Miles To Go Part 7

He heard a soft tap at the door and walked through the spare front room to answer it. A boy stood before him squinting in the harsh morning sun.

"General Armin has requested your presence."

"Tell him I'll be right there."

General Armin. Fareed shook his head. How absurd. Armin's mental state seemed to be deteriorating. It was bad enough when he put on a uniform, but this recent development of t.i.tling himself seemed beyond reason. Always mindful of his appearance, Fareed smoothed his s.h.i.+rt front before stepping into the blinding sunlight and heading for Armin's quarters.

Rennie had been walking all day. She was soaked in sweat, her tank top clinging to her. At least the heat was finally beginning to break. She had about an hour before she would need to make camp. She would certainly reach the river the next day. It had been sweltering since the sun came up and she had already gone through most of her water. She had to stay hydrated or she knew she would get sick again. At least the hiking was helping to alleviate some of the stress. At times she wished she could just break into a run. She had always been a great runner. It was one of the things that set her apart from the others in her cla.s.sno one could outrun her, not even the men. But she had to save energy and pace herself.

Running sometimes made her think of Brad's friend, Marta.

Brad's friend. She still thought of her that way, but Marta was her friend, too. Friends of a sort. Rennie had tried to steer clear of Marta. She had picked up on a flicker of attraction when she went in for one of her physical checks. MacPherson would send her in to run on the treadmill a couple of times a month and Marta would measure her heart rate, her blood pressure, her lung capacity, all in search of the key to her uncommon physical abilities.

One day, after a test late in the afternoon, Marta had asked Rennie to have a drink. Rennie caught the subtlety in her voice and the pointed expression on her face that suggested a drink might not be all she had in mind. Rennie hesitated. She had experienced this kind of overture before and always declined.

She had never been willing to risk anyone finding out.i.t would have been career suicide. But now, after working sixteen-hour days, seven days a week for months, she finally had a weekend off.

A night out with an interesting woman seemed too comforting to pa.s.s up.

They had agreed to meet at a restaurant near Marta's apartment in Adams Morgan. Driving up I-95 back to the city, Rennie breathed deeply, feeling a fraction of the strain she had acc.u.mulated over the past few months begin to slip away. She thought of her little apartment on Capitol Hill, an English bas.e.m.e.nt, only a few blocks from where she grew up. She hadn't been there in weeks, hadn't slept in her own bed in months not since the team had received their orders for the mission.

She missed it. It was her sanctuary, a place of safety and a place of isolationsomething she never had growing up in her busy household. She kept it her own, rarely had anyone over and never invited anyone to stay the night.

Driving down Independence Avenue, just past the Capitol, she swung a left onto Second Street. A few more turns and she was parked in the graveled courtyard behind her apartment. Living in the shadow of the Capitol, Rennie never took its grandeur or what it represented for granted. She loved her country, though not blindly like so many of her colleagues. Sometimes, when she was tired and came home from a day studying the not always rosy consequences of American influence, the thought of so much concentrated power filled her with dread.

Opening her apartment door, Rennie breathed in the familiar musty odor. It was an old building and her bas.e.m.e.nt had doubtlessly flooded countless times and would forever carry the feeling of damp. She tossed her suitcase on the bed, poorly made from her last too-short stay.

She sat down heavily on the edge of the bed and caught 0.

her reflection in the mirror of her old dresser. The mirror was mottled and warped with age. She stood and leaned toward the spotted gla.s.s. How long had it been since she had really looked at herself? With her routine at Quantico, she was out of bed, in the shower and out the door in fifteen minutes or less. She would be gone before the steam on the tiny bathroom mirror had dried.

Now, she saw that she looked very tired. And she needed a haircut. She ran her hands through her thick, dark hair, tucking a few strands behind her ears. She wore a tight black short-sleeved s.h.i.+rt. She had always been thin, but the incessant training had made her very lean. She could see her collarbones clearly beneath the stretchy material of her s.h.i.+rt and her arms seemed little more than muscle and bone.

She shouldn't have made the date with Marta. She was exhausted. And she was taking a huge risk. Marta was Brad's friend, but she had no idea whether she could be trusted. It was too late to cancel. She wouldn't stand her up. She wasn't like that.

