Limbo

by Melania G. Mazzucco

  All of a sudden a rifle shot, followed by a machine gun. Mullah Wallid had been spotted in a cave used as a sheep pen, under the rock face. The gunfire lasted only a few minutes, then the shouting started, a sort of chant. The radio informed me that he’d been taken alive. ANP handcuffed him and took him away. There were five other men with him, cut, bruised, and bleeding. Six insurgents arrested in a single operation: that exceeded all our expectations. Paggiarin would get a medal. The Panthers had reason to celebrate. “I can smell leave time, Owl,” Venier whispered. I only caught a glimpse of our target as he stumbled amid the houses, pushed by some ANP officers: a gnome in a turban and filthy white rags. Mullah Wallid looked straight ahead as he walked, his expression proud and fearless.

  * * *

  “Congratulations, guys,” Zandonà said when we climbed back into the Lince. We earned it. Not a single mistake. A textbook operation, fast, clean, no accidents or losses—apart from a goat, hit head-on by a machine gun. And an old geezer from Cerberus, who dislocated his ankle on the rocks. But he came back with both his legs.

  I suggested he concentrate, because it wasn’t over yet. In fact, the return was the most dangerous phase of Goat 4. It’s like when you’re in the mountains; the tension drops when you reach the summit, and you tend to get distracted, but the descent is more treacherous. We were at least four hours from the base, and night was beginning to fade. We were going to have to cross hostile terrain—a long, narrow valley—at first light. A few miles from the clearing, after crossing the dry riverbed, the track dropped into a sort of canyon, a narrow gorge between sheer cliffs that the Linces would have to traverse single-file. Impenetrable barriers of all-but-vertical rock faces that reminded me vaguely of the Dolomites, torn by deep crevices and ravines. There was no way out. I didn’t like it at all.

  We entered the gorge at 0447. According to my calculations, we should exit it by 0507 at the latest. Before sunrise, in other words. We drove as fast as possible, though given the rough terrain, we couldn’t go more than ten kilometers an hour. Jodice kept his Browning aimed at the crest of the mountains, at least four hundred meters above us. He kept seeing dark shadows, but they might have only been pyramids of stones. The mountains rumbled, the rocks amplifying the echo, and then silence fell over the valley again. It was 0459, and we were in the exact middle of the gorge.

  The vehicle in front of ours braked suddenly, and Zandonà slammed on his brakes as well. “King Kong, what’s happening, King Kong?” The radio worked only intermittently, the looming rock faces blocking the signal. All I could pick up was that 06, the sixth Lince in the convoy, had hit an IED. In the gloom of the vehicle’s interior I could just make out Zandonà’s drawn face, he was biting his lip nervously. Puddu was exhaling forcefully, as if in a trance. All I could see of Jodice in the turret were his legs. All the vehicles were stopped in a line, single-file. Stone chips rained down from the sheer cliffs, landing like confetti on the windshield. Greenish spots, filaments of bodies in the dark. “The gunner went flying, like a scrap of paper,” Lance Sergeant Spina said over the 07 radio. “I saw him with my own eyes. Who is it?”

  Info was racing from unit to unit. Names of Cerberus platoon guys. But no, I realized with a shock, if it was 06, he was one of mine. Iota Squad. It was Michelin! Pieri, the rubber man. “Medevac, medevac right away.” I can’t lose one of my men. Why did fate choose Michelin of all people?

  The radio reports that medics have already reached the wounded. But he doesn’t seemed injured, he bounced on the snow, he really is the rubber man. He’s moving, moving his legs, no broken bones, not even a scratch, Saint Lince has granted him a miracle. “The other four in his squad are unharmed as well, only a few abrasions,” I radioed. No response. “Can you hear me? King Kong, Skorpio, it’s Ripley. The Lince held, but the hull has been gutted, it won’t start, there’s no room to go around it, we’re stuck.” I looked up at the imposing mountains, the sheer cliffs, the setting stars, the lifting darkness. If someone was spying on us from above, they could see us clearly now.

  The wreck was wedged among the rocks. The heat of the explosion had welded metal to stone. Three hundred kilos of deformed door now looked like part of the landscape. I kneeled over Pieri. They had laid him out between the wheels of Spina’s vehicle. He seemed dazed, but kept trying to get up, repeating, “I’m fine, I’m fine,” over and over. Zanchi and Montano had to hold him down. “The chopper’s on its way, Michelin, you’ll be evacuated, you’ll be in Sollum in half an hour,” I told him. He gave me a dull look. “The Browning’s done for, I think” he said. He didn’t seem to realize what had happened to him; he looked surprised by the fear he read in our eyes.

