The Girl in Green

by Derek B. Miller

  ‘We trust him?’

  ‘We trust him to convey information responsibly, yes.’

  ‘When are we supposed to hear from him?’

  ‘As soon as he hears from the hostage-takers.’

  ‘Any other news?’

  ‘I learned recently that the can opener was not invented for a full eighty years after the invention of the can.’

  ‘What’s your point? That nothing is inevitable?’ Herb asks.

  ‘Maybe. Or that even the inevitable takes time.’

  31

  Märta has returned to the house. She is sitting on the red thinking chair, hoping it’ll live up to its name. Herb is leaning against the countertop where Märta stood last night, and Tigger is sacked out on the sofa. Clip is on the speakerphone.

  Tigger has heard from the dentist. There are decisions to be made.

  ‘What did he say?’ Märta asks Tigger.

  ‘He said he’d been contacted. He said the man on the other end of the phone did not sound Iraqi. He sounded foreign, perhaps Yemeni. He wasn’t sure. The dentist said the man was calm and professional, and therefore very scary. The dentist explained to this man — who has no name — that he is only our communicator. He said he does not work for any party, is doing this as a favour, and he has no power to make decisions. After he said this, the man on the other end said that he will not speak with a go-between and will speak only to the decision-maker himself. Our dentist explained that this is not a better solution, because the organisation forbids such direct contact. It is beyond his control. This way, with his own involvement, the path is more clear for a settlement. Then he asked if the hostage-takers had any requests or demands they wanted him to pass on. The kidnapper said yes, that he is to explain that if the decision-maker does not meet him face-to-face, he will kill everyone to help fill his quota. The dentist asked for proof that our people are alive. The man ignored him, and said that we are to come to the village on Sinjar. The market we used for the letter drop, he explained, also serves tea. We should come there, and then they will talk further. That was all. He gave us the day to make a choice.’

  ‘What does that mean,’ Märta asks, ‘about making a quota?’

  ‘ISIL,’ says Herb, ‘have apparently become Terrorism, Inc. They actually put out reports of the number of people they’ve killed, how, and when. In August, they published one detailing their attack metrics. I don’t even remember the categories, but they’re keeping numbers on their assassinations, bombings, suicide-vest attacks, cities taken over, IEDs, houses burned — you name it. That was from the 2011–2012 period, when most of us had barely heard of these guys. And there’s PR material now in English, profiling suicide bombers, giving bomb-making instructions, explaining the best places to kill the most civilians, and quotes from the Koran explaining why all this is a grand idea. It’s never been easier to step into their minds and lose your own.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ Tigger asks, his leg bouncing slightly on his knee. ‘We go to the meet, we probably die. We don’t go, our people almost certainly die.’

  ‘If we show up,’ Herb says, ‘we are giving them more hostages or more bodies. Going there is out of the question. Clip, you still on the line?’

  ‘I’m here, Herb,’ a voice confirms from the loudspeaker on the computer. ‘You’re right. You can’t go. Maybe we can offer them money.’

  ‘We don’t negotiate with terrorists,’ Herb says to Clip. ‘And that’s not just my opinion. UN resolution 1373 was passed after September 11, and we’re supposed to comply with it. It explicitly prevents the financing of terrorist organisations. We’re not supposed to pay them off. We’re not supposed to negotiate with them.’

  ‘Everyone is paying these people off,’ Märta says.

  ‘You used to be Red Cross,’ Herb says. ‘They have never once paid to get someone back. And their people are safer for it.’

  Tigger makes a wildly exaggerated arm movement and blows a raspberry through his lips that could have filled a balloon. ‘We are negotiating with terrorists! We’re aggressively doing our very best as a team to negotiate with terrorists. No, we don’t want to give them money or more hostages, that much is true, but please, spare me the high-level legal rhetoric. This is the real world. Here in the dirt. Merde.’

  ‘I’m meeting with them,’ Märta says.

  At which point, the three men fall silent.

