They escorted me out into the hot sun and blowing sand, handing me a thick black cloth which I wrapped around my head, tied low over my eyes. Everything burnt orange from the sun and the dust, that rose in fell in waves as the wind blew across the ridges and gullies. We got into a tan jeep and roared down a bumpy dirt road in the center of a convoy of vehicles. The commander spent his time talking into a radio and looking at information on his laptop, while I stared out across the landscape. Barren peaks of dark rusty brown rose in the distance topped with snow. Men in loose white trousers and long graying beards, women in long colorful dresses, their heads wrapped in shimmering cloths and their children scattered onto the roadside as we passed watching with tired eyes from gray banks of broken rock. The hot air whipped around me, and I basked in the heat of the sun as if I’d never known warmth in the air-conditioned corridors I’d previously been confined. I had the urge to run alongside the jeep, sure I could keep up with it, to run and never stop, but I remained sitting under the watchful gaze of the private and his machine gun. As we drove the sun set and with the darkness, I felt even more strength ebb into my body and more thirst drying my throat. I could see the clumps of little rough bushes hanging in no patterns in the ditches and swells of the land. I could hear the commander’s even pulse in his throat and the scent of fear from his guardsmen and my stomach clenched. My last sight of Derrick in his glass prison floated before my eyes reduced to a shriveled mass in the corner n ever moving except to feebly lift his arm, his eyes dulled until they were already a corpse’s eyes, until one day he was gone reportedly killed while we were locked in our rooms. Fear of an identical fate bore down upon me and my thirst welled up within me, two forces straining like a dam that’s been opened to the river for the first time.
“Eventually we arrived at a small compound layered with concrete walls and check points and the commander awoke from his fitful snoring, his laptop fallen asleep in front of him and ushered me into his office. He pulled a map out of a stack and sat it on his desk then stabbed at a red circle on it with a thick finger. ‘We have reason to believe he’s in a house here.’ He poked at a mountain and the veins stood out on the back of his hand. I licked my lips and nodded. He talked on and showed me an image of my target, a middle-aged looking man with thick glasses perched on a large nose, and dark eyes sandwiched between a white turban and a wiry graying beard. A man who looked a lot like the man I could have become had I been a man. Now I consider this night the beginning of my labor, my passage through the birth canal. The next night I would be born, but not in the sense that humans are born. I was never born. I was made.
As the chopper flew, low over the sandy ridges and gullies the men divided their flitting attention behind their night vision goggles between me sitting near the open door and the rough ground that rolled by below. Was wound tightly, every sense overwhelming my mind with streams of data, but I maintained my composure as I watched the landscape clear in the moonlight despite having refused a pair of the goggles. The hot air rushed around me roaring in my ears. The moonlight sparkled on the rocks below; a road lay like a white vein twisting through the gray soil. The helicopter touched down roughly, and I leapt out underneath the crushing wind of its blades before I’d even been waved out. I landed with a crunching of boots and ran hunched over with my gun in both hands as the chopper lifted off and left me standing in a narrow valley looking up into in a crystal-clear night.
A quarter moon provided all the light I needed to move at a quick trot down the mountain sending little animals scurrying into the harsh brush. The air had cooled, and I breathed in deeply the fragrant aromas of the land warming my hands under my armpits, the skin growing taut and rubbery in the cold, trading them off as I ran. Finally, I approached a valley with a thin stream of smoke rising from one end and I crawled up to the ridge on my stomach and peered into it. Up where the valley narrowed and backed up against a tall steep mountain sat a cluster of brick and mud houses. I saw a couple of men moving, nothing more than specks and I could hear the faint shouts and their echoes rattling between the slopes. I slipped over the ridge and once I’d crept partially down the slope I stood and began moving across the slope. As I drew closer, I could make out a couple of guards shuffling around the grounds and I angled towards the
