Ground Zero(24)

The American helicopter kept hovering right behind her—WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP. Reshmina knew that with just one squeeze of the pilot’s trigger finger, bullets would tear through her and her brother. Everything she had cared about, everything she had worked for and struggled for, would all be gone in an instant.

“Come on, Reshmina!” Pasoon cried over the roar of the helicopter. “Climb!”

Pasoon shifted his weight and pulled harder on her hand. Reshmina’s fear and panic gave her a desperate strength, and she wriggled her chest up onto the edge of the cliff and swung a leg up and over. Pasoon dragged her the rest of the way over the edge, and they collapsed in each other’s arms, weary but safe.

Except for the helicopter.

WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP.

Reshmina turned around again. The Apache’s blades swirled in the air, blowing Reshmina’s headscarf back from her hair and face. Reshmina thought she saw the pilot talking into the mic at his mouth. Was somebody far away deciding her fate, the same way somebody far away, piloting a drone, had decided her sister Hila’s fate? Reshmina stared into the eyes of the helicopter pilot. Would those be the last eyes she ever saw?

The Apache hung in the air a moment longer, and then, as suddenly as it had come, it tilted and lifted away to the right, leaving Reshmina and Pasoon where they sat on the edge of the cliff.

Reshmina slumped against her brother. She wanted to flop back on the ground and pass out. But the pops and booms of the Americans and the Taliban still fighting behind them meant that she and Pasoon were still too exposed.

Pasoon knew it too. They helped each other up, and with a quick squeeze of Pasoon’s hand, Reshmina thanked him for saving her life. Pasoon nodded, and then they hurried along the cliff, putting as much mountain between themselves and the battle as they could.

They followed a goat path down and around the mountainside, where they ran into an old abandoned logging camp. It was a small plateau where people had once lived while they cut down Afghanistan’s towering cedars and pines and sold them across the border to Pakistan. The Americans had shut most of these logging camps down, convinced the money made there was being used to buy weapons for the Taliban. But the move had backfired, in a way: When the loggers were put out of work, many of them traded their chain saws for rifles and joined the very same insurgents the Americans were trying to stop.

An explosion boomed from the other side of the ridge, and a tall gray mushroom cloud spiraled up over the peak. Reshmina took Pasoon’s hand again, and they dove behind a pile of old cedars as bullets peppered the logs.

Reshmina wanted to scream, partly from fear and partly from anger. She had just gone looking for her brother! She hadn’t expected to end up in the middle of a battle. Why couldn’t everyone just leave them alone?

Reshmina stayed flat on her face for a moment, catching her breath. When she finally looked up, she was staring right into the eyes of a camel.

The sight of it was so silly, so surreal after what they’d just been through, that she wanted to laugh out loud.

Pasoon did laugh. “Ha!”

Plegh. The camel spit in Pasoon’s face.

“Gross!” Pasoon cried, and he wiped his face on his sleeve.

“Uh, Pasoon?” Reshmina said, putting a hand on his arm.

Pasoon froze. There were even more camels sitting behind the woodpile—and people too. Twenty or thirty of them, an entire tribe of men, women, and children, all cross-legged on the ground, staring at Reshmina and her brother. The men were white-bearded and wore trousers and turbans and long tunics like Reshmina’s father did. Most of the women wore tunics and pants like Reshmina, but a few wore dresses with full skirts and wide sleeves, decorated with metallic laces and pendants and amulets. Their children huddled among them, the boys wrapped in blankets, the girls wrapped in shawls, unblinking and unmoving.

These people were Kochi, Reshmina realized suddenly. She had seen them before, but only in the distance. The Kochi were nomads. They had no year-round home, instead traveling back and forth across the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan with the seasons, selling rugs they had made and trading the meat and cheese and wool from their goats and sheep and camels.

“Hi,” Reshmina said.

The Kochi stared at her and Pasoon.

Rock and dirt exploded from the mountaintop above them as the battle between the Taliban and the Americans raged on, but the Kochi and their animals didn’t even flinch.

“Let’s get out of here,” Pasoon whispered. He tried to get up and go, but Reshmina pulled him back down.

“Not with them still shooting!” Reshmina told him.

One by one, the Kochi unrolled prayer rugs. Reshmina couldn’t believe it—they were going to pray right here, with an American helicopter flying around shooting bullets every which way.

Reshmina and her brother felt obligated to join them. Ordinarily they would have done wudu—washed and cleaned themselves with water in preparation for praying. They made tayammum instead, using the dust of the ground to clean themselves. God was forgiving and merciful and would still accept their prayers if He willed it. Better to pray than to not pray, their father always told them.

Reshmina fixed her headscarf and stood and bowed, stood and knelt. God knew Reshmina’s heart better than she knew her own, and when she sat to ask for forgiveness, she also said a prayer for Pasoon. Please help turn my brother’s heart from revenge, Reshmina prayed. Please show him another path.