American War

by Omar El Akkad

  It was a slow trip to Prince Wendell’s coffee shop. She had chosen this place and this time to meet her informant because it coincided with a lull in the traffic at the mouth of the river. By nightfall the first of the gift ships would begin the crossing back to the other side of the world, and the coastline would once again become congested as the Blues searched the freighters for stowaways. But in these few hours the sea was clear.

  Sarat docked at the foot of the platform and climbed the ladder to the deck. A neon “Open” sign buzzed on the door. Inside, the coffee shop was decorated with pictures of the old city of Savannah and of Prince Wendell’s childhood home.

  Sarat had seen many walls decorated with pictures like these—pictures treated by their bearers with ritualistic reverence, as though the memory of a thing, showered with enough devotion, could resurrect the thing itself.

  Prince Wendell sat at the counter. For a while he stared at the door, trying to make out his customer. When Sarat was close enough for him to see, he smiled.

  “Julia!” he said. “Good to see you again!”

  Sarat hugged the old man, one of many acquaintances in and around Augusta to whom she had given a fake name. “How you feeling, boss?”

  “Can’t complain,” said Prince Wendell. “Good month, this one. Storm just missed us. Last month though, Christ, that was a bad one.”

  He continued describing the previous month’s storm as he walked to the kitchen to fetch his customer a cup of coffee. Sarat sat at the table nearest the counter and waited. Soon she heard another skiff docking at the base of the platform. A Blue soldier climbed the ladder.

  No matter how many times they met, the sight of her informant’s uniform up close slipped a primal switch deep within Sarat’s gut.

  The soldier walked inside. He greeted Prince Wendell and soon the old man was back in the kitchen, preparing the soldier’s usual order.

  The soldier sat at Sarat’s table. Every month, they met this way, briefly, no more than a couple of minutes. And every month she marveled at the sight of him—the way he had grown into a man seemingly overnight, even as his frame remained stunted. He had survived, he had lived; it was the only thing that mattered.

  “You got him,” said Marcus Exum. “Every damn one of them is talking about it. Highest-ranking Blue casualty since they killed the president in Jackson.”

  “Couldn’t have done it without you,” said Sarat.

  Marcus looked over Sarat’s shoulder at the door.

  “You got someone joining you on this coffee run?” asked Sarat.

  “No. But you never know who else might come by.”

  Marcus slid a cigarette across the table. “Only intel I could get this month. It’s a convoy, four LAVs. They’ll be passing near the Tennessee line at Russell Cave. Supposed to have some deputy secretary from the War Office onboard, getting a tour of the front.”

  Sarat looked at the cigarette—she could see the outline of words and a simple map drawn on the inside of the wrapping paper. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Can I ask you a favor?” said Marcus.

  “Sure.”

  “Lay low a while. There’s talk they’re going to retaliate for what happened at Halfway. They’re going to put the old man’s son in charge of the War Office, everyone’s sure of it. And he’s going to tear the whole front apart. I don’t know how or when, but I promise you he will.”

  Sarat touched her friend’s shoulder. She felt the bars on his uniform, markers of his place in the hierarchy of what was once the most powerful force in the world, the military of her enemy.

  “You’re a good friend,” she said. Once more he glanced at the door.

  They heard Prince Wendell coming back from the kitchen. Marcus paid him and walked out without saying another word. Sarat waited a half-hour after he left, nursing her coffee and listening to Prince Wendell reminisce about the time George came through in ’57 and took the entire eastern edge of the city with it.

  Then she left for the docks. To the east she saw the Blue customs ships waiting, and she knew her friend would be there for another two days before returning to the base at Halfway Branch. She thought about that last time she saw him at Patience, about watching him walk that thin concrete tightrope to the alien country. And she begrudged him not a single one of the choices he’d made since.

  Excerpted from:

  ARCHIVES OF THE SPECIAL SENATE COMMITTEE ON INSURRECTIONIST AND SECESSIONIST ACTIVITY—TESTIMONY OF WAR OFFICE DIRECTOR JOSEPH WEILAND JR.

