Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders
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got up an inch and sat down, the way women do to shake off a subject from themselves. Above the trees to the west the sky was the color of amber, liquid and dirty from the marketplace stalls.
“What exists, Lucius? I ask you why you brought me up here, and you tell me a story about dead Viet Cong, about the soldiers of God. You tell me it’s real. What is real?”
“Sacrifice.”
“For you? For me?”
“Love.”
“Who were the Chinese on the roof?” April asked him.
the next afternoon they took off again, the pilot flying low above the ruinous desert country to the east, shaped by wind, through the jagged peaks and chilly, verdant valleys to the landscape of rocks that was home to the mujahedin. The flat, rocky ground came up to meet them, the pink horizon rocked back and forth, and April grabbed Burling’s hand with a disarming strength that reminded him sharply of the night before. At first she had led him, for which he was grateful, but as soon as he felt her with nothing between them, all the impediments around them ringed like forces held at bay, he’d begun to believe he was truly in love. What a fool I am, he thought.
“What is it?” she asked, drawing back.
The wheels banged across the slabs of the landing strip, jolting him out of his dream. The airfield had been built by the British after the war, part of their own misadventure in this remote, empty place. The plane shimmied as the engines and brakes dragged it down, then choked to a stop before a rusting Quonset hut. A hundred yards along the tarmac sat a Chinese military plane, with a Land Rover parked beside the tail. When the pilot opened the hatch there was no sound but the wind.
A rumpled guard roused himself from his seat against the corrugated steel of the hut, scratched his new coils of beard, and dragged his rifle out to see Burling’s papers of introduction, his bona fides from Jack. Somewhere a piece of metal banged against itself.
“How did the Chinese get here?” April asked.
“Overland,” Burling said. “The borders are pretty porous up here, but they can’t fly that plane into Samarkand.”
“I don’t see them, though.”
“I know. Neither do I.”
April tried to ask the guard in her limited Dari, a language of which she was proud for the very obscurity of it, but the guard was like a man waiting for a storm: as Burling’s papers flapped before him unremarked, he kept looking at the featureless sky. Abdul Hadi climbed from the plane and watched her with dark-eyed contempt.
Where had he been last night? she wondered.
“What on earth possessed you to learn a language like Dari in the first place?” Burling asked as they waited. “Apparently even the natives don’t trust it.”
She could see that Burling was trying to place the guard.
“They didn’t tell me that at Georgetown,” April said. The guard uttered a few rusty, atonal syllables she didn’t understand. “They were more about Pashto, the language of the rulers.”
“Did he say that they were coming?”
Abdul nodded before she could open her mouth, and suddenly her irrelevance coursed through her like a shock. The guard seemed to be suppressing an emotion, although it was unclear if the twitch around his mouth was mirth or rage.
“He speaks the languages, too,” she whispered fiercely to Burling. “Apparently some that I don’t.”
“There are a lot of them,” he said, “but I don’t trust him as far as I can spit. Come on. Roy!”
He hailed the pilot and turned toward the plane, but before he took another step they had begun to hear the sound of a small band of men riding down from the hills—not a sound exactly, but a sudden disturbance in the ceaseless wall of wind, the creak that is made by tack flailing the muscles of lathering horses. The pilot, smoking by the wing of the plane, reached for the holster on his hip, but Burling made a damping motion with his hand. Shapes emerged from the brown pack until each was an individual rider and animal, bearing down across the hardpan in a clatter of hooves and drawing up, veins bulging in necks dark with sweat. April watched them with her mouth half open, her hands raised slightly from her hips as if she were about to appeal to them for something. Mercy was the word in her mind. The air had stopped in her mouth. Saliva seeped from the insides of her cheeks, but her throat was bone dry. This was the first place she had been where she knew that being American didn’t matter.
The leader, who rode a bay stallion two hands taller than the rest of the horses, dismounted in a whipping of cloth. The loose jacket of April’s suit lifted in the wind, chilling her. Her hands were plunged deep in the pockets of her pants, stretching the coarse cotton across her hips and the backs of her thighs. She had always been strong, tough; her physical qualities had served her well while making her different and hiding her mind, her emotions, from men in particular. Burling had seemed to cut through those traits: while he clearly admired her body, wanted her openly like a younger man would, he seemed genuinely moved by her manner, intrigued by her mind. He made love as she’d thought he would, carefully, restraining, controlling a massive emotional and physical force. He moved forward now, a grim smile set on his face. The wind stung April’s cheeks. Slowly, he and the leader looked each other up and down. In a moment they were shaking hands vigorously and nodding, the leader looking to his comrades and flashing his gleaming white teeth, pointing and laughing as if he’d won a bet.
“Abdul!” The leader, an uncle to Jack’s power forward, gave the man a kind of greeting that April had seen in Kabul, grasping both shoulders, shaking him. “Come.”
“You stay here with Roy and the plane,” Burling told her, sotto voce. “If you see Abdul Hadi come out of that Quonset hut without me, he may have sold us up the river.”
“What do we do then?”
His eyes met hers as if to say that no matter what happened, it had been worth it, but she wasn’t so sure. Something told her that his own romantic dream would survive, with her as only a memory.
“I want to come with you.”
“That would be more dangerous than staying here,” he said. “I’m doing this for you, believe me.”
“Burling!” the leader said heartily. “We go?”
Together they started toward the hut.
The other riders drew their mounts together, the smallest man holding the reins of the leader’s incredible horse. April shuffled back toward the wing of the plane, where the pilot was smoking a cigarette. The mujahedin—because that’s what they were, “the soldiers of God” whose names she had taken in vain the night before—were nothing like she’d expected: up close, they were scruffy and rancid, with nervous faces and intense, dark, sorrowful eyes—not mountain lions at all, but scary in the way of stray dogs, unpredictable. They reminded her of hollow boys back home.
April said a few words to them in Dari, and they replied with a slur against women. The pilot, Roy Breeden, raised his eyebrows at her.
“They say they want to rape me,” April told him, although that was not exactly what they’d said. “I think a stake may be involved.”
“Like a Joan of Arc number?” Breeden squinted through his smoke.
“I could go for that maybe, if they didn’t smell so bad.”
The pilot took a pensive drag. A scar cleaved his upper lip, and when he smiled it made his mouth look like a beak. “These boys might not take you up on it,” he said. “They’ll be fed grapes by seven thousand virgins if I shoot them right now.”
April looked at the mujahedin. Suddenly their shifty demeanor seemed more menacing than before. Lucius had used the word “sacrifice” about them, equating it with love.
“What a load of shit,” she said aloud.