Chapter Twenty-One

The sound of the approaching aircraft changed. It was a throbbing, pulsing thunder now, like a helicopter, only faster and higher in pitch.

Blake pulled the flashlight from his pocket. Then he turned to the others, “Cover your faces the best you can, okay? It’s going to get pretty dusty.”

“What is it?” Nassiri asked.

“It’s a V22,” Blake told him. “An Osprey—tilt-rotor aircraft. It keeps its rotors forward, like an airplane’s propellors, when it’s cruising, but tilts them overhead, like a helicopter, to hover. They have selectable landing lights; they’ll use infrared here. They lit up the rotor tips just so we can see we’ll be clear of them when they come in.”

The green circles were nearly parallel to the ground now and the noise was growing.

“Listen up,” Blake said. “When they land, let them come to us. I’ve got the rifle stashed with our things, so they don’t see any of us holding a gun. But they’re deep in a country where they aren’t supposed to be, so this might become a little rough. Just go with it and let them get us on board. When they land, it’ll be too loud for us to talk.”

“All right.” It was Zari. She moved to the side and he could see she was bent forward over the vehicle’s hood, writing something.

Blake nodded. He then pointed his flashlight in the direction of the incoming aircraft and began blinking a series of rapid blinks to indicate it was clear to land. It was standard field procedure for situations in which the ground had no voice communications with the aircraft.

Now the twin green circles were parallel to the ground, even canted back slightly, very close, and they could discern the dark shape of the aircraft, almost like one of those boxy commuter aircraft, only with the two huge thiryt-eight-foot rotors whirling above it. It settled ground-ward and then hovered in a great cloud of stinging dust, the green rotor tips nearly obscured by the dust storm. The aircraft turned until the cockpit was facing away. Then the pitch of the rotors changed and the dust moved off to either side—it was oddly similar to the old movie, where Charlton Heston parted the Red Sea as Moses. As the dust cloud parted, they could see straight into the red-lighted interior of the aircraft and the first thing Blake noticed was the gunner on the ramp, standing ready behind a deck-mounted .50-caliber machine gun. Behind him was a cluster of men in camouflaged combat uniforms, one of them holding a rifle with an oversized hand guard and a long curved magazine; it took him a moment to recognize it as an H&K infantry assault rifle, a recent issue for the Marines.

That man and one other, carrying an M4 carbine, sprinted down the ramp of the Osprey and out to either side, panning the area around them with night-vision goggles. Then, weapons to their shoulders, they approached the group, the M4 covering them while the Marine with the H&K let his weapon hang by a shoulder lanyard, flipped up his night-vision goggles, and pulled a pocket computer and a flashlight from the upper pocket of his uniform. He directed the flashlight beam onto Blake’s face, then Nassiri’s, and signaled thumbs-up to the man with the M4. That man let his weapon hang by its lanyard as well and both reached out to guide the four of them into the aircraft.

WHEN THE MAN WITH the small rifle took Zari by the arm, his grip was gentle, yet firm. She looked at Nassiri and he nodded and came along with her as well, limping heavily from hours of sitting on arthritic hips, his old leather attaché gripped tightly with both hands.

Zari stooped as they passed the pile of rucksacks and bags and picked up her overnight bag—the only bag she’d brought along. The soldier guiding her shook his head and said something, but she pretended she didn’t know what he wanted, which was not true, and that she could not hear him over the noise of the engines and the rotor blades, which was true. She was banking on him being too much of a gentleman to physically remove the bag from her shoulder, and as it turned out, she was right. He shook his hand side-to-side—the universal sign language for “forget it”—and led them onto the aircraft’s ramp.

The metal beneath Zari’s feet vibrated, as if the aircraft resented being on the ground. She looked back at Nassiri and offered the old man her hand, guiding up and past the Marine who kept both hands on the deck-mounted machine gun, looking past them into the swirling dust and darkness beyond, all business.

Zari had never been on a submarine, but she imagined that the inside of the V22 was something like a submarine. The overhead and parts of the walls were crammed with pipes and tubing and the deck was dotted with D-rings set into hollows. Canvas seat bottoms were folded up against the bulkhead on either side and the entire thing was dimly lighted in red, which she knew was combat lighting, being used to preserve the nocturnal vision of the crew.

