Gun Work

by David J. Schow

  Maybe Erica, ready to yank off her human mask and reveal her true, bloodthirsty nonhuman self.

  Maybe the concession on lies and made-up stories did not stop with Carl.

  Barney’s battle mode was cranked full-up. First opportunity, smash faces, shed blood, obtain a weapon. If no weapon was available, use furniture, glass from a window, his own bones, anything. Walk out of Mexico with no water, naked if he had to.

  The first step was to get an arm free, snatch an opportunity. Every journey starts with a first step. This one would never get started as long as Barney was cuffed, masked, blind and bulldogged. All he could do was tick off the silent minutes of their portage. No one spoke. Presumably they were communicating, unseen by their cowled captives, with nods, winks, points; implied degradation, predigested visual jokes. The crew that had taken him and Carl were hardcore professionals. A few good men. Shakespeare had said that: A few, that is eight.

  To Barney, gunners were not as dangerous as bona fide gunmen. These men were gunners, but they were very good at what they did. Maximum threat potential. No slipups allowed.

  They were rousted from the van — Barney had no idea whether Carl had regained consciousness or not — and muscled across graveled pavement, through a door, down a narrow hallway. Another door. An elevator.

  A chair, secured to the floor. A set of cuffs for each wrist. The chair was metal, immobile.

  The sack rasped off Barney’s head.

  He was in a second- or third-floor room about twelve by twelve, facing a desk with several flat-screen monitors, a multi-line phone system, a bank of cellphone chargers. Little army men on one corner of the desk sorted out their toy battle plan. Painted jungle camo; tiny guns.

  The huge Samoan-looking badass stood behind Barney and folded his arms. His weight creaked the floorboards like tectonic plates. Carl was not in the room.

  “Who are you?” said a voice — it was the voice Barney had overheard on Carl’s hostage cellphone, back at the bridge.

  A man rose up from behind the confusion of computer screens. Five-ten, pattern baldness, well manicured, expensive suit, inarguably Mexican but without a trace of Hispanic accent.

  Barney exhaled nasally. This was how it always started. The pseudo-politeness, following by the punch in the face for emphasis. He heard the giant behind him move, cocking back for a flat-handed blow to the back of the head. He steeled himself.

  “No need, Sucio,” the man said. “Not just yet.”

  Barney could smell the big guy’s disappointment.

  “Let’s skip the patty-cake, shall we?” said the man. “Instead I’ll ask, what are you doing here? Why have you involved yourself?”

  “What’s the point?” Barney said. “Get on with it.”

  “Here’s your situation,” said the man, walking around to lean on the front of the desk. “For irrelevant reasons, our friend Carl chose to make a contact outside our explicit circle, which was prohibited. No doubt he lacked the honor to conclude the deal which he himself negotiated; no matter — you are now involved. What do we do with you?” His voice had the same curious lack of inflection or accent that Barney had noticed over Carl’s cell. “Do we let you free if you promise never to whisper a word of this to anyone? Unlikely. Do we manhandle you and hope the damage serves to insure your silence? No, just look at you. Beating you up would do us no good although I think Sucio would enjoy aspects of it.”

  “Carl is a shitbag,” said Barney. “He conned me. Do whatever you want to him and his accomplice wife. I just want out. I don’t care what any of you do. I made an error in judgment. I’m willing to pay for that however you like. But your operation is not in danger. I have no stake.”

  “That sounds very ethical, my friend, but there is still the matter of Sucio’s cousin Jesús.”

  “Mi hermano,” said the giant behind Barney, with a voice like two cinderblocks grinding together.

  “Excuse me, his brother.”

  “I was going back to the motel to set him free, once I found out about Carl. I’m sorry about the misunderstanding.” He noticed that the man, who had never introduced himself, seemed to have one lazy eye. Barney did not look at him directly all that much, but when he did, it was a toss-up as to which eye to follow. Bell’s Palsy, perhaps — the left side of his face seemed less active, which might account for the squint.

