part0012

The road from Al Abr to Ma’rib was long and dusty. There was nothing to see except gravelly desert, towering sand dunes and the occasional ridge of barren, ragged mountains. Yet despite their isolation, Kimberley Hustwait was glad her UNHCR Jeep had an armed escort. An armored personnel carrier of Yemen’s Central Security Organization traveled along with them. Ma’rib was a hot bed of rising Al Qaeda insurgency. There was no doubt in her mind that several attempts would have been made on her and her partner’s lives if the APC wasn’t there to protect them.

She looked over at her partner, Jean Marchand. His wiry, weathered frame sat behind the wheel, steering the Jeep over the equally weathered terrain. John Lennon-style sunglasses perched on his face, along with an expression of sophistication that only the French could pull off. Jean firmly believed he was a ladies’ man. He boasted that his French accent could get him into the knickers of any young lady he desired. He had put his signature moves on Kimberley when she first arrived in Yemen two years earlier. He soon learned that Kimberley liked men who could talk about subjects other than themselves. To his credit, after she turned him down, he had never propositioned her since.

Kimberley figured Jean had slept with a quarter of the foreign women working for the UNHCR… the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Yemen. That probably equated to one conquest every couple of weeks. She didn’t know where he got his energy from.

Despite the fact that Kimberley had not slept with him, or perhaps because of it, the two had become good friends. He respected her, and chose her for his fact-finding missioning into the middle of bloody nowhere. The Houthi invaders from the north were already causing mass displacement of refugees across the failing country. Jean and Kimberly were scouting out potential locations for displaced people camps. Locations close enough that refugees could reach them without much hardship, but far enough from the conflict to be safe. Access to the limited utilities available in this country was also a consideration. So far, they had found nothing.

“How are you holding up, Kimberly?” Jean asked. His accent was smooth, seductive… She could have almost fallen for him, if she closed her eyes and imagined his words coming from a younger, more attentive Frenchman.

“I don’t bloody know,” she snapped. Jean would often laugh at her heavy Australian accent. Especially when she slipped crass Aussie slang into her speech, such as lazy ‘mad as a cut snake’ and ‘bloody pervert’. “I wasn’t prepared, that’s all.”

“Nobody is prepared.” Keeping one hand on the wheel, he slid a cigarette from a packet of Scorpions in his shirt pocket. He had bought them in bulk during his last trip to Dubai. He placed the cigarette in his mouth and lit up. Kimberley had given up complaining about the dangers of secondhand smoking. Jean would only argue that Yemen's diesel pollution was far worse for her health. ‘Would she like the windows wound down and the heat to get in? Or endure the smoothing scent of tobacco in a nicely air-conditioned vehicle?’

Even though he asked this question often, Jean didn’t really care what she thought. He knew he was never going to sleep with her. There was no point in being nice.

“How can they do that to people?” she asked. Then she shuddered, as she remembered the scene on the road north out of Al Abr.

About fifty local men, women and children had been gunned down, execution style, on the side of the road,. Their bodies were left to rot and fester in the baking sun. She hadn’t expected to see that, not this early in the conflicts. The stench had been horrific. Yet Kimberley and Jean had managed to document it all, taking photos and making notes while the soldiers of the CSO looked over them. Much to her embarrassment, Kimberley had gagged many times. She had seen dead bodies before, even helped clean away the corpses of refugees when they died in camps. But she had never witnessed so many killed in such a brutal and pointless act of violence.

When they got back to Sana’a, an official report would be filed with the UN. She would also send her findings to her contacts in Amnesty International. They might not have stopped this atrocity, but the least she could do was expose it to the world.

Jean waved the cigarette in his hand, circling it in the air to emphasize his point. “These people have nothing. They have experienced floods, droughts and now war. They will kill if it means their own survival.”

Kimberley sighed. He was lecturing her again. She knew all this, of course. She’d been working the refugee aid circuit for five years now, through Iraq and now Yemen.

“Have a cigarette, Kimberley,” Jean continued. “The smoke covers up the stench of the dead. I know you can still smell them, even now. Scent has the greatest memory recall.”

“Jean, you are unbelievable.”

He nodded, appreciative of her words. “Oui! I am, aren’t I?”

She shook her head. Had he incorrectly translated her dig at him, or had he chosen to take it as a compliment? She could never tell with Jean. He seemed more like an aging rock star than a UN aid worker.

“Why did you decide to do this kind of work, Kimberley? It is not for everyone. There is no shame in saying it is too much, and going home.”

Kimberley remembered her previous life back in Sydney. Five years ago, she had been studying economics, politics and Arabic at the University of New South Wales. She surfed on the weekends, and partied with her mates most nights. There had been a string of boyfriends, of course. Impromptu weeks away at raves, beach parties in Bali and Thailand. Upon graduation, she received a position with an international business consulting firm, much to her parents’ delight. High powered suits, liquid lunches with the partners… An office cubicle crammed between twenty other graduates on the twenty-second floor of a slick, glass-clad skyscraper. A window overlooking Sydney Harbor, the Harbor Bridge and the Opera House. The view was spectacular. The money was okay. Life wasn’t supposed to get any better than this.

