Shadow on the Mountain

by Shaker Jeffrey

  Still inside rehearsing, Farida Adil had no idea anything had gone awry until someone burst in to tell her. At the time, she was wearing a tight pink blazer and ponytail—both haram in the eyes of extremists. Quickly, she donned a veil and fled the house to safety.

  Kidnappings and ransom demands, murders, and armed robberies were routine all over Iraq, but that aggressive celebrity abduction was big news, and was now the main concern in the COP meeting room. AQI had developed a taste for more impudent assaults—the latest attack had happened in full daylight and before a large crowd of witnesses. Our SO2 had just gotten word that the abductors were lurking around in the industrial part of Al Zirai, in the Shifa region, the nefarious quarter abutting Zanjilly. Major Howell told the team to be ready to move out at first light.

  HEAT LIGHTNING OVER Alshohada Bridge, not a cloud in sight; it wouldn’t rain here until October. By the time I strapped into the jump seat of the MRAP, I was already dripping hot. We hauled out fast, headed north—it wouldn’t take long for the watchers to clock our movements and dial them in. The three-vehicle convoy slid into an empty car lot near the mark; we pushed down the stair ramp, everyone watching their six. Beyond the carcasses of a few shelled buildings, it was as quiet as a still shot.

  Nothing moved, not even the air.

  Pepsi’s trademarked insignias crowned the top of the factory—an absurdity among absurdities you only find within the ruined bowels of an urban war. I’d seen the surrounding pulverized streets in the mock-up laid out over a table in the meeting room, and I knew we were headed to the alley. No more than rubble in places, every blown-out window was a vengeful eye, snipers lining the team up in their scopes and considering. Life or death for one of us might depend on nothing more than his mood; the next prayer; a chai break. Everywhere you went, the capriciousness of fate stalked your mortal paces. From the start, I knew that that long measured walk would end in a perilous place.

  More than once, we’d been called out to meet the Iraqi police to investigate and remove corpses from that district. If the bodies had stayed out baking, you needed to bring a shovel and sheets. Major Howell’s radio crackled as he moved to confer with Colonel Dildar. I stood at the mouth of the alley, staring it down like a bad day. Right over me, a lazy flock of blackbirds shed altitude, some congregating like a jury over the Pepsi insignia.

  That’s when I saw it: a gray blanket spread out over the ground. For a moment, I thought I glimpsed movement, but it was just the breeze buffeting the fabric, which had stains and small tears all over it. Two feet away, a bird watched me approach, stretching its dark wings, its beak gulping at the air, claws scratching at the pavement. I looked down to the covering: a dress shoe turned in at a strange angle and the blackened tip of a finger showed under the fringe. Then I did what I should not have, and pulled back the blood-soaked fabric.

  They say headless bodies have no souls—but the souls are always there, lingering near their vacated shells. There were two men from Sharqiya News: a cameraman—light meter still tucked into his pocket—and the fit-looking bureau chief, wearing prosperous city clothes. I took in the ruined collar of a fine dress shirt, no doubt ironed just that morning. And along the raw stub of neck: butchered vertebrae, ragged veins. The carotid still wet, coagulating blood already soaked my boots. On one of the hands, I saw a gold ring; every one of these details spoke to me only of life.

  I’d seen the dead many times, helped to wash their spent bodies for the funeral rites. Took a turn kissing my own father’s cold brow before we wed him to the earth—but not this way. Not this way.

  “Bodies,” I finally called out. “Bodies.”

  Major Howell and Colonel Dildar followed procedure to the letter, commanding the scene and my own nervous system. I stood by, translating between east and west; others took pictures, jotted down notes. Several people searched the vicinity for missing body parts and the other kidnapped crew member, whom they would never find. Sometimes the insurgents hammered severed heads onto fence posts or tossed them like ruined balls into residential streets to scare the residents. Rumor had it that the skulls of the most blatant heathens were fed to pigs.

