The Deadliest Strain

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Through the door, he could hear Fahimah crying out in anguish. She said something in Kurdish that he doubted was intelligible even to her cousin.

She knows about her sister.

Propriety be damned, he thought. He rapped his knuckles on the door. Ashraf must have been standing just next to it, as she immediately pulled it open.

"Can I talk to her?" Austyn asked.

"Yes, please," the young woman said tearfully, sliding past him and disappearing into the other room.

Austyn walked in, closed the door and leaned his back against it. She was crouched in the corner, her arms wrapped around herself, rocking back and forth, sobbing. The guilt he felt was overwhelming. The fact that he personally had nothing to do with robbing her of five years of her life, of time she could have had with her sister, didn't matter. He stood for the black hole that sucked the lives out of people who were innocent, as well as those who were guilty. There were no checks or balances, no chances to defend yourself. You were lost in an abyss, sometimes forever.

He knew the rationalization for the prisons. It was a dirty world. The government's duty was to protect its own people… and businesses. There was no place for idealism in that world. Austyn remembered reading in college something about idealism increasing in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem. Well, he was standing in the middle of the problem, on the border between Iran and Iraq, and he wasn't feeling too good about the business.

She said something again in Kurdish, one fist striking her chest again and again.

Whatever lid he was trying to keep on his emotions popped. He walked toward her, crouched down on the floor and gathered her in his arms.

"I'm so sorry," he told her. But no words were enough. Nothing he could say or do could take away the pain of losing this loved one, this sister, this last family member left… this one person you sacrificed your own life to protect.

Austyn didn't know how long he held her like that. Her sobs subsided, but the tears never stopped.

Large pillows made out of rugs were the only furniture in the room. At some point he leaned against one and took her with him. His shirt was soaked with her tears. Austyn wished she would get angry, the way he'd seen her do at the Brickyard prison. He wanted her to unleash her anger on him. But she didn't, and that made him suffer even more.

He didn't know how long they sat there like that before she started to talk.

"Rahaf is in a hospital in Kermanshah," she whispered. Kermanshah was a major city in the western part of Iran.

"What kind of cancer does she have?" he asked. His mind was already racing with arrangements that he could make to get Rahaf to the U.S. With the latest cancer treatments, there had to be something that they could do for her.

"It started as leukemia… some eight months ago. But she refused treatments… and now it has spread everywhere. They're keeping her sedated… so she can tolerate the pain."

She pulled away from him. Her eyes were swelled to slits, her nose was red. She reached for a box of tissues and blew her nose. He was relieved when she moved back and sat next to him.

"Who's with her?"

"A couple of the people she worked with at the camp," Fahimah said. "They took her there last week. The doctors say there is nothing more that can be done. They're just making her comfortable until she dies."

The Peshmerga soldiers who'd dropped them off were coming back tomorrow around midday to drive them to the border. They knew the Iranian guards who were on duty at that time. "We have to arrange for a faster way to get to Kermanshah," he told her.

She nodded. "Ashraf is going to make some calls. There's a small plane that occasionally flies between Ha-labja and Kermanshah to transfer patients to the hospital. She's going to speak to the manager of the hospital and see if they can fly us over there in the morning."

He was relieved that she was talking, thinking, planning.

"Rahaf's cancer was the reason my cousin Ashraf became interested in helping with Dr. Hearne's study," she said quietly. "I did not know."

"You and Rahaf were both here during the chemical attack, weren't you?" he asked, dreading the answer.

She nodded, looking straight ahead. "Including my parents, Rahaf and I lost twenty-six relatives that day."

He took her hand. "Do you want to talk about it?"

She didn't immediately answer. Austyn didn't know if it was helpful or not thinking of another loss right now. But that was where the root of Rahaf's cancer lay. He looked at her, wondering, wanting to know more. He was fearful to think the same illness could haunt her, too.

"Halabja was already battered by war when the chemical attacks came. Iranian troops and Kurdish Peshmerga guerrillas backed by Tehran had taken over parts of the city. The two days prior to it, we had suffered attack by planes and shelling by the Iraqis. The noise was horrendous." She gathered her knees into her chest. "We were still in mourning because of my brothers, so there was nothing being done about Norooz. There was going to be no celebration of the new year, the first day of spring, that year."

