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Chapter XXVII - Loose Ends

Sato sat awake in the early hours before dawn, his bad leg propped up on the ottoman, his eyes glued to the wide-screen television set Arlen had bought for football and race day viewing. No such divertissements occupied his thoughts tonight.

"UN forces report coming under fire from Serbian light armor at a border checkpoint between Croatian-controlled territory and the combat zone. The UN secretary has expressed outrage..."

"Its wild here, Angela! The Serbians have been bombing the city ever since their main tank column was repulsed ten hours ago. Bosnian government forces appear to be lightly armed but determined. The carnage is unbelievable..."

Sato felt sick, and sipped at his tea, which had gone cold while he was cycling through news stations for any sign of whether his friends and mate were alive, alright, coming home. Sharing the couch with him was his phone, a plate of discarded food he'd barely picked at which had gone cold hours ago, and a stuffed tiger that'd turned purple because Arlen had dyed it wrong.

"...Serbian soldiers reporting suspected action by special forces elements in the area behind their siege line..."

"...UN denies use of covert operations teams..."

"...One wounded soldier reports his unit taking severe losses from a 'shadow devil'..."

"...Reports of ethnic cleansing and wide-spread destruction in historic Sarajevo..."

Sato wasn't used to being tense. All the training he'd had since near birth had made sure of it. When the phone rang, his arm jerked and threw his tea cup. He didn't even hear it clatter as it hit the floor, his attention was so focused on the cell as he brought it to his ear.

"Moshi?"

Tamra's voice sounded as tired as he felt, but with a vein of excitement to it that had his heart speeding to match.

"Sato, we just heard from Buck. He's been arrested by the UN for violating some law or something, but he's alive! Rene and Zebra are with him."

He swallowed hard. She hadn't mentioned Arlen, but her voice didn't have the sense of dread he'd expect if she were planning to report his death or capture. The suspense was making him bounce in his chair and dig his claws into its arm.

"That is very good to hear. I have been worried. Where is Arlen?"

Tamra paused, and he heard muffled talking in the background, likely through her paw clasped over the phone.

"No word yet. Buck reported that Arlen broke off to slow up an enemy attack. They...They were escorting a bunch of children. Mission was a failure, so they...Um...Improvised?"

Sato sucked in a shaky breath, holding the phone away from his muzzle so she wouldn't hear the embarrassing state he was in. A moments' meditation brought him back to center, and he put the phone to his ear before speaking again.

"I am sorry to hear about the mission, but it is more important that they survived and are doing proper things. Rescued children? You will have to debrief me."

Her voice was relieved, since he'd let her off the hook without prying into Arlen's whereabouts. Sato knew well enough that she was worrying about as mucha s he was.

"Your uncle's planning to pay for Buck's legal defense and get him out of there on bail soon. Word is that Zeb and Rene are off the hook. They never arrested Zebra, and Rene got away with his 'volunteer rescue pilot' shtick or something. Buck's...Pretty messed up though. Broken leg and the doc I talked to said he might lose an eye."

Sato winced. Losing an eye would end the stag's field career, even if the leg didn't. No depth perception meant no ability to use a rifle properly. The silver wolf looked down at his bum knee, seeing it was swollen just from having paced around the house for half an hour almost five hours ago.

"Keep me up to date, please. Give my best to Buck and the others?"

"Yeah, will do. Sato...Get some sleep, wouldya? You sound dead on your feet."

"I am on a couch. Not my feet."

He was pretty sure she just rolled her eyes at the phone, and it made him smile despite the stress that felt like a vice around his heart.

"You know what I mean."

She hung up the phone and he turned up the news, watching as the story cycle continued with information he'd already heard, interspersed here and there with bits and snatches of new developments on the war.

Running a bar in the middle of nowhere had given the goat a lot of opportunity to see strange furs over the twenty years of his tenure as owner. When the war had gotten started, his business had skyrocketed, as had the odd individuals. Simple chance had put his bar not a mile from where the Croatian military had set up a blockade to prevent the war spilling further into their territory. Later, the UN had rolled into the area and taken over the road block.

