Masters of War (22 page)

The sun was a little higher over the mosque now, beckoning Clara eastwards, back to the MSF base. But the child needed her help. She froze for a moment, torn between fear and duty.

She tried to smile as she approached the woman, who at first backed away nervously – perhaps because Clara was obviously not Syrian. ‘Doctor,’ Clara said, before repeating herself with one of her few words of Arabic: ‘
Tabib.
’ She opened her backpack of medical supplies and pulled out a fistful of swabs, crumpled but still in their sterilised packing. The sight of them seemed to calm the woman, and she allowed Clara to take her gently by one arm and lead her to the shelter of one of the trees that surrounded the square.

The woman sat cross-legged on the ground, still cradling the child. Clara softly used a moist wipe to clean the blood from her patient’s face – she saw now that it was a little boy – until she came to the source of the bleeding. The wound was not nearly so bad as it appeared. There was a gash, about an inch long, in the fleshy part just under the child’s left eye. Clara wiped it carefully and flushed it with an antiseptic spray, all the while making gentle cooing noises to keep the boy calm. When the wound was as clean as she could make it, she closed it up with three thin lengths of Steri-Strip. She even found a forgotten piece of chocolate at the bottom of her bag, which the boy gratefully accepted and wolfed down as though he hadn’t eaten in days. Then he stood up of his own accord.

As Clara gathered her soiled medical equipment into a separate compartment of her rucksack, she felt the woman’s tear-filled eyes on her. For the first time, Clara looked properly at her. She was young, maybe not even twenty. Clara had assumed she was the boy’s mother, but perhaps not. Tentatively, the woman pulled at the foreigner’s sleeve and said something in Arabic. When Clara gave her a helpless look, she tried again in French. ‘
Venez avec moi
. . .
’
Come with me.

At first Clara shook her head. Tending to the boy had been a distraction, but now the fear had returned. The sun was fully above the mosque and more people had ventured out of their battered houses. She could only assume that more people meant a higher chance of troops, and she didn’t want to come face to face with anyone else bearing arms. But this woman was dogged, tugging at Clara’s sleeve with a look of forlorn desperation. Then the child started crying, and Clara crumbled. She could always find the mosque again, she decided, so she zipped up her rucksack, looked anxiously around and nodded.

The woman went first. Clara and the little boy followed. She held his hand. He was as unsteady on his feet as a newborn foal. They made slow progress. The woman led them away from the mosque and through a network of streets even more war-torn than those Clara had already seen. She saw gunshot pockmarks all over what remained of the walls of certain houses. Everywhere there was an overpowering smell of sewage. On the corner of one street, a group of men were feeding rubbish into a burning iron barrel. The familiar chill of fear slid down her spine. Even though she wanted to run, the touch of the child’s hand stopped her. Every thirty seconds or so, the woman looked back over her shoulder to check they were still following, before beckoning them on with a curled finger.

They hadn’t walked for more than five minutes when the woman stopped outside the entrance to a narrow alleyway between two rows of shelled buildings. A large satellite dish hung precariously from the wall above, looking like it would fall at any moment. The woman looked around nervously, as though checking that nobody was paying them any attention, before slipping down the alleyway. Clara followed with the child. The smell of sewage was even stronger here. Clara had to hold her breath to stop herself retching, though it didn’t seem to bother her companions. Twenty metres along, on the right-hand side, there was an iron door about five feet tall. The woman pushed it open – it was unlocked – and curling her finger once more she whispered, ‘
Venez
. . .
venez
. . .
’

Clara swallowed nervously. She looked in both directions along the alleyway, then gently encouraged the little boy to enter, bent down low and followed him in.

It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darkness inside. They were at the top of a flight of narrow, winding stone steps. Sudden panic spilled over her. What was she doing? She should turn back now, find the mosque again, head east. This was madness. But then the little boy looked up at her, his big eyes imploring, and before she knew what was happening she had started to descend the steps. She trod carefully as she followed her companions down into the basement of the building. After five steps she felt the air temperature drop slightly. After ten steps a foul smell hit her nose. A few steps more and she was in the basement.

