The Empty Quarter

by David L. Robbins

  With caution he plucked the thick artery walls apart before curling the needle upward. LB gritted his teeth and sucked, trying to sense the needle entering the narrowed chamber. He worked carefully, too much so, and blood flooded the hole again. LB stopped.

  “Mop.”

  Berko used a hemostat to pat a fresh gauze inside the wound. He dropped the pad under the truck gate.

  LB urged the needle deeper, then, making his best guess, turned it up until the point emerged on the opposite side of the split. With the hemostat, Berko gripped the needle, gently lifting it clear.

  “Pull all but two inches. Hold it high.”

  Berko raised the needle, tugging the nylon through the hole until only two inches remained. Using his fingers, LB tied a suture knot, looping the shorter thread around the taller post six times. When ready, he made a half hitch and pulled to begin setting the knot, trying to sense the correct pressure; too much and the knot would sink into the artery.

  LB drew the ends of the thread apart, tightening, thankful not to be working on the frailer vein in such tight quarters. The artery stood up against his touch and the hardening knot. He stopped, then stood erect to rest his back. The first suture was in place. He had no idea if it would hold, if he’d sewn the interior walls together, or if his nerves were going to hold out.

  “Okay.”

  Before Berko and Josh could repeat this, the princess thrashed.

  Josh flashed into motion, heaving down on her knee. Though she was tied flat, she strained violently against the straps. Berko leaped for her shoulders. Holding the needle and thread out of the way of her shaking thigh, LB let the artery slip off his index finger to disappear into the wound and protect the lone suture.

  The princess loosed a guttural howl. She arched her back, rising on her shoulder blades. She lacked the strength to lift more against the restraints and hands, and faded to the stretcher. LB leaned past Berko’s wide frame to get a look into her face. Her batting eyes showed only bare consciousness but enough to sense what LB was doing. She’d surged into lucidity to shriek at the pain, then passed out again. The spasm released, she lay still, muttering, only her shaking head free to move.

  LB had to make a decision. He couldn’t have the princess bouncing around in pain while he tried to stitch her up. It was near impossible work even with her quiet. Her torso and leg needed to be completely still, more than the straps could do. If she jerked at any moment while LB was sewing, the sutures could rip, the needle could further tear the femoral, any number of calamities. Keeping the princess motionless would take two big men, Josh and Berko. But the wound kept filling with blood, and LB was forced to sew with only one hand. He needed Berko to handle the absorbent gauze pads. The diplomat couldn’t control the woman alone, not if she kicked up like that again.

  LB could sedate her with a shot of ketamine, but her blood pressure was already perilously low. The heart might stop altogether. What if he quit the surgery right now and demanded one more time that Wally let him go with the princess in the back of a pickup? LB would ask Arif to keep his word. If the Saudi tried a double cross, Wally and the team would still have a fighting chance, with Predators on the way.

  The team freq chirped in LB’s ear.

  “Lima Bravo, Juggler.”

  “Juggler, go.”

  “What was that?”

  “She woke up. Not happy. You close enough to hear?”

  “We’re just outside the ring.”

  “Stay there, Wally. No matter what happens. I need your word on that.”

  “You can’t have it.”

  “I’m not sure this is gonna work. You’ve got to get Jamie and Mouse out if this goes south.”

  “Keep it north.”

  “Wally. No shit. Hold position. Don’t compromise the team.”

  Before Wally could respond, Berko took one hand off the princess to tap his PTT with the back of a bloody glove.

  “Juggler, Berko.”

  “Go.”

  “I agree, Captain. Hold position. Not much you can do for us. Exfil the rest of the team. We got this.”

  Somewhere on his belly in the desert dark, staring down a laser with the dot on the back of someone’s head, Wally was biting his tongue.

  “Roger. Out.”

  The transmission done, LB dragged a sleeve across his brow.

  “Thanks. He can’t stand not being the hero.”

  “What now? Knock her out?”

  “It might kill her.”

  The young lieutenant peered into the wound, already opaque with blood. LB shrugged.

  “You told Wally that we got this. What’ve you got?”

  “Nothing.”

  Standing beside LB, still crushing down on the princess’s knees, the diplomat piped up.

  “We need another set of hands.”

  LB rattled his head, knowing where Josh was taking this.

  “No. It’s her fucking husband.”

  “Exactly.”

  “He’s al-Qaeda. He’s already threatened to kill us. I do not want him standing here the next time she screams. This is hard enough as it is. Get someone else. Him.”

  The Yemeni spy could barely keep his feet, with a round through his shoulder and a rotten attitude. LB waved off his own suggestion.

  “Okay, not him. One of the tribesmen. Someone who doesn’t know her.”

  The diplomat had already taken both hands off the princess.

  “They’re all Muslims. No one but her husband’s going to touch her.”

  LB held the thread and needle and could not set them down to stop Josh from walking away. He opened his mouth to object at the diplomat’s back but Berko stepped in front, nodding that this was all that was left to them and they would deal with it.

  Josh strode directly into one set of headlights. This cast LB and the stretcher into his shadow. In Arabic, the diplomat called into the ring of men for Arif.