So, seeing a muddy, armed, and un-uniformed tiger with strange black fur come walking in to ask for a phone to borrow only really phased him because the tiger didn't fit in with the militaries in the area. American, not wearing a UN uniform, and heavily armed.

The look in the tiger's eyes as he brought him the phone was...Strange. Distant, blank in a way that had him thinking of paintings...Staring, empty eyes that seemed to take in everything and nothing all at once.

The goat moved away as soon as the phone was handed over, and went back to serving the dozen or so coalition troops who'd been wasting time in there half the day while waiting for orders.

Tamra looked out the window of her office, rubbing at the bags under her eyes. She hadn't slept in about 30 hours now, thanks to Kiyosato Goza's long list of tasks for her to do. Everything from calling lawyers to checking intelligence intercepts he'd somehow gotten for any sign of their missed target or missing tiger.

When the phone rang again, she had the sudden urge to throw it out her window. Instead, she picked it up, answering with a terse, growly, tired voice.

"What?"

She almost hung up, when the pause dragged on for more than a couple of seconds.

"You sound like shit, Tam."

The calico cat jolted upright in her chair when she heard Arlen's baritone rumble. She threw a paper clip across the room, and grinned at the yelp she got from Goza's assistant, Maasa, who had been chatting amicably with Raven over the office's desk intercom phone system.

He glowered at her with the receiver to his ear, and she stuck her tongue out at him, while gesturing for the wolf to listen in on her line.

"Where the hell are you, Arl? Sato's been worried half to death! Not to mention the rest of us."

His voice sounded dull, probably from exhaustion and battle fatigue, she figured.

"Did everyone else make it?"

Tam grabbed at a stack of paper she'd been going through, filled with photographs and biographic information on the kids. Some were marked with red 'DECEASED' stamps indicating they hadn't survived the running fight to safety. Others were marked with various things.

"Buck, Rene, and Zebra are all confirmed safely in friendly territory and alive. Lamia Kojic, whoever that is, is with Buck. Rene's picked up some strays too. Uh...Overall, eighteen kids survived everything, if my info is right."

Arlen's voice didn't really change pitch or intonation, so much as get quieter, a hoarse voice just over a whisper.

"We started with fifty."

Tam's rushing brain screeched to a halt, and she just looked at the pile of dossiers. The fact that her team had lost more than half the civilians they were escorting wasn't good. She felt a pang, too, for not caring more about the poor dead kids. She was worried about the mental state of her team more than innocent civilians.

The cat rubbed at her brow and filed that thought for later, when she could get time with the company shrink.

"If what we're hearing about the siege in Sarajevo is right, that's eighteen more than would have survived. Milosevic's tanks started razing that part of the city not long after Buck's timeline says you left the subway depot. Satellite maps show a lot of tunnels collapsed from the shelling."

The tiger didn't respond, but she knew he was still there. The soft sound of his breath was a sign from the phone gods that they were blessing this long-distance conversation, and she made an exhausted note to thank them later. Most calls to Eastern Europe during a damn war should sound like a conversation had during a hailstorm while inside a crashing car.

"32 dead."

She couldn't think of a response. Comforting him would just be patronizing.

"18 alive. Good. I'm in some little town behind the border check Buck went through. Sneaking through their frontier was cake. Send someone to get me."

Tamra nabbed another sheet of paper, and went over it to figure out who was local that could pick the tiger up. Her brows shot up when she realized Zebra was one of them.

"Zebra'll be there in a few."

"Good."

The sun was bright...Brighter than he remembered having ever seen it. The tiger sat down on an old, damp concrete bench and waited, squinting at the brightness, with his back leaned up against the building facade behind him.

The sounds around him seemed subtly wrong. The voices warped, transformed, the sounds of vehicles droning in ways he wasn't familiar with.

So exhausted...Hallucinations will start soon.

