Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

He was not Clooney. He and Davila weren’t on the set of Three Kings , and things had just gone from very bad to the brink of catastrophic.

“Easy, Davila, take it easy, I’m here!” He ripped open the package he’d selected and then another with an alcohol swab. The swab was pathetic, but that’s what he had. Plucking a long needle with a red stopcock at one end from its packet, he moved to Davila’s left, counted down his rib cage past the bandage over the groove the bullet had left, found the space between the fifth and sixth ribs, gave the site a quick swab?—

And then he eased in the needle, felt the slight hesitation and then give as the needle pierced the lung’s lining, slid the needle from its catheter, opened the stopcock, and?—

And then it really was just like the movie. There was a long, drawn-out ssss as trapped air escaped. Five seconds later, Davila pulled in an enormous breath, let it out, pulled in another, let it out. On the third inhale, his eyelids fluttered as he struggled to focus and then slid his right hand around the wrist of John’s free hand.

“Wuh.” His voice was thick, groggy. “Wuh?”

“How’s your breathing now?” Carefully twisting the red stopcock to the closed position, he tore off strips of tape and secured the catheter in place. “How are you feeling?”

Davila’s color was coming back fast. “Bedder,” he croaked then cleared his throat. “Better. Wuh…what…”

“You tell me.”

“It was just…all of a sudden. I was walking around.” Davila swallowed. “Then I got this sharp pain.”

Crap. “Yeah, I think you have a rib fracture from where the bullet hit. Let me have a listen and then I’ll check your dressing.” Placing the flat diaphragm of his stethoscope over Davila’s chest, he closed his eyes, heard the steady movement of air in and out on the right. Air was moving on the left, too, but more softly: not with a whoosh but a muffled huh .

He took down the bandage. The wound itself was unchanged. No bubbling, no new blood.

“You dropped a lung. A tension pneumothorax. The hole could be very, very small, there all along and leaking air. That would account for your shoulder pain. Or a sliver of bone from a rib fracture was jostled loose when you got up and started walking around. Or just bad luck, a bleb that decided it was time to burst because that sometimes happens to young, athletic guys. Here.” Crouching, he hooked his hands under Davila’s arms, mindful of the injury to the left biceps, and helped the other man until he was upright. “Let’s get you back into bed.”

“Yeah.” Settling back onto the cot, Davila let out a small groan. “Side really aches. How long do we have to keep that needle thing in?”

“For a bit. We’ll have to make sure it doesn’t kink. If we were in a hospital, I would have put in a chest tube, attached that to a pleural drainage unit, and left you be. The unit maintains a constant low suction to keep any air that leaks from collecting in the lung space. Since we can’t leave the stopcock open all the time, that means air builds up, and eventually it’ll be hard for you to breathe. Like putting a hand on a balloon when you’re trying to inflate it. Press hard enough and the balloon will never inflate.”

“What do I do now? Wait until I can’t…” Davila frowned. “You know, this reminds me of this movie. George Clooney was in it. Only he wasn’t the one who got shot.”

“Three Kings.” He explained about Clooney’s mistake then said, “But the principle’s the same for you as it was for the character Mark Wahlberg played. Soon as you feel like you’re short of breath again, you twist open the red stopcock and let out the air.”

“Probably the closest I’ll ever come to fame.” Davila cleared his throat again, though his voice was stronger, his tone steadier. “For how long? Like all night? All tomorrow?”

“Probably at least for the rest of the night. Even if you doze off, you’ll wake up when it gets too hard to breathe.”

“Like having a stuffy nose.”

“Like having a stuffy nose. Tension pneumothoraxes often resolve on their own.” He held up his wrist. “Started a stopwatch to see how often you need to release air. You should do the same. Over time, the intervals ought to lengthen, but I can’t be certain. What you really need is an x-ray, which you actually might get sooner rather than later.”

“Oh? How you figure?”

