Brother's Keeper

by C. E. Smith

  There is movement uphill from the bombsite. They duck behind the SUV. Burkett grips the AK-47. Nick looks at him, then reaches over and snicks the safety catch. Either on or off, Burkett can’t tell.

  Asadullah, the teenager from the neighboring compound, works his way over the scree.

  ‘Maybe he’ll help us get out of here,’ Burkett says.

  ‘I wouldn’t count on it,’ Nick says.

  ‘He could at least point us in the right direction.’

  All they know of their location is that they’re maybe twenty miles from Allaghar. The boy might know about military bases or nearby villages.

  ‘Now that he’s seen us,’ Nick says, ‘who’s he going to tell?’

  The boy kicks the still smoking debris. He squats down to pick something up and then tosses it aside. Burkett and Nick wait for some acknowledgment but receive none.

  ‘Hey there,’ Burkett says.

  The boy mutters in Arabic, hardly looking up from where he squats.

  ‘He says he can get us a cell phone,’ Nick says.

  ‘In exchange for what?’

  The boy answers before Nick can interpret the question.

  ‘He wants the rifle,’ Nick says, nodding toward the AK-47 still in Burkett’s hands.

  The boy blows the ash from one of the chaupar game pieces, intact but for an amputated fin. He stands, pocketing the draftsman. He points at the rifle and says, ‘Kalashnikov.’

  ‘Phone,’ Burkett says, forming one with his thumb and remaining little finger.

  The boy speaks, a sort of conspiratorial excitement in his voice.

  ‘It’s a satellite phone,’ Nick says. ‘At his family’s compound. His brother­in-law uses it to talk to the fighters.’

  ‘The fighters being the Heroes of Jihad,’ Burkett says, his head throb­bing all of a sudden. ‘If they have a phone, why didn’t they use it to call for help when their baby was sick?’

  Nick asks the boy. ‘Apparently they did,’ he says. The boy is speaking volubly now, apparently telling a story. ‘They were advised to come to you.’

  They follow the boy along the path toward his family’s compound. Nick takes the rifle from Burkett, removes the clip, checks the breech and passes it back to him. They won’t give it to the boy till they have the phone.

  When they reach the compound, they wait in the eaves while the boy goes inside. He could easily betray them, but they still have the gun, and Burkett can’t imagine him giving it up for the glowering jihadist married to his sister.

  A woman in a burqa emerges from the compound. She stands outside the closed door, perhaps scanning the tree line from behind her mask, perhaps staring directly at them where they hide. It can only be the boy’s sister, the mother of the baby, and as she and the boy approach, Burkett sees that she is the one carrying the phone. They slide deeper into the woods, out of view of the compound.

  The woman has hardly begun to speak when she stops short. They can’t see her face, but no doubt she’s registering their bandages, the short­ened digits, the gaping wound in Nick’s scalp. A moment passes and her voice comes whispering from the burqa.

  ‘Her husband is in Allaghar,’ Nick says. ‘She’ll wait while we use the phone.’

  ‘I thought we were keeping the phone,’ Burkett says. ‘Tell her we need to take it with us.’

  ‘Her husband will kill her if we take it,’ Nick says, already dialing.

  His first call is to Beth’s cell phone, which sends him directly to voice-mail, and Burkett steps away and turns his back during Nick’s professions of love and assurance of safety. After hanging up Nick dials an operator and reaches the US embassy in the capital. The embassy transfers him to an official who seems irritated when they can’t give their address, even though the compound doesn’t have one, and even though Asadullah pro­vides the exact distances from Allaghar and the southern pass. It would seem to be enough, since they were the target of a drone attack just last night, but the process of locating them, much less extracting them, seems beyond the capability of anyone in the embassy. After burning twenty minutes of battery power – much of that time on hold – Nick is told to hang up and wait for a call from someone named Anders.

  While they wait, Burkett learns from the woman that her baby has begun to crawl. He feels a twinge of pride at the thought of that makeshift enema.

  All at once a powerful nausea takes hold of him. He walks away from the others and grips a tree branch and vomits against the bark.