The tiger didn't even feel tired. Not energetic, either, but not tired. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, and everything seemed to swim around him, a sense of vertigo overtaking the black-furred male as he swayed to the side, and found himself laying out on the bench under the sunlight.

Lamia hadn't seen Buck or any of the other children in a full day, and was going stir-crazy pacing back and forth inside the Spartan room she'd been given. The United Nations troops had some trouble getting the story straight, she was pretty sure, which was why they were being delayed.

Though where they were being delayed in getting to, she had no idea. She paced the room again, counting ten steps in one direction and ten steps again in the other, her eyes trailing annoyedly over the simple cot and white plastic desk.

The phone on it rang, and she jumped in surprise before running over to grab the receiver, putting it to her ear.

"Yes?"

"Lamia Kojic?" The voice spoke in fluent Bosnian, and she felt a rush of relief. It boggled the girl's educated mind that the UN security forces in the area hadn't had a goddamned interpreter with them.

"This is Lamia. Who am I speaking to?" She didn't even realize how automatic the instinct to suspicion had become. The wrong word to the wrong fur could get her put back in the hands of the failed Bosnian government, and that could very well see her sold into white slavery or even sent back to the warzone. She'd heard the stories, and was inclined to believe they might actually be true.

"My name is Mirzet, and I am with the Ministry of the Interior."

Bullshit. I spent a week living in the burned-out wreck of your headquarters building...

"I just wanted to let you know what's going on with the other children. It sounds like the UN soldiers haven't been able to talk to you very well."

Her heart skipped a beat at the mention of the other kids. The ones she'd been responsible for. Her mind whirled with images of the dead and dying kids she'd seen, and she had to sit down abruptly, on the cold concrete floor, to avoid falling down when the wave of guilt and pain threatened to send her into hysterics.

The calm voice over the phone continued. She felt ashamed that he likely expected no response, and could probably hear her soft choked noises.

"The surviving children from your group have been claimed by the UN as refugees. They are being sent to Austria for medical treatment and foster services. Do you ah...Wish to join them?"

The question was pointed, leading, and the girl's concise and logical mind kicked into gear then, helping her to calm down so she could speak rationally and not lose whatever credit she had with this male. She couldn't face them again, knowing that her actions got so many of them killed. They would be safer without her anyway.

"I...No." She thought through recent events, mind whirling for another option to offer him. Anything so that she could avoid confronting the last few days' failures on her part. She remembered something then, an image of Buck roaring at UN soldiers while being dragged away...Something he had said she was sure he had meant to act as a way of shielding her from being sent back into the warzone.

"I am...I am newly married. I wish to go with my husband."

The voice on the other side of the line paused, and she heard hushed conversation in the background.

Ah-ha...They were verifying his story...

The voice came through again, sounding suddenly exhausted.

"Captain Buck is under arrest for interfering with a UN action. You, however, are free to go. If you want to stay with your ah...Husband..." The voice sounded doubting, but there were no records to prove her story false. "Then you should meet with the driver who is taking him to his holding area while diplomats talk about what to do."

She choked with relief and had to hold the phone up away from her head. The two girls, Sasha and Misha, she knew she needed to ask about them.

"Sasha and Misha Rojak...I need to know if they're all right."

The fur cleared his throat, and she heard paper shuffle.

"A serious concussion, some small broken bones...They will live, if the reports I'm reading are any indicator."

God has my thanks for small favors...Someone will have to take care of the children.

She swallowed down her shakes and spoke with the calm, erudite voice she had learned from the tutors and private schools.

"Good, that's excellent. Those two girls are heroes. When do I meet the driver?"

"He will be there soon."

She was glad to see Zebra again, even if the strange American had bad teeth and a weird sense of humor. He could speak her language, and didn't lie to her. Lamia was sitting in his car, as they drove away from the roadblock and its concrete buildings, towards the neighboring small town.

The mouse looked over at him, seeing his brown t-shirt and jeans, the subtle scars under the fur of his face. He'd lived a rough life, she could tell, and been doing it a lot longer than the year or so she'd been surviving in war-rent Sarajevo.