  But I could not stop myself from wondering how the militants executed the killings: knife or sword. Before or after a bullet to the brain. Despite every admonishment I lived by—to shield who I was and wanted to remain—my rookie Khanasor eyes stole glimpses of those terrifying stubs of raw flesh. Finally, I turned heavenward, watching the birds, all congregating now in the eaves along the Pepsi factory, just waiting for us to move away from their dinner. I peered down at my own feet, blood- and filth-spattered, and then glimpsed the bodies again. A contagion entered my veins, as it infiltrated every soldier in their time. Suddenly, I was disconnected and drained clean of the living essence that made me feel anything at all.

  Then Major Howell touched me on the shoulder, our eyes meeting over the oblivious dead: “Stop looking, Michael.”

  I was only inviting it in.

  THE LONG-WASTED TRACK running parallel to the river just north of COP Hotel was known as Death Road, because IEDs went off there every day. Bowers had taught me how to patrol that deadly street like a pro. But I’d said good-bye to Bowers at Thanksgiving dinner in the DFAC at Diamondback—had my first taste of turkey meat and stuffing—and learned the heavy cost of a soldier’s farewell. Hard to know if you’d ever see the friend who’d walked the line by your side, kept you alive, sane, faithful to God—ever again. Not likely. By then, I’d seen more than a few detonations in my time. Right out on the grid, José the medic had used a numbing cream and tweezers in the back of the MRAP to pull bits of shrapnel the size of nail heads from my shins.

  Now we were out again conducting a cleanup-op near Divil 1 and 2, by Death Road, trawling out the trash. For New Year’s 2009, I’d grown a full goatee and shaved my head. When Sergeant Cook saw me on a day off back at Camp Marez, where we took showers, naps, and did our laundry, he came up to me with a back slap:

  “Well, well, well, badass—now you even look the part.”

  Maybe I believed it.

  I watched as Captain Faulkner stood in front of a plywood board with a can of spray paint and used the full span of his long arm to scrawl out his name and cell phone number. An insurgent gang had been working Death Road hard, and Faulkner was compelling the enchained residents to come forward with information to shut the group down. On offer: prosperity, a future. But in those days fewer and fewer civilians were, as Bowers put it, drinking the Kool-Aid.

  Another mound of garbage sitting there oozing along the culvert like a vagrant, and I slipped on plastic gloves, considering where to begin among the cracked bits of plastic, bricks, rusted metal sheets, and tossed rocks. Even months later, I was still dragging around the absence of Bowers, or maybe I was just tired. Sleep was getting harder to find. Still, I should have been looking where I planted my boots; out on patrol your feet were the enemy’s best trigger. And if it hadn’t been for the hiss of Faulkner’s spray paint, I wouldn’t have stopped midstride and seen the thing that would have done us all in. Quarter of an inch, that’s how far my heel was from the detonator—I jerked back my boot fast—

  “Bomb!”

  The device had enough TNT packed in it to tear a gash out of the whole block and suck us all up with it. Boom—there and gone. They would have sent me home to Daki in a small lined box, along with those used copies of Sports Illustrated and my death pay.

  Who knows why that moment did it, but standing there in the aftermath of the controlled explosion, my nervous system began to collapse. I’d survived, by some nonsensical roll of the dice. And now I couldn’t stop my mind from racing back and forth, combing over every minute detail: the precise angle of my boot over the detonator, the hiss of Faulkner’s paint can, my eyes’ foolish skim of the lethal trash heap. And out there in the alley, leaning against a rusted gate, my whole body fell into a wild gallop, limbs shaking from the inside out. Then I slithered all the way down as though I were defla
ting.

  “You OK, Michael?” I heard Major Howell call out, and felt hands on my back pulling.

  “Yes, yes,” I said again and again, like some broken thing, as they led me to the MRAP.

  When I asked for water, someone gave it, and I thought I was all right.

  WE LEFT THE wire again after midnight under the thin gloam of a waning moon. Four vehicles: MRAPs and Humvees. Operation New Hope, launched in February 2009, had morphed into several joint US and Iraqi sub-ops throughout Mosul, all designed to degrade al-Qaeda and their capabilities in the region. For the entire month, it was boots on the ground: carrying out search and raid missions, following up on arrest warrants, destroying enemy munitions caches, and setting up a holding force to prevent re-infiltration. We all joked that we couldn’t remember the last time we’d changed our socks. Still, it seemed like the minute you got rid of one cell, another would come right down the line on a relentless conveyor belt carrying fighters out of Syria, the ranges of Nineveh, or just up the street a few blocks.