It was a large room, about fifteen metres by fifteen. The only source of light was a flickering, wind-up torch suspended from the ceiling by a short piece of wire. As Clara entered the basement, the light failed. A moment of silence, and then she heard the grind of someone winding it up again. Its feeble glow returned and Clara was able to look around.

There were twelve people down here, six of them children. The adults were all female. Their faces were as frightened as they were dirty. The foul stench came from a wooden box in one corner that Clara assumed was a makeshift toilet. Certainly none of the occupants of this squalid basement sat within five metres of it. They were huddled on the ground. At least three of the children were crying quietly, and two were coughing – a hoarse, croupy bark.

The downtrodden women were scared of her, that much was clear. They didn’t know who she was, or what she was here for. In a strange way, it gave her strength to realise she was not the most terrified person in the city. And she suddenly understood why the woman had brought her here. These women and children clearly needed medical attention.

The woman Clara had followed started babbling Arabic at her. Clara held up her hands. ‘English,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

As she spoke, another woman stood up and walked towards her. She was older, forty maybe, with streaks of grey in her black hair. ‘You are a doctor?’ she said. Her voice was dry and weak.

Clara nodded.

‘
Allahu Akbar
,’ the woman said softly. ‘My name is Miriam. We need a doctor very badly. Our children are sick. So are we. You can help us?’

Clara looked around the room. ‘Where are your husbands?’ she asked.

Miriam smiled sadly. ‘All dead,’ she said.

Instantly, an image of Bradley rose in Clara’s mind. She hadn’t even loved him, and the pain of his death was still raw. Imagine what these widows and orphans must be feeling. If she’d had any tears left in her, Clara might have cried.

‘How?’ she asked.

Miriam shrugged. ‘The war, of course. The men die, the women are left . . .’

‘Your homes?’

‘Destroyed.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Clara said. It felt like a completely inadequate thing to say. ‘But you
can’t
stay here,’ she said.

‘We can’t leave.’

Clara shook her head. She pointed out the makeshift toilet in the corner of the room. ‘That will kill you,’ she said. ‘The germs . . .’

Miriam’s expression was helpless. ‘We have nowhere else—’ she started to say, but she was cut short by the renewed coughing of one of the children. It sounded terrible. The child needed strong antibiotics, which was more than Clara’s shoulder bag of medical supplies could provide. And that was just the start. Clara dreaded to think what assortment of illnesses were festering down here. She approached another of the kids and bent down to listen to his breathing. Heavy, laboured. The child had a chest infection at the very least. Another – a little girl – had bloodshot eyes and some sort of fungal infection on the inside of her mouth that had caused several suppurating white sores the size of ten-pence pieces over her inner cheek and tongue. Some of the occupants of the cellar – both child and adult – smelled as though they had wet themselves rather than use the disgusting toilet.

Most of the children at least had someone to cuddle. There was one who was alone, a boy with curly dark hair, huddled up against the wall. His wide eyes followed Clara’s every move. She knelt down before him and took his hands. There were angry welts around his wrists, and his face was dotted with burns.

‘What happened?’ asked Clara.

Miriam was standing behind her. ‘They tortured him,’ she said in a flat, emotionless voice.

‘Tortured him? But he’s only—’

‘Twelve, yes. The men came to his school. They put a hundred children in one classroom, and took them out one by one to question them.’

‘What about?’

‘Their parents . . . their friends . . .’ Miriam’s voice grew quieter. ‘They tortured Hassam – his name is Hassam – worse than the others.’

‘Why?’

