The Empty Quarter

by David L. Robbins

  “That’s enough time.”

  Berko faced Arif.

  “We’ll do it.”

  LB turned for the hut, Berko with him. Arif hung back.

  Berko asked, “Are you coming?”

  “No.”

  LB imagined it was his wife that was going to get torn into. He might not be able to watch, either. He said before walking on, “We’ll keep you posted on how it’s going.”

  Arif drove a hard finger at the dirt under his sandals.

  “It will be done here. In the open.”

  “What?”

  Arif lifted his finger to the desert sky. The night chill laced around LB. Arif wore only a T-shirt and cotton trousers. He was thinly dressed, yet he smoldered.

  “You have said more drones are coming. If that is true then you, Sergeant, will be standing next to me, not behind the walls of the hut.”

  Berko raised a conciliatory hand. “I’ll ask my commander.”

  “You’ll tell him. I want the American diplomat, as well. And the Yemeni spy.”

  “Why?”

  “Are you still bargaining with me, Lieutenant?”

  “Just explain it so I can tell them.”

  “It is hard to have faith in you. In Afghanistan we were your allies; I saw the CIA at work then. I saw it again tonight. Also I have lived among the Yemenis. They, too, are a treacherous people. I will trust all of you better if you are beside me.”

  Berko and LB took this with them into the hut while Arif faded into the ring of men and guns.

  Chapter 36

  Inside the battered mud walls, Josh waited for LB and Berko to step through. The lieutenant was distracted by a radio conversation with Juggler. Josh took LB’s elbow.

  “What’s happening?”

  LB told him Arif’s demands and reasons. Meanwhile the young lieutenant finished reporting over the radio. He pulled off his helmet to brush a hand over the crown of his head. The kid, honestly trying to figure out the right things to do, had a chiseled All-American look, and Josh patted his shoulder.

  “Lieutenant. Sometimes on the bayou we rode alligators. It’s just like this here. You can’t hold on. You can’t let go.”

  Berko strapped on his helmet, finding no insight from rubbing his pate or from Josh’s try at empathy. LB walked close, the other two PJs flanking him. The princess lay unattended, and no guns pointed out of the hut. Berko shook his head.

  “I can’t send you out there, LB.”

  “You don’t have to. I’ll go.”

  “You think Arif will do what he said?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Berko gestured to Josh.

  “Any ideas?”

  “He’s given his word in a lot of directions. We’ll see which one he keeps. Either way, I’m in.”

  Josh turned on the Yemeni in the corner.

  “Khalil.”

  The spy would not look up. He pulled his jacket tighter as if it could protect him.

  “No.”

  With both hands, Josh hoisted the spy off the dirt floor. Khalil swayed, unsteady on his feet. Josh drove him against the mud wall, ignoring the sting of his own wounds. None of the pararescuemen intervened.

  “Walk out or get dragged out.”

  “I did my job.”

  Josh shook him against the wall.

  “And I did it with you. That’s why we’re both going.”

  Josh didn’t let the Yemeni loose but kept him upright with one fist balled in the jacket. He swung Khalil into the doorway and propped him there, like forcing a child to face the mess he’d made. He let Khalil go but rammed a hand before his eyes to warn him to stay. Josh turned for LB.

  “Let’s get the Stokes.”

  Berko shucked his M4 across his back. “We got it.”

  “You’re going?”

  The young lieutenant flung a quick glance at LB, who nodded, curt and visibly proud.

  “We don’t work alone.”

  Berko got on the radio, advising Juggler of his tactical decision and handing over command of Mouse and Jamie. He trailed LB to the rear of the hut to prepare the princess.

  Josh moved behind Khalil, edging him into the open, where tribesmen gathered and headlights swirled.

  Chapter 37

  Arif created a smaller ring of trucks, men, and guns.

  He ordered one of the pickups with its lights shattered to move to the center of the dirt track. He dropped its tailgate. This he lit brightly with the headlamps of the two remaining technicals that had their bulbs, plus all four tires, still intact. Arif collected the five Ba-Jalal brothers, two dozen Abidah tribesmen out of the trenches, and Qunbula Hossain of the Sai’ar from the roadblock. He conducted them into a circle around the open surgical theater he had made. The rest, he left to guard the mud hut front and rear.

