Part 5 – The Clue Beneath the Words
The airport was louder than Russell remembered.
Children running, intercoms barking names, rolling luggage rattling over tile like distant gunfire.
He hadn’t been on a plane since his wife died in 2009. Back then, he’d flown to Nebraska in a borrowed suit to bury her next to her folks.
Now, he wore boots with custom inserts, a flannel that hid the stiffness in his shoulders, and a soft brace under his jeans for the swelling in his right knee.
He moved slowly through security.
Metal detector beeped. Of course it did. Titanium rod in his leg.
He explained. They waved him through with a tired glance.
The flight from Tucson to Washington D.C. was long, but it was nothing compared to the one from D.C. to Jordan.
Twelve hours.
His knee ballooned halfway through.
He used the aisle to stretch, but it felt like bending a rusted hinge.
A stewardess offered a wheelchair in Amman.
He refused it.
“If I sit now,” he muttered, “I might never stand again.”
The next leg took him into Erbil, northern Iraq.
His interpreter, Karim, met him at the arrivals gate. Young. Skinny. Polite in a nervous kind of way.
“You really were in Desert Storm?” he asked as they rode in a beat-up white sedan past cracked billboards and sunburnt buildings.
“Every damn minute of it,” Russell said.
“You?”
Karim smiled sheepishly.
“I was born in ’94.”
The landscape outside the window changed slowly.
Pale hills. Tan roads. Loose goats nibbling at windblown trash.
Russell saw old concrete homes patched with metal sheets and clotheslines.
A boy ran past chasing a ball made of string. His face was so familiar, it made Russell wince.
“Al-Qasr’s still a ways out,” Karim said.
“But we’ll stop near Mosul first. I’ve arranged a meeting. There’s something you should see.”
Russell raised an eyebrow.
“From Omar?”
“Sort of.”
They pulled into a dirt lot outside a small stucco building.
Inside, a man in his forties waited behind a plastic desk, hands folded, a laptop open beside him.
His name was Ahmed. He worked with Sandsweeper, a local NGO that helped clear old minefields.
He had known Omar since they were boys. Said he remembered the day a dog pulled Omar from death.
“He was bleeding badly,” Ahmed said, “shrapnel in his side. But she stayed with him until his uncle found them.”
“She?” Russell asked.
Ahmed nodded.
“A dark-colored dog. Smart. Never barked. We called her Al-Ruh. It means ‘the spirit.’”
Russell swallowed.
“That’s her.”
Ahmed leaned down and opened a drawer.
He pulled out a leather-bound journal—worn, sun-faded.
“This was Omar’s. He left it with us years ago, for safekeeping.”
He flipped to the back. A page was marked with a corner fold.
In careful Arabic script, and translated loosely beside it, read the words:
“The American man had a scar across his left eyebrow. He walked with pain, even then. But the dog… the dog never left his side.”
Russell reached up, instinctively touching the faint line over his brow.
A shiver ran through him.
“That was me,” he whispered.
“He remembered.”
On the next page, a hand-drawn map.
Faint pencil lines, circles marking locations.
But in the center, underlined twice: The Well.
Russell leaned closer.
“This is Al-Qasr?”
“Yes,” Ahmed said. “But it’s changed. There’s a new settlement nearby now—displaced families. The old well’s still there, though. No one uses it. Locals say it’s haunted.”
“By a dog?”
“By memory.”
They left early the next morning.
Russell’s leg had locked up overnight. He needed Karim’s help to get his sock on, and even then, his hands trembled from the effort.
“Maybe we stop at a clinic on the way?” Karim suggested gently.
“They can give you a cortisone shot. Some relief.”
“No time,” Russell grunted, forcing himself upright.
“If I go soft now, I won’t make it.”
The road narrowed as they neared Al-Qasr.
Signs were mostly hand-painted.
Children waved from crumbling rooftops.
And then, just past a cluster of olive trees, the landscape opened into an old, dry basin.
“There,” Karim said, pointing.
“That’s the well.”
It stood alone—stone ring half-cracked, rope still tied to a rusted pulley.
Beside it, a flat rock shaped like a shield.
Its surface was scorched, as if it had survived something the rest of the ground forgot.
Russell stepped out of the car, slowly, holding onto the door for support.
The wind carried sand across the open field. It brushed his face, warm and grainy.
He limped toward the well, heart pounding louder than his footsteps.
On the rock, someone had scratched words into the stone with a blade or chisel.
Arabic on one side.
And in English, below:
“SHE CAME FROM THE FIRE”
“SHE STAYED”
Russell knelt slowly, every joint in his body groaning.
He placed one hand on the stone, one on the ground beside it.
For a long while, he said nothing.
Then:
“I left you here,” he whispered. “But you never left me.”
Karim stayed back by the car, giving him space.
Russell took a small photo from his breast pocket.
The one of Dusty and him in front of the Humvee.
He placed it gently on the stone.
Weighted it down with a flat piece of metal he found near the base—perhaps a bolt from an old vehicle, or something older.
The sand shifted behind him.
He turned.
Nothing.
But the wind carried a single strand of fur across the well’s edge.
Dark. Copper-streaked.
He caught it mid-air.
Pressed it between his palms.
And wept.