The restaurant was very dark. Rennie was late and apparently so was Marta, unless she had already left. Rennie sat down at the bar and ordered a drink.

"Hey! Sorry I'm late." Marta slipped onto the stool next to Rennie and laid her hand on her arm. "I had a few things I had to wrap up at the office."

"Don't worry about it," Rennie said, moving her arm from under Marta's hand with a glance at the bartender. "I've only been here a few minutes."

They moved to a table, ordered their food and made the usual small talk about work. Rennie felt awkward, unable to find her natural composure. She drank her wine quickly and poured another, feeling it settle into her limbs and slow the panic in her brain.

After the waiter cleared their plates, they sat slowly sipping the last of their bottle of wine. There was a lull in the conversation. Marta, her elbows on the table, was fingering the rim of her winegla.s.s. Rennie felt more relaxed than she had in months and for the moment didn't worry about who might see her. She watched Marta's finger on the gla.s.s. When she looked up, Marta was watching her intently. It was an unmistakable look of attraction, a look that could mean only one thing, but somehow mixed in with it was a trace of sadness too. When they stepped onto the sidewalk, leaving the warm intimacy of the restaurant, and Marta said, "Would you like to see my place?" the look was gone and the question sounded almost innocent.

But it hadn't been of course. Stepping into Marta's apartment, Rennie could see the clean outlines of her furniture in the mix of moonlight and citylight coming through the open windows.

Then Marta's hands encircled her waist and she felt her mouth on her neck. A sharp bolt of desire coursed through her body and settled between her legs. Rennie lifted Marta's head and their mouths met impatiently.

They kissed just inside the door, in the dark. They didn't pause to speak a word of meaningless endearment or to look into each other's eyes. All they wanted was to be mouth and hand and flesh, understanding the need for efficiency. Somehow they made it to the bedroom.

Afterward, they lay atop the duvet on the bed where they had fallen, hungry for each other. Marta lay with her head on Rennie's breast, an arm across her body tightly gripping her hip.

Then she seemed to doze for a moment. Rennie looked down at her, Marta's expression one of slumber, and felt her throat constrict. She couldn't allow herself to dwell on the fineness of the moment. She didn't have s.p.a.ce for such things in her life now and knew she shouldn't imbue it with meaning that wasn't there.

She bent and lightly kissed the woman on the forehead, lingering a moment. Then Rennie s.h.i.+fted and slipped from underneath her.

"Marta, I need to go."

Quickly awake and shaking off her drowsiness, Marta said, "Oh, okay, sure, yeah, I need to get up early myself."

Rennie dressed quickly, an emptiness replacing the afterglow of their lovemaking. Marta was in the kitchen drinking a gla.s.s of water when Rennie came out of the bedroom.

"Would you like a cup of coffee or something before you go?" she asked distractedly.

"No. Busy day tomorrow, you know. Thanks, though." She paused. "It was a nice evening."

Closing the door and running down the stairs to the street, Rennie wanted to get as far from Marta and her spare, dark apartment as she could. It wasn't as if she hadn't done this kind of thing before, it was just that she had always allowed herself to forget what it felt like afterward.

Letting go of the memory, Rennie threw her pack against the base of a tree where she would camp for the night. The thought of Marta always carried a twinge of desire and a slight queasiness. They had been together a few times after that first night. Marta had an edge to her, moments when a sharp nastiness would emerge, but she grew tender in bed. After that first time, they skipped dinner, neither willing to develop a fiction that they were actually dating. Such relations.h.i.+ps were bred by Bureau culture. Rennie wasn't surprised by this, she knew how things worked, but she had hoped after signing up and getting a feel for the lay of the land that she would be able meet someone on the outside and do the normal things people do who are interested in one another, instead of succ.u.mbing to the easy lure of furtive couplings with other desperate colleagues.

She shook her head wondering why she was thinking about Marta. She felt a deep twinge of guilt, manifesting itself in a sharp pain across her brow, for allowing herself to focus on something so mundane when her team lay dead miles behind her. But she couldn't allow herself to think of them. Not yet. Any thought of them took her mind to places she couldn't handle right now to intimately physical images of their bodies cold, their blood congealed, night creatures that prey on the weak and helpless drawn to their inert vulnerability. She knew that allowing such images to form completely would bring her down. And she couldn't be brought down.

