A grainy red horizon crept up the blackened sky as the Pave Hawk finished air-to-air refueling. The HC-130P flew less than a hundred feet in front, its four engines groaning. Then the giant transporter retracted the fuel line from the helicopter’s nozzle and the drogue basket fluttered back toward its parent like a giant floppy shuttlecock.
Maggie blinked away the last of night and gazed around the jam-packed chopper. Everywhere she looked there was a human being, sitting, sleeping, one or two simply watching the sky drift by as the wind rushed, some savoring their newfound freedom with hopeful looks and anxious smiles. The Pave Hawk was well over its limit of eleven people. But everyone understood it would be a death sentence to leave Besma, Havi or the two women behind.
Maggie glanced at Besma, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the door, stroking her little brother’s head in her lap as he slept. Although Maggie could not hear her over the whine of the twin engines, Besma’s lips moved with soothing words. The reddening daylight and the intimate image made Maggie experience a physical release, a welcome weariness softening her muscles after so much tension. Even though there were many more to follow Besma and Havi, it was a beginning. And there was no way Washington could ignore the Yazidi genocide now.
Besma’s assassination of Hassan al-Hassan was a fact that would never leave the confines of this group. No one held it against her. John Rae simply took the warm AK-47 from Besma’s hands, ejected the magazine, and set the gun to one side as he gave Maggie a knowing look. Maggie returned the same.
In the seats next to Maggie sat Kafka, in between his parents, an arm around each one of them. His mother slept deeply, the hood of her burqa pulled off, her head resting against her son’s chest. His father, the blood from the wound over his eye wiped clean with a medical wipe, stared out the open window, seemingly at peace. Kafka wore an exhausted look of serenity. He seemed to sense Maggie’s eye and turned to give her the first real smile she had ever seen from him.
There was still work to do, deactivating Abraqa, but much of that she could do on her own. And no one would be killed in the process.
For Kafka and his parents a new life would exist, once they were settled in the United States.