by Don Bentley
He was currently reclining on a couch in an adjacent room, his saline bag dangling from a field-expedient hanger I’d made using a light fixture. I’d moved him away from the community table, both so that he could conduct his conversation in private and so that he didn’t have to watch as we ate. Until I was sure he didn’t have internal injuries, he was on a saline diet.
But the right to privacy went only so far, especially when my wife’s life balanced on the outcome of Benny’s phone call. I was doing my best to eavesdrop, though Benny wasn’t making my task any easier. He conducted the conversation in the guttural language of his people, as ancient as the desert sands surrounding Zain’s spacious safe house. My Hebrew was rudimentary, to say the least, but like any case officer worth his salt, I was a dedicated student of body language.
Benny’s was telling me plenty.
The intelligence officer had begun the call with an even cadence, no doubt providing identifying information and a code word to a very surprised Mossad phone operator. But once his bona fides had been established, Benny abandoned any pretense of normalcy. His Hebrew acquired a machine gun’s staccato, ending with a crescendo that had Benny sitting up and yelling into the phone, despite his injuries.
After the better part of three minutes spent filling the airwaves with a constant stream of Hebrew, Benny paused, seemingly midsentence. For thirty long seconds, he remained frozen in place like an artist’s model. Then he closed his eyes and eased onto his back. One hand ventured up to finger the splint I’d taped across his broken nose as he continued to listen in silence.
It was the silence that had turned Zain’s delectable cuisine to ash. Shouting I could handle, but the deathly quiet from a man accustomed to giving orders was terrifying. Six thousand miles away, the woman I loved was at the mercy of a team of assassins. My plan to rescue her depended on cooperation from an Israeli who should have been at this moment rambunctiously planning his enemies’ deaths.
Instead, he was as silent as a tomb.
Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.
With a final ken, Benny hung up the phone. Then he looked at me.
“There is a problem,” the Israeli said, framing the words with a delicacy that was itself alarming.
“No kidding,” Virginia said. “Perhaps you’d like to be more specific.”
Another time, her sarcasm would have brought a smile to my face. But like the taste of Zain’s magnificent food, the look on Benny’s face turned any feeling of mirth to ash.
“The Iranians. They’re pushing into Iraq.”
“What?” I said. “More Hezbollah operatives?”
Benny slowly shook his head. “No. A Quds Force mechanized division. The Persians are going to war.”
“Iran is invading Iraq?” I said.
“Yes,” Benny said, “though they aren’t terming it as such. Officially, the mechanized division is performing a peacekeeping mission. The Quds Force is assisting the Iraqi army by securing the resupply routes bridging Iran and Syria. But it’s an invasion all the same. This is exactly what I was trying to prevent. I’m sorry about your wife—I really am. But Unit 8200 has more important taskings now.”
“So that’s it?” Virginia said, slamming her cup down on the table. “We save your life and get nothing but a thank-you in return?”
“No,” Benny said, standing on unsteady feet, “you get the gratitude of the Mossad. That is not an insignificant thing.”
Virginia leaned forward in her seat, ready to go another round, but my hand on her sleeve brought her up short.
“Let it go, East Tennessee,” I said, squeezing her arm. “At the end of the day, Benny’s first, middle, and last concern will always be the people of Israel. I’d have the same priorities in his position.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Virginia said.
Her statement lacked the emotion of her earlier outburst, but her matter-of-fact manner carried weight all the same. And the truth of it was, she was right. But that was neither here nor there. Benny’s world had just turned upside down. Unless we were going to literally hold the Mossad operative hostage in exchange for his country’s help, we were out of luck. Benny had called our bluff. I had enough shit going sideways at the moment. I wasn’t about to add kidnapping Benny to the mix.
Besides, though Benny probably wasn’t going to make my Christmas card list, I believed him when he said he owed me. In the business of espionage, having a high-ranking member of Israel’s feared intelligence service in your debt was no small matter.
“No worries, Benny,” I said, pushing away from the table to offer the Israeli a handshake. “Do what you need to do. If you need a lift somewhere, I’m sure Zain will oblige.”
“No need,” Benny said, giving us a weary smile. “I took the liberty of instructing my service to triangulate your phone. My compatriots should be arriving shortly.”
As if on cue, the sound of rotor blades reverberated throughout the room. I looked at Zain, preparing to tell the smuggler to let his guards know that the incoming choppers were friendly, but my asset was already issuing commands to his subordinates in a steady stream of Arabic.
“Color me impressed, Benny,” I said, helping the Mossad officer out to the building’s courtyard. “Y’all had helicopters already pre-positioned. For a country of eight million, you have quite the operational reach.”
“I’ve been missing for over a week,” Benny said as a UH-60 Black Hawk did a low pass over the house before setting up an approach to the large courtyard. “Those helicopters were probably flown into country aboard C-130s within hours after I missed my first check-in. We don’t leave people behind. Ever.”
The Black Hawk touched down in a man-made storm of dust and grit. I put Benny’s arm over my shoulder one last time to keep him upright, and to my surprise, he pulled me in for a hug.