  Nick and the boy watch him with blank expressions. The woman turns away and, lifting the hem of her burqa over a pair of tattered military boots, she steps up a small embankment to distance herself from Burkett, either from courtesy or disgust or some combination.

  Through a break in the foliage, they have a view of the compound. Burkett suggests she silence the phone, so no one from the house can hear it, but she already has. How often does her husband use the phone? What are the odds of his arriving home and discovering its absence?

  The phone buzzes and she passes it to Nick. Burkett leans close enough to hear the man on the line, Anders, who asks for their birthdates and social security numbers. He proposes a rendezvous three hours from now in a valley about four miles away. He gives the co-ordinates, no doubt assuming they can use the GPS in the phone.

  ‘It doesn’t have GPS,’ Burkett says into the phone. ‘We’re going to leave it with its owner.’

  It would be better not to draw Anders’ attention to the family, the jihadist brother-in-law: no reason to add the possibility of a drone attack to the threat of domestic violence. Burkett sees that Nick understands.

  ‘We have a guide,’ Nick says into the phone. ‘A boy who knows the valley and can take us there.’

  Anders seems to accept this. ‘How long will it take you?’ he asks.

  Nick converses with the boy and then says, ‘An hour.’

  The woman stays behind with the phone, and Asadullah leads them back to the bombsite. They keep to the trees, knowing the explosion could have attracted others. At the stream Burkett kneels to fill his water bottle. He starts at the sound of a voice, a groan of pain from the weeds nearby.

  Despite obviously broken legs, one of the jihadists has managed to pull himself down the embankment toward the stream. From the trail of blood and matted grass it seems he’s crawled at least fifty yards. Burkett doesn’t immediately recognize Sajiv’s face behind the mask of blood.

  ‘Careful,’ Nick calls from downstream.

  Sajiv stops crawling. He clutches what must be a wound in his abdomen. Burkett rolls him onto his back, expecting the worst, perhaps an eviscer­ating laceration, but there is nothing of the sort. Burkett doesn’t notice the grenade till he takes Sajiv’s wrist to check his pulse. Metal clanks in the dirt. Burkett runs, shouting for Nick and Asadullah to do the same. He feels the explosion against his back without ever hearing it.

  23

  Nick has him in a fireman’s carry. He stares at the backs of Nick’s legs and the ground moving below. He glimpses Asadullah in the lead, strapped with the Kalashnikov half his height. Faced with the need to carry Burkett, Nick must have decided it was easier to trust the boy than deal with the added burden of the gun.

  Burkett might have remained unconscious if not for the pain. His hand, his throbbing headache, the deep lacerations in his back and thighs: pain from everywhere seems to pulse not with his heart but with Nick’s footsteps. Even his nausea seems to rise and fall as he bounces against Nick’s shoulder.

  Fireman’s carry. It’s the name of a popular wrestling move, one of the very first he and his brother ever learned.

  He explores the wounds he can reach with his good hand. He feels coagulated blood on the makeshift bandages and wonders how long it took Nick to get the bleeding under control.

  These lacerations will need irrigation and debridement. If th
e shrapnel carried fragments of cloth or dirt through his skin, he’ll likely develop an abscess.

  His groans prompt Nick to stop and lower him to the ground. After less than a minute he lifts him again, now on the opposite shoulder, but Burkett cries out, begging to be put down. This side hurts so much worse than the other (the shrapnel must have fractured his femur) that he can’t hold back his screams and finally Nick obliges him by changing shoulders.

  It seems to Burkett that they’ve walked much farther than the four miles mentioned by the man on the phone. But the pain no doubt magni­fies his sense of time, and it is difficult to contemplate distance when his view is limited to the ground at Nick’s feet.

  Burkett is slowing them down. The pain of his fractured femur is unbearable. He asks to be left behind but Nick doesn’t acknowledge the question. He’s speaking to the boy about the Kalashnikov. A gun is a curse rather than a blessing, he says, or something like it. Burkett catches only fragments of the Arabic: a tool of sin. In the Ingil, Isa al-Mesih, Jesus the Messiah, taught his followers to love their enemies.

