Whisper

by Tal Bauer

  Until it turned up a narrow drive, lined with thick palms that towered overhead. The car disappeared from the feed, lost in the foliage.

  “Get the visual back!” Carter barked. “We cannot lose this car!”

  The images bucked and wove as the drone pilots swerved, changing altitude, axis and orbit, searching for a better angle. Images appeared through the mess of palm fronds. A two-story house with a flat roof. A long, gravel drive. The sedan, parked in front of the entrance.

  Two men embracing in greeting. The imam was one of them.

  And a stout and stocky man in black combat fatigues, with a short beard and a black taqiyah was the other.

  Carter’s gaze flicked to Kris.

  “It’s him,” Kris breathed. He knew that shape. Knew that man. Knew everything there was to know about him without having spoken a word to his face. He knew Saqqaf, from the inside of the man out. “It’s him.”

  Carter’s deputy spoke up, bracketing Carter. “We don’t know that for sure. We can’t get a definitive visual verification from this angle.”

  “Get the strike team in the air and on target, now!” Carter barked. “We are not losing this opportunity.”

  David leaned into his side. “I’m going with them.”

  A thousand different half thoughts poured through Kris. There wasn’t time to think, wasn’t time to talk. “Go.”

  David tore out of the command center as they kept watching the house. Kris imagined the frenzy of activity as the team prepared to launch from the airfield.

  David… be safe.

  “General, the chopper pilot is reporting engine trouble. They need time to fix the problem.”

  “They don’t have time! They need to get in the air, now!”

  Minutes turned to years.

  The two men on the monitors went inside the two-story house, talking amiably, warmly.

  Silence filled the command center.

  Grainy images of the house filtered through the palms, disappearing and reappearing.

  “How long will they spend together?” Carter leaned into Kris and asked softly.

  “We have no idea. Could be minutes. Could be hours.”

  “We could miss him, then. If we don’t get on the ground immediately. If he thinks we’re onto him, he could duck out into the palms and we’d never find him. He could run and disappear. We could lose this chance.”

  Kris nodded. “We do have fighters overhead.” Two F-16s held position over Iraq twenty-four hours a day in case any US forces needed immediate air support.

  “Do you want to capture him or do you want to kill him?” Carter asked. “What’s the CIA’s position on this?”

  Kris’s eyes slipped closed. Mousa’s viciousness, his rabid brutality, replayed behind his eyelids. David’s shattered faith. A hundred bombs exploding, a thousand scenes of carnage. Beheaded bodies and destroyed mosques. The shattering of a nation, of a region. A faith ripped apart with every act of savagery. The slow march of time toward a final point, Saqqaf’s plan to bring about the end of days. Anguished families on both sides of the world, mourning the loss of their loved ones.

  He’d been Saqqaf’s specter, his judge and jury, and his shadow confessor. He’d become as close to Saqqaf as another human could be, peering inside his skull, his mind, his psychology. Reading his emails, snooping through his laptop. He dreamed of Saqqaf at night, long dreams where they spoke across a river of blood as the world burned and airplanes crashed into the ground, but they were speaking different languages and nothing made sense.

  Was he to be Saqqaf’s executioner, too?

  “Sir, there’s movement in the house.” An operator zoomed in on the thermal scan. Two figures inside. One was moving toward the door.

  “We need to go. Now.” Carter’s eyes blazed. “Caldera. What’s your call?”

  He breathed in. Sounds faded, blurred together, smeared. He stared at the monitors, but all he saw was David. There is no Allah, not anymore. “Get the fighters. Bomb the son of a bitch.”

  Carter gave the order, an immediate redirect for the fighter pilots on standby to the tiny village. The pilot’s voice crackled over the command center’s speaker. “ETA, three minutes,” she said. She repeated the coordinates of the house. “Confirming target.”

  “Target confirmed.”

  The house wove in and out of the palms, circled on the monitors. Kris held his breath. Everyone leaned forward, eyes peeled to the screen. No one spoke. No one moved.