  ‘That is out of the question,’ Herb says.

  ‘That’s right. You can’t possibly,’ Tigger says. ‘And you are a blonde woman. They would love to kill a blonde woman after raping you to death.’

  ‘I just sent a motorcycle medic into the lion’s den, and he’s home again,’ Märta says. ‘The Kurds will not deliberately fire on us. Neither will the military. That leaves Sunni tribesmen, who might, and ISIL. If ISIL are extending the invitation and think they might get something out of it, it makes sense to conclude that we have negotiated access to them. The best protection would be to use a marked vehicle and to let everyone know who we are and why we’re there, and make sure they’re OK with it. You boys are missing the big move here. We have negotiated access.’

  ‘If the ICRC has better access,’ Tigger says, ‘why not use them?’

  ‘Louise won’t let us in one of her vehicles until we have an agreement with the kidnappers. We have an invitation, not an agreement. This step belongs to us. It’s only one step away.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ Herb says.

  ‘No, I’ll go,’ Tigger says. ‘It makes more sense.’

  ‘It makes no kind of sense,’ Herb says to Tigger, ‘because you’re about as scary as Linus and his blanket. Also, and I’m sorry to have to say this, man, but your accent in English is not intimidating. Mine is. When people hear me, they think of Samuel L. Jackson at his most unholy. When they hear you, they think of Pepé Le Pew smoking weed.’

  ‘Herbert,’ Tigger says, ‘you are not scary. These people have never heard of Samuel L. Jackson, who is also an actor and not an assassin, by the way. So he is not scary either. And I happen to know that you are in fact a giant teddy bear. You may think that having dark-brown skin makes you scary, but it does not. It makes you a very popular colour for a teddy bear.’

  ‘I’m scary.’

  ‘Uh-huh. I was in the movie theatre with you and your son, where you cried when little Nemo heard his father’s voice for the first time after their journey apart.’

  ‘My biceps are bigger than your thighs.’

  ‘Your son, incidentally, did not cry.’

  ‘OK, you two, knock it off. I’m going,’ Märta says. ‘The only question is whether I’m going alone or not.’

  ‘Oh, Märta, please,’ Tigger says. ‘Your very presence would be an insult to these people. I hate this Scandinavian quality you all have, especially that face you all make when confronted with your own naïveté.’

  ‘What face?’

  ‘That face — the face of fake confusion you hide behind to pretend you don’t even understand me, so that your Scandinavian identity of moral purity is not threatened.

  ‘The Finns are different,’ Herb says.

  ‘They never speak,’ Tigger says.

  ‘That’s the old ones. Young ones never shut up. Something’s going on up there.’

  ‘I feel as though we’re getting off track,’ Clip says through the speakerphone.

  ‘Yes, we are,’ Märta says. ‘It doesn’t matter that I’m a blonde woman, or that my hair is exposed, or anything else, for that matter. I’m the decision-maker. I’m the one they want to meet. And the Finns aren’t Scandinavian. They’re Nordic, but Finnish is from a completey different language group.’

  ‘Let’s just suppose,’ Tigger says, ‘that you go. You meet. You sit across from one another. You and the killer — the one who just bombed the security forces, and murdered civilians with a rifle to mak
e a quota, and left their bodies to rot. You order tea. It comes. Describe this conversation to me. I’m having trouble imagining it. I’m having trouble imagining any scenario, except for you being thrown into an oubliette or worse.’

  ‘I have an idea of how to make the best use of that conversation,’ she says.

  ‘What kind of idea?’

  ‘A bold one.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Herb asks.

  ‘Do you remember when we met?’ Märta asks him.

  ‘Yes, yes. Chicken Little had it backward — so what?’

  ‘I made Herb open the door by going over his head.’

  ‘I don’t see the relevance,’ Tigger says.

