River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (5 page)

So there had to be another way in. Wade walked across the floor—ceramic tile, not bare rock like the cave floors—into the darkness beyond the light’s reach. He barked his shin on something hard and round and muttered a soft curse. Feeling his way around it, he kept working his way toward where the far wall should be.

After two more bruises on his legs and a growing ache in his lower back from bending forward to grope for obstacles in the dark, he found another wall. It felt dry and dusty, but relatively smooth beneath the layer of dust. Plaster maybe, instead of bare stone. Solid, too. Tapping on it, Wade felt no give beneath his knuckles.

He kept one hand on the wall and started working his way left. After a couple dozen steps, the wall vanished. He probed with his foot and found a stair. He crouched beside it. Wood, not stone or plaster. The staircase was at least eight feet wide, leading up into impenetrable darkness.

Anything could be up there. He wouldn’t be able to see a snake, a tiger, an entire Sunni militia. Or a Shia one. They were no better.

Biting back his fears, Wade climbed again.

This had all taken too long. By now they knew he was out. They had to. Maybe it was a trap all along, and maybe not, but they would certainly have the exits covered. If this indeed led to an exit, and wasn’t just a long, exhausting journey toward ultimate disappointment. Hopelessness filled him and he almost sat down where he was, to wait in the dark until they found him with their flashlights and their guns.

Then he smelled the river again, and so he climbed.

At the ninth stair Wade had to push through a spiderweb that wrapped around him like a shroud. He pawed it from his eyes and mouth and kept going. A dozen stairs, fourteen, and then he came to another wooden door. A double door, this time, latched from the other side. Pressing his eye to the minute gap between the two doors, he saw natural light.

This door was at the top of the stairs, with no level space to get a running start. In the darkness he felt unbalanced, so he didn’t want to rear back and kick at it. If he fell down these stairs, he could easily break a leg, or his neck. Surviving the fall might be his worst option; if no one found him, he would stay there until he died of thirst.

Everybody had to die sometime, but he didn’t want to go like that. Wade loved the water; he hoped to die beneath it, leaving behind only a splintered boat washed up on a sandy spit in some river, not craving a drink in a dark hole beneath Baghdad.

He pressed against the door. Something snapped and it started to give way at the hinges. He pushed harder, putting all of his weight against it. Wood splintered, the hinge pulled free, and Wade tumbled into a lighted space, landing on his hands and knees on top of most of the door.

The racket he made was ferocious.

And yet no one came running, no gunshots echoed though the space, no bullets
spang
ed into the tiled walls around him.

Regaining his footing, he saw that he had fallen into a mosque. Old, no longer used, but a mosque just the same. It had probably been hit in the early bombing, the days of “shock and awe,” he guessed, but on further reflection he thought the damage might predate even that assault. Massive holes Swiss-cheesed the walls and an intricately filigreed blue dome roof, letting daylight in. The back wall, the one through which he had come, was pockmarked with bullet holes. Wooden benches had been reduced to rubble, and trash, including newspapers (Wade recognized several of the papers that had sprung up out of nowhere in the weeks following Saddam’s fall:
The Dawn of Baghdad
,
A New Day
, and
Those Who Have Been Freed
, mixed in with older, preinvasion copies of
Babel
and the
Iraq Daily
, the official English-language paper of Saddam’s government), glass and plastic bottles, greasy food wrappers, flattened shipping cartons with Arabic writing on the sides, covered the floor. This was where the garbage smell originated. For all he knew there might be bodies beneath the detritus. Wade didn’t think his captors had taken this route into the tunnels, because it didn’t look like anyone had passed through here in months.

He didn’t stand around wondering. Across the big room a doorway gaped, sunlight streaming through. Wade pushed through the debris and outside. He found himself on a city street lined with low, mud-walled buildings and courtyards. Peering over the top of a low wall, he saw a quiet, shaded yard, and beyond that, the Tigris itself tossed shards of sunlight back at him. The sparkle was all show; since the war had started, the Tigris had become ever more polluted. It was not a river he would choose to swim in, but at this distance it looked inviting.