  “It’s more than a misunderstanding, my friend. Jesús is dead. He bled to death, reading the bible. This is Mexico. I’m afraid it doesn’t look very good for you.”

  “No one dies from a bullet in the ass.”

  “Ah. But as I believe an autopsy will confirm, Jesús died from a brain hemorrhage caused by your other gunshot. I have a doctor working on that right now.”

  “He shot at me first.”

  “Mm. But Carl was not supposed to return fire, nor was he allowed to have anyone with him, much less an expert shot such as yourself.”

  “I didn’t know about Jesús. It was an accident.” It was all Barney had.

  “You do realize how that sounds?” said the man.

  “Yes, but it’s the truth. You guys butchered Estrella just to leave a memo; you realize how that sounds?”

  “Her actual name was Salvación, and she was recruited from a group that does not concern us.”

  “Who was she related to? The other women you find to donate fingers?”

  “Again, not your concern.”

  “Listen — just get Carl and his black widow wife in here and they’ll tell you. Obviously you’re not going to believe anything I say, so stop playing the movie bad guy and jerking off with your little speeches, okay?” Barney was resigned to whatever beating or retribution was coming; it was the only way of staying level in the face of chaos.

  “Unfortunately, that is not possible. Carl and his wife are on their way back to the United States. The proper funds have changed hands and our deal with them is done, which leaves you as a loose end. And there is the matter of Sucio’s brother, not to mention the difficulty you have caused by your uninvited involvement. They mentioned — that is, Carl and his wife mentioned — that you might actually have some value as a hostage yourself, that your government may be willing to pay for you. Your military record and so on. We are looking into that. In the meantime, I’m afraid you have no option but to remain here as our guest.”

  Then Sucio hit him, hard, in the back of the head with what felt like an iron dictionary.

  All of the lies Barney had lived by, all his isolationist maxims and misanthropy, his fables of a higher calling, the thin tissue latticework of rationalizations that he was somehow purer, better, more dedicated than ordinary humans, all the rules by which he had ordered his existence, were about to evaporate in the crucible of his pain.

  Part Two

  The Bleeding Rooms

  A lot of grunts in the unit have heard of RICO statutes, but few of them know what the acronym stands for: Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization, which handily defines most of Iraq’s assorted Ministries — the Ministry of Health, of the Interior, Education, Water Resources, Oil, Labor and Social Affairs. The list goes on unto boredom, with each ministry more corrupt than the last. Untouchable by investigators and immune to prosecution thanks to militia support from Shia leaders, each formerly legal enterprise has been overrun by criminals and there is no operative difference between the terms “militia” and “gang.” It is like Chicago during the Roaring Twenties, but without the charm, the music, or the tuxedos.

  (At least you had the security of knowing everyone around you was the enemy, said a small voice in Barney’s head.)

  The majority of casualties to Barney’s unit have been the result of Improvised Explosive Devices — IEDs — which are left lying around with the frequency of litter, waiting for some stupid American in body armor to disturb them. Boom, and the guy who gave you a cigarette and lit it for you while sitting across from you in the Humvee ships home with no legs and half his eyesight.

  Paranoia is not
only rampant in the Sunni Triangle, it is wholly justified. You essentially cannot even go to the head without a buddy watching your six. Patrols are wired tight and your areas of safe movement are strictly limited by arbitrary (and sometimes illusory) boundaries. You shoot hoops with your crew, you have to designate one of them to watch for snipers because you’ve dared to be outdoors.

  Sometimes guys just disappear. No record, no rescue, just sucked off the face of the earth as though they had never existed. The fear level acts as a practical version of the boogeyman.

  You are either bored to within an inch of self-mutilation because of no action, or scared to death from too much. No middle ground.

  The heat is a living, malignant thing. Even the climate seeks to destroy and demoralize you. You do your job while trying to ignore the sound of your eyeballs pan-frying in your skull, wait for your DEROS, and hope you do not lose any vital parts in between.