  The radio crackled. “Bombs away.”

  Drones didn’t transmit sound. One minute the house was there, between two palm fronds. The next moment, it was a plume of dust, shattered concrete and broken trees, a cloud of debris rising and rising into the sky.

  “Target destroyed.”

  Cheers erupted, soldiers and analysts bursting from their seats, pumping their fists and screaming. In the center of it all, Carter stared at the monitors, his jaw clenching, his arms crossed over his chest. Kris sagged, bracing his hands on the table in front of him before he collapsed.

  “Sir! The strike team is ready to go!”

  “Get them to the location right away. We need to confirm it was him.”

  Dust choked the air, miles outside of Hibhib. David and the others pulled their scarves up, checkered keffiyehs worn around their necks. Iraqi police from Baqubah were on the way to the destroyed house, police sirens wailing as the chopper overtook their convoy.

  They set down at the end of the gravel drive. Where the house had been, only a crater remained. Palms that had encircled the house had toppled, shattered in half and splintered apart like broken toothpicks. A thousand years of sand and dust hung in the air, upturned by the fighter’s twin bombs.

  “Start searching. Gotta find the body.”

  They sifted through the rubble, stamping out fires as they turned over broken chunks of concrete. Smoke made David’s eyes water. Six Iraqi policemen showed up, but hung back at the driveway. No one wanted to interfere with the Americans sifting through the rubble of a bombed house. No good came from that.

  David saw it first. A hand poking out of the ruins, blackened by soot. “Over here!”

  They flipped concrete like they were flipping Lego bricks, cleared the debris from Saqqaf in under a minute. He lay half buried in the crater, covered in dirt. Soot and burns painted his face, his body. Blood poured from his ears, his nose, his mouth. The bombs’ pressure wave had ripped apart his internal organs, liquefied them inside his bones.

  Saqqaf’s eyes flickered open. His gaze landed on thirteen American Special Forces soldiers standing in a circle over him. He mumbled something. Blood trickled past his lips.

  David crouched next to him. “Nam?”

  Saqqaf reached for David, his hand trembling. He shuddered, coughed blood. David leaned closer. An observant Muslim would whisper the shahada before they died, the statement of faith. Allah is the one God, and Muhammad is his messenger. It was supposed to unite the faithful’s soul to Allah at the moment of death. Would Saqqaf speak the words? Did he imagine, somewhere in that twisted brain, that he was on the way to eternal Paradise?

  “Ayree feek,” Saqqaf bubbled. He coughed again and went limp. His last breath shuddered form his chest.

  David shook off Saqqaf’s hand and stood. No Paradise for Saqqaf. But David had already known that.

  The strike team’s sergeant frowned. “What’d he say?”

  David snorted. “He said, ‘Fuck you’.”

  When the team got back, they brought Saqqaf’s body bag into the operations center. A gurney waited, and the strike force’s medical staff.

  General Carter and Kris waited while the captain of the team unzipped the bag. Carter had a sat phone in one hand, connected to the Situation Room. The president, Director Edwards, the national security advisor and the secretary of defense hovered on the other end of the line.

  “It’s him.” Kris nodded. “It’s him.”

  He thought he’d feel something. Anything. The sa
tisfaction of a job well done. The joy of removing a mass murderer, a butcher, from the world. Revulsion, finally seeing him face to face. He thought he’d feel a hundred different things.

  He felt nothing.

  Carter spoke to the waiting Situation Room. “Confirmed, Mr. President. Saqqaf is dead.”

  The medical team wheeled Saqqaf away for an autopsy and a full investigation into his death, and what they could learn about his life. The strike team headed back to their part of the base. General Carter marched into the command center, still on the phone with the Situation Room.

  What would happen next? When would the announcement of Saqqaf’s death be made? What kind of reprisals would his fighters, the children of Saqqaf, attempt? What would happen to Saqqaf’s movement, his death cult that wanted to remake the world in shades of hatred and gore?

