****
Deep breath. “On the third day she was dumped in one of those open-sewer gutters. Dumped in the gutter, like garbage. Still alive, barely. Somehow, somebody got her to the church basement. Sister Katterina tried to get transport to a hospital, a taxi, anything, but she couldn’t. The word was out, I guess. Marian never had a chance. But it’s probably better that way. What they did to her…she could never have had any kind of life.”
By then I was privately crying, so I was glad for the darkness to hide my tears. But once I started down that particular memory track, I had to finish. I owed it to her memory to bear true witness.
“Sister Katterina got word to me. Her church was near one of our patrol routes, and I had a black-market cell phone. The road patrol grunts were used to hitchhiking snipers. We’d drop off partway along their route and sneak into a hide, and they’d keep going. Sometimes the same guys picked us up on the way back, but not always. This gave us snipers a lot of leeway, especially in those early days when Baghdad was still almost a wide-open city. So I was able to get loose with just my spotter, who always had my back on everything.
“As soon as I could get down there, I went, but Marian was already dead. Sister Katterina had already covered her, wrapped her. She wouldn’t let me see her body. That’s where I said my last goodbye, in that church basement. She was in a white sheet. Her body was taken away by her family and given a secret Christian burial, so at least she got that.
“A few days later, Sister Katterina sent word to me again. She wanted me to see something. She had to tell me, show me. She had a laptop computer. We sat at the little desk in her basement office. She had a bootleg electric wire to power the place. She had taken pictures of dozens of girls who had been brought to her. She wanted me to know. Dozens of girls. You just can’t imagine.”
“No, I can imagine, Dan. They use rape as a weapon. When you can’t protect your women, when your daughters and sisters are raped and beaten and you can’t stop it and you can’t get justice, you just have to leave. Period. That’s pure jihad. It spreads the religion if you drive out your enemies, so Allah says it’s good.”
“When Marian’s parents heard those phone calls while they were torturing her, the kidnappers were screaming, ‘Allahu-akbar!’ They weren’t ashamed of what they were doing. They were proud.”
“Of course. Why would they be ashamed? It’s a holy act to terrorize the infidels into fleeing. Anyway, they’re just Christian whores, right? I mean, a girl over twelve showing her hair in public, she must be a whore! According to the jihad boys, girls like that have it coming. In Afghanistan it wasn’t just the local Taliban. A lot of the fighters didn’t speak any Dari or Pashto; they had a ton of Arab volunteers who came for the jihad. Show me a jihadist, and I’ll show you a rapist more times than not. They even had a name for it: ‘a taste of paradise.’ Can you imagine? The most fucked-up people on the planet, I swear to God. Hell, most of those guys marry their own nieces. Like a twelve-year-old virgin wants to be wife number four to her fifty-year-old uncle, who has a gray beard down to here? Hello? And she can’t say no to anything, not ever. Not to getting married, and not to having sex anytime he wants it. And if she refuses, she’ll get beaten—with the mullahs’ blessing. What kind of religion is that?”
“I know, Nick, like you said, it’s way fucked up. And some people still don’t understand why we’ve been fighting them for fourteen hundred years. The Christians and Jews were there first, and now the last of them are just about all gone. It took fourteen centuries for the Muslims to wipe them out or drive them out, and the bitter end of it happened on our watch. Right under our noses. I was there. I saw them do it.”
“So, what does that mean?” asked Nick. “That they’re stronger than us?”
“Hell no. It just means we’re weaker than we used to be. Not the grunts—we kicked their asses every time, we both know that. But as a society, we just don’t have the will to fight to win. Not anymore. Not like, say, on Iwo Jima.”
“Hey, don’t forget Hiroshima. Harry Truman sure ended World War Two in a hurry.”
“A big hurry,” I agreed. “That kind of will—the will to fight total war. Pillbox by pillbox with flamethrowers, if that’s what it takes.”
“I didn’t see any pillboxes in Afghanistan. And Iwo Jima was a long time ago.”
“Yeah, and Americans got weaker,” I said. “Softer. More PC. They’re still as ruthless as ever, and we’re not.”
