by Martyn Burke
They scrambled out from the protection of the treed area they were in and climbed to the top of another hill, looking down on a ravine with a road that ran through it. “Please,” she said several times. But it was not a plea; it was more of a statement.
Below them, a flashlight beam scanned the underbrush and then the parked cars. A man got out of one of the cars, angrily charging the beam, yelling at Ahmed to mind his fucking business and sending the light careening all over the place accompanied by fearful apologies.
“How does he know?” Danny said.
“He knows. He starts by thinking the worst about me and then working backwards. Somewhere along the line he gets it right.” The flashlight beam retreated farther down the ravine, flailing across bushes and trees. Ahmed passed under a faint street lamp, a stalking, distant figure in a long white robe and green cap.
“Arian-a!”
“He heard that some of the girls come here at night. Ever since he transferred to that school, the one out in Pickering where they pray all the time and study the Hadith, he thinks I’m going to become a whore.”
“That’s stupid. I’m going to—”
She reached down, holding his hand, squeezing it, and then brushing his cheek with her lips. “Good bye,” she whispered, and then took off down the hill, leaving him still feeling her warm breath on the side of his face.
“Wait!”
“Please don’t come with me.” She turned, and from where he was, Danny could no longer make out her face in the darkness. “It will make it harder on me.”
“I don’t understand this.”
“You can’t.”
“Why can’t I?”
“Pashtunwali,” she whispered from the near-darkness.
“Pash—” She had vanished. Danny listened as her footsteps crackled through the underbrush on the side of the hill.
Far below, an old car approached the ravine from the south, its muffler blasting away and one of its headlights shining up into the air, a quivering wand of light. The car came to a stop, an emphysemic jumble of rusted metal that sputtered and called attention to itself. Its one errant headlight shot high onto the hillside, framing Ariana in its gray glow, Ariana, frozen in a clearing and not sure which way to turn.
To the north, Ahmed’s flashlight beam was still slashing at the darkness when suddenly it stopped for a moment and swung around the ravine toward the noise of the car. Then it flashed upward, joining the headlight, and an alloy of lights shimmered on the faint outline of a woman on the hillside.
“Ariana!” Danny had never before heard her name sound ugly. Screamed in an angry slash of sounds.
Ariana ran until she was beyond the palsied headlight and the fainter beam of the flashlight that swung wildly as Ahmed raced toward the hillside, his white robes flailing around him. Which was when Danny went crashing through the underbrush, tumbling down the hill in the darkness, and making enough of a commotion that Ahmed stopped in confusion. Danny veered off, heading in a decoy maneuver, hurrying among the trees. He was heading almost in Ariana’s direction, trying to confuse Ahmed and to lure him into following the noises in the dark while giving her enough time to reach Queen Street.
But then everything got instantly darker after an explosion of light in his head.
He awoke partly wound around the tree he had crashed into. He was aware that footsteps were coming toward him. And that damn beam of light. That shone on him.
“Turn the goddamn thing off.”
“La ilaha illa Allah,” said the voice from behind the beam, sounding to Danny like something that was shattering.
He rolled around on the ground, holding his head. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Ahmed leaned over, above the flashlight beam. “That was her?” he screeched, part question, part accusation. “She was here. Here!”—all of it sounding to Danny like some rising note of hysteria that scraped against the pain he felt in his head. “Ariana? Where?” Like a needle being shoved in his ear. “You know! My sister. She is prostitute and you—” With one wild swing, Danny reached up and connected, his fist landing sideways on Ahmed’s head, spinning him around so he fell backward down the hillside. He was surprised at how light Ahmed felt, like hitting a pile of twigs.
“You are with prostitutes. All of you. She is with you,” Ahmed yelled.
“You fucking wacko,” Danny was yelling back at him and then suddenly was laughing, without knowing why. All he knew was that it felt better. Maybe because it made Ahmed angrier.
“It is not for laughing.”
“Yeah? Take a look at yourself.”
Some calculation of risk for Ariana raced through his mind. To defend her too much would send Ahmed screeching into a fit of certainty, confirming what he already believed.