  The American sergeant, the diplomat, and the Yemeni emerged as Arif had ordered. The large lieutenant came out with them. He and the diplomat bore Nadya’s litter between them, the husky sergeant walking beside her carrying bags of blood and fluid.

  The ring parted to let them through. The men, all Muslims, gasped at Nadya’s nakedness, her left leg exposed above the groin, her arm and face bare. They muttered over the strange clamp biting into her hip and the vermillion-stained wrap. It could not be helped that she would be viewed openly this way by the tribesmen. Motionless inside the litter, white in the garish light, she seemed made of marble—a fallen, broken statue. The Americans lifted the basket onto the lowered truck gate. The sergeant who would do the operation doffed his helmet, rifle, and backpack and set another pack on the truck bed close at hand. The others did not know what to do with their weapons.

  Arif walked into the lights. “Put down your guns.”

  The diplomat tossed a white-handled pistol from under his sweater into the truck bed. The lieutenant was slow to discard his rifle; he leaned it against a truck tire where he might get to it if he lived two seconds past the need of it. The Yemeni had no weapon; he looked lost and without purpose.

  Arif approached the stretcher on the table of the lowered gate. The sergeant stepped aside. Arif leaned over Nadya to lay his bearded cheek against hers. She did not stir. He listened to her breathing, stricken by her breasts against his chest.

  The sergeant tugged him by the shoulder to stand erect.

  “I’ll do my best. Let me get started.”

  “Is she conscious?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Did you give her more drugs?”

  “I can’t depress her blood pressure any further. She’ll have to put up with some pain, if she can feel it.”

  “My wife is a strong woman.”

  “I don’t know you well, pal, but I guessed that.”

  “Sergeant. You are aware you cannot fail.”

  “We understand each other. Now back up.”

  The sergeant laid open his heavy medical kit. Arif withdrew from the stretcher. His place beside the sergeant was taken by the young officer.

  Arif continued to retreat, catching himself from a stumble.

  In the formation of men around him, Arif knew the name of only one. He, Mahmoud, came to walk him away.

  Chapter 38

  Berko had said PJs don’t work alone. But LB was alone with the weight of many lives across his shoulders.

  He had only himself to turn to. He watched his own hands dig into the med ruck, grab the correct tools: forceps, a syringe pack, a vial of antibiotic, a bag of TXA clot inducer and an IV, a suture kit, sterile gloves, scissors, a headlamp. LB flowed through the first steps of preparing Arif’s wife for surgery, making definite movements. He took heart from himself.

  Stripping off his leather combat mitts, he jutted his nose at Khalil.

  “LT. Grab him.”

  The big lieutenant spun th
e Yemeni to face the stretcher. Behind his black mustache the spy had gone white as the princess. He’d need evac within the hour, tango two. LB handed him a unit of blood, the third bag the princess would absorb, and a fresh sack of saline. Both drained into the same IV.

  “Hold these.”

  “What am I doing out here?”

  “Holding these. Shut up.”

  LB snugged the internal straps of the Stokes litter around the princess. He tugged the elastic band of the headlamp around his brow, then stretched the gloves over his hands. He tossed Berko a pair to do the same, gesturing at the syringe and small vial.

  “Give her one mil ertapanem.”

  Berko tore into the syringe package. Quickly he drew from the glass tube one milliliter of the powerful antibiotic. The lieutenant stuck the needle into the princess’s deltoid while LB rolled up the burqa’s left sleeve to start a new IV for the TXA, tranexamic acid. The drug would promote platelets in her remaining blood to slow the bleeding during surgery and after.

  LB wasted no time. Out in the open, with Arif and twenty-five guns watching from a close circle, there was nothing to be gained anymore by stalling for the Predators.

  The team freq buzzed in his ear.

  “Lima Bravo. Juggler.”

  LB hit the PTT with the back of his sterile hand.