  ‘I don’t think our people are dead,’ Märta says. ‘I think our people would have been killed right away and left there, like the others, if that was the goal. But it wasn’t. So that means they decided to make use of them. I think these people want to gain from that somehow, and right now they’re testing the waters to see what use they have. But they need to stay in control. I think the right move is to get close, like they want us to, and then take that control away. When they’re off balance, we’ll have the advantage, and then we can solve this. At some cost, but we can solve it. That’s my strategy.’

  ‘What does this plan have to do with having gone over my head twenty years ago?’ Herb asks.

  ‘That’s where the boldness comes in.’

  32

  Märta is emphatic about Herb not coming. She tries to argue against Tigger coming, too, but the men shut her down so completely she knows that her authority ends there.

  The security guard, for reasons of his own, breaks from his sleeping regimen and washes the Land Cruiser, leaving the emblem of the IRSG shining brightly. If anyone wants to shoot at it, the rounds will easily penetrate the factory-standard sheetmetal of the Japanese consumer product, and the logo — glittering — will make an excellent target. But, of course, it always has done.

  The vehicle is packed up for the seven-hour round-trip journey.Märta oversees the communications equipment, insignia vests, and provisions, while Tigger calls Ahmed in the radio room.

  When Tigger calls to report their trip and explain their route, Ahmed tries to be as helpful as possible while nibbling his beloved sour -cream-and-onion potato chips. Hosni, in management, has tried to explain to Ahmed the inappropriateness of a radio operator eating potato chips — which he tried to prove by eating potato chips during the conversation to illustrate the point — but Ahmed likes them, and Hosni isn’t around very much, and everyone likes Ahmed because he is both friendly and trying to save their lives.

  And because Ahmed cares about the people in his charge, he tries to be as honest and delicate with Tigger as possible. He does this by yelling at him: ‘You are a crazy man! There will be a big attack today. No one knows where, no one knows when. Top of Sinjar Mountains and back is eight hours. That’s eight hours on the road in the middle of a battlefield.’

  ‘It’s seven hours.’

  ‘Those are seven Iraqi hours. Iraqi hours are different from Western hours. Not all Iraqi hours are the same length. And not all Iraqi hours are consecutive hours. It could take days to go seven hours. You don’t want to be out in the field for seven Iraqi hours.’

  ‘I think—’ Tigger says.

  ‘No, no, no. I think. I think for you. Here is what I think for you. There is one road up the Sinjar Mountains to your location. You get stuck behind a big truck? What then? You could be on the mountain all day. All night. What if your truck breaks? Flat tyre? You think the tow truck will come get you? What if you come down the mountain too fast and go off the road? Or one of the big trucks is overloaded? They are all overloaded. No brakes, no shock absorbers. What if it takes a turn too widely and can’t back up? Or the transmission fails? Or there is an IED. Or ten IEDs? And, by the way, they are not so improvised anymore. People really know what they’re doing. They are just EDs. This is what it is to take a drive in Iraq. Why you think people say inshallah after everything? You think everyone is a jihadist? You think everyone is even religious? You think everyone is even Muslim? No. Shiite, Sunni, Christian, Jew — everyone says inshallah, even if to different gods. You know why? Same road!’

  ‘We need to go.’

  ‘You make me nervous in my stomach, Mr Tiger.’

  ‘Tigger.’

  ‘That’s what I said — Mr Tiger.’

  ‘It is pronounced “Tigger.”’

  ‘It is not pronounced “tiger”?’

  ‘“Tiger” is pronounced “tiger”. But “Tigger” is pronounced “Tigger,”’ Tigger says.

  ‘Whoever you are, don’t go. Too many of my friends are dead. My soul cannot stand any more sadness. And I have to stop eating so much. This will not help me.’

  ‘Smoking helps.’

  ‘You make jokes, but please, Mr Tigger, today will be a heavy day for many people.’

  ‘We will be careful.’

  ‘And be safe. And Ms Märta. She is very respected. Very loved here. You keep her safe, too.’

  ‘Inshallah, Ahmed. Inshallah.’