Rennie was exhausted from the day's hike and from smothering crippling thoughts. She had made good time, a little over forty miles, she calculated. Forty miles. There was a time when covering that much distance in a day with a heavy pack strapped to her back would have been inconceivable.

She had never been much of an outdoors person, growing up in the city. Games of compet.i.tion would occasionally draw her out of her room, her cloister, her father had called it. She was always there, reading a book, usually sitting on the floor leaning against her bed where she couldn't be seen if someone opened her door. There in the world of books, she wasn't anyone's daughter, anyone's sister, just herself, imagining what it might be like to live a different life.

But after she left for college, she suddenly began to get a sense of herself and her place in the world. Her first dose of reality. She began to think of herself for the first time as a woman.

Before that, she imagined that when womanhood was conferred upon her (it was never clear how this would happen) it would bring with it certain privileges that she had missed as a girl, privileges not given to children. She learned, and perhaps she had always known it, that the absence she felt was not a condition of childhood but a condition of femaleness. This was a kind of revelation. She felt she had to do something, anything to remedy her sense of powerlessness.

Her first instinct was to move her body. She took herself to the gym and began running around the ancient indoor track overlooking the pool. She started with just a few miles. Years of inactivity made her lungs strain for each breath and her legs were shot through with pain from her first experience with lactic acid.

But her body quickly acclimated to motion and she could hardly believe she had lived so long without it. Soon she was running for hours, ignoring the pain which began to seem meaningless to her, something not quite real that she could compartmentalize as something not part of her, something one chose to feel or not to feel. She chose not to. She had yet to reach her limit, that point where she couldn't take another step or couldn't perform whatever was required of her. She only knew how good it felt to run and reach the place where she could go on forever, where she felt strong, and no one could stop her. Eventually after much hesitation she ventured into the weight room and saw to her surprise that she wasn't the only woman. Her physical conditioning became a kind of obsession and eventually she almost forgot why she had begun it all.

Rennie stretched out on the ground at the base of a tree that would be her home for the night. She had eaten about an hour before as she walked. Estimating that the river was probably only about thirty miles away, she wanted nothing more than to drink every drop of her dwindling water supply. She had considered pus.h.i.+ng on, but knew she needed to treat herself with great care at this stage.

She was beginning to grow accustomed to the woods. She felt her body conform to the hard ground. The trees above her were still, the leaves and limbs silhouetted against the sky.

The moon was large and low and just out of view but its light illuminated the black sky, revealing ghostly churning clouds.

Rennie's mood s.h.i.+fted as she took it all in. The clouds, moving and swirling, seemed violent and stood in counterpoint to the stillness where she was. She, too, was still, lying silent. But inside violence reignedthe violence of the previous night, the violence she herself would commit two nights hence for the sake of the mission, and the violence of her thoughts and emotions, s.h.i.+fting and colliding deep under her false calm. She pushed it all away and tried to rest.

She had no way of knowing if Armin had these woods patrolled. The absurdity of sleeping with no protection fell over her like a pall. She must rest, but to do so was to put herself at incredible risk. If she was discovered, she only hoped that death would come quickly. She had no choice and it felt like a sacrifice.

At least the two dead men supposed to be en route to the village wouldn't be soon missed.

When she woke to her watch alarm vibrating gently on her wrist, Rennie felt like someone was holding a warm hand over her mouth and nose. She couldn't breathe. The night had become oppressively hot. She kicked her legs trying to throw off an imagined blanket, but found she was without cover. She stood slowly, her limbs stiff from the night on the hard ground. It was barely light. She stripped off her tank and cargo pants and stood beneath the canopy of trees trying to get air to her limbs. But the air had no freshness to it. It was close and perfectly still, like the last breath of someone in the grip of a fever.

Dressed again, she grabbed her water bladder and took a big drink. She only had about two cups left, not nearly enough to sustain her for what she had to do. Knowing it would take her most of the day to hike to the river filled her with dread. This thought got her moving.

She packed up and ate as she walked. The MRE this morning was hard going down, the heat destroying her appet.i.te. She found a good trail, likely made by the local red deer, a variety larger and wilder in appearance than anything she had seen in the States.