She looked down at her lap, fidgeting with her fingers as she figured out how to ask what she wanted to. The burro pre-empted her with a chuckle.

"You want to know what sort of man Buck is, right?"

She didn't look at him, but did raise her eyes to gaze out the window at the town up the road.

"Yes." She struggled to keep her voice from coming out as a whisper. Showing weakness, fear, doubt in front of this male, even if they'd been under fire together in the most hellish night of her life, just went against the grain of her personality.

"Well, he's been in more wars than the rest of our group put together, and handles it better than anyone else I know." The burro turned the wheel as he spoke, bringing them coasting into the town while continuing. "He isn't full of compliments for people, but that's because he doesn't want them to become weak and reliant on him for praise."

Lamia leaned against the window, and let out a sigh. She felt empty inside, lost. Her world, that of her parents and their parties and connections, the world she had built for herself in the ruins of Sarajevo, it all seemed gone so abruptly.

She felt the male's eyes shift to her, and saw him grin that yellow-toothed grin of his out of the corner of her vision.

"And he respects you. For keeping as many kids alive as you did."

Lamia felt sick to her stomach, and curled up against the door before speaking again.

"Where are we going?"

The burro turned the wheel again, taking them down a dirt road in the tiny town's main drag.

"Picking up the tigger, heh."

She looked at him again, brows arched curiously upwards.

"The what?"

The mouse girl debarked the car, on the pretense that Zebra's legs were still hurt, and went walking towards where he'd pointed out. Her eyes took in the fact that it was a bar, brightly painted on the front with badly-drawn recreations of popular alcohol brands. She snorted in derision. Bars, in her mind, were the dens of people who wasted their time on self-pity. The mouse completely missed the hypocrisy of her own internal monologue.

There, laid out on a concrete bench, was the fur they'd come to pick up. Her breath caught in her throat, as she remembered the look on Buck's face when this tiger had gone off into the night alone. She knew, at that moment a few days ago, that Buck had never expected to see the male alive again.

Lamia walked up to him slowly, her experiences with combat-fatigued furs telling her to be cautious. Her eyes told her more than her experience. The tiger was filthy, the dust and mud having stuck all over his black on black fur and camouflage uniform. His paws were twitching slightly in his sleep, clenching like they would around a knife's hilt.

Something about him spoke to her of shadows and slaughter. The dark stains in his clothes weren't all mud, she realized. Some were blood, a day or two old in most cases, and he stank of gunpowder and the grenade smell whose proper name she didn't know.

Searching around for a moment, she found a stick, straightened up, and poked him on the ball of his foot.

The tiger's reaction was so instant that, even expecting it, she was taken entirely off-guard. In a black blur, he kicked his legs up, then down, and hurled himself on her. She didn't have time to scream, just to stare into his eyes as the tiger's paw closed around her throat, his knife drawn with the tip so close to her eye she could only see it as a blur.

She tried to swallow, to speak, but the paw on her throat kept her from it, and she knew better than to struggle while staring into eyes that wide and blank.

"Arlen, let her up and get in the car."

The paw on her throat loosened, and something in the tiger's eyes shifted. Then they widened again, and he let go of her, pulling back and jabbering at her in English. As she sat up, he seemed to realize he was still holding a long, vicious combat knife, and put it away with an exhausted but sheepish look as the burro led him back to the car.

Lamia rubbed her throat with a wince, and got up to follow.

She got into the car with the tiger still trying to apologize. She looked at Zebra, and spoke.

"Tell him he has nothing to be forgiven for. He...He has my thanks for giving us the time he did. Those explosions...They were him weren't they?"

The burro looked back at Arlen as the tiger fell silent and closed his eyes again, too exhausted to stay awake. Zebra's grin was as crazy as always.

"Him? Alone in the dark against a hundred Serb soldiers? I feel sorry for the Serbs." The burro threw his head back and laughed, as the first spatters of rain dashed across their windshield.