  Perhaps the best way to explain it, Madam Chairwoman, is with a simple analogy.

  In this country, we have elections. Our elections have strict rules, of which I’m sure every member of this committee is familiar. But, under special circumstances, we also have special elections. When President Daniel Ki was murdered, for example, we had a special election that was in fact not an election at all. It was an emergency measure taken in response to extreme and unique events. In other words, we set aside the normal guidelines because the circumstances themselves were far from normal.

  And I think it’s fair to say, Madam Chairwoman, that no reasonable person genuinely believed that by temporarily setting aside normal protocol and installing a President until the following election, we had somehow forever dismantled the foundations of American democracy.

  Now, to return to your question. You asked about the methods we use to extract information from insurrectionist detainees, and I am happy to answer.

  Since I assumed directorship of the War Office, insurrectionist terror attacks across the so-called Tennessee line—attacks similar to the one that cost my father his life—have plummeted. Certainly the primary credit for this goes to the brave men and women of our Armed Forces. But I believe that the dramatic reduction of secessionist violence is also a direct result of our strategic initiative to capture and interrogate known and suspected insurrectionist leaders in those regions where attacks have been most rampant.

  Let’s be clear, Madam Chairwoman: the people we target are no angels. We have focused our efforts intently on rebel recruiters—the cowardly men and women who have for years brainwashed young Southerners into violent, suicidal acts to further the cause of treason.

  Now these recruiters, in most cases, never had the courage to take up arms themselves. So we were faced with a choice, Madam Chairwoman: either spend years trying to prosecute them for crimes that, while very much real, are nonetheless extremely difficult to prove—especially to the standards of a peacetime court in a wartime setting—or extract from them as much information as we could. I speak of information, Madam Chairwoman, that has subsequently saved American lives.

  We do not act as monsters, Madam Chairwoman, even though we are often pitted against them. As is the case in any war, we use the tools available to us under the constraints of time and urgency to which we are subject. And in cases where information from insurrectionist recruiters has subsequently proven false or unreliable, we have responded accordingly. The mission of the War Office, above all else, is to protect our nation.

  And I believe we have done so, Madam Chairwoman. I believe in the coming months the insurrectionist terrorists will abandon their doomed efforts at disunion, and this war will come to an end. And I certainly believe that, just as we have returned to the normal rules of Presidential elections, we will also return to the normalcy of peacetime. I’m sure all the members of this committee echo my desire that we reach that normalcy as quickly as possible.

  I believe we are closer now to peace, Madam Chairwoman, than ever before.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sarat walked through the ruins of Lake Sinclair. She stayed close to the remains of Milledgeville Road. It was wrecked in places with craters ten feet deep, and in others with fallen trees and power lines and charred fencing.

  As she neared the lake, Sarat veered from the main road to the smaller paths that led past an old bank branch and a dry jut in the lake bed. Here the fallen trees were densest, interspersed with the b
oathouses and the crumbling docks. Occasionally, rodents rustled through the undergrowth, but otherwise it was quiet. Sarat walked slowly to the site of the meeting.

  The firebombing of Lake Sinclair happened early in the war, before it was known that the Blues had lost control of their airborne assassins. At dawn there came a buzzing sound, like a fly trapped in an upturned glass. All over the South, people had gotten used to the sight of the Birds, but no one had ever seen a flock before. They circled, a dozen or more with their wings outstretched, their shadows like fading bruises on the water.

  Nobody in the South knew why the Birds had chosen to obliterate this place. Some said one of the Union pilots must have entered the coordinates wrong. Or perhaps the generals and politicians who decided which places to burn and which lives to end had been given faulty intelligence.

  Nobody could settle on an explanation. But it was better to believe something, anything, than to accept that it had happened without reason—that the wandering Birds had simply congregated over this particular place on this particular hour and rained hellfire in accordance with no greater order than that of blind chance.

