The border crossing was done with certain careless precision, which Ellie suspected was because border crossings here always were. They sat in a helicopter, and waited for clearance, and were given a vector and crossing time and told not to deviate by more an half a kilometre or a minute.
The border-control operators were fussy, and pedantic, and didn’t seem to mix much with the debt-recovery personnel, as far as Ellie could see. She had a feeling the border-control operators kept themselves apart from everyone else because they knew they had to be prepared to turn on anyone without warning, if necessary.
Ellie would have kept apart too, in those circumstances.
Sameh was nervous, and irritable, and stayed quiet, like she usually did when she was about to fly anywhere. Quiet and hostile and unsettling, too. The aircrew did their best ignore her.
They all waited, Ellie in Sameh in their full battle gear, with all their equipment, sitting in the helicopter with the engines already running. Then, when it was time, they rose into the air, and exchanged passcodes with border-control command, and then flew straight over the wall.
Ellie looked down as they did, but couldn’t see much except dark grassy fields and fences. The wall’s actual infrastructure wasn’t visible at night. Even the floodlighting was infrared.
They flew over the wall, and kept going for another ten minutes, to a forward operating base on the American side. They landed, and looked around. The base was really just a fence and some prefab buildings and a helipad, used to make transfers like this securely. They got out of the helicopter, and into a large armoured SUV, and drove, with another SUV as an escort, to a dropping-off point where they would meet a local guide.
It was like Afghanistan, Ellie thought. It was almost the same. Flying in smaller and smaller hops, in smaller and smaller vehicles, being stared at by locals who lined the roads and watched, apathetically angry, because they had nothing else to do.
Ellie was sitting in the front seat, beside the driver, because she liked to be able to see where they were going. Sameh was sitting behind her, quietly. Ellie glanced back and made sure Sameh was all right.
Sameh saw her look, and shrugged. That meant she was okay.
“Here,” Ellie said, and held out a pack of med-pills, reaching backwards towards Sameh. They needed to be taking their meds every day again now.
The meds were a mix of pre-emptive shock management drugs and mitochondrial DNA suppressants. The shock management component was to keep them alive to reach a modern hospital, preferably in Canada, and the DNA suppressant was so if they did, and survived surgery, then their chances of suffering multiple organ failure several days later became almost nothing. That drug stopped their white blood cells producing excess free-floating DNA after serious injury, because free-floating DNA caused the fever which led to multiple organ failure. Together, the meds were a wonder-drug that prevented almost all non-instantaneous and non-surgical deaths in combat. It was said if you survived the first two minutes after an injury you would live. But the meds needed to be taken daily, because both drugs already needed to be in the bloodstream when the injury occurred to be effective.
Sameh took the packet of pills, and swallowed one, and passed them back. Ellie took one too, then went back to looking out the windows.
The scenery was nice, she thought. It was like Afghanistan, but prettier. They were on an old road, in a valley, with dark forested hills above them and a river to the side. It reminded her of some of the nicer bits of Russia and the Belarus, she thought. She’d almost come here on holiday.
Almost, except for how they were driving through a refugee camp, and had been since they got out the helicopter.
Temporary housing lined the road. There were a lot of tents. Tents, and demountable houses, and trailers and campervans and other movable housing. People seemed to have just washed up here, and stopped where they stopped, close enough to the Canadian border they could hope, but not so close they got chased off by border patrols. These were all the people whose credit history or security checks had prevented them from entering Canada. They lived here, and waited, and hoped, in mile after mile of portable, transient housing, with occasional toilet blocks and cooking facilities operated by the big Asian charities.
It was depressing, Ellie thought. Such intense, futile hope.
She watched the locals for a while, still outside and staring as they passed, even at night.
“Hey,” she said to the driver, beside her, suddenly wondering. “What do we call all of them.”
“Call who?”
Ellie pointed. “Them. The locals.”
“Americans.”
“Yeah, but there’s always a rude name. Like hajji. The name you call them behind their backs. So what is it here?”
He grinned. “Debtors.”
“Just debtors?”
“Yeah. They don’t like it.”
Ellie nodded slowly. That actually made a certain sense.