The Debt Collectors War Read online

  Ellie thought that was nice of him. Even though what he really meant was Miguel and Sameh were violent thugs, and Ellie could keep them under control. Under control enough to scare people well. That was what made them an effective search team, for actually making finds, Ellie knew, not how long they stayed deployed.

  William was probably right about having her head in the game, though.

  “Sameh needs to come too,” Ellie said, thinking.

  Sameh looked up, and grinned. Relieved she didn’t have to ask herself, Ellie supposed.

  William pretended to be surprised. He pretended, because the company were kind of rednecks, even though they were Chinese, and didn’t really approve of Ellie and Sameh being together. He wasn’t really surprised, though. It wasn’t like he hadn’t heard from other people, and it wasn’t like they hadn’t been sharing a room for years so that eventually he’d have to have realized that the demands for their own room and a closing door weren’t just modesty and privacy. And it wasn’t like Ellie and Sameh couldn’t have just got married and settled the matter for him, either.

  William acted all reluctant, and Ellie realized it was probably because he wanted Sameh to take unpaid leave, so she snapped at him not to be a prick and then, looking guilty, he said yes, that was fine. He told her to hold on, that he’d make some calls and email her a schedule to get her home, give him ten minutes.

  “Three days,” Ellie said. “I need to be back in three days.”

  “I saw,” William said, because obviously he’d read the notification message, even though they were both pretending he hadn’t.

  Ellie said thanks and hung up. Then reconnected the data link and sat and waited. Sameh sat on the edge of the roof and emptied her spare mags and polished the rounds inside them, overtly, on the edge of the roof, where the hajjis could see. It always gave them the shits because they thought the polishing made her shoot straighter. Even out here they’d seen movies. Sameh was an awful shot and cleaning her bullets wouldn’t help at all, but she scared them so much that whenever she shot at a hajji and missed they all assumed she’d done it on purpose, and was tormenting them for fun, and got even more scared.

  “I love you,” Ellie said.

  “I know,” Sameh said, and smiled at her.

  There were advantages to hooking up with another girl in the middle of a war. You could share toilet paper and tampons and moisturizer, when you had to. And there was someone around to appreciate that you tried to keep your fingernails neat, even if they were full of blood and dirt and gun-oil all the time. And sex was easier, and a lot less messy. You could fuck with both your trousers still on, humping each other’s legs. You could finger each other after a week shitting in a hole and not be that grossed out. Cleanliness was such a bonus that some women went gay in-country just so they didn’t have to suck week-old cock, but Ellie and Sameh had never been just that. There was a connection there that was actually real.

  Ellie didn’t quite know why, when they were so different. She told Sameh she was used to crazy Lebs because she was from Western Sydney, and Sameh told her she was a racist and to shut the fuck up, and then they usually had sex. But it was true. Ellie understood Sameh better than most people, and Sameh definitely understood her. She thought she’d found something important, and acted like it was, even though she couldn’t be sure because they’d never tested what they had in the outside world.

  Now she was about to. On the way to her daughter’s funeral, the daughter she’d never told Sameh she had.

  Ellie sat where she was and watched Sameh and waited. It was cold and dusty and Ellie looked at the goats and the mountains and thought in all her life she’d never seen anything like this.

  The tablet pinged. Ellie opened the email. William said a ride would be there in three hours, and he had flights set up to get them home in two days, with fifteen hours to wait in Dubai. Miguel was to stay, and brief the substitute team they were sending in, and Ellie was to be back in a week at the most. Ellie sent back yes and thanks and told Sameh, “We’re going.”

  They went downstairs and packed, and that only took ten minutes. After that they sat and waited.

  Ellie started to feel a little odd again. A little dizzy, and too warm, now they were inside and out the wind.

  They were in full armor, sleeved vests and thigh pads and helmets, survival gear in packs and sidearms as well as rifles. You didn’t fly the hajji wilds without being ready to walk yourself out if some prick took a shot with one of the old Soviet anti-air missiles that still, fifty years later, no-one had tracked down yet.