  In the years since the firebombing, the lake had gone dry. But a strong storm had come through the week prior to Sarat’s visit, and on this day the bed was still swollen with rainwater. A film of green algae covered the surface. Thick as carpet, the algae held the water so still that the entire lake bed appeared as emerald-tinted land, sturdy enough to walk on.

  Everywhere around the edge of the lake, the waterside houses lay in ruins, the small roads warped, the trees ashen and still. When she reached the lake bed, Sarat walked down a short driveway that led to a small and badly damaged church: a home converted into a place of worship. An ebony cross held firm to the front door.

  The house had been cleaved down the middle in the bombing. The ground under the lake-facing half of the home neared collapse. The back rooms—two bedrooms and a study—teetered precariously over the lake bed. The front half stood level on the land.

  Sarat climbed through a gap in the side of the house where there had once been a windowsill. The house was dark but for the midday light that dropped through the broken ceiling like a curtain. Inside, the house smelled of old paper. Fine particulate floated in the sunlit shaft.

  In the middle of every month she came here to meet Joe. But this was their first meeting since she’d shot the general at Halfway Branch five months earlier. In the time between, the Blue incursions into Southern territory had increased in frequency and severity. So much so that Joe had temporarily suspended their arrangement.

  She saw him inside the house, sitting where he always sat, on a wooden kitchen chair just beyond the curtain of sunlight. She recognized him by his outline: thin-framed, his posture neat, his hands clasped and resting on the table.

  “Good morning, Sarat,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “Mornin’, ” Sarat replied.

  “Come in, sit. It’s a beautiful day, no?”

  She still liked the sound of his voice, his strange accent. He had a habit of pronouncing Ps as Bs, soft Hs as hard ones. Sometimes when he talked about his home he spoke words in his own language that relied on alien letters, letters made of sighs and careful curls of the tongue.

  Sarat sat at the kitchen table. She felt the warmth of flooding sunlight on the back of her neck. Behind Joe, the floor began to slope sharply downward, and through the rear windows she could see the dull green surface of the near-empty lake.

  “Finally, I have a chance to congratulate you in person,” said Joe.

  “It was nothing,” Sarat replied.

  “It was certainly not nothing. The single most significant Southern victory since the beginning of the war. And you did it, Sarat. It is your victory.”

  “It’s no victory, it’s one man dead. They got plenty more still living.”

  Joe shook his head. “Albert was right about you,” he said.

  “Have you seen him?” asked Sarat. “I’ve been trying to reach him for months, but he up and vanished.”

  “I haven’t heard from him either,” said Joe.

  “You think they picked him up? He’s been known to them a long time.”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe if this were thirty, forty years ago, but he’s an old man now, like me, and they don’t care too much about old men. He was like this as a soldier too—he would disappear for days across the border into Ar-Rutbah without telling anyone. That was back when it was not a very good idea to travel carelessly in Iraq. He even brought me with him a few times to translate and drive. At first I thought he was doing something very dangerous, meeting with the enemy, committing treason. But he just wanted to see the land, to meet the people. I believe they eventually tried him for it—he spent a year in military prison. Did he ever tell you that?”

  “He told me you saved his life a couple times,” said Sarat.

  “I did no such thing. I was just an assistant, what you would call a fixer. The Americans liked having locals around who could speak English and Arabic, who knew the people and the area. It is always better if you can have people from the same country do the work.”

  The sound of a twig breaking outside derailed their small talk. Sarat turned to look out the sliver of space where the front wall was cracked open. She watched and waited for footsteps, but none came. She turned back to Joe, who sat undisturbed, his green dress shirt washed white by the sunlight.

  “If it had been the Blues, we wouldn’t have had time to worry about it,” he said. “Anyway, let’s get to business. What do you need?”

  “Lag’m,” said Sarat, using Joe’s word for the weapon. “Like the kind you brought last year.”

  Joe nodded. “All right. Big or small?”

