The Devil's Waters (2 page)

LB labored for breath climbing the hundred-yard path into the village. Behind him, the river valley thrummed with the beating rotors of
Pedro 2
hovering a mile off, the slowing blades of
Pedro 1
near the stream, and
high above, the circling HC-130 that would refuel both copters on the return to Bagram. Pausing to catch his wind, LB gazed south, where the squall crawled after them over white and russet peaks.

Doc passed him on the path. Four years younger than LB at thirty-six, Doc was the second-oldest PJ in the unit. Doc smacked him in the back on a Kevlar plate. Both men hauled almost a hundred pounds of medical supplies, weapons, communications, and armament up into the village. A breath at this height was a lot less nourishing than one at sea level.

“S’matter, old man?”

Doc ran marathons. LB lifted weights.

The Afghan teacher held out an arm, signaling that the walk was almost over. The boy’s hut lay just ahead.

Chickens scattered from their pecking at the corners of the village. A black-clad woman faded into the darkness of her hut, eyeing the passing PJs. Boys stood in doorways, dressed like little beardless men in the same woven coats and hats as their elders. Their hands, too, had begun to take on the roughness of this land, their eyes the mistrust, inheritances of such isolation. LB made no gestures, nothing to be misinterpreted. He closed in behind the teacher and Doc through the ancient alleyways of the village to a waiting open door.

The teacher entered first, bowing in greeting. Doc followed, LB behind him.

Inside, a dirt floor lay under threadbare prayer carpets. The window frames held no glass, only shutters. LB imagined the cold this household endured most of the year on the side of a mountain, night broken by homely candles, meals, and heat from a mud oven.

The boy lay in a cot on goatskins. The teacher moved to stand beside the father, who did not come forward to greet the Americans. Deeper in the shadows of the hovel, peering around the father, hid two women, drawing veils across their faces below the eyes. One, the
younger, crooked an arm over her distended belly, pregnant. The teacher explained that these were the man’s wife and widowed daughter.

Doc advanced first. The mangling of the boy’s left foot didn’t seem so bad until LB flicked on his flashlight. He caught his breath.

The outer half of the boy’s small foot had been sheared off. From toes to heel, the wound ran jagged as if bitten by teeth, not a forgotten land mine. The part of the foot the kid had left was bloated and purpled. The swelling carried into his calf. In places, the dying flesh had ruptured. A pasty pale green ooze let off a cloying, putrid stench, the signature of wet gangrene.

LB aimed the flashlight where Doc put hands on the boy. He slid his med ruck to the ground and, not pulling the light from Doc, dug in for antibiotics and morphine.

Doc laid a bare palm to the boy’s forehead to feel the elevated temperature of sepsis, then to the quickened pulse in his neck. Doc folded back the hem of the boy’s long robe, exposing the whole leg. Swelling and necrosis stopped below the knee, but were headed that way. Gingerly, Doc wrapped his fingers around the calf and squeezed. The boy moaned on the goatskins. He brought young hands over his face to cover his pain. The calf creaked, filled with gas by the bacteria devouring the foot. In the corner of the hut, the father cringed. Behind him, both women quietly cried.

Doc fired up his own flashlight to illuminate LB kneeling beside the cot, inserting an IV into the boy’s hot arm. He injected one milliliter of morphine to ease pain and anxiety. Because the kid was septic and the morphine could lower his blood pressure even more, he plugged in a bag of lactated Ringer’s to maintain fluids. Last, he piggybacked both antibiotics, penicillin and clindamycin, to slow the march of gangrene up the boy’s leg. LB rested the plastic bags on the boy’s chest. Doc held up the boy’s leg under the knee so LB could fast-wrap the ankle and calf in gauze. The boy whimpered, breaths
fast and shallow, then clamped his jaw bravely.

LB walked outside, gesturing for Doc, the teacher, and the boy’s father to join him. In sunlight, the father behind the beard appeared much younger than he did in the hovel. His eyes glowed, raw with tears and worry.

“Tell him,” LB said to the teacher, “his son is going to lose that foot and some of the leg. We won’t know how much till we get him back to the hospital. The doctors will do the best they can.”

The teacher did not look into the father’s face while he said this.

“Tell him his son’s going to live. But we have to go right now. Make sure he knows he’s coming, too.”