  They stop on reaching a well trodden path, and Asadullah points them downhill. Nick lowers Burkett to the ground while listening to the boy.

  ‘He says to turn right at the bottom of the hill and follow the stream to the clearing.’

  ‘Easy enough,’ Burkett says.

  ‘He says he thinks Allah will bless him for helping us.’

  ‘I hope he’s right.’

  Nick has his back to Burkett. He faces uphill, his feet staggered. He shakes the boy’s hand and thanks him.

  The back of Nick’s shirt bells. He jerks backward and comes off the ground as if yanked by a rope. The crack of a gunshot echoes past them.

  It takes all of Burkett’s strength to prop himself on his good knee and turn Nick onto his back. Nick’s mouth guppers in a froth of blood. Burkett places his finger on his neck and catches the final throbs of an irregular pulse. He tears off Nick’s shirt to reveal the wound, a small hole with little blood. Burkett stacks his palms against the sternum and begins a rapid sequence of thrusts.

  The boy squats in the greenery and points his Kalashnikov into the dis­tance. Burkett thinks with the boy’s help he might be able to drag Nick to the rendezvous. He feels ribs crack under his weight. With each thrust warm blood spurts from the wound. The bullet must have ripped open the heart or aorta.

  There is another gunshot. It follows by only an instant the splintering of bark to the right of the boy.

  Asadullah shoulders his rifle and grips Burkett by the wrist and begins dragging him down the hill, pulling with both hands. The narrow path forms switchbacks, which the boy attempts to bypass by scrambling straight down the incline, and when its steepness becomes too much for him he loses his hold, and Burkett tumbles in jolts of agony over the stones and roots. The boy follows, sliding on his backside and holding the Kalashnikov in his lap.

  Burkett knows the boy will have trouble dragging him on the flat terrain. He manages to stand on his good leg, using the boy for balance. Together they hobble toward a copse of trees. He tries to keep his right foot from touching the ground, but the effort of lifting it – the shred­ded muscles pulling against fragments of bone – seems just as painful as letting it jostle against the ground.

  Just beyond the treeline they come upon a high banked creek. The boy tries to ease Burkett over the edge, but Burkett falls on his injured thigh. He shouts despite the boy’s urging for silence. He lies in the mud hoping to wait out the pain. The boy gestures toward a mangrove leaning over a bend in the creek.

  ‘Let me have the gun,’ Burkett whispers. The boy has no English, but it’s clear from his eyes he understands. If Burkett has to lie here and wait for the sniper he might as well have a way of defending himself. But the boy turns away, taking the gun with him.

  Burkett crawls the short distance on his elbows. The mangrove roots splay over a depression in the bank. He pulls himself through a gap in the roots just wide enough for his emaciated body. It is a kind of damp grotto and between the roots he can see the trickling stream and the opposite bank.

  In the distance, perhaps a hundred yards away, a man in a white shirt appears in the creek bed. It is Tarik. He stalks downstream over the smooth stones, his khakis wet to the knees, and his rifle at his shoulder. He pauses and seems to stare directly at Burkett.

  The mangrove is an obvious place to hide, the first place Tarik would check. If only the boy had left him the Kalashnikov. He’d have a momen­tary advantage shooting at Tarik from behind the thick roots. Nothing would give him more pleasure than to shoot Tarik, the man who cut off his finger and killed Nick and probably Owen as well.

  The clearing, the site of the rendezvous, is downstream, and Burkett wonders if he should try to make a run for it. Can he hope to reach the clearing in time? Probably not – and even if he could he has no way of knowing when or if the helicopter will even arrive.

  Tarik crouches at a burst of automatic fire, waits a beat before starting upstream away from Burkett.

  Is the boy just eager to shoot his new gun? Or is he trying to draw out Tarik? He should have just returned home. Whatever he felt he owed Burkett, he more than paid it by bringing him this far. Why must he put himself in more danger?

  Burkett pulls himself from the cavity under the tree. He crawls on his forearms over the stones and trickling water. He starts at the report of another gunshot, a single pop from the sniper rifle. From much farther away comes a sputter of automatic fire.