“My sister. She was here!” Ahmed said struggling to his feet.
“Your sister?” Pumping the words so full of absurdity and ridicule that they had a force all their own, shaking Ahmed loose from his certainty. “Are you crazy? What the hell would your sister be doing here?”
Ahmed wavered. The zeal broke, leaving only indignation, which was not enough.
“Why would a nice girl like your sister be here in the park when dipshits like you are all over the place? Hey Ahmed, you know you got a problem? So tell me something: You ever been with a woman? I’ll bet that’s the problem, huh? See now—”
“No!” yelled Ahmed. “No! It is haram! And I—”
“Then don’t talk to me about whores,” Danny yelled. “I’ve seen you checking out the cheerleaders when they do cartwheels and their underwear is sticking up in the air. C’mon, you can tell me. You’re a crotch hound, I can tell.”
“Filthy! All you—you are the same as a dog! The Prophet, peace be upon him, has shown us. Infidels, you will see jihad—”
“Hey, bro,” said Danny, remembering how Omar had once called out to another kid from Pakistan.
“I am not your bro! Don’t you ever call me bro!” Ahmed was spitting all over as the words flew out of him.
“Sorry bro,” said Danny sweetly and then felt something shattering part of the hand he instinctively raised when he saw something flash toward him.
• • •
Danny lay beside the swimming pool, rolling around on the chaise lounge, groaning in pain and holding his index finger, which had been shattered by whatever Ahmed had swung at him. The pain came at him in waves, lessening slightly when he held his hand in the cold water of the pool. Inside Freddie’s place the voices were louder than when he’d left almost two hours ago. There was yelling from the ground floor. The French doors opened as Freddie yelled at someone inside that he was not the goddamn maid and that he could even buy a Porsche if he wanted to. Freddie came outside, pacing back and forth before he noticed Danny. “Don’t puke in the pool,” he said. “Fuckin’ animals, man. I’m telling you. That Jerry, what a dick. She’s crawling all over him. After I got her exactly what she wanted! Who else knows how to get a pineapple and olive pizza, man? I got it for her. She’s gonna lose out, man. I’m gonna lay down the law.”
“Freddie, what are you doing?”
“Pissing in the bushes. What does it look like?”
“Just checking.”
“You wanna go in there and piss in a bathroom that looks like the pizza from hell? After she pukes all over the goddamn place. It’s a fucking petri dish in there.”
From beyond the open French doors, Sue Chapman’s voice sounded in a symphony of vowels played on an instrument whose notes had been calibrated for effect. “Ferrr—ehh—deeee!”
“What?”
“You are so meeeeeean!”
“What—what?” A look of panic came over Freddie’s face. He zipped himself up and raced toward the house, vanishing into a volley of vowels about how meeeaan he was for hiding the keeeeys to his parents’ car when all she wanted was to drive Jerry home and—
Danny stuck his mangled finger into the pool, waiting long enough for the throbbing pain to subsid
e as he heard Sue Chapman promise to be back in ten minutes—fifteen max. On one of the glass-topped patio tables there was a bottle of some kind of liquor, over half full and burning as it went down his throat. But the burn felt good because it made him forget about the pain in his hand. And the more he drank, the more both the burning and the pain went away. He looked at the label that said Napoleon in big gold letters, thought maybe History wasn’t so bad after all, and then laughed at his own little joke before drifting into a fuzzy haze that ended when he sensed someone else was standing over him.
“Omar?”
“Fuck, man.”
“What’s wrong?” Danny said, wondering if it came out as Wassswrong?
“I kept seeing my old man.”
“Where’s Bonnie?”
“She’s a b-b-bitch, man.”
Danny wondered why Omar was suddenly tripping over words, sometimes verbally jackhammering consonants. “I thought you liked her,” he said.
“Yeah. Well. Whatever.”
“Seriously.”
“She . . . she didn’t c-cut it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I thought she c-could handle it.” Omar grabbed the bottle of brandy and drank one long gulp from it. “She’s supposed to be so fucking hot, man. But you think she could handle it? No f-f-fucking way, I’m tellin’ you.”
