“I can’t sleep,” Danielle said. Her mind was too busy, or maybe she was just too tired. She couldn’t remember how long she had been up.
“Warm milk,” Bogasieru suggested.
“No.” Danielle glanced at the other end of the room.
Cezar slept in a fetal position on a Murphy bed. Three empty beer bottles sat next to the bed. His camera was in his arms and his belt of batteries was connected to the charger. Despite his drinking, he never seemed to get drunk, and any buzz he got disappeared the minute he went to work.
“I’ll be back soon,” Danielle said.
“Be careful. Don’t forget your helmet.”
Danielle scooped the Kevlar helmet from the folding chair by the wall, shrugged into her bulletproof vest, grabbed her camera case, and let herself out. She heard the RV’s electronic locks snick into place behind her.
She walked through the rubble that filled the courtyard where the driver had parked the Adventurer. A building fronted the courtyard on the south side, with a solid mass of trees to the north and more trees that flanked the entrance and exit to the parking area. Four other vehicles, all of them wrecked and burned to the point of being only metal husks, occupied the courtyard. Thankfully, there were no bodies.
She lifted her camera from its case and took photos. The effort was a habit, a shorthand form of note taking. A picture was worth a thousand words, but a TV reporter had far fewer than that in a sound bite, so she wanted reference material to work from.
As Danielle walked, she gazed around. UH-1H Huey helicopters made the rounds with litters hanging over their sides. From the radio communications she’d monitored while in the RV, she knew the search-and-rescue teams were still finding and removing wounded soldiers and civilians. The Hueys ferried wounded to the military hospitals, or took emergency triage personnel to treat wounded on-site if those casualties needed to be stabilized before being moved.
Streamers of black smoke spiraled through the air and clouds of harsh smoke drifted through the city, bringing biting pain to throats and nasal passages. Several fires still raged, adding to the casualty lists and to the property damage.
In the full light of day, Sanliurfa lay scattered and broken. If she hadn’t already been numbed by everything she’d seen over the past few days, Danielle felt certain she would have broken down and wept despite the professional distance she tried to maintain.
Sanliurfa was a historical city, one of the oldest around. Danielle knew from the background piece she’d done on the city soon after the retreating military forces had settled in Sanliurfa, that evidence of human habitation existed more than two thousand years B.C. Christianity had its roots there, and was followed by the Moslem beliefs and rulers that had constructed the architecture that still stood in so many places.
The city had worn many names throughout its life span: Edessa, Urfa, and finally in 1923—after the Ottoman Empire succumbed to the annals of history—Sanliurfa. Wars had torn the land all its life. Border disputes and issues over water rights regarding the Euphrates River—known as the Firat locally—remained high on the list of reasons armies fought or stayed prepared for war. Christian crusaders had traveled thousands of miles to sack the city in 1098, and it took fifty years for the Turks to take it back.
Medieval architecture stood shoulder to shoulder with modern buildings, hotels, and apartments. But the bazaars, the eight great marketplaces that still thrived on the agricultural business where people of several cities came to buy, sell, and trade vegetables, fruits, and meats as well as barter for handcrafts that included clothing, furniture, and dishes, had existed during all of that time.
Trade had been Sanliurfa’s lifeblood, no matter what name the city wore. But that was all gone now. Danielle had seen two of the great marketplaces in tatters. The Syrian pilots had deliberately targeted those, taking the chance that many of the populace would gather there as normal to swap news and bargain for the things they needed while selling the things they didn’t. The tactic had worked. Dozens of dead and hundreds more injured had resulted from the attacks.
Outside the courtyard area, Danielle walked south, following the natural boundary of the block. Even in the downtown area where she was, most buildings stood no more than two or three stories tall. None of them had windows. The glass had either been shattered during the first attacks or had been broken out later by soldiers or occupants so they couldn’t turn into deadly shrapnel during the next attack.
An earthmover, borrowed from a Sanliurfa construction business, dug a great gaping hole in the park across the street. The claw scrabbled back and forth with loud clanks that echoed between the buildings. A line of trucks bearing the dead that had been gathered so far waited to dump the bodies into the mass grave.
Other squads dug more mass graves around the city.
The heat, Danielle knew from the reports she’d given, spread disease from rotting corpses quickly. If the military teams hadn’t been ordered to delay Syrian occupation of the city and were on their way out, they probably wouldn’t have bothered with the dead.
Whenever possible, American dead were buried apart from the Turkish people and military as well as the U.N. forces. If things went well and the Syrians were forced back into their country, American military would return to the city and claim their dead. Forensics would allow them to ship the bodies home to families to inter at Arlington or in family burial grounds.
For a moment, Danielle stopped and watched the mass burial. Several Turkish families clung to the sides of the military trucks. Soldiers gently but forcibly removed some of them who were overcome with emotion