  What would the president do? What was the US’s role now? What could they do to right this U-turn of history and despair?

  David interrupted Kris’s swirling mind, taking his hand and drawing him close. Dust from Saqqaf’s death house clung to his black fatigues. Blood stained his sleeve, his knee. Saqqaf’s blood. David pressed their foreheads together.

  “Let’s go home,” he whispered. “Let’s get the hell away from here.”

  Chapter 20

  July 2006

  A different sun and a different sand filled their days.

  David took Kris to Hawaii, where they rented a beach house and spent their days lying in the waves, or lying in bed. Lying in each other’s arms, never separating.

  David drank Kris in like he was nectar from God, manna from heaven. Kris felt their breaths sync, felt their hearts beat as one when they lay beneath the stars, when they watched the heavens unfold, endless stretches of eternity and radiance.

  A thousand million stars in the sky would not be enough to count the ways I love you. Or grains of sand on the beach, even if you split every grain in half.

  They kept the TV off and never looked at a newspaper. Didn’t read email or download cables to check on. Nothing existed, for two perfect weeks, except for them and their love. If there was a heaven, each moment could have been an eternity spent in perfection. Lying on the beach, facing each other, David laced his hand through Kris’s.

  He didn’t have to say anything. Kris already knew.

  Kris’s cell phone rang on the thirteenth day.

  “Mr. Caldera.” Director Edwards called him, personally. “You did a hell of a job in Iraq. One hell of a job. I have to say, I’m incredibly impressed with your analytical expertise, and your ability to target and neutralize two of our most wanted targets in the War on Terror. You’re the real deal, Mr. Caldera. The president wanted me to pass along his personal thanks to you, and to tell you he’s incredibly impressed. And proud. Very proud.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I have to say… I’m also impressed by the moral stance you took early on with the detainee program. We’re cleaning that program up now. Mistakes were made, but they won’t be again. Not on my watch.”

  He didn’t know what to say.

  Director Edwards sighed. Kris heard leather creak over the line, like Edwards was in his office, sitting back at his desk. “Kris, the reason I’m calling is that I want to talk to you about your future. I realize that you may have a lot of opportunities coming your way soon. But I want you to stay. And, more than that, I want you back on the hunt for Bin Laden. In Afghanistan. Your country needs you, Mr. Caldera. The world needs you. What do you say?”

  Never, in the history of ever, in his whole life, had he imagined the director of the CIA would tell him he was impressive. That he was amazing. A hero, even.

  That the president thought he was something special.

  That was a world that didn’t exist for him, he’d thought. Sissy gays and men with too much attitude didn’t get noticed like that. They got noticed for their clothes or their voice or the way that straight people always made a spectacle out of their existence. They got noticed for being bothersome, or outside the norm.

  He cried when he hung up, chest-wracking sobs as he buried his face in David’s hip. For a moment, he wanted to call his papi, scream in blistering Spanish at him, throw the president’s praise in his face. I did become something, you son of a bitch. Other people see me. Why could you never?

  The impulse faded as soon as it had sparked. He’d given up on his papi when he was sixteen. Instead of a father’s approval, he sought the approval of dozens of lovers, mixed with college professors and the thrill of proving people wrong. How that led to the CIA, and then to the president being proud of him…

  Dan’s voice came back to him, replaying a night years and years before in Pakistan, drinking cheap white wine on the roof. You blew the door open, Kris. You blew the door for all us gays open.

  Where was Dan now? He’d lost track of everyone and everything while he and David were mired in Iraq. For two years, it had been as if nothing else existed outside Iraq’s borders, that the rest of the world was some far-off place, totally removed from the horrors of the day to day.

  “What are you going to do?” David stroked his back, broad, rough palms sliding over his smooth skin. “Do you want to stay?”