“What I said about my gratitude wasn’t just words,” Benny said, yelling over the helicopter’s twin turboshaft engines. “My service repays its debts.”
Before I could reply, Benny ducked under the spinning rotor blades and climbed into the helicopter’s cabin. With a roar of its turbine engines, the UH-60 leapt from the ground and thundered out of the compound, its wingman in trail.
“What now?” Virginia said, shading her eyes with her hand as she watched the helicopter fly out of sight.
“That’s a good question,” I said, heading back into the compound. “Benny flying the coop is a bitch, no two ways about it. Without him, I’m back to square one.”
“What do you mean?” Virginia said.
Instead of answering her question, I turned to my asset and maybe friend. “Zain, I’m assuming that if your network put out some feelers, you could find the location of tonight’s auction?”
The smuggler shrugged. “I believe so, yes. These gawads tend to advertise. The auction will allow men to purchase new slaves as well as trade in their current ones.”
“Trade in?” Virginia said.
Zain nodded. “Yes. Most of the girls are exchanged numerous times. A man takes one home for a week, and when he tires of her, he sells his slave to someone else and buys another.”
“Motherfuckers,” Virginia said, her cream complexion flushing crimson.
“So finding the auction and by extension Ferah is doable,” I said, thinking out loud, “but that’s only half of the problem.”
“What do you mean?” Virginia said.
“It’s like this—rescuing Nazya’s sister, while noble, does nothing to protect the next defenseless girl or the one after her. Zain, you said the Iraqi authorities have known about this sex-trafficking ring for some time. Why haven’t the police done anything about it?”
“The Devil.”
“Exactly. The key to all of this—Nazya, Ferah, Laila, the assassins trying to punch my ticket, the mole—all of it comes back to one man. The Devil. If we leave her
e without putting him in the ground, nothing will change. But without the NSA or Israel’s Unit 8200, I don’t see a way to get a lock on the Devil. He survived Saddam Hussein, the American invasion, the Iraqi civil war, and ISIS. He’s a shadow. If he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be.”
“So maybe we make him come to us,” Virginia said.
“How?”
“The same way you land any fish—by dangling something they really want in front of their nose.”
“And that would be?”
“Me.”
FORTY-THREE
Hang on,” I said. “I must have misheard. For a second, I could have sworn you were suggesting we use you to bait a homicidal maniac.”
“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting,” Virginia said.
“No.”
“But you haven’t even heard my plan.”
“And I don’t need to. The answer’s still no.”
“Why? Because I’m a girl and you think it’s too dangerous?”
“Because you aren’t a trained operative,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong. You’re good at this. You’re great at thinking on your feet, and I wouldn’t have gotten this far without you. In fact, I think you have what it takes to be a case officer. But you aren’t one yet. Not by a long shot.”
“So this has nothing to do with the fact that I’m a woman and you want to protect me?”
“No.”
Okay, so maybe Virginia’s gender did play a small role in my calculus—I’d seen what those monsters had done to Nazya. I had no intention of letting East Tennessee get in the same zip code with a bunch of serial rapists, some of whom were convinced that their atrocities were sanctioned by Allah. But that didn’t make my stated reason any less true. Virginia was not a trained operative, plain and simple.
“Well, that’s funny,” Virginia said, hands on her hips as her eyes bored into mine, “because me being a woman has everything to do with why I want in on this. Right now a fifteen-year-old girl is in the hands of the same beasts who gang-raped her sister. Fifteen. In a sane world she’d be practicing hairstyles with her friends. Instead she’s about to be auctioned off as a sex slave.”
“We’ll get Ferah out,” I said. “I promise.”
“And I believe you,” Virginia said, “but that’s not good enough. Not anymore. You said it yourself—as long as the Devil’s still breathing, she won’t be the last fifteen-year-old at risk. I know you’re worried about exposing me to more than I signed up for. I get it. Really I do. But I’m telling you that as a woman, as a human being, I won’t be able to live with myself if I do nothing. I don’t want to just rescue Ferah. I want to save all the girls. Every last one. To do that, we have to cut the head off this snake. We have to get to the Devil.”
“I understand,” I said, frustration coloring my words. “But I still don’t get where you come in.”
“That’s because you’re a man. A good man. But the Devil isn’t. I’ve heard how you described him—a businessman, not a jihadi. But more than that, he’s a kingpin—a gangster. He wears handmade leather shoes and tailored shirts. It’s not enough that he’s successful. The Devil is into status. And what do you think is the ultimate status symbol for a piece-of-shit Arab sex trafficker?”
“A Western woman,” Zain said from across the room.
“Exactly,” Virginia said, turning to acknowledge his comment, “but not just any Western woman. Someone who looks completely different from the women here. Someone with blue eyes, auburn hair, and pale skin. Someone his friends would consider exotic. And do you know what would really get his rocks off?”
“An American woman,” Zain answered.