  Chapter 39

  Arif strained against the hands of Mahmoud and a Ba-Jalal brother. He did not fend them off; he wanted them to stop him. If he rushed to the screaming Nadya, he would sweep the Americans aside to hold her and that would achieve nothing. Better to be held back, chewing his beard, let the Americans have their chance, though his heart like a horse tried to pull him to her.

  After her shriek, the diplomat walked forward to call his name. The elder and brother let Arif go, for he had stopped his efforts to go to her. She must be dead. The Americans were going to tell him this. Now the Ba-Jalal had to urge him forward. He spoke over his shoulder.

  “Mahmoud.”

  “Yes.”

  “Be ready to kill them all.”

  Arif strode into the ring and the white lights. The Makarov rode under his T-shirt nudging him, ready to do its part.

  The diplomat greeted him. Arif prepared a fist.

  “She’s fine. She’s strong, just like you said.”

  Arif stopped in front of the diplomat. In his periphery, the circle of tribesmen whispered and weapons rattled into tensing hands.

  “Then she is not dead.”

  “No. But she’s in some pain.”

  “Relieve it.”

  “The sergeant will explain. We need your help.”

  Arif did not wait to follow. He brushed past the diplomat, until his arm was snared by a fast grip.

  “Before you do, listen to me.”

  Arif held still. The diplomat was a powerful-looking man, wounded himself, and fearless. Arif recalled Russians like this, bears of men, hard to put down.

  “What.”

  “Your wife has an awful wound. What they’re doing is not easy to look at. There’s a lot of blood. You need to let these men do their work. Stay in control, Arif.”

  “This, from the kidnapper of my wife.”

  “I want you to know I
regret it.”

  “Regret. That is a Western notion. As if to ask for forgiveness is to receive it. Islam demands tawbah.”

  “Repentance.”

  “You must sacrifice to be forgiven. Now take away your hand.”

  Arif charged to the stretcher, putting the diplomat behind him. The sergeant blocked him from Nadya’s wound. The man held a suture needle and thread. Both gloved hands were coated in red, as were the young lieutenant’s beside him.

  “Move aside.”

  The sergeant refused. “Not until I tell you a few things.”

  “Do not make me repeat myself.”

  “Or you’ll what? Really.”

  Again, privately, Arif was glad of the restraint. The sergeant was right to slow him, make him check his emotions before seeing the damage.

  “She is in pain. Help her.”

  The sergeant described the injury to Nadya’s femoral artery, the complications he faced in drugging her.

  “I need you to keep her quiet. Keep her still. Talk to her.”

  “Will she hear me?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Let me see.”

  The sergeant moved aside. The wound confronting Arif forced him back. He’d lost the hardness of a mujahideen against blood and injury. The ragged hole was worse than he’d imagined. The harsh clamp, her snowy flesh, more spilled blood, the slow rolling of her head, all made him despair again for Nadya’s life.

  The diplomat positioned himself at her naked knee to press down with both hands. The Yemeni spy kept out of the way, holding intravenous bags and looking as if he might keel over. The big lieutenant eased beside the sergeant, who nodded at Arif to do what he’d been summoned for. Hold her down. Calm her.

  Arif put his back to the Americans. He leaned across Nadya to hold her head in his hands, keeping his elbows on her breast should she convulse again.

  The first time he saw Nadya at a party in Riyadh, he knew she was Al Saud. He, a gangly and fervent boy of twenty-one, had returned from jihad in Afghanistan, she from medical school in Paris. He did not for a second think himself unworthy of her. Perhaps that was why she’d picked him. Now he watched that girl fight the agony and fear that his missteps had brought her. Nadya was innocent of all but loyalty to him. Only at this moment, after a quarter century of marriage, after prison and exile, did Arif accept that he could no longer keep her.

  Behind Arif, the Americans resumed. Nadya stiffened against their gory sewing. Above her, Arif lowered his weight. Staring into her flickering eyes, he lowered his voice and his lips, as if to kiss her.

  “Would you like your favorite story? Yes? It’s been how long since I’ve told it? Years.”

  If Nadya could hear, she could also feel the Americans jabbing inside her hip. This was awful to believe. But if so, she knew, too, that her husband stood with her.

  “In the desert, Muhammad said to his young wife, Aisha, ‘Let us race.’ He had married her when she was nine and he was a young man, but now he was old and bearded. In front of his army, the Prophet ran a race with his wife and lost. He thought this wonderful. But he fed Aisha meat, and made her fat. When they raced again, he won. And he said, ‘This for that.’ ”

  Arif whispered to her of their home in Ma’rib, how he would make her coffee every day and bread if she would teach him to bake. He would put candles in each room and fan her while she slept. After she healed they would race in the desert. “And I will win, because I will make you fat.”

  Behind him, the Americans murmured and worked at her wound. Nadya surged against them once, they all held her in place, but she did not wake enough to wail as before. She collapsed into the litter, exhausted and fully still, as if that had been her final burst of life. Arif stopped talking and for minutes only stroked a rough thumb across her cheek.

  A tap came at his back. Arif finally kissed her parted lips and turned. The American sergeant had put down the bloody needle and thread.