‘They found him playing at being a rebel fighter, using a stick for a machine gun. So they tied plastic cords around his wrists and hung him from the ceiling with his feet off the ground. Then they beat him. Most people last an hour hanging like that before they pass out. Hang for two hours and you are dead. Hassam passed out from the pain of the beating, so they woke him with cold water. Then they burned the skin on his face with cigarettes. They did this every day for five days. They wanted him to confess to something, but he had nothing to confess. His parents were already dead.’

Clara brushed the back of her hand against the child’s cheek before standing up again.

‘You see,’ Miriam said, ‘why we would rather stay down here?’

Clara barely knew what to say. With her limited supplies, there was very little she could do for them.

Unless . . .

She took Miriam by the hand. ‘The streets are quiet,’ she said. ‘I know somewhere we can go, where my friends are. East of the city. There are lots of doctors there, and medicine. Do you understand? Medicine?’ As she spoke she tried to block out the sound of scurrying from the toilet corner. Whatever rodents were attracted by the excrement, they were sufficiently brave not to be put off by the presence of humans. ‘
Medicine?
’ Clara repeated.

Miriam nodded, but her face was uncertain. She turned to the others and addressed them in Arabic. As they spoke, the women seemed to shrink back against the walls. They started to mutter and it was clear that Clara’s suggestion was unpopular.

‘They will not come,’ Miriam said. ‘They are scared. The government men have guns . . .’

‘If they stay here, they’re dead. Hassam, all of them.’ Clara felt the old fire in her veins. She wanted to help these people, but she couldn’t if they refused to help themselves. ‘I mean it, Miriam – two days, maybe three, the children will start dying, and that’s if your building isn’t bombed tonight. Do you understand?’

Miriam nodded, but she did not translate.

‘Once you have one dead body in here,’ Clara persisted, ‘you’ll be overrun with rats . . . bacteria . . . you’ll have to leave anyway. Better to do it now, at the right time . . .’

Miriam relayed this to the others, who were silent.

‘I’m going to where the doctors are. I’ll take you all, if you like, but we have to go now. If we wait, the children will be too weak, and . . .’ She shrugged. ‘I’ll wait for you upstairs.’

Clara turned her back on the women and children and climbed up from the basement. Out in the alleyway, she realised she was shivering, even though it wasn’t cold. Was she doing the right thing? She had no idea. In the past forty-eight hours it had become impossible to tell any more.

She waited for two minutes that seemed a lot longer. Nearby, she heard the sound of vehicles. It was strangely comforting – a normal city noise, not the dreadful crash of bombing from above. She felt a glimmer of hope that she
could
, in fact, lead these women and children to the MSF camp, if only they would agree to come. She hadn’t been exaggerating. Stuck down there in the medieval filth and darkness, it wouldn’t be long before one of the kids succumbed to an infection, and it would spread. But it could be easily treated with the proper drugs.

If only they would agree to come.

Just when Clara thought the women had decided to remain where they were and she was to be faced with the impossible decision of going back down or leaving them to their fate, the little iron door opened. The face of the child she had tended at the mosque appeared. She smiled at him and held out her hand, helping him out into the alleyway. Miriam came next, before, one by one, each of the women and children filed out. Thirty seconds later they had congregated in the alleyway and were waiting silently, their expectant eyes fully on Clara, waiting for her to tell them what to do, and where to go.

Danny had to hand it to Buckingham. His fitness levels were crap, but he was willing to push himself. In the two hours between leaving the crash site and the imminent rising of the sun, they’d managed to cover about seven kilometres, travelling eastward and parallel to the Homs road, two klicks away. Now they were flat on the ground, Buckingham gasping for breath, Danny scanning the surrounding countryside through his night-sight.

There were mountains to the east – not jagged peaks but high, rolling hills through which the Homs road twisted and turned. The crash site, to the west, was out of sight now, but Danny counted three military vehicles travelling west and he didn’t have much doubt about where they were headed. The road was busier now that dawn was approaching – a vehicle in one direction or the other every thirty seconds. The traffic was only going to increase as the sun rose. It was time to get out of sight.