  It is a three-hour drive to Sinjar, through Tal Afar, and at least another hour or more up the mountain, which is longer than planned but still early for the meeting. Märta contacts the dentist from the car and tells him to let their interlocutor on the other side know that she’s on her way with a driver because she doesn’t drive, which is a lie that will have to do. He is to inform his people not to obstruct or otherwise delay the vehicle, which the dentist is to describe carefully.

  Beyond that, there isn’t much to do, and listening to music is too incongruous.

  Tigger communicates with Ahmed in the radio room with the precision of a former military officer. She finds it soothing. Too many young NGO staff scoff at formal systems and procedures, or else giggle, and don’t understand the importance of them. She’s met young project-officer teams in far-flung locations around the world who haven’t even registered their presence in the country with their own embassies, let alone become certified in basic security in the field or advanced security in the field through the UN’s free and online training courses.

  Not with Tigger and Herb. The giggling ends when you watch someone die who didn’t need to if they’d followed procedure. They both have.

  Of course, all this faith and respect for procedure is quite rich, given that she’s currently breaking every rule in the book by putting the decision-maker in touch with the hostage-takers.

  They drive past the Mosul Dam, built by a German-Italian outfit, with its four massive towers rising from the turbine generators. It stands over one hundred metres tall and is the fourth largest in the Middle East. Märta and her NGO have been watching it since 2007, because of a report from the US Army Corps of Engineers concluding that it has an exceptionally high probability of failure. If it breaks — or someone blows it up — it will kill half a million people.

  They leave it behind, and drive through Tal Afar. It is different, which is not to say better, with the Americans gone. There has not been a moment of peace here in over a decade, though the level of violence has gone up and down. It all feels dangerous: driving is dangerous; stopping is dangerous. There is no way to know whether the dentist’s message will produce the hoped-for effect, or how far ISIL’s reach extends. Someone might jump out at any moment and capture her and Tigger, just as they captured Benton and his party. Safe passage will be the result of either careful planning or dumb luck. She’ll never really know which it was.

  Märta is feeling nervous. She’s in control, but she’s nervous. She has too much information and knowledge, and too vivid an imagination not to be nervous. There are also not enough distractions. Without something to do, her mind is building highly imaginative scenarios of death and destruction — the kind that never announce themselves, are never predictable, and that happ
en in a sudden burst or explosion of hyperactivity from out of nowhere, followed by nothing. The kind of events that happen in fits and spurts. That’s why more PTSD is being produced by this war than others. The danger is permanent, but it only happens in fits and spurts.

  Fits and spurts.

  It sounds funny, doesn’t it?

  Fits and spurts.

  She says it aloud. She hasn’t spoken in an hour.

  ‘Fits and spurts.’

  ‘What?’ Tigger asks.

  ‘It’s an American expression. “Fits and spurts.” It means something that happens in a sudden or jumpy manner. That’s how violence happens here. In fits and spurts. They’re funny words, aren’t they? Try and say it fast: “fits and spurts”. Sounds like a law office for the porn industry. “Good morning, you’ve reached the law offices of Fits and Spurts, how may I direct your call?”’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘It’s funny, right? I’m not losing my mind, am I?’

  ‘I was thinking about something else. Besides, the phrase is “fits and starts,” not “spurts”. But who am I to judge whether you’ve lost your mind? I’m right here with you,’ Tigger says.

  ‘You were thinking about something else? You weren’t thinking about how funny the words “fits” and “spurts” are, and how much funnier they are when you say them together?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What else is there to think about?’

  ‘You always get like this before something difficult.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s … after all this time, I still can’t believe people act like this.’

  ‘Like I said, you are Swedish. You cannot stop being yourself.’

  ‘I’ve been gone from Sweden for so long.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. After the age of twenty, we don’t change.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  ‘We do not change. We make better choices, perhaps. Get smart. Wiser. More experienced, certainly. But I will always be French. You will always be a Swede. There are worse places to come from. You can see some of them if you look out your window.’