  Ellie needed a drink. She was thirsty, but didn’t drink before helicopter flights because trying to pee in a chopper in combat gear just wasn’t worth it, and peeing down your own leg was worse, only for emergencies.

  Sameh was fidgeting too. She was scared of flying. She always got into an odd mood before they flew anywhere, which was once or twice a month on redeployments.

  Sameh had quite specific worries about flying that went way past being SAMed and fireball crashes. She’d told Ellie a little of it, late at night, ashamed of her fear. Being shot down and injured, the only survivor and having a broken leg and being helpless while whole villages took their turn with her. Ellie calmed Sameh down, usually, as they waited for helicopters, said that wasn’t going to happen because Ellie was going to survive too, and unlike Sameh she could shoot straight and so would fight her way out.

  Ellie thought she should say it again, but she felt hot and odd and tired and couldn’t be bothered. Sameh wouldn’t just be thinking about helicopters, either. She didn’t like civilian airliners, because of hijackers and not being allowed a weapon, and Ellie understood that one and almost felt the same.

  Sameh was going to be worried about flying to Sydney, and Ellie thought she should say something, and reassure her.

  For some reason she didn’t, and just sat there instead.

  After a while, Sameh said, “Are you really okay?”

  “I’m okay,” Ellie said.

  “You don’t seem it.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Stop saying that. You’re not.”

  Ellie looked at her. “I really am.”

  Sameh looked at her, unconvinced.

  “Thank you,” Ellie said. “For coming too.”

  “What have I got here? If you’re gone?”

  Ellie nodded. “After the funeral,” Ellie said. “I need to do some things.”

  “I heard.”

  “It might get complicated. It’s Australia.”

  “I understand.”

  “We might get caught.”

  Sameh looked at her for a while. “I know.”

  Ellie though about that. “Thank you,” she said.

  Sameh shrugged.

  A lot of Sameh was an act for the hajjis and the boys. Inside, she was a fairly calm, sweet person. In the field, on deployment, she didn’t have a conscience and killed people without a thought, but that was only because they were in a war. As if she had the hajji idea about Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb back to front, and saw Dar al-Harb as everywhere with other Muslims where guns were pointed her way. In the world of peace, the outside world, she went all calm and normal.

  Ellie had noticed that before, and wondered how Sameh would cope with this.

  But maybe Australia was about to become Dar al-Harb, like everywhere else they went for work, and Sameh would just do what was needed without worrying too much.

  “You’ll really come?” Ellie said.

  “Of course I will. I love you.”

  Ellie nodded, and hugged Sameh, but she still didn’t cry.

  *

  Miguel drove them down to the hajji field they used as a landing pad and hugged them both goodbye, and the hajjis were scared enough with all the unusual kafir activity that they stayed indoors and quiet and they didn’t see one all the way down, and that was a relief, easier for everyone.

  They flew in the helicopter to a military airfield, and landed
while flares arced out behind them and door-gunners watched the ground beneath for the spiraling smoke of missile traces. They handed over their weapons and gear to the local company rep, to hold until they got back. They changed into civilian clothes, backpacker clothes, in a corner of his office, and rode a rattling turbo-prop airliner to another dusty hajji town, and then a bigger, quieter plane down to Dubai.

  They got a hotel room, for the fifteen hours they had to wait. They washed and showered and scrubbed their skin, and Ellie shaved her legs for the first time in a month because shaving with the gritty dust in the mountains always gave her a rash. Sameh didn’t shave, because she was a uncivilized heathen who rejected Western cultural imperialism, she said, even though her religion told her she ought to. They ate, and got drunk, and didn’t have sex because they hardly ever did when they were first out in the world like this. Not yet. Not so soon.

  “This is a mental health stop,” Sameh said. “You know that, right?”

  “I know.”

  They were supposed to transition in stages from the war to the world so they didn’t crack up and kill people back home.