  “I’ve done what I can. You want to see?”

  “Yes.”

  With a forceps, the sergeant widened the wound’s red walls for Arif to peer down. Arif hid his lips behind his sleeve. The young lieutenant dabbed a gauze pad into the hole to soak away the last shining beads of blood.

  The white picket of a running suture marked the sergeant’s efforts. All eight loops were sloppy and irregular, a few millimeters apart, but they appeared firm on top of the crimson artery. Arif looked away as soon as he’d satisfied himself that the sergeant had done what he claimed.

  “Will it work?”

  “I don’t know. What if it does?”

  “I will speak with the tribes for your lives.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Then I will not.”

  The sergeant held Arif’s gaze a long moment. He seemed to imply a challenge: Let us make this only about you and me. When Arif did not accept, the sergeant shrugged as if he’d tried to take the burden for the others and failed.

  “You understand. People are going to die. They don’t have to.”

  “No one will die who does not have to.”

  Again the American stared at Arif, but differently, with an icy malice. The sergeant wanted to kill him on the spot as a way to save his men.

  Arif indicated the patch on the man’s arm.

  “That others may live, Sergeant?”

  “That’s what it says.”

  “Then let us find out.”

  “All right. LT.”

  The big lieutenant moved beside the clamp. In slow turns he reduced the pressure on Nadya’s pelvis. The belligerent sergeant broke away from Arif and used the forceps to widen the wound. He patted the wound with white gauze, then tossed the stained pad on the grim pile under the truck.

  “All the way.”

  The lieutenant spun the handle. The sergeant dipped clean gauze again, inspecting his suture.

  “There’s some seepage.”

  He watched closely into the wound, then set down the forceps to walk to the end of the basket, at Nadya’s feet. He laid hands on her cloth shoe.

  Arif threw up an arm.

  “What are you doing? Do not touch her.”

  “Little late for that. Fine. You come do it.”

  The American moved away from Nadya’s foot. He instructed Arif to take off her shoe, then pinch the nail of the big toe.

  “Squeeze hard. There. Now let go. Watch.”

  The flesh beneath the nail, already pale, blanched more under Arif’s pressure. When he let up, the nail bed pinked.

  The sergeant nodded. “We got capillary refill.”

  Arif set the shoe between her ankles.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means she’s got blood flowing through her leg.”

  “You have fixed her?”

  “No. Come here.”

  The sergeant walked Arif beside Nadya’s wound. He peered again into the wound. The torn flap lay flat under the nylon thread yet continued to weep crimson drops. The sergeant nodded to himself; this was the best he’d expected, and he may have been proud.

  “She’s still bleeding, but a lot slower. She needs a real surgeon in a real hospital as fast as she can get to one. We have to worry about that stitch holding for the trip, plus infection. Her blood pressure’s still way too low. You got to let us take her out of here.”

  Arif backed several strides from the stretcher.

  “Wrap her wound. Prepare her to travel. Then I will want a moment with my wife.”

  “Good. Okay.”

  Instantly the Americans busied themselves over Nadya. They dismantled and stowed the tourniquet clamp, plugged fresh bags of blood and fluids into the intravenous line, wrapped a clean white bandage about her thigh.

  When finished, Arif waved them away from her. He pointed to the middle of t
he circle, into the crossing headlamp beams.

  “Leave your weapons.”

  The sergeant rattled his head.

  “That’s hard to do.”

  “I intend to keep my word, Sergeant. It will be easier to argue on behalf of rescuers than kafiri18 fighters.”

  The young lieutenant walked away first. The big diplomat escorted the reluctant sergeant away from his leaning rifle. The wounded Yemeni shuffled alongside the Americans.

  All the armed Abidah in the ring and in the earthen ruts, the Ba-Jalal brothers and the Sai’ar, the two armed Americans left in the mud hut—none knew what to make of this walk away from Nadya, into the center. Some tribesmen relaxed, believing the crisis had passed; others fidgeted with their guns, an ominous clacking. A few caught Arif’s eye while they stuffed fresh qat leaves into their mouths to steady themselves for what was to follow. Arif found Mahmoud in the ring of weapons and asked for another minute. The elder dipped his long beard.

  Alone, Arif moved beside Nadya. He lapped a hand over her bare calf, withholding a cry at her barely returning warmth and color. He lowered the hem of the burqa and replaced her shoe. Nadya lay peacefully in the litter. Plastic bags rested on her waist. Arif left the veil up to bring his nose just above hers. He did not whisper but spoke as if she were strides away.

  “I bless you, my wife. I thank you. I thank Allah for you.”

  Nadya registered nothing. Without the strain of the surgery, the torture in her hip, she’d retreated deeper into her body, to rest beside the river of her flowing blood.

  Arif pressed lips to her bare forehead. He stopped himself from giving the kiss all the meaning and memory the moment called for. If he did, he would stay too long. Arif let his lips touch her skin, found all his long marriage in this, and took it as enough.

  He beckoned Mahmoud to come. The elder walked into the light, past the Americans and the teetering Yemeni.

  “How is your wife?”

  “She will live.”