Night Hawks

by Charles Johnson

  Then he waited, his teeth set, bone against bone, as Joshua nosily blew his nose in his hand and in a roosterish voice told Caleb to check the barn. Waited, being now the trapper and the trapped, as the barn door creaked on its hinges. Now it opened, and Fowler made a hissing in-take of breath. It opened, he saw Joshua step inside, and the hunted blew the hunter to Kingdom Come. He bolted outside, clambered over Joshua’s shattered body, and, his chest pounding, rammed the stock of his shotgun against the side of Caleb’s head. He ran south, swift as a deer. Ran so hard he felt he was nothing but legs and burning lungs.

  After a moment, his running slowed to a few steps and he stopped, facing round, pausing to make sure an enraged Caleb, bent on revenge for his brother’s death and not thinking clearly, was pursuing him. When he saw the hunter closing the distance, he—the hunted—smiled bleakly. If something happened to him, if he could not outrun or outwit Caleb, then his argument was that he had known happiness and freedom before—let that do—and Ida and her baby would know it now, because “Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd” was much more than a song. It was a black American charm with back-and-hidden instructions in every stanza. A coded message only Negroes on the run could know. A detailed map for someone to follow to freedom. The first river was the Tombigbee, which would take them to Mobile Bay. The two hills were Woodall Mountain and a smaller one at the highest point in Mississippi. Earlier, he’d marked the dead trees with charcoal as a sign. The ribbon of river on the other side was the Tennessee. Its left-hand side would take them to the Ohio River and to Paducah, Kentucky, where his wife, Adele, would be waiting. Yes, he thought, as he started to run again, so fast his feet seemed scarcely to touch the ground, yes, they would be fine. And that meant, one way or another, he would be fine, too.

  Idols of the Cave

  State my name for the record?

  All right. Wahab Khan.

  Do I understand why I’m on trial? Do I understand the seriousness of the charges against me?

  Yes, sir, I do. But sometimes I wonder if it really happened, or if someone told me a story about it.

  You’re on trial facing a court-martial, years in prison, and maybe execution. It began when the villagers in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan valley told the government that the Taliban had returned. They forced the villagers out of the caves where they had been living. There were three thousand honeycombing caves that had been hacked out of sandstone two millennia ago by Buddhist monks who believed in the inescapable interconnectedness and non-duality of all things. They ran alongside holes where two huge statues of the Buddha used to stand in the dun-colored sandstone Bamiyan cliffs before the Taliban blasted them with tank fire and dynamite. The governor of Bamiyan said those caves were one of his country’s cultural treasures. “We have caves,” he said, “that even the Devil doesn’t know about.” So to rid the area of insurgents, you couldn’t use your standard tactic of dropping five thousand pounds of bunker-buster bombs to seal entrances and ventilation shafts. Leave it to the military to never make things easy. You’re here on trial because you and your platoon had to clear those ancient caves of insurgents, room by room.

  Was Afghanistan hard on me? Are you kidding? Every day was hell. It was such a tragedy we couldn’t bring ourselves to say our drawdown was a retreat because the U.S. military never retreats. So we called it a tactical retrograde.

  The worst part of your tour wasn’t the camel spiders and scorpions you found in your clothes and boots, or getting G.I. (gastrointestinal) that kept you shitting brown soup all day, or the nasty-tasting hydration tablets, or being your team’s combat medic, or the powdery moon dust that covered everything in southern Afghanistan. No, the worst part was the constant fatigue. And the worst part of the fatigue wasn’t it being physical but in your case psychological, because as a Muslim American soldier, you always had to prove yourself to narrow-minded people like your commanding officer, Major Billy Joe Tyler, a Christian countryboy from Mississippi, a fierce defender of his faith who was always on your case, pulling your chain, because he thought you were a candy ass since you went to college, majoring in Middle Eastern classics, and because, as he once put it, “My God is bigger than your god. My tribe is stronger than yours. I mean, why are you even here, Wahab? You’re going to kill us the first chance you get, aren’t you? So you can get your seventy-two virgins in heaven, right?”

  Major Tyler was blond, thirty-five years old, with a sweaty voice, squint lines around his seven-mile stare, and a classic weight lifter’s body—short forearms and legs, a broad chest, with maybe eight pounds of pure muscle on his upper body, which probably meant he’d be dead by forty from the strain on his heart. You tried to keep your distance from him, because he had so many tattoos stamped on his body they made your eyes swim—one tat between his shoulder blades was a saying by General James Mattis: Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet. Needless to say, Major Tyler fell a little short on the politeness part. Added to which, and most of all, he was deliberately dirt-ignorant about other countries and people of a different confession. Whenever you took a moment to step away from the barracks and offer morning prayers, he started singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” as soon as you came back into the room. You guess he sensed how much you disliked and feared him, because he was always testing you with little, casual microaggressions and drive-by put-downs. Testing your loyalty and patriotism, as he put it. Most of the time he called you by any name but your own.