“Handle what?”
“Making my old man go away!” Omar almost exploded as if it was all so obvious that any moron should get it.
Danny sat up, wrestling with the dampness of the cushions on the chaise lounge that clung to him. “Your old man’s in Arizona. Or Timbuktu, or wherever.”
“You know you really don’t have a clue, do you?” said Omar indignantly. “He’s in here, man,” he said, pointing to his head. “That’s where that motherfucker is. I’m up there in Freddie’s bedroom with her and you’d think that she would at least have enough hots to make me stop hearing haram,” he said, throwing himself back on a chaise lounge and finishing the brandy in one gulp. “She was supposed to be so fucking hot, man. Biggest fuck in the whole school. And could she handle it? No way. All I could think of was my old man yelling all that shit at me.”
The French doors swung open and Freddie trundled out like he was powered by steam. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Go away,” said Omar.
“I live here.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“She said ten minutes. Fifteen max.” Freddie was yelling now. “That was an hour ago. And she’s still not back. If my parents knew someone was driving their car—”
“Freddie go away, willya. We all got our own problems.”
“Jeeze,” said Freddie and then trundled back inside.
Danny felt the pain in his mangled finger coming back and suddenly wanted to be anywhere but where he was.
“Hey, Danny, do you know what you want to do when you grow up?”
“I dunno. Why are you asking me that?”
“I want to know what it feels like.”
“What are you talking about?”
Omar didn’t respond, and for a moment Danny thought maybe he’d left. He was standing in the shadows. “My old man’s a fucking t-terrorist.”
“So’s mine. They all are.”
“I’m serious. You know why he’s going back to Peshawar?”
“If I don’t even know where it is. Why would I know why he’s going there?”
“He organizes money for bin Laden.”
“What’s bin Laden?”
“Not what—who. You’ll figure it out.”
“How am I going to figure it out?
“You will.”
Later, when the planes flew into the Twin Towers, Danny wondered if he had been involved in a kind of historic moment, there at Freddie’s place. But then up there in the mountains on one of those quiet, cold nights, after telling me about that night at Freddie’s, he decided that it was just another one of the warning signs that everyone saw but no one understood. “People aren’t built for warning signs,” he said. “Just being born is a warning sign.”
I told him I’d get back to him on that one.
The Mountains
11
That night, most of us were extracted. (Who thinks up these words? When I hear we’re being extracted I think of a rotten tooth being yanked out. The military loves words like that.) We watched from inside the Chinook as it rose into the thin mountain air, a fat bird struggling for flight. The traces of unmelted snow gleamed in the moonlight like gashes on the faces of the now-silent mountains around Shah-e-Kot. Back at Bagram, the mandatory proclamations of tactical brilliance from the geniuses were celebrated in spite of evidence to the contrary.
I lasted a day there and then managed to get re-OpConned, sent back to the Canadians at Kandahar, which meant jumping another Chinook, this one suddenly developing rotor problems, making the TuffBins I was sitting on feel like the innards of a cement mixer. I stepped off the helo barely able to walk, staggering over to our Rakkasan billets at Kandahar airport, a truly bizarre modern structure like inverted concrete beehives dropped down on the medieval landscape.
Danny was waiting for me.
Hovering was more like it. And when he saw me staggering toward the billet with a rucksack that suddenly weighed a thousand pounds, he swooped down on me like a hawk with a secret. Still wearing British desert fatigues, with a billowing shirt that never seemed to touch his pants, he flapped his way toward me, propelled by the force of the loopy grin that belonged on someone half his age. Or maybe I was just imagining it was a grin.
“Constance.”
“What about her?”