Austyn said nothing, trying to visualize the situation she and her family had faced.

She continued. "That was March 16 in the Christian year 1988."

There seemed to be no tears left in her. She rested her head against the rug, still looking into space.

"I remember it was Wednesday morning. Because of all the bombing, no one was going to school. We heard planes going overhead, but there were no blasts afterward. It seemed strange that they'd dropped no bombs. Rahaf and I went out. I counted seven, but Rahaf kept swearing that there were ten Iraqi planes overhead. They were dropping smoke bombs and pieces of paper." She took another tissue and wiped her face. "We didn't know that the Iraqis were checking which way the wind was blowing."

Austyn gathered her to him, and she leaned against him willingly.

"But it wasn't long before they come back."

"Yes. It was around noon. Maybe a little after noon," she croaked. "Other children were amused by those little pieces of papers, but my parents forced Rahaf and me to stay in a shelter that my father and brothers had built in our dugout basement maybe ten years before that. There were no windows, no clocks. My mother kept coming down and checking on us. We just assumed there would be more bombing like before. We never thought… never even imagined… the Iraqis were going to drop chemical bombs on us."

Austyn remembered reading that the Halabja attack involved various chemical agents, including mustard gas, the nerve agent sarin, tubin, VX and hydrogen cyanide. The most authoritative investigation into the Halabja massacre had been conducted by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. They had concluded that Iraq had been responsible and not Iran, as the U.S. administration had wanted reported. According to Iraq's report to the United Nations, the know-how and material for developing chemical weapons had been obtained from firms in the United States, West Germany, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Egypt, Netherlands and a Singapore company affiliated with the United Arab Emirates.

There was plenty of blame to go around for supplying the gun, but Saddam Hussein and his henchmen had been the ones to pull the trigger.

"They came back," she continued. "It wasn't too long after that we heard the thunder of Iraqi planes overhead again. But again there was nothing. No missiles, no shattering explosions, no screaming… just silence. I remember Rahaf saying that maybe they were spreading more paper over the city."

"How long was it before you suspected something was wrong?" he asked.

"Not long. Minutes, perhaps. I remember spending the entire time arguing with Rahaf, trying to convince her not to go up, to wait for our parents to come and get us. But then, shortly after the bombing, we started hearing the sound of people shrieking and wailing. We stared at each other. We didn't understand. Then, just as abruptly, the noise of voices just… stopped."

"Did you two go up then?"

She nodded. "I still remember fighting with Rahaf. I had this feeling that something horrible had happened. But despite being younger, she was bigger than I was. She went up there, and I had to follow."

Fahimah closed her eyes. The tears weren't too far away. Austyn wanted to tell her to stop talking about it. He'd seen pictures of streets littered with the dead. Men, women, children. So many children. Many victims had a grayish slime oozing from their mouths, their frames contorted, fingers grotesquely twisted in pain. Most of the victims probably died within minutes. For those affected by nerve gas, death was instantaneous; their breathing stopped so abruptly that people simply dropped to the ground as if frozen. They were the lucky ones.

He had seen the pictures, and that was horrifying enough. Fahimah had been there.

"We found our mother in the kitchen. She'd been cutting beets. She was dead. Our father was sitting in the doorway. His face was frozen in a scream. There was a sweet smell in the air. I got gas in my eye and couldn't breathe. Rahaf started vomiting. It was green." She grabbed a couple more tissues, blew her nose, rubbed away the tears. "Rahaf and I and thousands of other refugees fled the city that day. We were not there for the burial… not even the burial of our parents."

The tears overwhelmed her again.

"I'm so sorry," he said once again.

She looked up at the ceiling, and they sat for a few minutes in silence. A few more tears escaped, but she dashed them away. Austyn could see her slowly regaining her composure.

"No more," she said finally. "I cannot cry anymore. I have cried enough. I need to pull myself together. I need to be strong for Rahaf. We will see each other tomorrow."