Would the trail lead her straight to the river? Her compa.s.s indicated she was heading in the right direction. She was already covered in perspiration, sweat stinging her eyes. She stopped, pulled a T-s.h.i.+rt from her pack, wiped her face and tucked it in the waistband of her cargo pants.

Around noon the ground began to get damp and then so soft her boots were sinking into it. She had to be close to the river now, but had to veer away trying to escape the muck. The area clearly flooded regularly and she wondered if she'd have to traverse what might turn into a swamp in order to get to the river. The farther she walked, the deeper the mud seemed to get.

She kept moving farther south and farther from the river. She thought that it must start to solidify soon and then she could cut back northeast. Her boots were already caked with the muck and in some spots she sank to the ankle.

Finally free of it and back on solid ground, she stopped to drink one of her last sips of water. The trees here were farther apart and the sun shone bright and hot on her head and shoulders. The moisture in the air had increased as the sun moved to its highest point and she began to worry about becoming dehydrated again.

She felt lightheaded and took off her pack and sat at the base of a slim tree. She was already completely drained. She wished she could just close her eyes until the hottest part of the day had pa.s.sed, but she knew she needed to stem her dehydration before she became ill.

She stood and struggled back into her pack. She hadn't felt the weight of it earlier in the day, but now she could feel the muscles in her back and shoulders straining against it. She decided to head northeast again to see if she could skirt the bog. Maybe it wouldn't be too bad. She tried not to think of what prehistoric life might be lurking there.

The ground looked entirely normal in some spots, until she stepped on it and heard the sucking sound against her boot.

Thick viscous mud oozed from under whatever greenery and dead leaves were on top, hiding the soft ground underneath. A light suction formed and she had to pull her foot out of the mess with each step, as if forces deep within the earth were trying to pull her in. She paused against a tree to s.h.i.+ft the weight of her pack. She felt very weak.

A large log lay across her path. She stepped over it and her foot plunged into the sludgy earth on the other side up to her knee. The weight of her pack pushed her down hard, deep into it, sc.r.a.ping her back leg against the log. Trying to steady herself, one arm went into the mud and the other grabbed hold of the log before the weight of the pack forced her headfirst into the mess.

She pulled herself back onto the somewhat more solid ground on the other side of the log. One leg felt heavy, coated with mud and grime, the other was bleeding through her pants from a long gash where her s.h.i.+n sc.r.a.ped the log. This is bad, she thought, really bad. Here I am dying of thirst and there's a swamp between me and the only water source I know of.

She sat down heavily on the log. It s.h.i.+fted and sank a little underneath her. She sc.r.a.ped the mud off her leg and hand. The cut on her leg was still bleeding. She couldn't deal with that right now, she had to get to water or she would pa.s.s out. Her vision was beginning to cloud and she figured she wouldn't have misjudged the solidity of the ground if she were at full capacity. She looked at her watch. Two o'clock. She tried to survey the ground to determine where it was soft and how deep it was. Looking over the log to where she plunged in, she should have realized that the area was impa.s.sable. Okay, concentrate. It didn't seem as bad farther along. She began walking east and couldn't see any place that looked as soft as where she'd fallen. She turned and headed northeast again. The cut on her leg was beginning to sting, but it wasn't bleeding anymore.

The ground was more solid now, but Rennie realized she wasn't walking steadily. She couldn't seem to put one foot in front of the other in a straight line. And she was moving very slowly.

She could barely pull her T-s.h.i.+rt from her belt to wipe her face and when she did she realized she was no longer sweating and she began to shake. Every modic.u.m of moisture left in her was going to support her organs. She raised her hand to her face and felt herself crumple in a rush of emotion. She sank to her knees as the ground danced and wavered in front of her.

I'm going to die here.

She knew it. Her skin felt ice cold and she shook violently from head to toe. And then her nose picked up something in the air. She smelled it before she saw it. And the temperature felt just a touch, the merest shade, cooler. The air had a moist, organic smell. Then she saw the water and wondered if her eyes were playing a trick on her.