From the position of the sun, he knew that if he followed the river to his left—to the west—it would eventually lead him to the Green Zone. There he would find Americans, soldiers and diplomats. Until then, he could only hope to encounter a U.S. or an Iraqi patrol, and pray that no militia soldiers or insurgents spotted him. Or anyone else. Americans were about as popular in Iraq as avian flu was in the States.

He started walking, keeping the river on his right. The streets were strangely empty, as were the skies. He heard no screaming F-16s, no big lumbering transports, no helicopters buzzing overhead. He didn’t even hear any birds. It was as if a nuclear bomb had gone off while he’d been underground. He hadn’t been that far underground, though. He would have felt the blast. If they had survived, his captors would have brought him up, forced him to bear witness to yet another American atrocity.

Except for the silence, it was a typical Baghdad residential street. Power and phone wires crisscrossed overhead, and here and there obviously illegal splices directed pirated electricity into homes. Buff-colored buildings, some with balconies, faced onto the street. Their yards were hidden behind walls. A few spindly palms brushed the sky.

Cars and trucks had been parked haphazardly along the sides of the road. Wade kept an eye out for any with keys inside, since hot-wiring wasn’t in his skill set and wheels might make the trip to the Green Zone quicker. On the streets, the smell of shit competed with the river’s odor, because trucks hosed down the dust with untreated sewer water. The aromas of sewage and death had become inescapable inside the city.

At the end of a city block, someone had hauled together the carcasses of three burned-out cars as a barricade. This was the dividing line between neighborhoods, between Sunni and Shiite. Ordinarily, men would be gathered here with guns, but there weren’t any now. Wade passed through the narrow space left for foot traffic.
So much for stealing a car,
he told himself.
That might just complicate things.

The next block was rubble, burned-down buildings, chunks of stone and concrete, twisted steel, flame-blackened timbers. Both sides of the street had been destroyed, with debris almost meeting in the middle. He picked his way gingerly down the narrow aisle. At the beginning of the next block, another barricade, this one made with materials salvaged from the rubble. Still no guards.

After ten minutes or so, he finally saw a sign of life.

A pig, a scrawny sow with ribs showing through her flesh, trotted across the street ahead of him and disappeared into an alley. When Wade reached the alley, he paused, looked around the corner cautiously, in case someone waited there who had released the pig, or whom she had been running from. But the alley was as empty as the rest of the streets. He looked the other way, but the pig was gone.

The emptiness of the tunnels beneath the mosque had been unexpected, but this was just too weird. People had been fleeing the city—hell, the whole country—by the hundreds of thousands. An Iraqi with a toothache had to go to Jordan, because all the dentists already had. But there were still plenty of people around.

So where could they be? What had happened to everyone? Wade hated questions that didn’t have answers. He tried to block them out with his rivers, running through their names as he walked, his own private rosary: Belle Fourche, Marais des Cygnes, Coeur D’Alene, Loup, Gros Ventre, Touchet, Sevier, Deschutes, Payette. Arikaree, Apishapa, Chikaskia, Yampa, Yaak.

After another few minutes, wondering why there had been no boat traffic on the river, he heard a vehicle. At last!
Someone
was alive.

The sound came from the direction Wade was headed anyway, toward the Green Zone. With each passing second, though, his heart hammered in his chest, harder and harder. To come all this way just to be shot down by militia soldiers, or worse, by Americans who didn’t realize who he was…

He crouched down between a white Toyota and a Mercedes panel truck and watched, ready to dive beneath the truck if necessary. When he saw a small convoy of Humvees flying United States colors, he thought he might burst out crying. He had to take the chance. He wiped away a single tear, sniffed, and stepped into the middle of the street, waving his hands.

