Page 49 of What is Lost

Parviz said something else to the big guy, whose eyes narrowed as his glower deepened. After a breathless moment, the man gave a curt jerk of his head then backed away, fingers clamped on the boy’s shoulder and hustled the kid out of the restaurant.

“Okay,” Parviz said as the door clapped shut. “We wait minute, two minute, let them get far from here. Then there no more trouble.”

“I wasn’t looking to make it,” John said. “What did the guy say?”

“Say he is boy’s uncle.”

“His uncle.” Now that he’d gotten a good look at the child, he knew this wasn’t the whole story and probably wasn’t true. “Anything else? Why was he so pissed? Not as if we were harassing the boy.”

“Yeah,” Davila said, “he came up to us.”

“He say boy steal from strangers.” The driver mimed pulling something from his vest. “Picking pocket.”

“Seriously? That kid’s the Artful Dodger?” At Parviz’s puzzled expression, John added, “Character from a book…never mind. That guy said the kid’s a thief?”

“I sure didn’t that vibe, Davila said.

“That what he say.” Parviz started for the door. “Okay, come. Enough time pass. Now, we go. No need more trouble now.”

“What?” Davila snagged the driver’s elbow. “What do you meanmoretrouble?”

“I mean,” Parviz said, “change of plan.”

PAINT IT BLACK

AUGUST 2021

They calledthe planOperationUplift. John couldn’t decide if this was meant to have religious overtones. Probably not. More than likely, the wit who’d dreamt up the name aimed for a cutesy play onAirliftbecause who wanted to conjure up images of Berlin? Especially since, in the end, the Commies kind of won that one. Of course, you could say they won the battle and lost the war, but...semantics.

More than likely, the guy who’d presented the operational name to his superiors had also never read H.G. Wells. If he had, he might have been moved to veer away from casting the Americans as Doctor Moreau.

Because, of course, that meant all those clamoring, desperate Afghans were animals.

If John thought operatingwith dwindling supplies at the beginning of the evacuation was tough, nothing compared to the runup to the finish line.

With four days to go before the Americans got the heck out of Dodge, the situation, bad to begin with, leapfrogged right over terrible and landed on dire. It wasn’t just that their workload had quadrupled. The problem was the utter and absolute lack of planning that had gone into the evacuation. Nobody really had thought this through. Everything was being done on the fly and on a shoestring. They all lurched from crisis to crisis: a shortage of this, a lack of manpower here, no thought even given to where troops were supposed to bunk much less how they were expected to care for the thousands clamoring to get out of Afghanistan.

Kabul Airport was a wreck, like a fortress during a prolonged siege. John had seen pictures of people in Indonesia, the Philippines, Ethiopia...think of any overpopulated, impoverished area where the world dumped its garbage. The airport wasn’t as bad, probably because only a few weeks had passed. While there were no mountains of waste, the airport had become, literally, a garbage dump. Trash was everywhere: paper, cardboard, empty water bottles, discarded clothing, abandoned vehicles leftby the Afghan military, mattresses, tarps, shoes, sandals, hats. Abayas, trousers, boxes of mementos, tunics, cutlery, toys, balls, pictures, electronics of all kinds because none were allowed through.

The Abbey Gate was the only way in. The gate lay at the end of a narrow road. An open sewage ditch filled with gray watery sludge ran down the center. High concrete walls and barbed wire lined both sides of the throughway which was packed with Afghans: a mosh pit with no space to sit or lie down. There was no shade. The air was fetid with the stink of sweat, diarrhea, and sewage stewing under a merciless sun. Perched atop cargo containers which served as a chokepoint before actual entrance, the Taliban sometimes employed their version of crowd control by firing into the air. This only resulted in chaos and stampedes as people tried to flee or find cover. Many who fell or tripped were crushed or suffocated. Children were separated from parents; some were simply snatched because having a small child was seen as aget out of jail freecard, a ticket out of town. Almost everyone had papers. Some documents proved previous employment by the Americans. Many more were simply photographs taken with U.S. soldiers or scraps of cards with American names and promises—If you ever need anything—dashed off in ink. Anything a person could think of that mighthelp, he brought, along with his fear and desperation.

Calling this a “gate” was a laugh. There were no crossing rails to be lifted out of the way. There were steel doors, but no one used them. The first and last time the earliest contingent of Marines tried—this was two days before John and Ronnie landed—they were so few and the numbers of refugees so large that the mob very nearly forced their way through.

What the American troops used instead was a hole in barbed wire. If a Marine stationed along the concrete wall thought papers looked legit, he would pluck that person out of the ditch and pass him or her through that hole for “processing”: a fancy word for sitting for more hours in the sweltering heat, waiting to be called.

What happened next to an Afghan hoping to make it out was a bit like Alice falling down that rabbit hole. Except there was no great hallway lined with doors, and the only key that would get an Afghan anywhere was the proof he or she presented.

The Americans weren’t monsters. If you needed patching, you got patched. If you needed water, you’d get a bottle. You might even score some food. This is where the kids made out. Infants got formula, and more than one Marine took pains to coo and cuddle. Youngsters got water and candy. AMarine might find a ball somewhere and play a bit of soccer. Those were the photo op moments the brass loved.

In the end, though, if your papers didn’t pass muster or a State Department dude decided you were conning him or you’d done something to really piss off a Marine—tossing a baby onto barbed wire and then claiming that was your kid was right there on the list of piss-offable offenses—you were booted right back out, like a mangy, unwanted stray.

Uplift, indeed.

As horrible asthis endless stream of the wretched was, John’s biggest worries were two: the Marines—and what the heck Roni was doing on her breaks.

To say the Marines weren’t doing well was an understatement. Most were teenagers on their first deployment, and not only were they terrified, they were also unprepared. No one sat down and ticked off a checklist on how to decide if an Afghan should be allowed through or not—or even what to say when they had to turn someone away. Everyone was making it up on the fly.

Even worse, soon after their arrival, a stomach flu swept through the troops. John could’ve predicted this. You didn’t need to be a medicalEinstein. The troops were stationed at a sewage ditch, for God’s sake. So many soldiers got knocked down from puking their guts out—when they weren’t crapping their brains out—that the medical teams set up a different treatment area just to tend to the troops needing IVs. Which was both good and bad. Good because sometimes there really was nothing like a bag of saline to perk a guy right up again. But bad because if that poor guy could stand up without falling over, he got sent back out.

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