  “I mean, it’s Dubai. It’s one of the biggest airports in the world. He could’ve got us a flight out to somewhere, and got you halfway home at any time of the night.”

  “I know. It doesn’t matter.”

  Sameh nodded, but kept watching Ellie closely, warily, like she thought Ellie would go off.

  Ellie wasn’t sure that was fair. It was never Ellie who was the problem, and they both knew it. Ellie was the sensible one, the steady one. Sameh caused the problems. She always seemed to have to do something wild to adjust. That night, it took a couple of hours in the hotel bar before it happened, but Ellie had been waiting. An American oil-worker hit on Ellie, mostly ignoring Sameh, and didn’t back off fast enough when Sameh said Ellie was her girlfriend. Not fast enough, like not at the speed of light. Ellie sat there, a little surprised there was still oil, and still foreign oil workers, when the local industry was automated and ran mostly on robots, and Sameh got up and stood in the man’s face and told him to fuck off or she’d break a bottle over his face and then crush his balls with the ashtray on the table. He looked at her and went pale, and Ellie quietly told him to go. He did, quickly, nervously, because even now, even in the safety of an airport hotel bar, this was still the MidEast and even nice Americans had instincts they’d learned from being hated for a century. That, and because instincts or not, Sameh had a way about her that anyone could see. She was dangerous, especially now, unsettled and bored and waiting for a flight when she hated to fly. Anyone could tell that death was rarely as near as it was around Sameh.

  The man went away, and Sameh had got that out her system, so Ellie took her upstairs and took her to bed, and they fucked for half the night, enjoying sex without grubby hands and scratchy clothed legs, then dozed and hugged until it was time to fly out to Sydney.

  Occasionally Ellie wondered what kind of terrible mother she was, and if she’d really gone native enough to kill the man who killed her child, and not shed a tear for her dead baby.

  *

  They flew. To take her mind off flying, Sameh had been asking about Naomi since they left the base, and she kept asking for the next seven thousand miles.

  She asked in the creaking old Blackhawk, older than both of them, as they watched the world tilt and sway beneath them and clenched their tummies against a bullet coming up through the floor. She asked in the rattling hajji-air turboprop, shouting over the engine noise, and in the supersonic mega-airliner leaving Dubai, holding each other, whispering in the dim cabin, as other passengers slept. Sameh was obsessed with not knowing about Naomi, and that Ellie hadn’t mentioned she had a daughter, and kept asking questions, so Ellie had ended up explaining in little bits, in disjointed pieces, as the questions occurred to Sameh to ask.

  “How did I never know?” Sameh said over and over.

  “I just didn’t tell you,” Ellie said. “I was fifteen. It was a long time ago.”

  “Tell me now,” Sameh said, in the helicopters and airliners, and in the screening and scanning queues at arrivals at Sydney airport, and in the self-driving taxi heading into the city.

  Ellie answered her questions sometimes, and ignored others, and eventually Sameh was satisfied and stopped asking.

  “You’re okay with what I’m going to do?” Ellie said to Sameh, because she was thinking about that more than anything else.

  “I’m okay,” Sameh said.

  “You’re sure? If you’re not, you can go back before I start. I’ll be fine on my own.”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” Sameh said. “Really.”

  Ellie looked at her.

  “You need me,” Sameh said. “I can turn it on and off when I want to. You can’t.”

  Ellie nodded, because it was true, and kissed her, and said, “Thank you.”

  Chapter 2

  Sydney had grown in the years Ellie had been away. It had grown in the last century, too, and was now a bowl of light between the mountains and the sea and home to thirty million people.

  The old world was dying, and the new was growing, and Sydney had always been at the heart of that. Sydney and Lagos and Tashkent and Shanghai, and a dozen other places Ellie had flown over and passed through.

  Ellie didn’t see her parents, or any other family. They hadn’t talked in ten or twelve years, so there was no reason to start now. They didn’t like Ellie, and they wouldn’t like Sameh, and if Ellie visited, there would just be screaming and blame and in the end Ellie would walk out. Like she did every other time. She and Sameh went to a hotel, and checked in, and when it was time they went to the church where the funeral was being held.