  “Juggler, go.”

  “LB, can you do this?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “Trying.”

  Electronic silence wavered long enough for LB to think Wally had signed off.

  “Lima Bravo.”

  “Go.”

  “Don’t drown. Charlie Mike.”

  “Charlie Mike. Out.”

  LB inserted the new IV catheter into the princess’s left arm, finding a vein more quickly than before. He plugged in the TXA, handing the 250 ml bag to Josh. The diplomat held his gaze for a beat.

  “You get us out of this, I’ll join the GAs. I swear.”

  “That supposed to be an incentive for me?”

  LB left the big diplomat grinning uncertainly. He leaned close to the princess’s moon-gray face.

  “Can you hear me?”

  Her head lolled to the side. She hummed a low meandering moan, but she wasn’t lucid enough for LB to give her anything for the pain. She was effectively out of it.

  “Okay.” He said this to himself, though Berko and Josh echoed, “Okay.”

  He lit his headlamp. With the scissors, he snipped away the sodden gauze wrap, laying bare the bullet hole.

  Bruised and serrated skin rimmed the entry wound, a larger and more jagged puncture than LB had expected. The princess had been in the back of the Mercedes when she got shot; likely, the round had passed through the car, which flattened the jacket before hitting her. On the inside of the thigh, he found the exit wound the same, a nasty oval tear from a flattened bullet.

  Using his fingers, LB spread apart the lips of the hole. A purple-black jelly smacked inside: congealed blood. Using forceps he plucked out three sopping gauze pads stuffed deep. He released these to the sandy ground. Slowly, the hole began to fill again with blood.

  LB dabbed a clean gauze pad into the puncture to dry it and get a quick look inside. The muscles of the princess’s thigh had puckered, her body’s attempt to close down the bleeding tunnel. LB levered in the forceps to pry the wound open, a blunt dissection. The princess stirred in the stretcher. Without being told, Berko clapped hands on her legs. The diplomat freed his own hands, giving the clot inducer bag to the Yemeni spy, allowing him to press on the princess’s shoulders. Josh whispered to her a soothing, hushing noise.

  LB paused, withdrawing the forceps. He looked up from the wound to exchange worried looks with Berko.

  He’d come to the end of his paramedic skill; his unit did a few nights a year in a Vegas hospital ER, but never in the surgical suites.

  LB was aware of his own heartbeat. Berko must have suspected this, because the kid nodded. “You’re good.”

  LB couldn’t just put on a show of cool to help a wounded soldier keep his; he needed more than fake confidence. He needed the tangible steadiness that came with the real thing. A slow pulse and an unwavering hand. Deadly composure. Or he had no chance.

  He drew a long, slow breath and closed his eyes. LB recalled himself a young man staring down a rifle scope, hidden in a green and steamy tangle of leaves. The settling of his nerves, the unerring sense of the trigger, a different uniform, the one shot, a result every bit as bloody as what he opened his eyes to now. He reached back for more, the same, over and again in many jungles and years.

  The irony was not lost on him. He was calling on the deaths he’d collected as a soldier for the calm as a PJ to save the princess, himself, and the men waiting for him to act. LB exhaled as he’d been trained to do twenty years ago as a shooter, soothing his pulse and breathing, pacifying his hands. He gave himself over to the inevitable, the old feel of the trigger pulled, the bullet away. He grew still, and his heart receded.

  LB put those memories behind him, where they lived in a shallow grave.

  “Okay.”

  Once more, Josh and Berko repeated this.

  LB inserted the gauze pad again, soaking up the rising blood, then spread the thigh muscles with the forceps. With his left index finger, he prodded the wet walls to peer into the confusion of the bullet hole. He worked the forceps left and right, weaving his headlamp in search of the blood vessels, prodding at the layers of yellow fat and blood-starved meat. He steeled himself against the pain he must be causing; the princess groaned but lay motionless under strong hands. Was Arif being held back, too?

