The Black Widow

Natalie examined the gaping wound to the leg. A challenging case, to say the least, she thought dispassionately. The patient had been comatose for ten hours. He had suffered two serious penetration wounds, not to mention the likelihood of numerous additional fractures and crush injuries common to victims of building collapses. Internal bleeding was a given. Sepsis was just around the corner. If he were to have any hope of survival, he needed to be transported to a Level 1 trauma center immediately, a scenario she explained to the clawed Iraqi.

“Out of the question,” he replied.

“He needs urgent critical care.”

“This isn’t Paris, Dr. Hadawi.”

“Where are we?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“For security reasons,” he explained.

“Are we in Iraq?”

“You ask too many questions.”

“Are we?” she persisted.

With his silence he confirmed that they were.

“There’s a hospital in Ramadi, is there not?”

“It’s not safe for him there.”

“What about Fallujah?” She couldn’t believe the word had come out of her mouth. Fallujah. .

“He’s not going anywhere,” the Iraqi said. “This is the only place that’s safe.”

“If he stays here, he dies.”

“No, he won’t,” said the Iraqi. “Because you’re going to save him.”

“With what?”

One of the fighters handed her a cardboard box with a red cross on it.

“It’s a first-aid kit.”

“It is all we have.”

“Is there a hospital or a clinic nearby?”

The Iraqi hesitated, then said, “Mosul is an hour’s drive, but the Americans are attacking traffic along the roads.”

“Someone has to try to get through.”

“Give me a list of the things you need,” he said, extracting a grubby notepad from the pocket of his black uniform. “I’ll send one of the women. It could take a while.”

Natalie accepted the notepad and a pen and wrote out her wish list of supplies: antibiotics, syringes, surgical instruments, gloves, suture material, a stethoscope, IV bags and solution, a chest tube, clamps, pain medication, sedatives, gauze, and plaster bandages and fiberglass casting tape for immobilizing fractured limbs.

“You don’t happen to know his blood type, do you?”

“Blood type?”

“He needs blood. Otherwise, he’s going to die.”

The Iraqi shook his head. Natalie handed him the list of supplies. Then she opened the first-aid kit and looked inside. Bandages, ointment, a roll of gauze, aspirin — it was hopeless. She knelt beside the wounded man and raised an eyelid. Still responsive.

“I need to know his name,” she said.

“Why?”

“I have to address him by his real name to bring him out of this coma.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible, Dr. Hadawi.”

“Then what shall I call him?”

The Iraqi looked down at the dying, helpless man at his feet. “If you must call him something,” he said after a moment, “you may call him Saladin.”

41 ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ

AS A PHYSICIAN IN THE emergency room of Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center, Dr. Natalie Mizrahi had routinely confronted ethically fraught scenarios, sometimes on a daily basis. There were the gravely injured and the dying who received heroic treatment despite no chance of survival. And there were the murderers, the attempted suicide bombers, the knife-wielding butchers, upon whose damaged bodies Natalie labored with the tenderest of mercies.

The situation she faced now, however, was unlike anything she had faced before — or would again, she thought. The man in the bare room somewhere near Mosul was the leader of a terror network that had carried out devastating attacks in Paris and Amsterdam. Natalie had successfully penetrated that network as part of an operation to identify and decapitate its command structure. And now, owing to an American air strike, the life of the network’s mastermind rested in her well-trained hands. As a doctor she was morally obligated to save his life. But as an inhabitant of the civilized world, she was inclined to let him die slowly and thus fulfill the mission for which she had been recruited.

But what would the men of ISIS do to the female physician who allowed the great Saladin to perish before his mission of uniting the Muslim world under the black banner of the caliphate was complete? Surely, she thought, they would not thank her for her efforts and send her peacefully on her way. The stone or the knife would likely be her fate. She had not come to Syria on a suicide mission and had no intention of dying in this wretched place, at the hands of these black-clad prophets of the apocalypse. What’s more, Saladin’s predicament provided her with an unprecedented opportunity — the opportunity to nurse him back to health, to befriend him, to earn his trust, and to steal the deadly secrets that resided in his head. You must not let him die, the Iraqi had said. But why? The answer, thought Natalie, was simple. The Iraqi did not know what Saladin knew. Saladin could not die because the network’s ambitions would die with him.