Ministers of Fire. Mark Harril Saunders

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      “There are a lot of them,” he said, “but I don’t trust him as far as I can spit. Come on. Roy!”

      He hailed the pilot and turned toward the plane, but before he took another step they had begun to hear the sound of a small band of men riding down from the hills—not a sound exactly, but a sudden disturbance in the ceaseless wall of wind, the creak that is made by tack flailing the muscles of lathering horses. The pilot, smoking by the wing of the plane, reached for the holster on his hip, but Burling made a damping motion with his hand. Shapes emerged from the brown pack until each was an individual rider and animal, bearing down across the hardpan in a clatter of hooves and drawing up, veins bulging in necks dark with sweat. April watched them with her mouth half open, her hands raised slightly from her hips as if she were about to appeal to them for something. Mercy was the word in her mind. The air had stopped in her mouth. Saliva seeped from the insides of her cheeks, but her throat was bone dry. This was the first place she had been where she knew that being American didn’t matter.

      The leader, who rode a bay stallion two hands taller than the rest of the horses, dismounted in a whipping of cloth. The loose jacket of April’s suit lifted in the wind, chilling her. Her hands were plunged deep in the pockets of her pants, stretching the coarse cotton across her hips and the backs of her thighs. She had always been strong, tough; her physical qualities had served her well while making her different and hiding her mind, her emotions, from men in particular. Burling had seemed to cut through those traits: while he clearly admired her body, wanted her openly like a younger man would, he seemed genuinely moved by her manner, intrigued by her mind. He made love as she’d thought he would, carefully, restraining, controlling a massive emotional and physical force. He moved forward now, a grim smile set on his face. The wind stung April’s cheeks. Slowly, he and the leader looked each other up and down. In a moment they were shaking hands vigorously and nodding, the leader looking to his comrades and flashing his gleaming white teeth, pointing and laughing as if he’d won a bet.

      “Abdul!” The leader, an uncle to Jack’s power forward, gave the man a kind of greeting that April had seen in Kabul, grasping both shoulders, shaking him. “Come.”

      “You stay here with Roy and the plane,” Burling told her, sotto voce. “If you see Abdul Hadi come out of that Quonset hut without me, he may have sold us up the river.”

      “What do we do then?”

      His eyes met hers as if to say that no matter what happened, it had been worth it, but she wasn’t so sure. Something told her that his own romantic dream would survive, with her as only a memory.

      “I want to come with you.”

      “That would be more dangerous than staying here,” he said. “I’m doing this for you, believe me.”

      “Burling!” the leader said heartily. “We go?”

      Together they started toward the hut.

      The other riders drew their mounts together, the smallest man holding the reins of the leader’s incredible horse. April shuffled back toward the wing of the plane, where the pilot was smoking a cigarette. The mujahedin—because that’s what they were, “the soldiers of God” whose names she had taken in vain the night before—were nothing like she’d expected: up close, they were scruffy and rancid, with nervous faces and intense, dark, sorrowful eyes—not mountain lions at all, but scary in the way of stray dogs, unpredictable. They reminded her of hollow boys back home.

      April said a few words to them in Dari, and they replied with a slur against women. The pilot, Roy Breeden, raised his eyebrows at her.

      “They say they want to rape me,” April told him, although that was not exactly what they’d said. “I think a stake may be involved.”

      “Like a Joan of Arc number?” Breeden squinted through his smoke.

      “I could go for that maybe, if they didn’t smell so bad.”

      The pilot took a pensive drag. A scar cleaved his upper lip, and when he smiled it made his mouth look like a beak. “These boys might not take you up on it,” he said. “They’ll be fed grapes by seven thousand virgins if I shoot them right now.”

      April looked at the mujahedin. Suddenly their shifty demeanor seemed more menacing than before. Lucius had used the word “sacrifice” about them, equating it with love.

      “What a load of shit,” she said aloud. The horses had moved more closely together, and she couldn’t see the hard desert light between their bodies anymore. Her own bravado went brittle. This might work with the hollow boys in the gravel lot behind the high school, as the vapor lights wore out from the game, but she’d miscalculated here: she’d never been outside of Kabul. Two other riders dismounted, and for the first time she noticed the rifles lashed across the pommels—long, black, shining automatics like Jack’s own M-16. Breeden flipped his cigarette toward the nearest hoof, reached back into the plane, and casually brought out a shotgun—a twelve-gauge like her father’s—holding it as if it were as harmless as a broom. April turned to the men, who had drawn their horses back at the sight of the weapon. “I’m the closest thing to heaven they’ll ever get.”

      “You’re a hell of a woman, all right,” the pilot observed. “I can’t decide if I like you or not.”

      “Do you think these boys know Jack?”

      “Might.”

      She couldn’t tell if he was implying that knowing Jack might not be an asset right now. He held out the carved walnut stock for the men to inspect. The one who’d been holding the leader’s reins handed them up to the man beside him, who still sat his horse. Then he came forward and weighed the shotgun like an offering in his palms.

      The near proximity of the dismounted men, who gave off a rank odor of horses and sweat, was causing fear, the real thing, to run through her like a current. She was guilty, she realized, not only of coming up here with Burling, but of thinking she could handle this. She had run with the boys all her life, run from her brothers straight to Jack, which had upset her mother and scandalized her graduate student friends at Berkeley, with their stoned existentialist boyfriends who didn’t care what women thought, even whipsmart scholarship girls like April Wheeling, who could drink harder and quote Jean-Paul Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, and Fanon better than they could. When Jack went off to Vietnam for the second time, April had finally realized she could want more than boys could give her, but it was hard to break their grip. Beyond the horses, she could see Lucius Burling and the leader coming back across the runway. No Abdul. What did that mean? Trailing them was the stout Chinese man she had seen on the roof of the hotel. The man who’d been holding the leader’s horse barked something at his clan, in a dialect she could barely understand. He removed a thick knife, about twelve inches long, from his garment. Fear gripped her heart when she realized what the man had said.

      “Roy?”

      The man on the horse trained his rifle on the pilot.

      “They said we’re not leaving,” April told him.

      Breeden moved his hand to the holster, but the rifle gestured him to take it away. Breeden didn’t do as he was told. She saw him unsnap the holster, and the rifle went off above her, a quick burst that cut Breeden down. He was on his knees, screaming obscenities, as the horses crowded around her. At first it made her feel safer, their bellies pressing against her, the familiar sweet, sharp smell. She had a flash of her father, his long legs in blue jeans hiked high on his backside, climbing stiffly up the hill toward his broken-backed barn, winter СКАЧАТЬ