  A Lince costs two hundred and fifty thousand euros—three hundred and forty-five thousand dollars—but all it takes to destroy one is a hundred and fifty kilos of TNT, which they sell here for a few dollars. Numbers always prove you wrong in this country. I knew that Paggiarin would be upset at losing a Lince, he would have preferred a clean run. This was the first IED to hit Ninth Company. The captain was almost as attached to his vehicles as he was to his men. But 06 was totaled. I thanked it silently, as if it were a dear friend. I was sorry to condemn it to death, but not even a scrap of metal can be left for the enemy. I radioed in its coordinates so our planes could destroy it as soon as the field was clear. I tried contacting my superiors, to ask for orders. Were we supposed to wait until the area was cleared? The sun would rise at 0524, the sky was already growing light.

  But all I got in response was an electric short, like fingernails on a blackboard. I’d lost contact with headquarters. The only person I could talk to was Skorpio—Vinci, that is—the Cerberus commander, who was in 01 behind the ANA vehicles. “I’m already past it, I’m going to keep going,” Vinci said, “we’ll position ourselves at the mouth of the canyon. It’s too risky and pointless for all of us to stay trapped in the gorge.” “Roger, over,” I confirmed. But I had my doubts. “Should we divide up the column?” I wanted to ask him. It had been beaten into my head: never divide up the column. But it wasn’t just numbers that didn’t add up here in the Stan. The rules didn’t either. I told myself that you have to decide for yourself sometimes. You have to assume responsibility. There’s no such thing as an absolute right and wrong. It all depends on the circumstances. In the wrong circumstances, nothing is right. It wasn’t right to divide up the column, and it wasn’t right to keep it together. Only a few seconds to evaluate the pros and cons. If this was an ambush, then maybe he was right, it was better for one group to make it to safety. And if it wasn’t, even better. All in all, there were seven vehicles trapped in the gorge. Two of my squads and one Afghan squad. Thirty-five men. I looked at my watch. We still had twelve minutes of night. I gave the order to turn back: we had to get ourselves out of there as quickly as we could.

  “What the fuck,” Zandonà protested, as he shifted into reverse. It was a tricky maneuver, the gorge was as narrow as a birth canal. The Lince veered, its sides scraping against the rocks. “When I was in Bosnia,” Jodice was saying, “a Serb shot out one of the tires on my Jeep. I swerved off the road. So I climb out the broken window and go looking for the bastard. That asshole could have killed me. He was the size of a bear, sure, but to shoot at a headquarters jeep! So I jot down his house, his street, everything, but there’s nothing I can do, I’m unarmed. Two days later, I’m on leave and I run into him in the bazaar. Turns out he’s the butcher. He’s slicing up a bull’s balls. I jam the punctured tire around his neck, like a life preserver, and throw him in the river. The tire’s popped, the asshole starts to sink, nearly drowns.” I didn’t find Jodice’s acts of bravado very amusing, but at that moment I was grateful he’d come up with another story, because it diffused the tension, put some distance between us and the shadow of death which had passed over us all; we could still feel it. And as the seven vehicles slithered slowly back up the canyon, I could clearly see the white trail of a rocket-propelled grenade above us. An antitank rocket w
hizzed by and exploded against a nearby boulder before I had time to yell “RPG left.” Rocks as big as plates crashed against the windshield. So it wasn’t just an isolated IED: this was an ambush.

  Flashes of light on the rock face to our left. The last vehicle in the column was hit. It came to a stop, blocking our escape. We were trapped in the middle. “Killing zone!” I yelled into the radio. “Killing zone!” What is it they taught me? What did I do during training? Get into position? Stay in the vehicle? Take shelter? But reality doesn’t look like the simulations. Decide in a split second what can save your life, and the lives of others, or lose it. “Everyone out!” I shouted. We threw ourselves on the ground, dragging grenade launchers and assault packs full of ammunition, sliding between the wheels. Another RPG hissed past us and crashed into the motor of the Lince that had already been hit, sowing metal shards that bounced off the rocks and rained down on the whole column. Bazookas fired ruthlessly on the vehicles at the head of the column, but there wasn’t anyone there. Spina didn’t think my order was stupid, he had followed it.

