Chapter 16: The Door Home

April 2011

Omar did not sleep the whole time they were gone.

He’d been told it would be hours — out before dark, the long careful infiltration, the walk to the pickup, the flight back — and that if it went clean he’d have them by dawn, and if it went wrong he’d hear that too, fast, over the same radios that had carried them north. So he did the only thing left to a man who’d given everything to a plan and could no longer touch it: he waited, on the firebase, in the cold, in the dark, near enough to the operations center to hear if word came and far enough not to be in the way, and he counted the minutes like beads.

He prayed, mostly. Not eloquently. The same few words over and over — bring them out, bring them to me, don’t let it be the night it goes wrong — the prayer worn smooth as a river stone from six months’ handling. He thought about every way it could go bad. He thought about Yasmin stumbling on the bad ground, about Mariam’s months-heavy body on a hard climb, about a patrol on the wrong trail at the wrong hour, about a child of his that might never draw breath because the men he’d sent couldn’t reach the house in time. He stood at the wire and looked north at the black wall of the mountains and could not make himself sit down.

The hours crawled. The cold got into his bad leg and set the healed-rough bone aching, and he welcomed the ache, because it gave the waiting something to push against.

And then, in the grey hour before the dawn, when the eastern ridges had just begun to separate themselves from the dark, he heard it — far off, faint, the heavy beat of rotors coming down out of the north. He was at the edge of the pad before anyone could tell him to stay back, peering into the half-dark, his heart slamming, watching the running lights resolve out of the gloom, watching the great dark shape come down the sky toward the firebase, toward him, settling lower and lower with that thunder he’d heard lift them away and had not stopped hearing since.

It touched down. The downwash tore at him and he didn’t feel it. The engines spun down toward idle. The side door slid back.

And his wives came home to him.

They came out into the grey light bent under the dying rotor-wash, helped down by the same quiet men who’d gone to fetch them — Mariam first, because of course Mariam first, the matriarch leading her household even down out of an aircraft, and then Nadia, and then Yasmin, and then Dina, the four of them in their dark mountain clothes with their single bundles clutched to their chests, blinking, disoriented, set down in a world of strange machines and strange men and harsh lights they’d never seen the like of.

For one heartbeat they didn’t see him.

And then Mariam did. She went absolutely still, there on the edge of the pad, her eyes finding him across the thirty feet of swept gravel — and her face, the matriarch’s face that gave nothing away, that had stayed dry-eyed through the leaving and the waiting and the climbing-out, simply broke. She said his name. He couldn’t hear it over the engines but he saw her mouth make it. Omar.

And then they were all running.

He met them halfway and they hit him all at once, the four of them, and he got his arms around as many of them as arms could hold and the rest pressed in around, and they were all of them weeping and laughing and saying his name and touching his face and his shoulders and his chest as if to be sure he was solid, was real, was actually there and not one more dream to wake from — and Omar Mansoor stood in the middle of his whole heart returned to him and put his face down into them and wept without a particle of shame, the way he had not let himself weep in all the long six months and the longer three days.