  Virtually every long stretch of road is nicknamed a “highway of death.” The US forces in Iraq face the same problem the Soviets had in Afghanistan — lack of adequate security forces for travel or any kind of troop movement. Whenever a vehicle hits a land mine, eats an IED, or is taken out by an RPG, there is usually an insurgent with a video camera to record the flaming vehicles and dead or dying Americans and deliver it via the Arab TV networks to show the enemy is vulnerable. You need a whole armored division to adequately protect a road, and as long as the troops are there, nothing ever happens.

  Until something does.

  (Who ordered you to take a nap? said the voice in Barney’s head. Snap to.)

  The mine blows both the starboard wheels off the Humvee in which Barney is riding, and flips it. The driver had tacked to avoid what turned out to be a decoy in the road, a suspicious irregularity designed to make you swerve into a real, better-concealed trap. This happens in the middle of a hellacious sandstorm that has reduced visibility to about three feet. No warning; just the eardrum-imploding crack of a bomb going off beneath your vehicle’s chassis armor (which did not function worth a damn because there was not enough of it); you go gravity-less like shorts in a dryer in total silence because you are temporarily deaf, and when you can refocus your eyes, everything is on fire.

  Your body armor becomes an impediment, its bulk preventing you from jumping out of the vehicle and getting back to a place where the ground is down and the sky is up, and as you scramble you notice your feet are aflame.

  Later you find your boots partially melted; your feet are burned badly enough to prevent you from humping out on your own power.

  No glorious mission, no taking that essential hill, just panic and terror as your team scatters into the merciless, sandblasting wind. Nobody knows who is dead and who is alive. What you first think to be enemy gunfire is the rounds in Sgt. Tewks’ magazine exploding from the heat. Tewks takes one in the calf from his own weapon.

  Everybody gets immediately lost in the sandstorm and no one can hear anything. Barney scrambles like a mad crab to get distance, and flops on his back from a sudden jolt of pain in his side. A piece of the Humvee is jutting out of him, having breached a seam in the constrictive oven of his body armor. He tries to sleeve sweat from his vision and sees his own blood.

  Nothing on earth sounds like an AK-47 on full auto. It makes a kind of chopping racket, hence “chopper,” before the slang got updated to mean Hueys. They sound similar to the old Thompsons, but not exactly the same, and Barney knows the difference from experience. Most of the gunfire is Kalishnikovs; very little return fire from the Belgian M249 Minimi SAW his unit is packing, even less of the pop-and-crackle of M4s or M16A4s, the standard field issue. The enemy is pot-shotting them where they lie.

  He tries to claw out his sidearm, his carbine already swallowed by blowing sand, which is covering him up like snowfall. All of a sudden it hurts to move. Anything. Any second now a renegade with an AK-47 will spot him, helpless as a turtle, and add a bunch of holes to his life. Time slows to grains of sand, trickling.

  A buddy grabs his arm and hauls him to a kneeling position, pointing and shouting the path to rally, to comparative safety.

  It is their passenger, their observer for the day, their guest journalist from the States.

  It is Carl Ledbetter.

  Barney woke up.

  They starved Barney for a week to tenderize him, then began messing with him, because they could.

  He was not much of a fighter on one Styrofoam cup of water per day.

  His pacing circle was eight feet from the thin futon pad on the floor. They had taken his boots. The cuff on his leg was eight inches long, impossible to slip, custom-fabricated, attached to a case-hardened steel chain through a special double-eyelet. The chain fed back to a wall inset and looped through a metal U-bolt secured inside its own little grated cage. Somebody had done a lot of thinking about prisoners and the ways they escaped, when given oodles of time and nothing to do. At either end, the chain bore no lock — thus, no lock to pick.

  His pants had been slit to accommodate the big shackle. Same pants he had worn before, just grimier.

  There was not a single sharp object, potential bludgeon or metal edge in the entire room. No lamps to be shattered for parts or glass. Screw and bolt heads had been welded or sheared smooth. No bathroom except for a squat toilet in the Thai style, within reach of the chain radius. Therefore no tank lid, no toilet parts to adapt as weapons or picks. No daylight, although there was a barred and locked-down window behind steel mesh, out of reach of the chain. No night, because the inset ceiling lights (unreachable and unbreakable) burned 24/7.