  I slid behind a rock and retrieved my SC 70/90. My face was covered in dirt. The heat burned my throat. But the water and provisions were back in the Lince. “It’s an ambush, they’re firing on us from seven and five o’clock,” I reported over the radio, forcing myself to remain calm. Dozens of rockets had hit the FOB. But it wasn’t the same thing. In that gorge we were exposed, beyond the protective barriers. And I didn’t know any better way to indicate our coordinates, or what the enemy position could be, because we were surrounded by rubble and ruin, a warren of ravines and caverns. The insurgents could be anywhere. They were firing from the left ridge, but also from higher up, as well as from the rocky terrain behind us, and we couldn’t tell how many of them there were. We couldn’t see them either; they really did seem like ghosts.

  “Where are they? Where are they?” Jodice shouted as he brandished his Browning, aiming a volley at the crest of the rock face, where—three hundred meters above him—tentacles of smoke were twisting upward. I recognized the brief, disciplined volleys of a well-trained gunner, who knew not to overheat the barrel. “Get down, Spaniard,” I yelled. Bullets whizzed past my ears, but our attackers’ aim wasn’t perfect. They were probably still at least four hundred meters away. The radio squawked, too many people trying to talk at once, a muddle of voices, all on top of one another. I had lost contact with Spina’s squad, which had sought refuge in a deep cleft between two rock faces. I tried to use the infrared strobe to indicate our position. Cramps low in my belly. While Venier babbled on about a bloody nose, shrapnel maybe, and I was trying to figure out where Zandonà had gone—I’d lost sight of him—I realized that in those months of solitude, everything had changed. I was scared for that twenty-year-old kid. I finally found him, curled up behind a low rock that only covered him up to his shoulders. “Get out of there,” I said, and he rolled next to me, shaking like a leaf, terrified, rifle between his knees. He was just a driver. He’d been trained to step into any role, just in case, but he’d never fired a shot in action, and hoped he’d never have to. Me neither, for that matter. They didn’t let me participate in what were considered high-risk operations. I was scared for Owl, who never slept, for Lance Sergeant Spina, who treated me like a schoolgirl, for Venier, who went around smelling poppies, even for the Spaniard. Not for myself, though, because I didn’t consider myself important to anyone except my mother. Each of us individually was nothing, but together we were everything. If something happened to my deputy, my gunner, or my driver, it happened to me, too.

  Libra’s calm voice came over the radio to inform Pegasus that the QRF had already been activated, we’d be exfiltrated as soon as possible. “They won’t be able to rescue us,” Zandonà said coldly, “it’ll take too long, they’re getting closer. I saw two coming down, they’re hiding back there.” We were being hit with hand grenades now, which struck the wheels of our Linces and bounced against the windshields, while bursts from AK-47s swept the snow.

  The familiar noise of the Browning fell silent. Jodice was trying to get the ammunition belt unstuck. The overheated metal burned. I heard him swear as he fidgeted with the mechanism. The gun was jammed. We had no more cover. Jodice climbed out of the turret and ran on all fours, zigzagging through the slush. “Jesus Christ, I’m not even twenty-one,” Zandonà whispered, “I don’t want to get myself killed like this. There’s a lot I want to do with my life, why can’t you just take them out? What the fuck does it take?” We aimed in the direction of the flashes. We all fired, even me. I couldn’t say how long it lasted. An eternity or an instant. Amid the racket of our rifles I distinctly heard the thud of something falling. So they weren’t ghosts. “King Kong,” I said to the radio, even though I didn’t know if he could hear me, “there’s one at four o’clock, I’ll send up a tracer bullet to show you his position, our Browning is down.” Jodice holed up behind the rock at my back and pulled out his pistol. “I’m sorry, Sarge,” he said, “that’s never happened to me before, I was careful not to overheat it, I respected its rhythms, it must have been defective.” He was afraid I didn’t believe him. The smell of cordite and smoke. The sun cast a splash of yellow on the highest jag of the mountain. The light glided quickly across the rocks, the shadows retreated. “I got him,” Venier babbled incredulously. “I lifted my head, aimed where I saw the flash, and I got him.” But the others didn’t stop. Shots were coming closer. “I saw his head explode, Sarge,” Owl whispered, “a red cloud, then there was nothing left.” My watch said 0531. They’d been firing on us for almost half an hour.

