The Debt Collectors War

Chapter 4

Miguel drove them down to the hajji field they used as a landing pad and hugged them both goodbye, and the hajjis were scared enough with all the unusual kafir activity they stayed indoors and quiet and they didn’t see one all the way down, and that was a relief, easier for everyone.

They flew in the helicopter to a military airfield, and landed while flares arced out behind them and door-gunners watched the ground beneath for the spiraling smoke of missile traces. They handed over their weapons and gear to the local company rep, to hold until they got back. They changed into civilian clothes, backpacker clothes, in a corner of his office, and rode a rattling turbo-prop airliner to another dusty hajji town, and then a bigger, quieter plane down to Dubai.

They got a hotel room, for the fifteen hours they had to wait. They washed and showered and scrubbed their skin, and Ellie shaved her legs for the first time in a month because shaving with the gritty dust in the mountains always gave her a rash. Sameh didn’t shave, because she was a uncivilized heathen who rejected Western cultural imperialism, she said, even though her religion told her she ought to. They ate, and got drunk, and didn’t have sex because they hardly ever did when they were first out in the world like this. Not yet. No so soon.

“This is a mental health stop,” Sameh said. “You know that, right?”

“I know.”

They were supposed to transition in stages from the war to the world so they didn’t crack up and kill people back home.

“I mean, it’s Dubai. It’s one of the biggest airports in the world. He couldn’t have got a flight out to somewhere, and got you halfway home any time of the night.”

“I know. It doesn’t matter.”

Sameh nodded, but kept watching Ellie closely, warily, like she thought Ellie would go off.

Ellie wasn’t sure that was fair. It was never Ellie who was the problem, and they both knew it. Ellie was the sensible one, the steady one. Sameh caused the problems. She always seemed to have to do something wild to adjust. That night, it took a couple of hours in the hotel bar before it happened, but Ellie had been waiting. An American oil-worker hit on Ellie, mostly ignoring Sameh, and didn’t back off fast enough when Sameh said Ellie was her girlfriend. Not fast enough, like not at the speed of light. Ellie sat there, a little surprised there was still oil, and still foreign oil workers, when the local industry was automated and ran mostly on robots, and Sameh got up and stood in the man’s face and told him to fuck off or she’d break a bottle over his face and then crush his balls with the ashtray on the table. He looked at her and went pale, and Ellie quietly told him to go. He did, quickly, nervously, because even now, even in the safety of an airport hotel bar, this was still the Middle East and even nice Americans had instincts they’d learned from being hated for a century. That, and because instincts or not, Sameh had a way about her that anyone could see. She was dangerous, especially now, unsettled and bored and waiting for a flight when she hated to fly. Anyone could tell that death was rarely as near as it was around Sameh.

The man went away, and Sameh had got that out her system, so Ellie took her upstairs and took her to bed, and they fucked for half the night, enjoying sex rather than grubby hands and scratchy clothed legs, then dozed and hugged until it was time to fly out to Sydney.

Occasionally Ellie wondered what kind of terrible mother she was, and if she’d really gone native enough to kill the man who killed her child, and not shed a tear for her dead baby.