With urgency, the teacher repeated this.

Doc said to LB, “Let’s just lift him on that cot and carry him down.”

“Good.”

When the teacher finished translating, the boy’s father whirled in his long coat for the open hut door. Inside, he told the family what was happening. The women wailed until he shouted them silent.

Doc rested a hand on the teacher’s shoulder. “What do you teach?”

The man smiled shyly at the attention. “Reading and writing.”

“Can girls come to your school?”

“No. They have a separate school.”

“Is it any good?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

Back home in Vegas, Doc had four daughters, a wife, and a female dog.

LB turned the teacher by the arm. “Come on.”

Inside the hut, the father stood ready
at the head of the cot, the women pressed into a dim recess. The teacher moved to the father’s shoulder. LB and Doc bent to hoist the foot of the bed. Doc lent only one hand to the cot; the other supported the IV bags.

“Up.”

The four maneuvered the cot out the door. The boy, like his father, shed years outside. He was no more than eight, smooth skinned with long black lashes fluttering under the morphine. The women filled the doorway, sniffling. The daughter’s veil had gone crooked from her crying; her mother reached to straighten it over the girl’s puffy face.

“Hang on,” LB said. “Set him down.”

The men lowered the cot to the rocky path. LB walked back to the hut, curling a finger for the teacher to follow. The father trailed.

The women retreated in the doorway. The mother hurried to obscure her daughter’s face.

“Wait,” LB said, holding up a palm. “Wait. Teacher, tell them to stand still.”

The man spoke for LB. The women did not disappear into the house.

From behind, Doc called, “What’s up?”

The father rushed forward, in front of his wife and daughter. He bellowed, waving LB and the teacher back from them. LB held his ground.

“Tell his daughter to take down the veil. I need to see her face again.”

The teacher rattled his head. “This is not possible.”

“Make it possible. Tell Pops here she might be sick. We need to check her out.”

The women watched
the discussion from the doorway, with the father blocking the way. While the teacher spoke, the father waved his arms more, raising his voice in ire and pointing at LB.

The teacher faced LB with shoulders down. “He will not allow it.”

“Then tell him to look. Look at her hands. Her feet and ankles. Face and neck. He’s gonna see they’re swollen.”

The father rejected this before the teacher had finished translating.

“He says she is with child. This is natural.”

Doc piped up. “Ask him if she ever has seizures. Ask if she shakes, do her eyeballs roll up in her head.”

The father shouted over the question. He aimed a leathery finger at the boy moaning on the cot.

“C’mere.” LB pinched the teacher’s coat to draw him close. “Ask Mom.”

“I cannot speak to her.”

LB let the teacher go. He stuck his tongue in his cheek, considering what to do. He shrugged at Doc, who shrugged back.

Doc set down the bags to put his M4 into his hands. He moved between the father, the teacher, and the women. Doc spread his legs and set himself. The two Afghan men raised their voices and hands, but neither advanced on the stolid Doc, who held both at bay.

LB stepped around them to the mother. She positioned herself in front of her pregnant daughter, both with veiled faces and frightened eyes. They did not retreat, though the father hollered and pointed for them to do so. Doc kept the man back not with his weapon but with a raised, warning finger. Neighbors came out of their own stone hovels to investigate.

Quickly, LB pantomimed what he wanted the mother to do, lift her daughter’s long frock to show her ankles.

The wrinkles beside the mother’s eyes deepened as she looked at LB. After more loud objections from her red-faced husband, she nodded and spoke.

LB called to the interpreter, “What’d she say?”

“Her daughter sometimes shakes. Her hands and face are swollen, and her feet. She does not need to show you.”

LB returned
the mother’s nod.

“It’s called eclampsia. It’ll kill the baby, and maybe your girl here. Her blood pressure’s too high; we’ve got to treat it. We can fix it in Bagram.”

LB held out an arm, inviting. The mother waited for the teacher’s translation, then took her daughter’s hand from atop the girl’s belly. She left the doorway, towing her daughter. Leaving the hut, she shouted behind her into the dark.

Inside, deep in the shadows, what LB thought had been a pile of clothes shifted, rose, and ambled forward. An old man, grooved and pitted by decades of mountain wind, scuffed into the light past LB without a glance or a word. He passed the cot, patting the boy’s head.