“I activated the bat-signal.” He detailed what he’d found in the van then said, “I don’t know much about sat phones other than they work pretty well even in bad weather.”

“So, help might be on the way,” Davila said.

“ Might isn’t the same as is , especially with the snow, but let’s hope so.” He snapped off his latex gloves, one after the other. “At least to get you off this rock and to a hospital for an x-ray and maybe a proper chest tube. Might not be as horrible as we think, but you can get that arm taken care of, too, and some decent IV antibiotics.”

Davila watched him put away his gear and then, after a few seconds, said, “How did you know?”

“That there was trouble? The kid.” In the excitement, he’d forgotten about the boy. He turned, found the kid wedged into a corner. A Glock lay in the middle of the container where Matvey had dropped it. Sheesh, Worthy, how’d you forget a thing like that? Scooping up the weapon, he jacked out the magazine, checked the chamber then locked the slide. “Kid fired off a couple rounds. Must’ve figured I couldn’t hear him shouting.”

“I don’t remember even hearing a shot,” Davila said. “In a tin can like this…”

“Yeah, the blast would’ve pretty loud. In the morning, we might even find the holes where the bullets punched through.”

“Smart kid.”

“Saved your life.”

“Yeah. Think it’s about time you cut off those zip-ties?”

He did. “Matvey,” he said then mimed that the child should hold out his wrists. “You did good.” What was the word? “Khorosho.” Slipping his knife under the plastic loop, he cut the zip-tie around the child’s wrists. “Khoroso.”

“Spasibo.” As the boy rubbed his wrists, a tentative smile twitched over his lips. “Spasibo, Chawn.”

He wished he knew the Russian for don’t mention it. Instead, he beckoned the child to follow and sit with them. “Here,” he said, holding the boy’s sleeping bag open. “Stay where it’s warm.”

After a pause, the boy ventured closer then made a salaam gesture, bowing low, pressing both hands together before taking John’s hand in his and kissing it. “Spasibo,” Matvey said. “ Tenk-oo , Chawn, tenk-oo .”

“Hey, it’s okay, it’s nothing.” He was embarrassed. Pulling his hand free, he said, “You don’t need to do that. I don’t own you.”

“Hate to break it to you,” Davila said, as the boy cocooned himself in a sleeping bag, “but I think the jury’s out on that.”

“Mmm.” He changed the subject. “Listen, it’s impossible for me to say if and when this pneumo will get better. Could be a day or two. Could be a week. Could be you don’t get over this until you get a proper chest tube.”

“Meaning life will suck for a while.”

He nodded. “Although you could argue having a life to think is sucky is better than none at all.”

Davila chewed on that for a moment. “What if this gets better?”

“You mean, as in you don’t need to let out any air?” He shrugged. “We can run the experiment of leaving the stopcock closed and see. If you make it through a day without trouble, then I could pull it.”

“If you did, could I keep going?”

“Keep going,” he repeated, the words coming automatically until his brain caught up. “As in go with me?”

“Yeah, as in go with you.”

“Honestly? Probably not. If there’s a piece of bone floating around in there, the same thing could happen again.”

“But it might not.”

“Maybe.”

“That didn’t sound very optimistic.”

“Because maybe no can also mean maybe yes . Davila, all you did was walk around in here. I don’t think you’ll be up for a lot of hard mountainous trekking or even a bouncy ride back to Dushanbe without someone sitting next to you the whole time. On top of everything else that’s happened, you dropped a lung . If I’d been even five minutes later…”

After a moment’s silence, Davila said, “What about you? What are you going to do when help gets here?”

Actually , John thought, it might be more accurate to say what he’d do if help got there. For such a small word, that if was huge . Their bat-signal might not bring anyone at all. If he’d been in charge and picked up an SOS, he’d check the area out first, maybe do a flyover with a drone as soon as the weather cleared.

