As soon as the nearly equatorial sun had with its usual great acceleration fallen below the western horizon, a doctor, corpsman, Holworthy, and a dozen special forces from a platoon of Commando Jaubert boarded an NH90 helicopter resting on the Siroco’s aviation deck. Six commandos at each side door went in and took their seats in less than thirty seconds, not because it was necessary but because that was how they did it when it was.
The Commandos Marine were at least as impressive as the SEALs. Their selection process, if not their training, was harder; there were fewer of them; and they spoke perfect French, even if not to the standard of the Academie Française. The doctor, corpsman, and Holworthy walked up the rear ramp. Although the medical personnel carried heavy duffels, the interior was already set up with an ambulance’s worth of equipment, and body bags.
Holworthy had gone over a map with the pilots, but at their signal he would come forward to guide them on the approach. As the engine started and the blades slowly began to rotate, the doors were closed and the ramp lifted. Holworthy didn’t know much French, and couldn’t even get the gist of the various commands and responses. None went over the radio. Communication with the air boss on the ship was by hand signals exclusively.
When the engines were running smoothly, the helicopter lifted from the deck and sidled over the sea. Then it pointed its nose down slightly and gathered forward momentum and altitude as it flew toward the coast. As the helicopter cleared the beach on a night with no moon, Holworthy heard the command assombrir, meaning to darken. When the NH90 left the anchored ships, the sailors on deck followed the almost hypnotic red light under its belly and watched its dirty exhaust trailing into the distance. But as soon as the command was given, all external lights were extinguished and the interior grew as dim and red as a photographic darkroom. The light before a raid was always both comforting—in that it was calming—and terrifying, in that the dim red color was suggestive of blood and fire. Holworthy and his French counterparts had long been conditioned to see red light as a precursor to battle.
The helicopter flew at almost 200 mph, 50 to 60 feet above the ground. No trees or structures on its route were higher than that, and it could safely follow the terrain so closely because the pilots had night-vision helmets. The engines of military aircraft are more powerful than those of their civilian counterparts, and it is impossible not to feel the difference. Inside, the NH90 was functional and rough—webbing straps, drab partitions, racks, handles, folding seats, a cable hoist. And no one was so inexperienced that he was nauseated, as he might have been, by the helicopter’s deliberate swaying and tacking to protect itself from antiaircraft missiles and ground fire, even if the latter would be largely ineffective against the NH90’s armor. The desert below seemed empty but for a few wild camels visible to the pilots through their night vision goggles. As the beasts, stampeded by engine noise, loped along in the dark, the ghostly white tint given to them by the night-vision goggles made them look otherworldly, and its infrared caused their humps, the hottest parts of their bodies, to look like arc lights on legs.
After a long stretch, Holworthy heard, “Zero minus dix,” his signal to come forward into the cockpit. Soon after he arrived and donned a night-vision helmet, he saw the central escarpment in the distance, and soon after that he thought he could make out the narrow canyon that split it. With the announcement, “Zero minus trois,” Holworthy heard a chorus of rifle bolts pulled back and then the loud sound of their release and rounds expressed into a dozen chambers. Looking back, he saw the commandos lowering their night-vision equipment.
As Holworthy guided the helicopter to the spot where Rensselaer had gone over, it swept back and forth from side to side for about forty-five seconds, scanning for enemy. As far as anyone could tell, the plateau was deserted except for the bodies of the dead, which Hadawi had failed to retrieve. Spread about like boulders, some had died on their knees and then fallen forward as if praying, though not in the direction of Mecca. One was draped over his tripod-mounted machine gun. Everyone in the helicopter knew that when he got out, despite the night wind, he would have to deal with the stench.
As it was landing, the helicopter rotated 180 degrees after the CO of the special forces called out “Treuil!” (“Winch!”). Until corrected, the pilot had forgotten to land with the winch on the side facing the defile. At touchdown, the side doors opened and the commandos jumped out, racing to form a perimeter, some leaping over bodies. Followed by the doctor and the corpsman with a litter attached to a line playing out from the winch, Holworthy and the commando CO went to the edge. The French had agreed that Holworthy would go down, and he was about to. Already in harness, he clipped onto the cable. The four men looked into the defile. None of them had night vision, but they could make out the ledge below, and that a form lay upon it, absolutely still.