The angry father finally closed his mouth when his wife and daughter strode past him without deference, heading down the hill. Doc slipped his M4 back over his shoulder. The teacher, father, LB, and Doc hoisted the cot. Carrying his corner, the father sulked, conflicted, until his eyes fell again on his boy, soon to lose a foot. This was not a bad man.

LB freed a hand to press the push-to-talk on his unit radio. “Juggler, Juggler. Lima Bravo.”

“Go, LB.”

“Leaving the village now. Came for two. Bringing back five.”

A pause, then, “Typical. Roger.”

The cot slowed them on the path. LB grew breathless headed down from the village, just as he’d been going up. The old man and two women arrived first at the copter. They waited outside the reach of the idling HH-60’s slowly turning blades.

The four men carried the cot close to the copter’s open door, easing the boy down. Quincy and Jamie hurried to tend to the women and the old man, who looked to have taken his longest walk in years. The father and teacher intercepted the two PJs.

Wally stepped to LB, lips pursed and skeptical, eyes masked by his reflecting shades.

“Where we gonna put ’em?”

Wally was right to
ask. There wasn’t room in the HH-60’s bay for the five-man PJ team plus this whole Afghan family.
Pedro 1
had dumped only enough fuel to evacuate the father and son. The two women and the old man were unexpected, another four hundred pounds of load at eleven thousand feet. The chopper couldn’t spill fuel while on the ground. The purge valve was located right below the jet engines. If the exhaust didn’t ignite the fuel puddled in the dirt, static electricity from the whirling propellers probably would. A fuel dump had to be done in the air. The alternative was a fireball.

Wally cocked his head. “You ever think things through before you do them?”

Wally motioned for the chopper’s engineer to hand down the Stokes litter. Reaching to his vest, Wally flicked the comm switch to
Pedro 2
’s frequency. The copter flew a bone pattern, a slow oval above the valley miles off. Framed between peaks, the storm line crept closer.

“
Pedro 2
,
Pedro 2
, Hallmark.”

When the copter answered, Wally informed the pilot to come in for a pickup. Dump five hundred pounds first.

He turned to LB. “All right. Let’s load your folks up. Me and Quincy’ll wait for
Pedro 2
. These are your patients, LB. You go with them.”

LB loosed a sigh. That had been his exact plan, to wait with Quincy for
Pedro 2
. Wally had leaped to it before he could say anything.

This was vintage Wally. The man had a nose for credit, what would get him noticed and promoted from captain to major fastest. Staying on the ground in unfriendly territory to assist the evac of a local family would make a nice little act of selfless courage, good reading in the paperwork afterward. LB was a first sergeant, not bucking for more. PJs weren’t officers; CROs were. LB was going to stay a pararescueman. He wanted to wait for
Pedro 2
so he could
stretch out for the ride back, that was all. But now that Wally had laid claim to the second chopper, LB made a plan. He considered it a game, like chess, to thwart Wally. Not because the man wouldn’t make a respectable major. Wally was a stickler and too good-natured by half, but a fine officer. Wally had guts and skills. LB just liked opponents, and Wally so often made himself one.

Jamie and Quincy herded the family under
Pedro 1
’s accelerating prop. The pilots intended to take off the instant everyone was on board. Turbulence from the squall was already cascading down the mountains towering above Rubati Yar. The teacher stayed back with the village elders and others who’d gathered by the stream. They grabbed their hats as the winds from the storm and copter built.

The valley grew noisy as
Pedro 2
neared. High above,
Ringo 53
droned, circling. Both copters were going to need refueling soon.
Pedro 2
closed to a hundred yards from the stream and slowed, showing its belly, waiting for
Pedro 1
to clear.

Because the boy would be taken off the chopper first at Bagram, he needed to be loaded in last. LB pointed for the father to climb on. Jamie and Doc followed, to help the mother and pregnant daughter climb on. Concern for his two sick kids and the approaching storm had convinced the father to make an exception for these American soldiers touching his females. Last, Jamie lifted the old man into the bay by himself.

LB shouted, “Start strapping ’em in,” and Jamie and Doc began strapping gunner’s belts around the Afghans to anchor them to the floor.