She struggled to her feet, falling before she regained her height. She drew in a deep breath and felt an almost religious ecstasy course through her body. She threw off her pack and rushed to the muddy edge of the river. She plunged her arms into it to the elbow and rejoiced in its coolness. She brought her cupped hands to her mouth, but stopped as her lower lip touched the small pool of water. She violently shook out her hands and wiped the trickle from her lip.

"s.h.i.+t! s.h.i.+t! s.h.i.+t! Get it together!" She turned and grabbed for her pack, ripping it open and searching its pockets for her iodine tablets. Her hands couldn't stop jumping as she twisted off the cap of her water bladder and knelt again to the water to fill it. She felt her sub-gun swing around from her back and caught it just as the tip of its muzzle slipped into the river. G.o.ddammit, G.o.ddammit, it wasn't supposed to be like this. She was falling apart and everything was going wrong.

No, you're okay, you're okay.

She just needed to drink and eat and gather her strength again. She dipped her water bladder into the water and filled it, dropping in two of the tablets and tightening the cap. Now, she had to wait at least ten minutes while the tablets did their work.

She crawled back from the river into the shade, dragging her pack with her.

Leaning against a tree, she stared at the water bladder, her face slack. Her skin felt clammy and she was covered in grime. She knew she was sick but accepted the knowledge dumbly, ignorant for the moment of the possible consequences. She looked at her watch and realized she hadn't noted what time she put the tablets in. She raised her hand to her mouth as her face twisted into a picture of grief. "I can't do this," she said quietly as her body kicked lightly with the emotion. And then she knew that she would die, right there on that spot, unless she did something. She looked at her watch again. She knew she couldn't risk a guess.

She turned the bezel to the current time to clock the ten minutes and resumed her dead stare at the water bladder.

She would try to eat something while the iodine tablets killed any lurking bacteria in the water. She hadn't eaten since morning and this accounted in part for her condition. She looked through her MREs, chose a beef stew and ripped open the package. The sight of the brown glop made her stomach shudder and she tasted acid in her throat. Her stomach leapt a few times as she put the first spoonful in her mouth. She put the odor and taste out of her mind by concentrating on the second hand moving around the dial on her watch. She forced down several bites and then finally, the time elapsed, she uncapped the water bladder and drank the entire liter in almost one gulp. The water tasted horrible, but it didn't matter. She felt better just knowing she had water in her system. She scooted back to the edge of the river, refilled her water bladder, added another two tablets and then reset the bezel on her watch.

She crawled back to her tree and checked out her surroundings.

She could see several hundred yards down the bank of the river until it turned slightly. The river's edge was sandy for part of the way and then ceded again to woods. A slim path cut through the woods, keeping along the river. She hoped the path had been made by animals and not by roving bands of mujahedeen.

It was late afternoon and she only had a few hours before she lost her light completely. She could make good progress in that amount of time if she weren't so thoroughly wiped out from dehydration. She'd camp here for the night and try to repair whatever damage she had done to herself. She needed to drink as much water as she could before setting out again the next morning.

After a few moments of rest, she filled the three bladders she had brought with her from the ambush site. She added the tablets and then, after ten minutes, she slowly drank another liter of water. Before that first taste she had felt like a dry hard husk, so empty of moisture that she might never soften again. Now she intended to saturate herself. She ate another MREher appet.i.te had returneddrank the foul water and leaned against her tree, feeling her body come alive.

She knew she would be able to reach Armin's encampment the next day in good time. She would take the shot at night, as planned, as Armin presided over his brother's memorial festivities and then run like h.e.l.l.

She pulled her pack to her and unlashed Brad's sniper gun.

She remembered her training as a shooter. Snipers usually worked in teams of twoshooter and observer. She wasn't very proficient at either and now she was on her own. She a.s.sembled the two pieces of the weapon and peered through its scope. She flinched as she caught a glimpse of an animal on the other side of the river. The scope was equipped with night vision and that was what she would likely use for the shoot. She broke the gun down 0.

and laid it at her side.

The sun was nearly down, staining the sky a streaked ma.s.s of orange and pink. The river had taken on a gla.s.sy mirrored quality that made it look as if you could walk on its moving surface. Rennie looked around carefully and started pulling off her clothes. She was covered with grit and grime. Her legs were still streaked with mud. She laid her clothes over the unloaded sniper gun and slipped the sub-gun across her naked chest and back. The strap was rough against her skin.

