goats, slaughtering them with AK-47s on automatic, laughing, watching the terrified animals be torn apart, screaming and bleating in fear.
“Hey,” Dara whispered, her voice rising, “his temp is up two degrees.”
“Good,” Matt murmured. “Let’s keep doing what we’re doing.”
His eyes burned and smarted. Matt desperately needed sleep, but he knew there would be none. His mind came back to Dara and her safety. He had to get her to Turani. And now, if this kid survived, Matt would have to take him to the village, too, whether he was from it or not.
He continued gently holding Hadi’s feet between his hands, switching from one foot to another. They worked without speaking for another ten minutes. Both knew what was at stake.
“Did he say anything to you?” Dara asked.
“Just his name. I don’t know what village he’s from.”
“He’s so young. My God, sending a child out in weather like this, Matt? It’s criminal.”
Giving her a patient look, he said, “The kid probably didn’t know this weather front was coming through. November is tough in the mountains, and they want their goats to get the last grass of the year before the snow covers it for the season. Hadi was probably up in this area doing just that. The blizzard hit, the kid couldn’t see where the hell he was, and he did the only thing he could. He followed the goats to this cave. The lead nanny knew where it was and led the herd to it. But Hadi must have slipped and fallen in the snow, breaking his ankle.”
“If you hadn’t been there, Matt, he’d have frozen to death.”
Matt heard the emotion in Dara’s low, husky voice. “That’s why I went looking for him,” he answered wearily. Wiping his watering eyes with the back of his hand, he continued to warm Hadi’s small, tough-soled feet. “He’s just a kid …”
Dara choked back emotions rising quickly within her. She held Hadi’s delicate hand, thinking his long, slender fingers were a sign he was an artist. Maybe a writer. She wondered if he’d ever get a chance to be either. She studied Matt’s profile, his hair like twisted ropes once again, gleaming gold and brown beneath the moonlight. She heard a lot of veiled feeling in his voice, saw him swallow hard a couple of times, his mouth tightening. He was just as upset over this boy’s condition as she was. More than anything, she loved that Matt didn’t try to bury how he felt. He cared deeply about people and he had a huge soft spot in his heart for children. He’d given Aliya comfort when she so badly needed it at the Kabul orphanage.
“How,” she asked quietly, catching his glance, “do you reconcile something like this with what you do for a living?”
His mouth twisted. “Can I take a rain check on that? It’s a heavy conversation. I can answer it when I’m clearheaded and I’ve had enough sleep, Dara.”
“Of course.” She gave him an apologetic look, seeing the red rims of his eyes. “How much sleep have you gotten?”
“Not a lot.”
“You let me sleep.”
“You needed the rest. Your knee needed it, too.”
Shaking her head, Dara wanted to reach out, slide her arms around him, and hold him, because she could hear his emotions barely beneath the surface, saw the anger deep in his eyes over this boy’s condition.
Dara bit back any more questions. “Why don’t you go lie down and sleep? I can take care of Hadi.”
“No, not until he wakes up.” He gave her a wry look. “You don’t know Pashto and I do. He’s going to be full of questions.”
“How many languages do you know?”
“Let’s see,” he said, slipping his hands over Hadi’s left foot once more. “Greek, Turkish, Farsi, which is Persian, and Pashto. Oh, and enough Urdu, which is Pakistan’s main language, to work undercover in that country, although it’s my weakest language.”
“Wow, and here I thought I was doing well with English, Latin, and French.”
A smile grudgingly appeared. “My mother insisted we know at least five languages. Given that my uncles in Turkey and cousin in Greece each know six, she challenged us to do the same.”
“Knowing other languages isn’t a bad thing,” Dara said. She stopped for a moment and placed the ear thermometer into Hadi’s small ear. “Oh, good. His temperature is ninety-six, Matt! He’s coming back!” She smiled with relief, meeting his exhausted, dark eyes.
“He should start becoming conscious any time now,” he murmured. “Let’s just keep this up. It’s old-fashioned, but it’s working.”
“Did you actually go undercover?” Dara asked.
“Because I’m part Middle Eastern, look the part, and am fluent in many of those languages, my CO would send me into Pakistan with a handpicked team. We’d rescue little girls or young women who had been kidnapped from Afghan villages. They’d be taken across to Pakistan and were sold into the sex slave trade.”
Dara gave him a soulful, sad look, nodding.
“No place on earth is immune from these sick, perverted bastards doing this to innocent young girls and boys with no way to protect themselves from these predators.” He spat out the words in a low, grating tone. “That’s why I’m heading up the KNR Division at Artemis. I’ve got nearly nine years in KNR apprehension and finding survivors, so I know what it takes to get them home to their families again.”
“It had to make you feel good to find these children.”
He grimaced. “Yes, I was happy to find the child or teen, but she or he was deeply traumatized, so we were taking a broken human being back to their family.”
She saw he was barely hanging in. “You need to sleep, Matt. Go lie down. I’ll wake you up when Hadi becomes conscious.”
He twisted around to look at her. “I didn’t know you had a drill sergeant in you,” he laughed quietly, appreciating her gesture.
Her lips pursed. “I can when the occasion demands it. Like now.” She lifted her hand. “Please go lie down. I promise, if I hear anything I’ll wake you immediately.” She touched Hadi’s drying, shining black hair. “And if he becomes conscious, I’ll wake you up.”
Grunting, Matt slowly rose, his joints stiff and protesting. “Okay, you have a deal, doc.”
Dara watched him go over and lie down on the limestone floor, his head on his ruck, arms tucked tight against his chest. As he lay on his side, her heart opened wide to this warrior. Matt had such quiet courage and conviction. She had no idea what went on in these mountains. But once Matt had seen the goats come into the cave, he knew that someone was out there in the icy cold, and he risked his life to find a hurt boy.
How many men wou
ld have made the rescue effort he’d just made? How many men would have cared enough to go after that child? She looked down at Hadi, his face now peaceful, no longer tense. She saw his gaunt cheeks flooding with pink, indicating his body was finally warming up, that the hypothermia was leaving. He would live.
Gently, Dara moved her fingers through the thin, silky strands of Hadi’s hair. Whoever had cut his hair had placed a bowl over his head, taken a pair of dull scissors, and hacked it off around his skull. She held his hand, feeling the warmth begin to steal back into his cold fingers. She was sure his parents were beside themselves with worry and anguish.
This was a country that created nothing but heartache, as far as Dara could see. Matt had already dropped off to sleep.
In less than a week, Matt had become the most important person in Dara’s life. Closing her eyes for a moment, holding the child’s limp hands, she wanted desperately to survive this. She wanted Matt to live. She wanted a chance, a real chance, to know this man under less threatening circumstances. She wanted to spend time with him, listen to what he thought and how he felt about the world.
Clearly, he was his mother’s son, devoted to Delos, passionate in his desire to help those who had so little. She was privileged to have met him, to have loved him, and to know that he would give his life for those he protected.
For these reasons, Dara knew that, if they got out of this alive, she’d be helpless to deny him anything.
CHAPTER 15
Matt snapped awake. He heard Hadi talking in Pashto and as he raised his head, he shot a look in the boy’s direction. Dara was sitting at Hadi’s side, holding his hand. Quickly, Matt dragged himself upward, biting back a groan, his damned knees complaining.
“I was going to wake you,” Dara said quietly, looking up as he came over.
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