“The mujahideen know what they’re fighting for: seven-ty-two virgins in heaven forever. I mean, that’s a pretty cool death bonus, if you believe in it.”
“I guess it is, but what the hell were we fighting for?”
“Let me get back to you on that,” said Nick. “So, what happened to Marian? You said the nun showed you pictures.”
“Oh yeah. The pictures...” Time to sink all the way down into my darkest memory pit. “Well, Sister Katterina had hundreds and hundreds of pictures on her laptop. Dozens of women and girls. Some only eight or nine years old. Marian’s photos were just the newest batch. I didn’t want to look, but I had to. I owed it to her. I couldn’t just let her be flushed out of the world without even that. Katterina was brave enough to take them, so I had to look.”
I shook my head. Those evil images were back, sharp as ever. I went through the list on automatic, like a robot. “They cut off her hair, of course. Burned her all over with cigarettes. Blinded her. Cut off her nose. Her ears. They even cut off her… Oh God, it was beyond evil, what they did to her.” I was sure that Nick could tell that I was weeping by then, even in the dark. I had been a sniper and I’d seen a lot of gruesome things, but nothing like that for sheer cruelty.
“I’m sorry, man,” he said gently. “Really sorry. What a tragic life that poor girl had.”
“Tragic’s not the word. There’s no word for that kind of evil.” I hoped my short time with Marian counted for something on the happy side of her ledger. The time that we held hands across the table and dreamt fairy tales of California.
“One thing I don’t understand. Why did Sister Katterina even take horrible pictures like that?”
“Why? Because nobody would believe her. She told me she approached some foreign reporters about it, on the sly. Told them about the girls. The mullahs told the reporters she made it all up to slander the mujahideen. A seventy-year-old nun! So she took pictures to have the proof, but even then it didn’t matter. Nobody would ever show them. Nobody. Too gory. Too…disturbing. The reporters ignored her, and ignored her pictures. Her story didn’t match the story they wanted to tell. The pictures were too horrible to show, but without the pictures it’s just an unbelievable story.”
“Catch-22.”
“Catch-22 from every angle. Nobody wanted to think about it, the obliteration of the Christians over there. We were too busy building the new Iraq. If the Sunnis and Shi’ites wanted to wipe out the Christians neighborhood by neighborhood, well, so be it. Too bad for them. But Sister Katterina was keeping a record. Proof. Maybe someday, somewhere, historians will give a shit what happened. What still happens. But I doubt it. Nobody gives a damn.”
We were both silent for a while, listening to the music.
Nick said, “So, did you ever find out who did it to her? Did anything happen to those guys?”
“Legally? No. A woman needs four male witnesses to her own rape, otherwise she gets charged with adultery and can be stoned to death. So not too many men get charged with rape—it just doesn’t pay to make the accusation. It’s basically a free crime over there. And killing a wine-selling Christian whore? Hell, they’d get a goddamn medal of jihad for that. But don’t worry: I got some payback.”
“Payback’s a bitch, huh?”
“It was for those guys.” I didn’t mention the particulars to my new crewman, but to be accurate it was six times righteous. Unofficially. There were a few side benefits to being a Marine Corps scout-sniper team leader. I had a certain degree of latitude in selecting
my particular areas of operation. I eradicated most of the gang who tortured and butchered her—and long may they roast in hell, since my brand of punishment was much too lenient given what they had done to her.
The memories of my individual acts of revenge softened the edges of Marian’s post-mortem photographs in my mind. I finagled the team assignment schedule, inventing reasons to be in her old ’hood. Did a little sly detective work based on our existing enemy insurgent intel. Copied pictures, memorized faces. All line-of-duty scout-sniper stuff. Got some info from Sister Katterina, and from Marian’s father. Made the rape gang militia my sideline hobby over the next three months. Treated six of them to Sierra Match King therapy.
My spotter always saw the same imaginary weapons in their hands that I saw. Or lamented the miss that didn’t actually miss. He knew what I was doing and agreed with it, and I trusted him with my life. Anyway, I got all of the ones who were still in my hunting range before we rotated out. At least those six human monsters would rape and torture no more. Those were six for me, and not for the Corps. My first ever that way, but not my last.