I could make some sort of SOS. He’d seen a movie about a pilot who’d crashed in the Arctic. Who was the actor? Definitely not an American…but why did he keep thinking of Hannibal Lector? The actor wasn’t Anthony Hopkins, he was pretty certain .

He was startled from his thoughts by a quiet sss. The sound was like the movie hiss of a cobra. His watch read 17:39. “Not bad.”

“Easy for you to slay.”

“Listen to him,” John said. “The Sphinx makes a joke.”

“Savor it. One a day’s my limit.” As Davila reset his watch, he asked, “What were you thinking about? And don’t say all the years you wasted stamp collecting.”

He was tempted to point out Davila’s second joke in less than thirty seconds but bit back on the impulse. “Hannibal Lector.”

“Seriously?”

“Scout’s honor.”

“I don’t think we’ll be here long enough to be the next Donner party.”

“Oh, ho, look at you . Well-read and all. And here I thought you were only a muscle-bound hunk.”

“ Now who’s stereotyping?”

“You’re right.” He held up his hands in surrender. “My bad. I’m sorry.”

Davila waved off the apology. “What does a cannibal have to do with us?”

“Naw, I was trying to figure out the actor.” He explained about the movie. “I’m thinking that stamping an SOS into the snow would be a good thing to do. That, and keeping those bat phones charged. Sooner we get you off this rock, the better.”

“The sooner help gets here, the sooner you’re off this rock and back on track. John, if it’s possible, you have to go on. I don’t know what your relationship with Captain Keller was, but I do know that she’s counting on you.”

I loved her with all my heart. Words he had never said and now would not say because they would do no good and, in the end, were nothing more than words. Besides, he had failed when she’d most needed him.

“This where you give me an oorah pep talk?” Turning away, he busied himself with pouring bottled water into a pot. “About comrades in arms?”

“Just stating the obvious.” After a pause, Davila said, “What happened, John? There wasn’t an after-action report on whatever you guys were doing.”

“There wouldn’t be,” he said, tearing open a soup packet and dumping the contents into the pot. “Because there was no report.”

“And why was that?”

“You’re not a dumb guy, Davila.” He stirred water with a camp spoon, watching the crystals dissolve. “Why do you think?”

“Off the books. Something deniable.”

“Very good. Give the man a gold star.”

Davila ignored the jibe. “What was it about? The mission?”

He debated for a half second then said, without looking up, “Our mascot. Or, rather, kids like him.”

Davila’s eyes narrowed. “I wondered about that. Him.” He inclined his head toward Matvey. “I know he’s more than just a pickpocket. I was watching you when he came up in the restaurant. The way you looked at him…as if you recognized him. Not him -him, but what he is or was, and you almost said something, something you were almost positive about. What was that?”

He debated. Decided, finally, the hardest thing to run from was the past because that was always just over your shoulder. “Around his eyes. Where it’s kind of dark, smudgy? You can still see the ghost of it, like black eyeliner.”

Davila nodded. “I noticed that. It isn’t dirt?”

“No, it’s kohl.”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“Very black eyeliner. Leaches into the skin if you’ve been doing it for a long time, but boys like him go really heavy on the makeup.”

“What do you mean, boys like him?”

“Like… him .” He avoided saying the boy’s name; he didn’t want the kid to know they were talking about him. “They dance.”

“Oh.” Davila frowned. “Dance…like ballet? Or, like, a club?”

“Closer to a club. Boys like him dance for grown men and do…” He made a vague gesture. “Other things.”

He saw the moment Davila got it. “Seriously?”

“As a heart attack. They call them…” He almost slipped and said it in Pashtun. “Dancing boys in English. Or chai boys, if the Taliban’s information mi nistry’s putting out the information. Different words, same idea.”

“John, how do you even know about that?”

“Because that boy and others like him?” He let out a long sigh and noticed, only in passing, that the container had warmed enough for his breath not to steam. “They’re why Roni got herself killed.”