  Less than an inch below the skin, two reddish-brown ropes crossed the wound’s path. LB widened the jaws of the forceps to angle his finger deeper, to slip under and ease the pair into better view. The femoral artery traveled down the leg sandwiched between the vein and nerve. If either the artery or the vein had been sliced in two by the bullet, it would have retracted like a snapped rubber band, impossible for him to retrieve. LB held his breath and curled his finger, gently tugging both blood vessels into the beam of his headlamp.

  The tubes were rubbery and flat, each a third of an inch wide, without enough blood to inflate them. Both were plainly vessels. One felt thin and pliable, the vein. The other was more brawny: the femoral artery. LB emptied his first relieved breath. Neither blood vessel had been cut. Next, he needed to determine the damage.

  “Berko. Loosen the CRoC. Just a little.”

  The lieutenant backed off on the clamp, one turn, then another.

  In the crook of his finger, LB sensed a feathery pulse. The thicker vessel came alive, swelling on the princess’s desperate heart. The thinner vein remained unfilled, waiting to carry blood out of the leg.

  LB strained the forceps as wide as he dared, risking a rip in the princess’s flesh. Again she muttered. Across her shoulders the diplomat shushed and cooed. LB nudged the pair of vessels further into the light of his headlamp.

  The warmth of blood dribbled over his gloved fingers. The artery had been rent by the bullet on the right-hand side, to the inside of her thigh, as it burrowed through the leg. A small flap, less than an inch long, rose and fell, mouthing blood with every quick pulse. LB tucked his thumb inside the tear to mark it. He waited more seconds for the vein to fill and stiffen, letting the princess bleed. In moments, the vein responded and swelled, showing no leak. LB let it slip off his finger back into the ugly hole.

  “Crank it down.”

  Berko turned the CRoC’s handle. The throb and bleeding in LB’s hand halted.

  His headlamp flashed across the anxious faces of the diplomat, Berko, and the Yemeni.

  “It’s the artery. The vein’s good.”

  The diplomat asked, “How bad?”

  “Seven or eigh
t stitches.”

  “You’ve done stitches, right?”

  On flesh wounds, on skin. Using both hands. Without his own life on the line, plus the lives of five others. With not so many guns aimed straight at him, from a lot farther away.

  “Hold her leg down. Tight.”

  The diplomat shifted from the princess’s shoulders to press down on her knee, while Berko checked the bags of blood, fluid, and clot inducer, all in the arms of the Yemeni. The LT located a pulse in her right groin, lifted her eyelids, then lay the back of his hand against her cheek to check her temperature, clamminess, color.

  “She’s hanging in. Like he said, she’s tough.”

  Out of the suture set, Berko handed LB a curved needle trailed by twenty inches of white nylon thread. With the tips of the forceps, LB gripped the eye of the needle.

  Keeping his thumb inside the damaged flap, LB wiped the wound dry with a sterile pad. The Yemeni leaned in close, a pinch to his eyes. Was this remorse for the princess, fear for himself, a lack of faith in LB?

  “It’s Khalil, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Khalil. Lean the fuck back.”

  The hand that moved the Yemeni away was Josh’s.

  LB tugged lightly on the artery to test its elasticity. If he pulled too far, the tear might lengthen and rip the vessel more. The artery gave him some play. It felt gristly, lined with muscle.

  He exhaled, long-winded. The wound had filled again, but he could do nothing to stop it. Along with the artery, the bullet had slashed an uncountable number of smaller blood vessels. The leg was a reservoir of unmoving, deoxygenated blood, and though the CRoC was as tight as it could be, the wound would continue to weep. With gauze LB dried the jagged opening as best he could, then added to the crimson pile growing at his boots.

  He eased his thumb from the cut in the artery. The flap closed. Quickly, before the blood could rise again and blind his hands, LB dipped the needle near the left extreme of the fissure. It had done him good to snap at the Yemeni spy; the sound of his own aggravation was a familiar thing and reassuring.

  The needle pierced the shell of the artery. LB pushed it through delicately; if he shoved too deep into the collapsed artery, he might prick the opposite arterial wall. If this happened, he might sew the vessel shut. A practiced surgeon knew how to avoid this danger. LB knew only that he had to.