A black combat helicopter patrolling the aftermath thudded above slowly. She saw the dark visors of the crew.
Watching the scene.
In that instant, her answer had been delivered, although it would not be revealed to her until later.
Samara looked upon Ahmed.
Tenderly she slid her hands under the sheet.
Lovingly she collected her son.
The old women admonished the relief workers who tried to take him from her and pushed them back.
Ahmed was weightless in her arms as Samara began walking through her devastated city to the morgue.
The old women followed, beating their chests with clenched fists, shouting prayers as others joined them to form a death procession.
As they passed from neighborhood to neighborhood, weary soldiers, fingers on triggers, eyed them, scanning them for signs of an insurgent ruse.
They glimpsed Ahmed’s small hand that had escaped his death shroud, as if to reach for reason in a time and place where it did not exist.
Helicopter gunships continued to hover directly above Samara as her tears fell upon her dead son.
In the time after, people from the hospital, neighbors and kind strangers from relief agencies helped her.
Samara had a vague and mixed memory of what followed.
She’d been taken to a room in the local mosque.
Muhammad and Ahmed were naked, side by side on tables where the old women guided her in washing them for their journey to paradise.
152 Rick Mofina
The women prayed as the bodies were cleansed.
Then they were wrapped in cloths and placed in coffins.
The next day the coffins were secured to the roofs of cars, draped with flowers and driven slowly in a pro cession to a cemetery on the bank of the Tigris River, one of four rivers said to flow from Eden.
The coffins were lowered into a single plot to rest together, father by son. Samara’s friends struggled to keep her from throwing herself into the grave.
Depleted of life, Samara refused to leave the cem etery.
Hours passed, day turned to twilight, which turned to night and prayers. The old women understood and watched over her. Covering her with blankets and shawls.
When a new day approached, they made her tea and brought her bread. They sat with her in silence, contem plating the Tigris, a river as old as time.
A river that knew great sorrows and great joys.
A river that held the answers.
And as the sun broke, the old women answered the call to prayer, leaving Samara to gaze upon the Tigris.
Statue-still, she was a portrait of pain.
Numb, alone, disconnected from the world, Samara was being transformed.
Every passing second, every tear, every beat of her broken heart, brought her closer to an awful knowledge.
The chant of the old women completing the morning prayers ended. Without invitation, one of the oldest among the mourners took her place next to Samara and took her hand.
Gnarled fingers wrapped in leathery, sunbaked smooth skin traced the lines of Samara’s palm. The old woman studied it in silence for a long moment.
Then she spoke to Samara in an ancient dialect.
She had known Samara’s mother and her grand mother, she said, knew her people, that Samara’s tribe was descended from Bedouins, near the disputed region.
Samara will soon go there.
She will return to her people and the desert because the next stage of her life is there.
It is already foretold, here. The old woman gave Samara’s hand a gentle squeeze.
In the weeks that followed, Samara journeyed to the cemetery every day to contemplate her loss, the river and the old woman’s prophecy.
A few months later, she made inquiries to interna tional relief agencies.
Samara asked favors of influential doctors who knew diplomats, who could expedite matters as she prepared to go to the desert, to find whatever awaited her there.
24
The Rub al Kahli, Empty Quarter, Arabian Peninsula
The battered Land Rover and Mercedes trucks, each bearing the star symbol and lettering for a global relief agency, lumbered over the great dunes.
Occasionally they vanished in the sandstorm as they pushed deeper into the no-man’s-land straddling Yemen and Saudi Arabia’s Ash Sharqiyah, in the Eastern Province.
The two-truck convoy was on a rescue mission that had begun two days earlier. A twin-engine plane ferrying rig workers to the Gulf of Oman for a Dutch oil company spotted the remains of an attack on a Bedouin encampment some three hundred kilometers southeast of Abaila near the Yemeni border.
Nowadays, camel caravans were rare and Bedouin tribes seldom wandered this deep into the Empty Quarter. The desert in this isolated part of the world was among the most forbidding on earth, covering some half a million square kilometers with fine, soft sand and sand sheets. The region was largely waterless, un inhabited and, until the 1950s, was unexplored. Now, it
Six Seconds 155 was early summer, season of the shamal, the severe northwesterly winds which produce the most blinding and suffocating sandstorms ever known.
The Empty Quarter was a lawless zone ruled by terrorist gunrunners and extremist rebels. Local gangs routinely kidnapped tourists, foreign oil workers or travelers and held them for ransom.
Failure to pay resulted in beheading.
After traveling a day and a night and aided by a tem peramental GPS, the small search party had reached the reported location. It was not likely they would find sur vivors, the flight crew had warned.
It was dangerous proceeding as the winds hurled wall after wall of sand at the trucks, rattling windshields and hampering visibility. The relief workers were led by an Egyptian doctor from Cairo. Then there was a Brazilian, who’d left his job as a Sao Paulo banker, a young female American death-penalty lawyer from Texas, and an Italian soldier from Venice.
Out of the hot swirling sand-laden winds, which had blotted the sun, a large piece of fabric, a remnant of a tent, suddenly enshrouded the Rover’s grill, flapping madly on it like a traumatized victim as the party came upon the carcass of an animal, its stiffened limbs pointing skyward.
“Looks like a goat,” said the soldier, stopping the Rover. Pulling his head scarf around his face and stepping into the storm, he leaned over the carcass and saw it was not a goat but the corpse of an old man. He had been disemboweled. The soldier said nothing as the wind slammed against him. He knew the work of the group behind the crime. They would find no survivors here. When the soldier returned to the truck, he said to the others, “Let’s keep moving.”
From Ethiopia to Algeria, Kurdistan and Sudan, each of the relief workers knew the horrors visited upon the dispossessed. The stare of a dead child’s eyes, the stench of a corpse, the colors and textures of human organs, torn limbs, the feast of maggots on a decapitated human head, all were common experiences for them.
They were acquainted with evil.
As expected, they’d found no survivors among the several dozen victims of what was an attack by a fun damentalist extremist group of bandits. Many of the victims had been beheaded after they were tortured. “That is their signature,” the soldier said as they searched for documents and identifying items that would be recorded in a regional data bank at Riyadh. Even the camels, sheep and goats had been killed.
The toll was four men, six women and eight children aged two months to thirteen, according to the doctor’s estimates.
Bedouins were camel and goat herders, a vanishing people who, for centuries, had been nomadic from Af ghanistan to Sudan. Although some tribal vendettas carried for generations, this attack exceeded any perver sion of tribal law, sect or creed.