  I was sure we would end up like the French in the Uzbeen Valley two years earlier—attacked, surrounded, besieged until all their ammunition ran out, and then tortured, throats cut, butchered, their mutilated bodies taken around from village to village so that people would know what happens to foreign soldiers. In Italy no one ever heard about it, the story didn’t even make the papers, but for us it was a nightmare, and even though we never talked about it, we thought about it all the time. The Uzbeen Valley was too deep and narrow for the helicopters to intervene, to fire missiles and save the French soldiers. And now we, too, were in a deep and narrow valley, and maybe we wouldn’t be saved either.

  That was the moment I understood what war is. To be a puppet in the hands of a puppeteer who doesn’t know you, doesn’t care about you, doesn’t even know you exist. My destiny didn’t depend on me anymore, on my ability or my courage. The name of my platoon, the position of my Lince, the effectiveness of our Browning, even the weather—these were the things that could make a difference. It was just like the stories my grandfather told me about the battles between the Greeks and the Trojans under the walls of Troy. The warriors fight and kill, but above them are the gods, and it’s the gods who decide who shall live and who must fall. In the end, all their courage and heroism doesn’t matter. The mysterious gods who worked the strings of my destiny while I was under fire in a gorge seven kilometers from a village whose name I didn’t even know were in the TFC in Shindand, in a room lined with computer monitors, an NCO who takes the call at the FOB at Bala Bayak, an officer who requests authorization for American helicopters to intervene. Either the helicopters come roaring from behind the mountains, kicking up flashes of smoke, white plumes dancing on the mountain crests and in the crevices, or our request gets bogged down, authorization is delayed, help doesn’t arrive in time, and the insurgents climb down the rock face undisturbed and slit our throats one by one.

  But none of this happens. While the helicopters circle too high above the gorge, we realize we’re shooting at the wind. It was the wind that was blowing against the snow. Whoever it was that attacked us, whoever it was who laid the ambush, has vanished, has been repelled. A dreadful silence settles over the valley. All you can hear is the wind whipping against the rocks, and stones falling on stone.

  * * *

  That evening, back at the base, while the men were washing away the sweat and mud, the a
drenaline and regret, the fear and dust that were plastered to our skin like paint, I slipped into the Lambda tent, figured out which cot was Jodice’s, and left a blood-soaked tampon in his sleeping bag, in plain sight, right on his pillow. Because I really did have my period at Negroamaro. And cramps. But I went anyway. Because Manuela Paris was not a dead dog or someone’s sweetheart, or some little college grad protected by headquarters. She wasn’t a woman either. Manuela Paris was an Alpino.

  When the Spaniard found that bloody bullet in his sleeping bag, he simply picked it up and threw it in the trash; he didn’t grumble that it had stained his pillowcase, the only one he had, or that he had to sleep with his mouth on my blood for three months. We never talked about it. But from then on, he respected me not merely because of my rank, but as a person—and he became my friend.

  12

  LIVE

  Mattia leaves the Bellavista at nine in the morning. A coal-colored wool suit and tie; maybe he really does have a work meeting. He doesn’t take the Audi from the garage. Instead he gets in the dark car with tinted windows that’s waiting for him, motor running, by the glass doors of the lobby. Manuela, who has just gotten up, is still dazed from the benzodiazepine, and can’t see who is behind the wheel. Mattia sits in the backseat. Like an important passenger, someone worthy of a driver.

  Vanessa, who is spying down to the street from the living room window, notes that it looks like one of those politicians’ cars. “No,” Manuela assures her, “Mattia’s not into politics, I’m sure of that, one hundred percent. He’s an anarchist, a libertarian, he minds his own business, he wouldn’t be the least bit interested.” “If you ask me, he’s some kind of secret agent,” Vanessa pronounces. “He’s in hiding here, waiting for orders to kill some terrorist in a sleeper cell, an Iranian nuclear engineer, or a member of some clandestine organization. I don’t like this at all, honey,” she says. “Apart from the fact that secret agents aren’t assassins,” Manuela protests, “he’s not an agent, one hundred percent. I know what they’re like, those secret agents, there were two of them at the FOB, and I can promise you he’s nothing like them.” “Don’t get involved with a secret agent, Manuela,” Vanessa urges her. “It’ll complicate your life.”