But suddenly, she quit. She moved back with her parents to save money. She dumped her boyfriend dejour, a man who loved only his work in share trading. She applied for every job she could with the UNHCR. A month later, her qualifications and language skills earned her a volunteer role in Baghdad. Her parents had almost died of fright when she told them where she was going. They begged her to stay, but there was no talking her out of it. Twenty-four hours later she was inside the Green Zone of Bagdad. Minutes later, she had already witnessed her first suicide bombing.

Life had never been the same since. Work in the Iraqi refugee camps had been hard work. She had been forced to confront and challenge everything she believed about herself. She knew most volunteers didn’t last through the first six months, but she was determined. The only thing that got her through her ordeal was the knowledge that she was making a difference. Her life was no longer about hedonism, meaningless sex and making gross profits for multinationals. Kimberley had come to realize, until she had come to the Middle East, her life before had been pointless.

“It’s not too much Jean. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Besides, if I spend one more day in the office trying to work out what the hell happened to those missing vaccine shipments, I’ll go mad.”

“Trips into the field remind you why you are here? Right?”

She nodded. Jean was good at being sympathetic when it suited him. “I hate the bureaucracy in this country. I’ve talked to every government department, in length, and no one knows what happens to it. The medicine just… bloody disappears.”

Jean nodded sagely and focused again on the road. He took a drag from his Scorpion cigarette.

She gazed through the dusty windshield. They were in the middle of a long strip of the desert, with nothing but sand dunes on either side. This was the edge of the Rub’ al Khali desert. The vast sea of sand dunes was greater in size than Jean’s home country of France. It stretched all the way north to Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia.

As she continued to stare at the endless stretch of burning sand outside the window, Kimberly narrowed her eyes in surprise. A lone local woman, dressed in a brightly colored Sana’ani cloth, walked along the road ahead. She was at least fifteen kilometers from the nearest settlement. In this heat, it was surprising she had not passed out, or died already from dehydration.

When they drew close to her, Jean didn’t seem to be stopping. She was about to ask why he could be so cruel, when the woman stepped out onto the road in front of them.

“Bordel de merde!” he cried out as the cigarette dropped from his mouth. He gave the wheel a sharp turn as he pumped the brakes.

The Jeep went into a spin, skidding through the gravelly sands.

Kimberley tensed, grabbed the dashboard and held on tight. She was waiting for the sickening, squelching crunch she expected when they hit the woman, but… nothing. They jerked to a stop without hitting anything.

“Putain!” Jean yelled when they came to a stop, trying to put out the cigarette as it burned a hole in his frayed cargo pants. “Putain! Putain! Putain!”

Kimberley didn’t care for Jean’s wellbeing. He wasn’t seriously hurt and could look after himself. She leapt out of the Jeep, covering her face with her veil so as not to offend the soldiers of the CSO. She searched for the woman.

She found her standing alone on the road, her head hung and her body slumped. Two of the CSO soldiers had raised their assault rifles at her. They were shouting at her in Arabic, ordering her to get down onto the ground and place her hands behind her head. She wasn’t complying. Perhaps she wanted them to shoot her.

“Aintazar daqiqa!” Kimberly yelled back at the soldiers. Wait a minute! Her hands raised, she didn’t wait for permission and went to the woman. “Are you okay?” she asked in Arabic. “I can help you? Are you lost?”

The woman looked up at her and stared without focus through her dark, almond shaped eyes. Kimberley guessed she was a Bedouin woman judging by her clothing. She looked to be mid-thirties, probably even pretty behind the veil. There was bruising around her eyes suggesting that she had recently been assaulted. She also looked to be carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders.

“Would you like some water?”

Kimberley took her to the Jeep, calling over her shoulders to the DSO as she did. “We’re taking her with us. She needs medical assistance!”

The soldiers grumbled and returned to their APC. They just wanted to go home. It had been a long day, scouting the desert in the crazy heat of forty-plus degrees Celsius. A crazy Bedouin woman was Kimberley’s problem now, and not their concern.

Kimberley offered a water bottle. The woman slipped it under her veil and gulped quickly, draining the lot.

She shook her head .

“Is there someone we can take you to? Your family, perhaps?”

“I have no family. They were taken from me, by Al Qaeda.” She sobbed, then spoke in articulate and practiced English. Kimberley was shocked that she knew any English words at all.

“I have been forsaken by Allah, for breaking his commandments,” the woman moaned. “I saw a plane, an airplane shot out of the sky. An ill omen, a sign of his anger with me. As it fell into the desert, I too have fallen from his grace!”