I often wondered if that was why Sister Katterina had invited me back to see the pictures she’d taken of all of the female victims. Yes, she wanted me to bear witness to what happened to Marian, to all of the long-suffering girls, both Christian and Muslim. Sister Katterina turned away no terrified and brutalized girl or woman in need, the saint that she was. But I wondered if she hoped, in some secret part of her soul, that I’d do what I did. She knew I was a Marine scout-sniper. I never gave Sister Katterina an after-action report, but I’ll bet she knew. She had her own sources.
Marian was nineteen when I’d known her, not much younger than I was at the time. Cori Vargas could have been born in Iraq and Marian in Venezuela, but it hadn’t happened that way. Or they both could have been born in San Diego or Miami. Life is just so damned unfair. But at least, because of Marian, I’d known one of God’s real angels for a brief time. And I got to meet a genuine saint, the blessed Katterina. If she wasn’t a saint, the word has no meaning.
Sade was singing about a smooth operator she’d known. Rebel Yell continued driving along her path, her luminescent wake churning along behind. After a minute or two of silence between us Nick said, “You know, you make a lot more sense to me now.”
“What do you mean?”
“This whole finding-Cori-Vargas thing. You’re rescuing Marian.”
“What?” I was taken aback.
“Oh, I think you know exactly what I mean.”
“Bite me, Doctor Freud. I’m turning in. Good night. Bang on the deck if you need me.” I went through the pilothouse, took one more look at the radar and the chart-plotter GPS, dropped down the ladder, and made aft for my bunk. As I lay in my rack, I admitted to myself that there was some truth in what he said. I don’t like seeing women abused or beaten, and certainly not raped. Not when it happened in the sandbox wars, and not when it’s done by the likes of Richard Prechter and Jolly Boy Trevor. Men who treat women like that are human cockroaches, and I’ll step on every last one of them that I find.
****
At the 0300 change of watch Tran took over from Nick. I came up for the turnover, because Tran’s English is limited and hard for a new guy to understand. Overnight we passed between Conception Island and Rum Cay, and kept sailing a course of seventy degrees until we could see the lights of San Salvador. At 0600 when Victor came on deck to relieve Tran, I was up again. We tacked over and headed southeast on a course that would take us along a line just to the west of the Castigos. Other than when making major sail changes in ugly weather, Rebel Yell was easy to handle. The heavy steel hull took the widely spaced six-foot rollers in stride, and with its long keel, it held course as if on railroad tracks. Once out of harbor, we almost never steered by hand, giving that job to our autopilot.
The wind had backed from southeast to northeast, so after tacking over to our new course we were able to shut down the diesel, making seven knots of speed under all four sails. We switched off our radar, not wishing to announce our presence to the world beyond our sight.
After breakfast and coffee, when we were more than thirty miles from land in any direction, we broke out our weapons for some test firing and practice. If we had a clear horizon, we could shoot anytime we felt like it. The always-available 360-degree weapons range was one of the fringe benefits of ocean sailing. Your bullets and the sounds of your gunfire could not travel as far as your eyes could see.
Shooting always put me into a festive mood, so I found an old Billy Idol CD, pushed it into the disc player in the pilothouse, and cranked the cockpit speakers up to ten. Nothing got me as amped up as hearing the old British rocker sing “Rebel Yell,” and I wanted that motivation to infect Nick as well.
And, of course, I wanted to see if he was as good with weapons as he said he was. With no explanation, I handed him my AK-47 and a full magazine of thirty rounds. The rifle was black, with brown wood furniture. The other weapons were legal in the Bahamas and many countries, but not the Kalashnikov, which was kept craftily hidden and never declared to customs. Nick didn’t know the AK existed until Tran handed it to me and I handed it to him.
We stood in the back of the cockpit, braced against the aft pulpit rails, and put in foam earplugs. The boat was heeled about fifteen degrees to starboard since we were sailing on port tack, meaning the wind was coming from the left side. The blasting rock music and the boat’s rolling and heaving motion provided noise and distraction, which were intended: when you’re shooting for real, there are always plenty of distractions. I was never in a firefight that resembled a straight-lane rifle range, with calm commands of “ready on the right, ready on the left.” Shit is happening in a gunfight, and that’s the only time your marksmanship really counts.