“Awesome,” was all he said until we were in his tent and he was hunched over his laptop. There were messages from Constance, most them sounding like fortune cookie stuff, the kind dreamed up by the Mexican busboys at our Chinese takeout joint back home in Santa Monica and believed fervently by dentists and lawyers going through bad divorces—Love will be yours if you are daring—while eating chow mein alone in their new single-bedroom rentals, leaving them pumping fists in the air and resolving to hit some bastards with that class action suit that would definitely get the attention of the blonde paralegal in litigation who—
And yet, once you read through Constance’s fortune cookie stuff, there was one of her messages that really got your attention: You have missed something of importance. Something in a dark place. Something that was used to steal from you.
Danny was excited as he read it for what must have been the hundredth time.
“That cave—‘a dark place.’ And those boxes, the ones we saw in the cave. Filled with fake passports and the weapons our guys gave Zadran. That’s how Zadran would have paid Omar. In guns. To buy Ariana. That was the dowry. Instead of camels or mules, Zadran bought Ariana from her own family with guns. That’s how the weapons got there. Ariana was sold—stolen.” The words came tumbling out like some speeded-up revelation brought down from the mount around Shah-e-Kot. “Omar wanted weapons; Zadran wanted her. So they sold Ariana to him.” He looked like he was talking to me, but really he wasn’t—you have missed something.
By this time, even our guys had gotten back into the Constance business. Lieutenant Colonel Lukovich was now in the States, and the new guy hadn’t yet figured out why so many of these laptops were appearing all over the place. Forget Clausewitz. Sun Tzu. Patton. Now it was Constance, master military strategist. Three centuries of incrementally rational military thought went right into the voodoo dumpster. You might as well have had a witch doctor running the OpsCen tent—Sir, considering the psychic intel we’ve received from Hollywood, don’t you think we should avoid Objective Blue and go for Objective Orange instead—
Like I said, this was in the days before Big Army moved in and made the whole Afghan thing a subsidiary of War Inc. These were the days when our guys rode horseback into battle whenever it made tactical sense, and no one filled out forms or consulted wi
th military lawyers. These were the days when rules were being made up to fit whatever we needed them to fit. It was war fought from the bottom up, with all the attendant loopiness that drove most of the generals crazy.
Dear Soldier, I wish you all the best and all good fortune and I know that my previous readings will bring you—which was pretty much a form letter from the Other Side, but Danny didn’t see it as that. For him, Constance’s e-mail was The Sign that was coming from Ariana. She was out there waiting for him, in the murderous fastness of those mountains a few kilometers and a dozen centuries away. She was out there, loving him as she had loved him for all those years when they were growing up. She—
I watched Danny convincing me, convincing himself. And I cringed on his behalf.
• • •
Here’s what you need to know about my guys, the Rakkasans: One day in World War II, the Japanese woke up and saw the sky fill with American parachutes. They started yelling, “Rakkasan,” which means something like umbrellas that come down from the sky. The name stuck. Back then our guys just loved saying the word—go ahead, try it. Rak-ka-san! It had no end of ethnic superiority possibilities. Then those same guys added some Hoo-Ah! cluster of Latin words no one understands but feels jazzed about—in this case it’s Ne Desit Virtus (Let Valor Not Fail)—words more or less designed to provoke sneers among a segment of the Chardonnay crowd on both coasts. Which does not stop newly minted batches of Rakkasans from getting sent off to war with all this Ne Desit Virtus business ringing in their collective ears. And the truth of it is that, when the incoming rounds start obliterating your immediate surroundings, all that Hoo-Ah! stuff surely does give aid and comfort to those whose woebegotten hides are on the line for whatever doctrine the Free World has sent us to drum into the heads of murderous tribals living a century or two behind the civilization curve.
The Canadians were cursed with being pretty much the same as us and yet not at all like us. It was the paradox that they lived with, and usually railed against. They didn’t have all the Hoo-Ah! stuff. At least, not like ours. Once in a while they’d do a crazy move, strutting around like roosters and raising that goofy flag of theirs, the one with the red target-practice maple leaf for a bull’s eye, planting it on some godforsaken piece of ground that wasn’t going to see a subdivision anytime soon. Like they’d studied the Iwo Jima photograph and thought they could improve on it. But for the most part they were just people trying to remember a skill they had collectively once possessed and forgotten—in this case, warfare.