  I have to stay, he’d said once to David, in an abandoned embassy in a ravaged country on the other side of the world. They’d been younger, and the war had only just begun. I have to stay and make sure this never happens again. He’d been so idealistic, so certain that he was where all the failures had originated, that he’d been the weakest link in the chain of American national security.

  After five years and two wars, and horrors he’d never imagined could be real, was any of that true?

  He’d still been a child when he watched those planes slam into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. A college graduate and a junior CIA officer, but still a child where it counted. His world would forever be shaped by that morning, ripples translating in both directions, forward and backward in his life. Was there a life he could live, somewhere, that wasn’t impacted, saturated, with the War on Terror? With September 11 and the day’s aftershocks? Would he ever be able to live with himself if he walked away, knowing what the world was capable of?

  The only thing as monumental to his life as September 11 was David.

  “What do you want?” he whispered.

  “To stay with you. Forever. Wherever that is.” David kissed the back of his hand. “This is your career. You’re admired. Respected. I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth to support that. And you.”

  Shit, he was going to cry again. “David—”

  David swallowed. Turned fifty shades of magenta, every hue of flushed unease. “There’s just— There is something that I do want.”

  “What? Anything.” Whatever David wanted, needed, he’d give him. “Is there something I’m not doing for you? Something I need to change?”

  “No, no.” David kissed the back of his hand again, lips lingering on Kris’s skin.

  He dropped to his knees, both of them. Cradled Kris’s hand in his palms. “I want to marry you,” David whispered. “I want you to pick me. I want you to keep me, forever.”

  Kris’s jaw dropped. He was definitely going to fucking cry again. His heart was pounding, tears were erupting, and something was bursting in the center of his chest. “David—”

  “The Quran says all souls were created in pairs. One soul, one life, that was meant for two people. In this world, we’re supposed to find the other half of our souls and join together with them. Rejoin, and find the house of peace that we once knew before time.” David moved closer. “I feel that with you. I always have. From the moment we met, it’s been like I’ve known you for forever. Like everything in me is supposed to belong to everything in you.”

  Tears poured down Kris’s face. He couldn’t breathe. “David…”

  “I was incomplete without you. I never want to be that way again. I want us to be together for all eternity.” David kissed Kris’s hands, th
e backs, his fingers, and turned his hands over. Kissed his palms, the very center of each. “Will you allow me to marry you? Will you let our souls join together? Forever?”

  He pitched forward, falling into David’s arms as he nodded, sobbed, gasped, tried to speak, all at the same time. “Yes, yes—” He could only repeat the word between hiccupping sobs as he clung to David, as he buried his face in David’s neck, his shoulders. Kris poured into him, folded into his arms, into his hold.

  David carried him to their bed and stripped Kris’s bathing suit, tears in his eyes as he kissed his way up Kris’s body. He took his time, savoring Kris like they were marrying that moment, like Kris’s yes was all it took for them to be wed, their souls joined together. He made love to him, joining their bodies as if making love were a prayer, an act of devotion to Kris’s soul. A promise for all time in the curve of skin on skin, the thrust and hold, palms sliding up thighs and ribs, and in their curled toes.

  Kris was a bonfire, a firework, dynamite that kept erupting, a nuclear warhead that kept expanding along every one of his nerves. There was no end to the moment, to the lightning, to the blaze. And he didn’t want it to ever end.

  Late the next day, when Kris finally raised the white flags, completely spent and physically unable to endure another moment of David’s lovemaking, they discussed how to make it all work. How to turn the spiritual into the legal in the world of men.

  “I’ve been researching.” David flushed as he ate slices of mango. “I think we should go to Canada. We can get a license and get married right away. No residency requirement, no verification. We can just be married.”

  Kris sipped his mimosa, his third. The world was soft on the edges, the roar of the ocean an ever-present hum in his veins. “Let’s do it. Let’s do it right now. I don’t want to wait.”

  “Really? You’re sure? About this, and us?”