  Captain Faulkner’s brainchild of handing out his cell phone number paid dividends when a ten-year-old kid called in first, and then just showed up at the COP gates, a plastic bag full of empty Pepsi bottles in his bony hand.

  “One brave kid,” Faulkner said when he called me in to translate.

  The cemetery of the thirteenth-century Mar Thoma church sat nestled like a secret castle deep within a subdued residential area, behind huge stone walls. The boy who’d called Faulkner lived in the vicinity and, like most children of war, had turned out to be a proficient spy. Night after night, at 23:00, he’d watched from his fragile perch in a persimmon tree as Arabic-speaking men showed up in a convoy of old sedans. He heard shoveling and saw crates of munitions of all varieties. He listed each one to us like an expert: IEDs, detonation devices, explosive belts.

  Then he walked over to the map tacked to the whiteboard and put his finger right on the spot. When Faulkner asked him why he was there, putting his life at risk, the boy turned slowly in his shredded Nikes. He pulled in his lips under the fluorescent lights; his face went dark.

  “They killed my brother and my father—and now you will kill them.”

  I will never forget the grim resignation in his war-torn voice.

  AS WE PULLED along the church lane, the walls stood to one side like a cliff rising up into the dead of night. Moving through the gates, the vehicles lumbered between a dense lattice of grave markers displaying large photographs of the departed, faces illuminated as beams of searchlights were cast over the flat terrain. Right away, several soldiers went to work digging. No one liked being there: the shovels themselves were a desecration, but cemeteries were good hiding spots for munitions caches—I’d been through this routine before all over Mosul. It wouldn’t take long. Two feet down in a fake tomb, we found the first crate and hauled it out. Then another and another. It was as though there were no corpses there, only things used to make them: rockets, explosive belts and barrels, IEDs by the dozens. It would take hours to pull it all out, categorize and document each one. The long night was still and quiet.

  But the enemy had been waiting for us, having taken up positions along the high walls. The first group opened with RPGs and machine-gun fire. Every soldier dropped. Prone near a grave marker, I tried to get a bearing as more shots poured down from every side. All around, men low-crawled the ground like heavy shadows. I could see a church spire rising like the head of a spear and watched muzzle flashes light up the perimeter. A deafening blur now, men hollered, returning fire. A foot away, an Iraqi soldier turned to look at me, his wide-eyed face frozen in terror—then a bullet sheared off the back of his skull and he fell away. I rolled from useless cover to useless cover as figures went down like dominoes. I shouted for the medic, but the fury of combat engulfed my voice. Impotent, I waited.

  Because you often don’t feel a hit, we’d all been trained to check for holes, and I found mine as my hands crawled down my calf. The accompanying burn was diabolical, but I still believed it was just a graze—within seconds, my pant leg was soaking wet. All I could do was lie there, mouthing the name José into the raging gun-powdered air. A long time later, I saw a face emerge as though from dark water, but by now I was losing so much blood that it was hard to tell figments from reality.

  A memory rushed in: the time José stitched up my forehead back at COP. We’d been told to keep our feet clear of the river that served as a fertile breeding ground for swarms of bloodthirsty insects. I hadn’t heeded the warning and the fly that bit my face took out a chunk of flesh. José showed up with his magic numbing cream, gauze, and huge Puerto Rican grin. “No big deal,” he’d said, and I picked up the phrase like a dropped coin.

  “No big deal,” I heard myself saying now, as my severed veins gushed.

  Then some other medic crawled over, holding up a syringe, and I was no longer sure that José had been there at all. Flashes twinkled all around the blur like the Christmas lights the teams strung across the base in December.

  And then in that stupor, I was sitting behind Bowers on a motorcycle riding fast between the pear trees in the barren orchard, both of us laughing, the others all calling out, “Happy Birthday, Abu Jacob.” Father of Jacob, the name the Iraqis had given him as a sign of respect, and for one of the sons he had waiting back in Idaho.