  Ellie’s parents’ church, Ellie remembered, which was everything she’d forgotten she was running away from. They walked into the foyer, and looked around. Sameh was looking around at the walls, and it took Ellie a moment to realize why.

  “Fuck,” Sameh said quietly. “Look at this place.”

  There were bible quotes everywhere. There was cross-stitching in wooden frames, and wood-burned words, and even a poster with cats on one wall. Churches had suffered over the years, in this part of the world. They’d had to sell their cathedrals and buildings and gold and silver. Now all they had was small houses and plain walls.

  “It’s like a hajji house,” Sameh said. “A really bad hajji house. Except in English. And cheap. And fucking tasteless.”

  “Yeah,” Ellie said. “Fuck, sorry. I’d forgotten how bad they are.”

  Sameh let go of her hand.

  “Hey,” Ellie said, and grabbed it back.

  “I don’t think they’re going to like us doing that,” Sameh said. “Like the mullahs don’t.”

  “Fuck that. And fuck them.”

  *

  Ellie had been wondering about the funeral. She wondered what it would be like. She had no idea who the kid had been, so didn’t know what she’d have liked. She expected something pretty awful, a lot of religion, and a lot of prayer, and Ellie and Sameh sitting down the back while people who had actually known the kid lied and said she was a good and happy person.

  Lied, because she obviously wasn’t, since she’d ended up the way she did.

  Ellie wondered if that was anything to do with her. She’d left Naomi because she’d been fifteen when she had her, and hadn’t been able to cope. She’d run away from her family, and into the army, but maybe she should have come back and got the kid too.

  Ellie didn’t plan to say who she was, but people would work it out. They were going to stand out, Ellie and Sameh, especially since Sameh would be hugging Ellie. Ellie was expecting trouble. She was expecting snide comments, and glares, and being ready to grab Sameh’s arm, just in case.

  Instead, there was no-one here.

  They were standing in an empty, quiet church.

  *

  Ellie stood there for a moment, wary. The church was empty. There was no-one else there, and
no coffin up the front.

  The only person in the church was a man in a suit, sitting at the front of the room. After a moment that man stood up and walked back towards Ellie.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “We deceived you. Your daughter is alive and unharmed.”

  Ellie stepped towards him. Sameh was quicker. The man tried to back away, but not quickly enough. He was down almost as he finished speaking. Sameh had him on the ground, in an arm lock, and was kneeling on his shoulder and face. He was bleeding a little from a graze on his lip, where he had hit it as he’d fallen.

  Suddenly, people appeared around them. Through the door Ellie and Sameh had come in by, and through another at the far end of the room. The backup team, flooding in, pointing guns, trying to overwhelm Ellie and Sameh with surprise. Ellie wasn’t surprised. She’d expected them, once it was obvious this wasn’t a funeral. There had to be a team, and Sameh probably expected that too, and decided it was best to get the team out into the open.

  There was a lot of noise, and a lot of confusion. Everyone was shouting, what the fuck and you can’t do that and let him go. Everything Ellie would expect from a crowd of outraged hajjis, except they were shouting in English. That was a change.

  It was a small room, and they were all standing too close to Ellie and Sameh. They had handguns, but their guns weren’t raised, weren’t leveled, which meant they had instructions not to risk hurting Ellie and Sameh.

  They wanted to talk, Ellie decided. They had no intention of shooting her.

  “There’s no problem,” Ellie said. “Everyone calm down.”

  Then she had to grab at another of the backup team, a woman, who took a swing at her for no apparent reason except getting caught up in the excitement of it all. Ellie blocked the swing, and grabbed the woman’s arm, and turned into a bouncer’s lock, twisting the woman’s wrist until it bent enough the woman stopped moving. Ellie held her like Sameh was the man, until she decided they were both under control.