  “Both. Same as last time. There’s a convoy coming down near Tennga next week. Got a colonel riding with them. I know the roads they’re taking, I’ll lay the mines down there.”

  “Same as last time, understood. Anything else? More rounds for Templestowe? Cash?”

  “Just the mines,” said Sarat.

  “Consider it done.”

  “There’s something else.”

  “Of course.”

  “I heard there were secret peace talks happening, that the Free Southerners had some of their people up in Columbus a few months ago. There any truth to that?”

  “I believe that is correct,” said Joe.

  “That still happening?”

  “From what my people tell me, the director of the War Office has suspended the talks.”

  Sarat smiled.

  “I told you,” said Joe. “It is your victory.”

  WHEN SARAT RETURNED HOME from Lake Sinclair there was a stranger’s car parked in the driveway, an old fossil-powered sedan. Standing beside it was Attic, the eldest of the Salt Lake Boys.

  “Christ,” said Sarat. “I thought they killed you at Fayetteville.”

  “Mr. Bragg wants to speak to you,” Attic said. He was as tall as Sarat but thinner, emaciated to the point of appearing sickly. He had dead, distant eyes like his brothers.

  “Which one,” said Sarat, “the boy or his father?”

  “Mr. Bragg Senior,” said Attic. “He wants to see you and your sister.”

  “He doesn’t need to see my sister. Let’s go get it over with.”

  “He said he wants to see you and your sister…”

  “You deaf or just stupid?” said Sarat, approaching the boy. There was a mechanical quality to him, a sense of removal. “You and I can go, or you can go back to Atlanta alone. Your call.”

  They drove west toward the Southern capital. The car had an old radio; Sarat turned the dial. Between bursts of static came dispatches from amateur broadcasters scattered nearby: disembodied Bible reciters; howling cultists preaching apocalypse from the confines of their cabins; madmen squalling into the void. She settled finally on an old man reading a list of names. In the background there played a patriotic Southern hymn Sarat remembered from her
childhood. The old man spoke in monotone, barely pausing for breath, and it was impossible to discern whether he was reading the names of martyrs or traitors or simply inventing the names as he went along.

  “So what happened to you up in Fayetteville, anyway?” asked Sarat.

  “I was captured,” said Attic.

  “The Blues got you? And they let you go? Goddamn, you must have spilled your guts and then some. Old man Bragg must love you if he’s keeping the rebels from stringing you up with your pockets in your mouth.”

  “I didn’t say a word, and I wasn’t captured by Blues,” said Attic. “I was captured by terrorists.”

  It took Sarat a moment to realize he meant the other Southern rebels, the ones who had refused to come under Bragg’s umbrella group. She let out a high cackle.

  “You let your own people get you? Holy God! That’s more embarrassing than the Blues just shooting you dead.”

  “They’re not my people,” said Attic. “They’re terrorists. Mr. Bragg is my people. I’m free because of him.”

  “Terrorists, goddamn,” said Sarat. “That word will work on anybody, won’t it?”

  But Attic wasn’t listening. “I didn’t say a word,” he repeated. “I didn’t say a word.”

  At the lip of the horizon, veiled with grime, the capital of the South appeared.

  A WALL OF TOWERING SLUMS pierced the sky, afloat in haze. The buildings marked the outer edges of Atlanta, a city impossible with size and growing, forever inching outward, metastatic with life.

  Once, long ago, its landscape had been inverted. Skyscrapers dominated the downtown core, and beyond them stood the hospitals and the arenas and the sprawling university campuses. Further out, the skyscrapers gave way to the suburbs, lined with strip malls and parks and golf courses and a ring of highways.

  Now the tallest buildings belonged to the slums that walled the outer reaches of the city, towers brown and dull as rotting teeth. Within them lived the refuse of the Southern State—refugees from the border towns and from places ravaged at random by the Birds; the poor of the southernmost coast who fled the storms and the scorching heat; soldiers and rebels and people who were born here and whose parents and grandparents were born here, people who knew no other home.