  When they gave him food, it was usually something wrapped in a tortilla. No utensils. No plates. No paper towels or napkins. No dessert.

  No clocks.

  Trapped, sweltering, occasionally delusional from no time-sense and no diurnal/nocturnal shift, it was easy for Barney to hallucinate, then nightmare. The parallels to Iraq were too abundant. He had to try to remember things: Where he was, how he had gotten here, what had gone wrong, what could be done.

  He arbitrarily benchmarked the first day he got beaten up as Day One, although it could have been Day Five or Week One; Barney had no idea how long he had been unconscious after Sucio had smashed in the back of his head.

  On Day One, Sucio and some of the thugs who had taken Barney at the Pantera Roja formed a circle and pounded the crap out of him, playing keep-away with his head. Barney swallowed a lot of his own blood. They abandoned him when he could not stand up to even make a pretense of defense.

  Barney was down in a dark hole for a long time after that, and by Day Two, he apprehensively guessed that he might already have been in this place as long as a month. It was impossible to tell. His brief sessions of sleep were frighteningly deep, like coma.

  He had to use his noodle, or plummet into insanity, or worse, despair.

  His first breakthrough was the discovery of some reading matter — a copy of the Mexican tabloid ¡Alarma! from which the staples had been removed. It was all in Spanish and was at least five years old. Yellow journalism at its finest. Some of the lurid photos — auto wrecks, murders, kidnappings, assorted decapitations — at least gave Barney visual images on which to center his attention. That the staples had been extracted from the fold-over newsprint suggested that the tabloid might have been left here on purpose, the better for prisoners to fantasize their most extravagant fates, and thus foment less trouble.

  Barney’s second breakthrough was noticing the guy apparently named Mojica. Barney remembered Mojica, the little ferret-like sonofabitch with the mirrorshades. Mojica with the obsessively manicured beard that ran like a gray penciled line delineating his jaw. From Mojica’s hair and beard growth, Barney calculated that he had been prisoner no longer than a week.

  Mojica, of course, was a cousin of the late Jesús, hired thug and bible student. Mojica got his nasty little punches and kicks in generally after the giant Sucio had done the prep work, the major softening up of the subject — the assaul
tee.

  More unconsciousness.

  They roughhoused Barney about once every three meals after they started feeding him; mostly brown mystery paste in a tortilla. Diarrhea rollicked his GI tract. His tormentors never spoke except to laugh or exchange insults with one another, so Barney decided to speak to them:

  “Hey, maricón, ¿donde está mi television?”

  A fat guy named Zefir kicked Barney in the gut and Barney vomited on him.

  Past a certain point — pretty quickly, if you have learned how to take a bruising — actual pain becomes a vague true north. Barney knew what he had provoked and had prepared mentally for the onslaught.

  For the first time, his jailors regarded him queerly, as though they suddenly did not have the upper hand. That was all the victory Barney sought from that little gambit.

  Next up: “Hey, Sucio: ¡Oye, tu madre!”

  No complex insult was needed. Mexican invective was extremely touchy on the subject of anyone’s mother, and the blackest curse was always assumed. You did not have to call her a whore or suggest a dirty coupling; all you had to do was say “madre” instead of “mama” to get your target to blow like a volcano.

  Sucio actually punched one of the other guys to get up close and personal with Barney that time. He shoved, then struck, a smaller fellow apparently nicknamed Condorito, who had an unfortunately prevalent Mexican body type: low-slung, bow-legged, no ass to speak of. Condorito went submissive, then beat Barney up third in line.

  While he was bludgeoning Barney, Sucio unleashed his idea of a poisonous stream of rancid insult. He went crimson and saliva sprayed. What he failed to realize was that he had violated the hitherto-uncrossed line, and was yelling at Barney directly, thus acknowledging his existence.