  What’s that? Did I hate Major Tyler? No, I wouldn’t say that. I guess we both were just trapped in the cages of our different cultures.

  You remember one day when everyone in your section of the platoon was shoveling a few hundred sandbags, regular Joes and officers in their shorts and flip-flops, no rank visible, because fortifying your defenses was everyone’s job. It was hot work, and every so often Tyler stopped, dripping sweat, looking at you with a smirk, and finally said, “Abdul, I read that if something isn’t in the Qur’an, you Muslims believe it’s unimportant and it just has to go like the way T-man blowed up those Buddha statues. But if it is in the Qur’an, then you don’t need it so it still just has to go. Do you practice that? My people, my tribe wouldn’t do that. That’s why we’re at war. A holy war, like the Crusades.”

  You told him, quietly, that you believed in appreciating and preserving valuable things from other cultures. That was an Islamic tradition, one violated by the Taliban and the butchers in Daesh who preached a mad doctrine of error to the world. Under your breath, you prayed for Allah to keep you safe and show this kafir and the others that you were just as American as they were—a second-generation citizen after your parents came from Turkey, but these days nobody would suspect that given the way your dad, a doctor, and your brother, Raheel, a computer technician, were always detained at airports, and the way kids in middle school teased your sister, Shawna, by tearing off her head scarf. Being Muslim in 2017 was, you decided, a bit like how black people could never move carelessly in a country like ours, how you always had to hold yourself to a higher standard, how you were always involved with the real meaning of jihad, which is an “inner struggle,” a critical self-examination aimed at the goal of achieving peace. You never had the luxury of making mistakes. Major Tyler, sensing this about you, that you often were torn between deciding if something was halal (permissible) or haram (prohibited) by your faith, was always trying to trip you up.

  When you arrived at the caves, he said, “Abdul, I don’t think I’d trust you in a crunch, but since you act like you think you’re better’n everybody else, and talk like a syllabus, why don’t you take point?”

  As ordered, you took lead, moving slowly away from the abandoned village in the valley in scorching, 90-degree July heat, sweat streaming inside your uniform. You could hear a stray dog barking its brains out, every exhalation a yelp, but you tried not to let it distract you. You moved slowly, hunched forward, because of all that gear you, as a combat medic, had to wear—helmet, a submachine gun
and shotgun for close-quarters combat, and eighty pounds of equipment and medicine in your rucksack. And since this was a combat mission to clear out those caves, you had a respirator, earplugs, and night-vision goggles.

  You climbed easily enough up to the entrance to one of the circular caves fifteen meters wide by fifteen meters long, and signaled for the others to follow. Twenty soldiers were in your Special Forces urban warfare unit. Major Tyler and Jimmy Doyle, a plucky kid with mouse-like eyes and a flat, pale face, shook out, running ahead of the others. Entering the cave cautiously, you could see the Taliban had been there, and might be there still. They’d left ammunition, supplies, and propaganda. You stepped closer to examine the munitions, but that’s when you heard a salvo of machine-gun fire from what your intel told you was supposed to be an abandoned village. Intel? That was a joke. The guesstimates and maps the higher-ups gave you were called the Comics or the Funny Pages by everyone in your company. Suddenly that flawed intel put you in a firefight, the others caught in a crossfire, and the mission turned into a damned soup sandwich. Tyler and Doyle scrambled into the cave seconds before a rocket-propelled grenade hit the entrance and knocked you to your knees. Your earplugs had been in the open position when you approached the caves so you could distinguish between hostile acts and natural sounds in the environment. But that explosion passed right through the open position of your plugs. All of a sudden, you were deaf, straining to hear Major Tyler shouting like someone underwater as he told Jimmy Doyle, dazed by the blast, not to keep backing into the cave, which was what he was doing, and that’s when he stepped on the pressure sensor of a buried IED that blew up the ground and sent you plummeting ten feet into a subterranean chamber.

  Excuse me, what did you say? What did we find in the chamber? What was hidden there? I’ll get to that in a moment, sir.

  When you hit bottom, you were so dazed for a few seconds your eyes were swimming, and you didn’t move until you heard a groan angle across the air from Major Tyler. You were experiencing pain yourself—skin was torn away from your ribs—and you could taste blood in your mouth. You’d both come crashing down in darkness hot, rubbery, through the ceiling of a sealed chamber onto rows of clay water jugs that broke open when you landed on them, spilling their contents—Buddhist scrolls written on birch bark in some pots and works in Arabic. Your first thought was that they’d cushioned your fall. Your second thought was that if you were injured, this was a blessing because it would be the end of your tour, your ticket home.