Nick smoothly loaded and cocked the AK, showing more than adequate familiarity with its operation. “Great gun,” he shouted over the rock music. “Not super accurate, but you always know it’ll go bang. What’s the sight, an M-68?”
“Close. It’s an Aimpoint, but a newer model.” He had referred to the rifle’s red-dot sight, mounted on top just forward of the receiver. The M-68 was the version issued to the military. My black Aimpoint sight was about half as long as a toilet-paper tube. It corrected a major deficiency of the Kalashnikovs: their crappy iron sights.
With the Aimpoint, instead of lining up conventional open sights, or seeing a crosshair inside the tube, you just saw a bright red dot. You put the dot on what you wanted to shoot, and that’s where the bullet flew, within the limits of the cartridge you were firing. For the Russian .30 caliber, that was about four hundred yards. But within its range, the red-dot sight made the Kalashnikov much deadlier. And not only was the optical sight totally waterproof and practically indestructible, its battery would last for years even if it was left on. The U.S. military had bought over a million of them.
He turned the rifle onto its side and examined the safety lever. “No full-auto?”
“Nope,” I answered. “Semi-auto only.” Not that it mattered much. Both versions were illegal in the States now.
“You have a laser too. Cool.” He pointed to the infrared laser aiming device attached to a rail on the right side of the barrel, just forward of the wood forestock. The thing was about as big as a pack of cigarettes. These military lasers were just as illegal for civilians to own as the semi-automatic Kalashnikov rifle, and just as available if you knew where to look. Nick said, “Infrared, right?”
“Yeah, but it has a visible green laser too. That way you can check your battle zero in the daytime.”
“Cool. The ones we had were twice as big, and they only had infrared.”
“That was the old PEQ-2,” I said. “This is a 15.”
“Then you must have a NOD, right?” He meant a night observation device. The invisible infrared aiming laser was useless without night vision to allow you to see the bright green dot at the end of its beam.
“I have a
PVS-14.” That was a monocular night observation device. With the NOD on my left eye and the IR laser on my rifle, I had a combination that was pure death out to a few hundred yards. The laser was used sparingly, only right before firing, because an enemy with night vision could also see it. But against an enemy without night vision, it was like troops with belt-fed machine guns versus spear-wielding natives in a bygone era. In the military this happy state of affairs was called overmatch.
Nick was grinning. “Shit hot, man. Pretty high-speed gear for a mere civilian puke.”
I looked straight at him. “Fighting fair is for suckers.”
He looked back at me and put up a fist. “Dead suckers.”
“Damn straight.” I gave him his fist-bump over the rifle, rapping our knuckles together. “So, did you get to shoot AKs much in the Rangers?”
“Not really. Just a few times at the range. We always used our M-4s and M-16s for the real deal. Or SAWs, or whatever you were assigned. When we recovered AK’s, we had to turn them in or destroy them. We did get some familiarization fire, in case we ever had to fight with battlefield pickups. But I never did. Shoot them for real, I mean.”
“Well, Nick, I guess there’s a first time for everything.”
He laughed and asked if he could take a few potshots at nothing, and I said to be my guest. He shouldered the ugly rifle, adjusted the brightness of the dot inside the Aimpoint, then picked a distant swell and fired a few rapid shots. The rifle blammed and the bullets made violent splash eruptions a half second later. “Nice,” he said. “Not exactly a sniper rifle, but I like how it feels.”
We had a jumbo bag of cheap birthday balloons for target practice on the ocean. Tran blew them up one at a time and let them go. After a few yards floating in the air, the colorful balls hit the water and stuck, then slid away from us at seven knots as Rebel Yell sailed onward. Nick stood with his hip braced against the corner pulpit, sighted on the first pink balloon, and fired when it was about thirty yards behind us. He missed with his first shot, but we could see that his splash was just a few inches off and he popped it with his second, churning up a gout of water as the pink ball disappeared.
Castigo Cay Page 8