*
Rensselaer would not have felt the cold of night, just as toward the end of the day he hadn’t felt the heat. He was beyond that. No longer on an alternately freezing and burning rock ledge in the desert of a country—a whole region of the world—that offered little but one kind of suffering or another, he was on a terrace with Katy. In the distance, snowcapped mountains were blindingly white. The terrace was surrounded by geraniums, roses, and evergreens. It overlooked a valley thick with pine, fir, and palm trees. Royal palms rose as high as cedars, and thousands of date palms showed patches of saffron where immature dates had begun to form in clusters. The sun was strong in a flawlessly blue sky, but a cool wind blew over Stephen and Katy as they reclined on chaises.
He had suffered the heat and the cold, but then, when suffering was over, she came to him and brought him to this place. It had been unnecessary to try as he had to will her into his mind’s eye, when she was merely waiting for him to release. And when he did, he was with her, and in such equanimity that he was not even shocked by its perfection.
So little was left of Rensselaer by the time Holworthy reached him that the mythical twenty-one unaccountable ounces of his soul were just about to float up between the rock walls to be taken by the wind. Holworthy, the cable supporting him, and one knee on the ledge, leaned forward and put a finger on Rensselaer’s neck. Expecting to feel cold, hard flesh, he was surprised to feel the heat of a high fever. The pulse, however, was so weak that in combination with the high fever it hardly promised that Rensselaer would live.
“Litter!” Holworthy called. It was lowered to him. He positioned it against the cliff face in preparation for rolling Rensselaer into it. This would be very difficult. First, he struggled to put webbing around Rensselaer’s waist, and then clipped it to the cable, should Rensselaer slip from either the ledge or the litter before he was tied in. As Holworthy started to turn Rensselaer toward him, he found resistance from the head. “Don’t fight me,” he said. “I’m putting you in the stretcher.” There was no answer. Holworthy traversed a foot or two left and felt around Rensselaer’s head, which had stuck to the rock.
“Médecin! Médecin!” he called up, tilting his head back.
“J’arrive!” He heard, and the doctor began to rappel down on a separate line anchored in the helicopter.
When he arrived on Holworthy’s right, Holworthy said, “His head,” and pointed. The doctor pushed off from the ledge and sailed around Holworthy to examine Rensselaer.
“We have to get him quick,” he said. Then, feeling around Rensselaer’s head, he added, “I don’t want to open the wound. I don’t know if it’s surface or not. But I may not be able to prevent.” He took a suture kit from a pocket and extracted the thinnest thread. Then he carefully put the thread behind Rensselaer’s head, and in a sawing motion used it to cut through the hardened blood. When he was done, he said, “Okay. Not bleeding,” and he and Holworthy got Rensselaer onto the stretcher, strapped him in, and signaled above. The winch moved slowly, lifting Holworthy and the stretcher, which Holworthy kept level and away from the cliff face by planting his feet against the rock, walking up, and pulling the litter out toward him. Three men hauled in the doctor as he walked up the rock in the same way.
Holworthy was not even aware when the soldiers who had made a perimeter around the helo boarded it. As it lifted and tilted, the doctor and the corpsman moved Rensselaer from the wire litter to a more comfortable stretcher. They took his vitals, hooked him up to a monitor, and ran an IV into him. The doctor examined the back of the skull. “We clean, stitch, antibiotics, and it’s finished. The fever may go with hydration. We have to X-ray, et cetera. He may have internal injuries. Spine, brain, hemorrhage.” He put on gloves and glanced at the monitor. “He’s already coming back a little.”
The helicopter picked up speed and climbed. As it did, and all kinds of good things were running into Rensselaer’s veins through the IV, he awoke. He saw the doctor, and then Holworthy. The first thing he said, in a hoarse, barely intelligible voice, was “Who are they?”
“French.”
“The hostages?”
“Safe.”
“You should have left me there.”
“Why?”
“It was Eden,” Rensselaer said, and then retreated back into the dream.