She stepped gingerly into the water, her feet sinking deeply into the soft, slippery mud. Once she was a few steps from the bank, the mud ceded to sharp rocks but she still wore her hiking bootsshe couldn't risk a foot injuryand they would dry quickly as she slept. When the water was up to her knees, she squatted, immersing herself, and rubbed at the grime coating her body with her hands as best as she could. The water was gloriously cool to her skin and if she weren't naked she would have enjoyed her dip in the river. But she couldn't help but continually scan the banks for movement. Slos.h.i.+ng back through the mud, she climbed up the bank, her sub-gun in her hands as she emerged from the water.

Rennie dressed quickly, feeling vulnerable, the water on her skin dampening her s.h.i.+rt and pants. She had fresh clothes in her pack but would need them when she reached the village after the shoota woman covered in blood and dirt would arouse attention she couldn't afford. It had been a harrowing day and she had lost some time, but the water and food and even the bath seemed to have taken effect. She felt almost born anew or at least how she imagined that might feel. A little tired and weak but somehow energized. A slight breeze came off the river and floated across her still moist skin.

She lay her head back and looked at the sky. It was still hazythis was humid countryand the haze patterned the sky and danced across the surface of the water. When she fell asleep she was almost relaxed.

CHAPTER NINE.

Fareed Reza woke early. He had slept badly, suffering in the heat and consumed with the memory of his conversation with Armin the day before. It brought to mind the time when he was first introduced to Armin, a few years ago, in London, when Armin was scouting around for help in building his movement. Fareed had been attending the Masjid Ibrahim in East London for about a year. He had been turned off by the religious hysteria of so many young, poor Muslims, brought to a frenzy by the political speeches that took place there after wors.h.i.+p. But he soon came to realize that here lay power, right before him, like an offering.

Here he could affect things, directly skirting the difficulties of legislative politics. He never thought of it as terrorism, even as he'd watched the reports of that first explosion.

Abdul-Haafiz al-Katib was not the spiritual leader of the mosque, but he wielded great power there. It was he who brought in the speakers who incited the young wors.h.i.+ppers to leave their new country, travel to their ancestral homes and take up arms against the West. And it was he to whom Ahmad Armin appealed for help in setting up his camp.

Fareed had never felt comfortable with al-Katib. He was a rough man with rough manners and the sn.o.b in Fareed found him distasteful. But then al-Katib approached him, with deference as he always dida nod to Fareed's wealthsaying, "I think I have found a calling for you, brother." Fareed was intrigued, more so when he discovered that al-Katib wanted him to meet Ahmad Armin.

Everyone in the Muslim community was well familiar with Ahmad Armin. His story had struck a chord with many, resounding throughout mosques all over the Muslim world and in Europe. It fueled the anti-Americanism that filled the hearts of extremists, young and old. No one believed that Ahmad Armin had murdered his brother. In the beginning, Fareed wasn't certain.

He was a man devoted to reason and without more evidence he withheld his judgment. Until he met Armin. Sitting in an outdoor cafe in SoHo, listening to the man's story, he was convinced that the Americans killed Na.s.ser Armin when he changed his mind about defecting. The CIA, fools that they were, had once again interfered with Iran's right to manage itself, and once again, it would come back to haunt them.

That meeting had been the tipping point for Fareed.

Before, he had been a detached observer, waiting for the right opportunity to make his mark in the world. With Armin, he had found his cause. Like many, he was powerfully affected by the man's personality. Fareed hadn't seen the instability in Armin then, perhaps it hadn't yet emerged. He was carried along by the man until he was so deeply involved that he didn't know how to extricate himself. Their original intent had been to a.s.semble an army and make threats. All Armin wanted was for the United States to admit that he hadn't killed his brotherhe wasn't so naive to believe that they would accept responsibility, but he knew it was within their power to clear his name without admitting any American involvement. But he badly misjudged the extent of the Americans' stubbornness. After Armin sent out his demands and then his threats and was ignored, he changed. p.r.o.ne to fits of anger, he ramped up the religious element in his speeches. Before he had used just enough of it to keep the attention of their little army of young fanatics. Now, he constantly invoked the call for jihad, citing the more violent pa.s.sages of the Koran.