The road shimmered in the early morning, the sun’s angle still low enough to reflect. Not penetrate. Along the margins, scrub-covered terrain materialized out of the dawn, a prickly array of drab color. The truck’s undercarriage creaked, and the Mack truck air conditioner spewed chunks of ice. He slowed when he reached the marker Antonelli had given him as a reference, a road sign showing the distance to Wad Rawah as twenty-one. Only somebody had crossed out twenty-one and scrawled thirty-three. It could be that the original version was wrong. Or it could be that somebody felt the need to convert miles to kilometers. Then again, maybe the town had just moved. They were nomads, after all.
Davis looked for a turnoff, but didn’t see one. No road, no sign with an arrow, no building in the distance. Nothing but a rocky path on one side that meandered off into the desert. It looked jarring, but Davis decided this had to be the place. He yanked the steering wheel hard right, and a lousy road turned into a raw trail. The truck bounced and groaned, left a rooster tail of dust as it pounded over ruts and loose stone. A minute later he arrived. From a distance it looked like a Boy Scout jamboree, a small city of canvas and wooden poles and rope, all situated in the lee of a large hill. The tents were the open air variety, no sidewalls, some at least fifty feet wide. Military grade, he guessed, probably surplus from a war. Iraq or Afghanistan. Maybe Korea.
Davis parked the truck, and resisted a suburban urge to lock the doors. There was no entrance to the compound, no front or back or reception area. It was just an amoebic outpost of hope in the middle of a godforsaken desert. He searched under the tents — or more accurately, tarps strung tightly over stiff wooden poles — and saw Dr. Regina Antonelli at the side of a bed. Only it wasn’t a bed, but rather a blanket on the sand. Around it, fifty other blankets. And in the next tent fifty more. There were a few raised cots, perhaps reserved for the most seriously ill. But only a few.
Antonelli spotted him and waved. Davis maneuvered carefully through what seemed like a human minefield. The condition of the patients was all over the board. Men and women. Young and old. Expectant mothers waiting for their joyous hour. Stricken old men waiting for God. He could discern a few nurses, though no two wore a common uniform. He could tell them apart by the simple fact that they were standing and working. More telling was what was missing. There were no gurneys, beeping monitors, or IV poles. In fact, aside from the patients and blankets, there wasn’t much to advance the idea that this was even a clinic.
He watched Antonelli inject something into the arm of her middle-aged patient. His black skin glistened in sweat, and his breathing was shallow and uneven. Davis stood at the foot of the blanket and waited for her to finish.
“Welcome to Al Qudayr Aid Station,” she said, beginning to write on a chart. “I will be with you shortly, Mr. Davis.” When she finished writing, Antonelli set the chart in the sand near her patient’s foot. “We have a great deal of work here.”
“I can see that.”
“On the best day, we have nine nurses and two doctors to care for our patients.”
He surveyed the place. “How many patients are there?”
Antonelli shrugged. “We have no time for such trivia. We simply go from one to the next. Do what we can.”
“This place seems pretty remote. Where do they come from?”
“There is a village just over the hill.” She pointed toward the high dune. “Some are from there, and occasionally a group will arrive in a vehicle. But most—” she gestured toward the scrubland, “most simply come in from the desert. They walk in, sit down, and wait.”
The man in the bed coughed, a weak, wet expulsion. His gums were bleeding and his lips were blue. Antonelli looked at him forlornly, turned away, and began walking. Davis followed. A woman lying in the sand reached out as Antonelli passed, probably more in reflex than hope. The doctor threw out a practiced smile of patience, then dodged her like a soccer player avoiding a tackle. When she was outside the tent, Antonelli paused and stood still.
Her gaze was a faraway blank as she stared at the empty desert. Antonelli clutched her arms to her chest, and he could see anguish in her eyes, weariness in her posture. He was struck by how different she seemed, not the tough-as-nails woman who’d confronted a squad of armed men yesterday.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she replied too quickly. “I did not invite you here to perform counseling. Judging by your performance yesterday, I doubt you would be very good at it.”
Davis said nothing.
She clutched some more, twisted her shirt sleeve up to wipe away a tear at the corner of one eye. Antonelli then looked at him more thoughtfully.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should not burden you with my problems, Mr. Davis.”
“It’s okay. And call me Jammer.”
She looked at him questioningly, then tilted her head in the direction of the patient she’d been tending. “Dengue fever, day six. His circulatory system is shutting down. I don’t think he is going to survive.”
He looked over his shoulder at the man on the blanket. He didn’t look good. Davis had seen death before, but not the kind that came in places like this. Not on this scale. He considered what to say, and only one thing came to mind.
“How can I help?”
The wailing voice beckoned, a tin warble from a cheap speaker outside the hangar. Fadi Jibril eased back on his heels, thankful for the distraction. He had been up all night, taking only one brief respite on the cot near the back wall. The parts from Hamburg had still not arrived, so he’d been slugging through software validation. He was comfortable with the code, getting good results, but there had been little time for integration testing. Jibril was neck deep in a fault injection series when his tired thoughts were mercifully interrupted by the call to prayer.
If there was one constant in his life, one thing that remained steady and true, it was his faith in Allah. He pushed a diagram aside, picked up his Koran from a nearby table, and carefully unwrapped the protective cloth. He made his way to the sink, washed thoroughly, and started off toward the prayer room. The nearest proper mosque was in the main passenger terminal, wholly impractical for those who worked here. As such, the imam had provided a makeshift place of worship in an annex to the hangar. It was an awkward venue, gilt curtains over corrugated metal, fine rugs on cold concrete. To Jibril’s thinking, not a fitting place for holy worship. Still, the room was clean, and he could not deny its convenience, so the engineer kept with the old adage: There is no inappropriate place to pray.
He was nearing the prayer room entrance when someone shouted his name from behind. Jibril turned and saw a lanky young soldier with a wry smile on his face.
“Special delivery,” he said. Three boxes were piled on the concrete at his feet.
Jibril nodded, and the soldier turned away and trotted out the door.
Full of hope, Jibril rushed over. The parts should have arrived yesterday, and indeed probably had, but the local army contingent had a reputation for meddling with shipments. He could lodge a complaint with the imam, but at this point, he reasoned, there was little to gain. At the very least, the ruffians had never lost a shipment. None that he knew of, anyway.
The reinforced boxes were heavy, and Jibril transferred them to his work area one by one. That done, he put the first on a bench, and opened it using the claw end of a hammer. When he saw the telemetry modules inside, Jibril’s heart sank. He double-checked the model number, studied the connectors and saw a clear mismatch. He settled heavily onto his work stool and let out a long sigh. Another setback.