  And it would have been except for what happened next.

  You heard the major moan again. You found your tactical flashlight, flicked it on, and when its seven hundred lumens lit up the cave, you saw him lying a few feet away from Doyle, whose head was smashed open like a melon. Dark blood was guttering from a raw, ugly gash in the major’s side, caused by shrapnel. You moved toward him, aching in every fiber, your knees feathery, tore away only enough of his clothing to expose the wound, then applied direct pressure with your hands to keep him from bleeding out. You checked him for additional wounds. In your backpack, you found hemostatic dressings (HemCon) and pressed it against his wound for two minutes to stop the hemorrhaging. He looked dazed and frightened and confused, but he was conscious and praying to his god when it was you giving him oral antibiotics from your combat pill pack.

  You said, “How’re we doin’?”

  Tyler began another moan, but cut it off, releasing instead a cough. “You tell me. Is this place gonna be my coffin?”

  “I don’t think so,” you said. “Be still. We’re just having a bad day.”

  He made a feeble smile. “You think?” Then his eyes bent up to meet yours. “Wahab, I guess I was wrong about you. I apologize. In your religion, in mine, we both need something to struggle against.”

  You didn’t answer, but that, of course, was an answer. After inspecting his dressing again, you said, “We’ll be okay. They’re coming for us. There has to be a dustoff inbound right now for rescue. All we have to do is just wait here—wherever here is.”

  “Don’t take me to an Afghan hospital. I’ll die waitin’ to be treated. I want American, you understand?”

  You told him you did.

  “And where the hell are we?”

  “I think we’re in what used to be an ancient library,” you said. “The IED unsealed it. Even the Taliban probably didn’t know it was here.”

  He gave a slight headshake. “What’s all this stuff on the floor?”

  You were wondering the same thing yourself, and swung your flashlight’s beam away from Tyler and around a chamber that looked like a holy ruin. Once upon a time, two thousand monks meditated in these caves. Time had accumulated in the air and thousand-year-old walls covered with the oldest oil paintings in the world—scenes from Buddhist mythology, left there by monks and travelers on the Silk Road. Above you, there were clusters of skittish bats and, at your feet, their droppings—guano—turned white by time, crumbly, frail as ash. The air felt thick enough to tear with your nails like tissue. All around you on the rocky floor, in a room of tombed wonders and rarities, were fragments of clay pots, the ancient writings they contained, and artifacts from Egypt, India, Persia, and China, for Bamiyan in its Hinayana Golden Age was at the crossroads of the world. You lifted from the raff of rubble a sheath of time-discolored treatises preserved over the centuries by the dry, shady condition of the cave, and you looked and saw . . .

  Saw what no one had ever seen in their wildest dreams.

  “Major,” you whispered, “these pots are full of Arab manuscripts.”

  “So?” he said. “This is fuckin’ Afghanistan, ain’t it?”

  With all the dust in the air, you swallowed to wet the inside of your mouth. “Sir, this stack of pages—right here—with commentary by the great Arab scholar Avicenna, is Aristotle’s Physics, his Metaphysics, his De Anima, his Poetics, and”—you held your breath—“his treatise on comedy. This is like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

  Tyler was trying to understand the importance of what you were saying, but having a hard time. “You said comedy. What is it? A joke book?”

  You wiped away dust and cobwebs from the wafer-thin pages, reading the text with a slow finger. “Well, yes. I think I see a joke here.”

  “Tell it to me.”

  “Okay . . . Two cannibals are eating a clown. One stops and says to the other, ‘Does this taste funny to you?’ ”

  The major laughed, and that made him clutch his side and groan again. But laughter in a situation like this was good. “Tell me another one.”

  “Uh, okay. Here’s one. Never bet on a racehorse named Zeno.”I Tyler’s eyebrows drew inward with thought. He scratched his neck. “I don’t get that one.”

  But then you were so excited you started talking out loud more to yourself than him as you thumbed through Aristotle’s lost treatise, remembering that he, Aristotle, used to stutter, hated children, and was never quite accepted by the Athenians because he was an outsider from Macedonia. All his works and even the skill of reading were lost during the catastrophic European Dark Ages, but when Muslims conquered Syria they discovered there a treasure trove of Greek culture that came from the earlier conquests of Alexander the Great, a student of Aristotle, and these works they preserved (as you would preserve this work on comedy) when they swept across North Africa into Spain, thus reintroducing arts and sciences to European Christendom, giving the West back Aristotle, the inventor of formal logic, general science, and an understanding of marine biology that was not improved on until the nineteenth century. And all that set the stage for the fifteenth-century information explosion that we called the Renaissance.

  What’s that? Did the major accept what I was saying? Did he understand this history? Well, I thought so . . .