  The creek merges with a larger stream, perhaps the very stream that ran past their compound. Burkett makes his way to the center, where the current helps carry him over the stony bed. It isn’t long before he reaches the clearing, gentle slopes rising on either side of the stream. He drags himself into the field of mud.

  A puddle holds his reflection: a bearded, gaunt face he hardly recog­nizes. If not for the blinking eyes it might be the face of a cadaver staring up from an unfinished grave. He hears the helicopter before he sees it: a sperm-shaped silhouette in the nimbus of its propeller. He turns back to the water just as his reflection vanishes in the downdraft.

  24

  At an outdoor table Burkett and five other physicians are drawing self-portraits. It’s the sort of infantile situation he’s come to expect at Sapphire Meadow, the Appalachian facility where he’s lived these last five weeks. Only three more before he graduates – assuming he passes his drug screens and shows up for therapy and lectures.

  Burkett has drawn a figure in repose, the head turned to the side. It’s the setting that gives him pause. Is he lying in that basement cell, or his bed at the army hospital? He’s drawn himself on the left side of the page, the perspective from directly above. A subconscious decision, leaving so much blank space on the right: a place for a roommate.

  He is tempted to draw an identical figure in the same bed – that strange presence he felt the night of the explosion. The neurologist ascribed that experience not to some spiritual or sexual visitation, but instead to the rare phenomenon of hemineglect – an injury to the right frontal lobe that prevented him from recognizing the left half of his body. Scans of his brain showed subarachnoid blood over the right hemisphere and, sure enough, a tiny infarction in the frontal lobe. Presumably the blood prod­ucts caused vasospasm, abnormal clamping of the arteries. He considers himself fortunate: a larger stroke might have left him with the permanent problem of having to share his body with a stranger.

  Or perhaps the figure he’s drawn isn’t lying in a bed at all, but on the floor of that helicopter, shoulder to shoulder with Nick. The team of Navy Seals might not have gone to the trouble of retrieving the body, but Burkett told them Nick had been one of their own. And they wouldn’t have even found the body if not for Asadullah, who came upon them waving a white flag and boasting that he’d singlehandedly fought off a sniper.

  Burkett glances at the s
elf-portrait to his right, a work undeniably superior to his own. Rory Bird, an anesthesiologist, shades orange the flames engulfing a figure near the center of the page. Bird is no artist, but the fiery detail suggests he could do better than dots for eyes. Or maybe that is the point: maybe he’s trying to say something about how addiction destroys personality.

  ‘Have you applied yet for your Tennessee license?’ Rory asks without looking up from his drawing.

  ‘Finished it this morning,’ Burkett says.

  Of the six physicians spending the months of March and April at Sap­phire Meadow, Rory Bird, at thirty, is the only one younger than Burkett. He’s been trying to persuade Burkett to move to Nashville. He says there’s no place like it for a single man. If he could measure a city’s concentra­tion of female beauty, Nashville would rank higher than any other. Rory’s medical training has taken him to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, but none compares to Nashville in what he calls ‘per capita pulchritude’. Another selling point is Rory’s father, a physician-entrepreneur who owns a chain of imaging facilities. He’s offered to hire Burkett in a full-time role supervising the patients during their scans.

  Their therapist, a slim woman in her thirties, strolls around the table appraising their self-portraits. She mumbles her admiration of Rory’s personal inferno. She pauses behind Burkett and says, ‘Dark,’ as though it were a compliment.

  ‘I haven’t filled in the colors,’ he says, though he doubts he’ll bother finishing it. Even if he weren’t expecting Beth Lorie any minute, the self-portrait has begun to seem like a lost cause. He started with the idea of keeping it simple: lines and curves, a man lying still. But lying where? The problem, if he were forced to label it, might not be the setting so much as the man’s perception of it. How with pencil and paper can he convey this nagging idea that the world around him is artificial, the objects and people like projections on a screen? Or his fear that if he looks too closely the illusion will fall away and he’ll see the screen itself?