“Bingo,” Virginia said. “We land the Devil by baiting the hook with something he’ll want as soon as he sees it—me. You said it yourself—Zain’s men might find the auction’s location, but we won’t be sure the Devil will be there. Not unless I’m on the auction block.”
“What if he sends someone else to bid for him?” I said.
Virginia smiled as she shook her head. “Not gonna happen. The Devil is a peacock. He isn’t going to send an underling to take possession of his new toy. Not our guy. He’ll show up to collect his American whore in person so that everyone can see. You know I’m right.”
She was right, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. On the surface, her plan had real merit. More than that, it was the only shot we had. The only shot Laila had. But just because Virginia’s plan was sound didn’t mean that my earlier objections were moot. I understood what she was saying, and I felt the veracity of her words in my bones. I even understood why she felt the way that she did. After all, Virginia was the one who’d heard Nazya’s agonizing story firsthand.
But that didn’t change the fact that Virginia wasn’t qualified to do what she was proposing. She was a quick study and a steady hand, but at the end of the day, she was still a chemistry professor, not a spy. As much as she insisted otherwise, Virginia didn’t understand what she was signing up for, not in the visceral, blood-in-the-dirt way that I did. If I went through with this, I was potentially exchanging one woman’s life for another’s—Virginia for Laila.
That was something I simply could not do.
“I’m sorry, Virginia,” I said. “I really am. But I can’t let you do this. I’ve been captured by the Devil twice. Each time I barely escaped with my life.”
“But I’ll have an advantage that you didn’t,” Virginia said.
“What?” I said.
“You. Look, you recruited me, remember? You said that I’d have the chance to do something that would light my blood on fire. Something that really mattered. We’re talking about rescuing a fifteen-year-old girl from a bunch of monsters. I can’t think of too many things that matter more than that. Truthfully, I’d do this by myself if I had to. But I don’t have to because I’ve got you. The man who went head-to-head with the Devil twice and still came back for more. But this time the Devil won’t know you’re coming. I’m not an operative—you’re right about that. But I don’t have to be. That’s why you’re here.”
“You still don’t get it,” I said, shaking my head. Finding Zain’s gaze, I directed my next comment at him. “Will you talk some sense into her?”
“I would,” Zain said, “but I happen to believe she’s right. Is what we’re proposing risky? Yes. But in some ways, it’s the perfect operation. Virginia just needs to be herself—a terrified woman about to be sold to a sex trafficker. And you just need to be yourself.”
“Which is what?” I said.
“The sword of justice,” Zain said. “If we do nothing, Ferah and countless girls like her will be lost. But more than that, the Devil, and the evil he represents, will continue to thrive. This isn’t about you trusting Virginia, or even me, to do what must be done. No, I believe this is really about you trusting yourself, Matthew. This is who you are. This is what you do. Allah has placed an opportunity before us all. An opportunity to right some of the wrong that infects this place. We just need to be brave enough to seize it.”
I looked from Zain’s weather-beaten brown face to Virginia’s creamy complexion. The two of them couldn’t have been more different: a smuggler who’d eked out a living in this desert land, and a chemistry professor raised in the mountains of Tennessee. There was no reason why their paths should have ever intersected. None at all.
But here they were.
Here we were.
My relationship with God was complicated. Mom and Dad had done their best to inculcate me with their beliefs, but my childhood faith hadn’t exactly weathered the transition to adulthood intact. The things I’d seen human beings do to one another since I’d left the sanctity of my boyhood home had left me questioning many things, my belief system included. It had been a long time since I’d even cracked the cover on the Bible Mom had tearfully given me when I’d headed off to college, but a f
ragment of a verse from the Book of Esther came to mind all the same.
And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?
Like Queen Esther, I found myself at the intersection of two paths. I could chalk Ferah up as yet another casualty to the horror that was the Middle East and try to get to the Devil a different way. Or I could risk everything, including the lives of the two people sitting across from me, in a desperate attempt to save her.
Maybe the fact that Virginia, Zain, and I were all sitting in a safe house in Iraq was due to something more than just coincidence. Maybe someone or something really did have a master plan.
A master plan that included such a time as this.
“All right,” I said, looking from Zain to Virginia. “Let’s roll.”
FORTY-FOUR
The next several hours passed in a blur. Within minutes of my agreeing to Virginia’s plan, Zain’s men had converted the safe house’s central meeting space into a makeshift tactical operations center, or TOC. A stream of workers carried in a large-screen TV, computers, maps of Mosul, and an assortment of Pelican cases. The TV went onto the wall and was quickly synced to the auction’s Facebook page. The display showed pictures of the women currently for sale, their starting prices, and a clock counting down to the flesh market’s inevitable conclusion. Maps were spread across hastily set-up card tables as Zain and his lieutenants annotated facilities with known ties to the Devil’s organization with a precision that would have made a DIA analyst proud.
As they worked to provide me with a picture of the battlefield, I wandered over to the Pelican cases and started popping lids. Their contents should have surprised me, but somehow didn’t. Maybe this was because I was becoming more jaded with each passing moment, or maybe nothing about Zain or his organization surprised me anymore.