  More rounds buzzed past my head, but I couldn’t hear a thing, and I saw another form go down, legs twitching.

  And Bowers was with me again at the gates of Diamondback when my brother Samir showed up dressed in new fatigues. He was signing on to be an interpreter.

  Go back to Daki, I’d said to him, and handed over my full pay packet. Then I held him hard by his thin farm-worked shoulders. Get rid of that army gear they gave you. Get out…

  “Get out of here,” I said to the medic. “This is no place—this is no place for angels.” Even as I heard myself say it, I knew I was teetering over the edge of mortality.

  A soothing voice told me to settle down, and somehow, I knew just then my situation was grave. And yet I didn’t feel a thing anymore. I was fading now; slipping in and out of places like a boat sailing pleasant waves.

  That’s when I peered into that enveloping nothingness and caught sight of my Babo on his white horse, riding the fog and hellfire between the grave markers. Then my shallow heartbeats and laboring breaths seemed to give way, and I heard my mother whisper:

  You were the one standing with him in the space between worlds, Shaker.… In time, you’ll know what it means.

  And Babo was right there in his uniform, gold ring on his finger, glinting. Those pale lodestar eyes on mine, and he held out his long arm. So grateful, I raised my hand.

  The medic told me to stop moving—he didn’t see what I did.

  But Babo had pulled me right up to his saddle, and we were riding away fast through the mist.

  “Have you spent your packet already, boy?” he looked back and asked me.

  “Maybe so, Babo, I don’t know.”

  Someone hushed me.

  But I was long gone.

  Chapter Eight

  The Fortress

  WHITE LIGHT GLEAMED OFF THE WALLS—LIKE COMING TO, DEEP inside a sugar cube. Moments later, an onslaught of odors: melting plastic, peroxide, iodine, urine—blood. Blurred views of people moving about as though through water; fatigues and face masks. The slaps of latex gloves peeled off. On the stretcher next to me, a human form writhed under its thin covering like a pupa working its way out of a cocoon. When the movement stilled, I turned away. Moments later, a fire of agony erupted within the mangled sinews of my leg, and all on its own my voice released a long primal moan. Suddenly, fingers tugged, and I could feel the wraith-like shadows of people hovering over me. A downdraft buffeted my hair and IV lines dripped like leaky faucets into my arm. Then, as though a sorcerer’s hand had waved it off, the sensation of pain lifted, all feeling itself emptying into a cyclopean void, and I ran an impassive gaze along the room.

/>   Other damaged shapes keened on gurneys; some sitting up and staring out, their stumps already bandaged, the latest products in what I would come to think of as a factory of missing limbs. I was in the military hospital at Camp Diamondback, where the 1st Medical Detachment Forward Surgical Team treated my wounds. Hard to know if the staff had tagged me as dead or alive—they used their own secret ranking system in there. The dying were always the last to know it.

  Groggy, I slowly moved my deadweight hands for a quick corpus-roster: face, arms, every finger, and then I surveyed the full lengths of both legs, one covered in thick bandages. My body had taken in two bullets: foot and calf—same side. I exhaled and closed my eyes, relieved. But behind my lids, a slow film played out of the frenzied minutes just before I was shot: checking the man who went down next to me in the graveyard and battling to stop eruptions of blood. I plugged a finger deep inside a gaping hole, and warm flesh squeezed around my digit like an infant’s wet mouth suckling. The medic appeared and applied compression bandages; he administered a shot and slithered back into the pitch and carnage.

  On my right, an American soldier talked about going to see a guy named Walter Reed. It would be years before I learned that Walter Reed was a military hospital in the United States, where some of the most broken soldiers went. All things considered, I was lucky—after surgery I’d be back on the front line in a matter of weeks.

  Acid stirred in my gut, and I held it down, pressing a cheek into the pillow. The raw truth of that endless war lay in waste all around me. So hot now, my temples throbbed, and I longed for Haji’s well: clear water flowing from the spigot. Cucumbers flourishing in a desert. A game of baseball in the shadow of Shingal. Small miracles of home—all that had been sacrificed already could not be for nothing.