The front Humvee braked to a stop, road dust billowing around it like smoke. Long moments passed. Wade couldn’t see them from here but he could envision the barrels of dozens of weapons all leveling on him. One guy with a nervous twitch and it was all over.

Finally, a soldier—a jug-eared, gap-toothed black kid who looked fresh off the family farm—climbed down from the passenger side of the front Humvee. “Wade Scheiner?” the kid asked. “Sir, are you Wade Scheiner, with CNN?”

Then the tears did come, and Wade couldn’t stop them, and when the soldiers spilled from their vehicles, shouting his name, recognizing him, he couldn’t even make out their features through the saltwater in his eyes.
Saved,
he kept thinking,
I’ve been saved, I’ve been motherfucking saved at last and I don’t even know how or why.

FOUR

Although the tiny kitchen inside the offices of the
Voice of the Borderlands
newspaper smelled like coffee, only about a teaspoon of black sludge coated the bottom of the pot. Molly McCall sighed and set her mug on the counter with a heavy
clack
. Monday morning and she by god needed some caffeine in her system before she could face her desk and the story waiting there.

The story’s intent was serious enough. The American southwest had been racked by a decade-long drought, and a couple of rainy years had done little to tip the balance back. Rather than providing another sober-minded, drowse-inducing explanation of this, however, managing editor Franklin Carrier had instructed Molly to work a local angle. With Halloween behind them, Thanksgiving and the holiday season would rush in soon enough, so Molly had been talking to growers, florists, and party planners about how the drought and the reprieve of the past summer’s rains would affect what plants and flowers would grace El Paso’s holiday tables this year.

It seemed like a strange take, focusing on those affluent enough to purchase plants for centerpieces. Generally the
Voice
’s concern was for the less fortunate, those who might pluck some greenery from their own yards (if they had yards) to place on their tables (if they also had tables). She had diligently called on a wide variety of farmers, flower shop owners, even some of the people who set up pumpkin and Christmas tree or chili
ristra
stands on street corners. Today she planned to work on beating those random bits of conversation into a shape that readers would recognize as a newspaper story.

She rinsed out the coffeepot, stuck a new filter pack in the holder, filled the pot from the tap and poured the water into the coffeemaker’s receptacle. Whoever took the last cup was supposed to start a new pot. That was the rule. The office was never empty; any time of the day or night somebody might need a cup.

When it finished brewing, she filled her mug, tossed in a dash of cream, and started toward her desk. The message light on her phone had been blinking when she had come in, but she hadn’t wanted to deal with voice mail until she was fortified.

She had almost reached her desk when Frank’s voice boomed from the doorway of his private office. “McCall!”

Molly turned midstride, diverting around Suzi McKellar’s desk toward Frank’s office. He stood in the doorway, his right hand on the jamb over his head, his left hand leaning casually against his hip. Almost everything about Frank Carrier was casual. He wore a tie to the office, but no jacket, and most of the time his tie was tugged away from his throat, collar button open, shirtsleeves rolled back over muscular forearms. He was a tall man, solidly built, with skin darker than Molly’s coffee since she’d added the cream but not as dark as it had been straight from the pot. His hair had begun turning gray in the last couple of years. He smiled as Molly approached, and his soft brown eyes seemed illuminated from within. While he was no candidate for sainthood, at times Molly thought he could groom himself for that role, given the right incentive.

“What’s up, chief?” she asked when she neared him. Her brother Byrd had bought her the DVD set of the 1950s
Superman
TV show for Christmas two years ago because, he had said, “If you’re going to be Lois Lane, you need to learn from a pro.” They were both far too young to have caught the show on its original run (she was thirty-three, Byrd four years older), but he had been into comics throughout his teens and had seen episodes here and there. Watching the surprisingly entertaining if cheesy series, she had decided that her favorite aspect was the chagrin with which Perry White responded to Jimmy Olsen calling him “chief.” Ever since, she had done the same to Frank.