The man guiding her steered her over to the side, and a pair of uniformed crew passed her, carrying Hormoz between them; Hormoz winked and gave her a thumbs-up as they passed. They laid Hormoz on a litter secured against the bulkhead and the man guiding Zari folded down two of the canvas seats and pointed at them, lifting the shoulder harnesses as he did.

Zari helped Farrokh into a seat and guided his arms through the straps of the harness. His eyes wrinkled with pain; it was obvious his arthritis was troubling him greatly. Still, he released the leather attaché only long enough for Zari to strap him in. Then he gripped it again. Zari pantomimed giving him a shot in the arm, after which she placed her hands together and put her head against them, closing her eyes for a moment to convey the impression of sleep. Farrokh nodded emphatically.

There were three men bent over Hormoz. One was strapping him into the litter, and another was hanging an IV bag for the needle they already placed in and taped to his arm. The third uniformed man was taking a blood-pressure reading and after he’d written it down, Zari tugged on his sleeve, pointed to Nassiri’s pain-contorted face, mouthed the word “arthritis,” and repeated her pantomime for a shot to make him sleep.

The man held up one finger, turned to the man hanging the IV, and wrote something on a plastic slate and showed it to him; the other man nodded.

The man Zari went to—he looked young, like a teenager—took Farrokh’s pulse, blood pressure, and temperature, and wrote them all on a cardboard tag. He gave Farrokh an injection with a pen-like hypodermic device, checked his watch, wrote something else on the cardboard tag, and tied it onto one of Farrokh’s shirt buttons. He put a plain noise-suppression headset—the kind of thing a person would wear to go shooting—on Nassiri and offered a second set to Zari. Then the young man tightened the seat harness around Farrokh and went back to Hormoz.

Zari glanced to either side. Everyone was back on the aircraft now, and the American agent, the one masquerading as a Canadian professor, joined the people clustered over Hormoz. She remembered huddling with him under the blankets as the helicopter flew down the wadi, and felt a moment of dizziness and warmth.

Already, Farrokh’s eyes were closed in sleep, his arms wrapped around his leather attaché. Zari opened his shirt pocket, took out the small Moleskine notebook he had there, undid the elastic strap, and opened it exposing the pocket in the back cover, where he’d put the SD card.

Zari did not remove the card. She didn’t even touch it. But she took from her blouse the note she’d written on the hood of the SUV, put it next to the media card, replaced the elastic strap, and buttoned the notebook back into the old man’s shirt pocket.

There was a hand on her shoulder; it was one of the Marines. He motioned at the seat next to Farrokh, and she sat in it, put her overnight bag under her seat, and slipped the padded harness straps over her shoulders. The man’s lips moved; Zari assumed he was apologizing for being so close, because he put a waist-belt across her lap and tightened both it and the shoulder straps until they were beyond snug.

Zari nodded her thanks and the man got up and walked to the front of the aircraft.

Zari looked around; everyone was busy with one task or another. The man with the big rifle was talking into a boom microphone attached to his helmet and the American agent and three of the crew were bent over Hormoz. There was only one person near the loading ramp now, the person manning the machine gun.

Zari looked at the American agent. He was turned away from her now, and she waited a moment to see if he would turn, if their eyes would meet. And when he did not turn, she slid her hands up her shoulder straps and slowly, stealthily, began to loosen them.

BLAKE WAS STILL ALERT and attentive. He didn’t make the rookie’s mistake of relaxing once he was aboard the aircraft, because the fact remained the aircraft was still deep inside a country where it was not supposed to be. He’d relax once he was in US-controlled airspace.

Still, he’d been glad to see Zari allowing one of the Marines to strap her into a jump seat. With what she said about the Warshowsky woman, there’d been a moment he thought she might not come along. But now, all hands were present and accounted for and, while Pardivari was the worse for wear, they were all alive and headed for a much safer place.

He was pleased to see the flight crew was bumped up to include two Navy hospital corpsmen and a trauma surgeon. And the team knew what they were doing; they stabilized Pardivari and secured him for transport quickly and effectively, and one of the corpsmen was continually logging his vitals while the surgeon prepared a detailed brief on a ruggedized notebook computer.

Blake bent over Pardivari and squeezed his hand. The missionary grinned back and winked.

A Marine corporal tapped him on the shoulder and showed him a clenched fist on an open palm: sit.

Blake nodded, began walking aft, and stopped.

One minute before, Zari had been strapped in next to the physicist. Now the seat next to the old man was empty.

He looked both directions, blinking in the dim red light. There was no sign of her.

Zari was gone.