Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  “Chechens. Uzbeks. Pashtuns. All mixed in. As much al-Qaeda as Taliban.”

  “This is why we’re here?” Danny sounded as if he would rather be doing something else.

  “Unless you know of a good bar nearby,” said Tom.

  “We just ran a laser check,” said Striker, another Special Forces guy with a Southern accent, a big full beard, and a doo-rag tied around his shaved head. “Twenty-four hundred meters.”

  “What’s twenty-four hundred meters?”

  “From here to those poor bastards, Mo, Ali, and the teacher being dragged up the mountain,” said the Southern accent, sounding surprised and vaguely irritated that Danny would even have to ask.

  “Can’t do it,” said Danny, sounding relieved. I knew where this was going. “Even Hathcock couldn’t do twenty-four hundred meters.” Hathcock was some old Marine in Vietnam who used to crawl through jungle gunk and take out Viet Cong at ungodly distances—or so the legend was, the one that every sniper practically had to memorize before they let him touch a weapon.

  “You can do it.”

  “How do you know I can do it?”

  “We checked. Let’s go.”

  “Are you sure these really are bad guys?”

  “Am I sure?” Tom was getting a bad case of slit-eye all over again. “What the fuck do you want me to do? Run down there and ask them why they’re dragging those poor motherfuckers up the mountain?”

  “Okay, okay.” A long, fretful pause, looking around, shaking his head.

  “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Hey—pal, we can’t call in air support and drop a bomb because we’d kill the terps and the teacher too. So take out those assholes willya?”

  “Life isn’t something to be taken just like that.”

  Tom, Striker, and all the other Special Forces guys exchanged looks. “Jesus Christ. A fucking Guinness Book of Records here—a sniper with an identity crisis,” said Tom.

  “Just shoot the motherfuckers,” said Striker.

  “Why are you even over here?” said another Special Forces guy.

  “To find the woman I love.” Danny said it like it was the most normal thing in the world. He was calm, almost serene.

  There was a complete, pure moment of infinite silence. And stillness—stillness as absolute as can exist in this cosmos. As three Special Forces guys stood there like those pillars of salt in the Bible. And then:

  “Fucking Canadians.” Tom shook his head almost sadly.

  “They’ll do it to you every time. I had a brother-in-law once. From Winnipeg. I know,” said Striker.

  “You know what?” I asked.

  “Whatever Americans want to do, Canadians want to do the opposite. Just to prove they’re not us.” Someone else agreed and started talking about a hockey player he once knew.

  Danny wasn’t paying attention. He was looking through the binoculars. “I just want to be sure, that’s all.”

  “Sure? You want us to have Wild Eye come round from the plateau and tell us his plans for those poor bastards being dragged up the mountain? Barbecued or roasted on a spit?”

  “Wild Eye? What’s Wild Eye?” Danny swiveled, remnants of his serenity falling away like something that had shattered.

  “Not what. Who. The skinny fanatic with the goofy eye. The one who’s leading that sorry-ass bunch. One of the sons.”

  “Wild Eye?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Sons of who?”

  “Some fucking al-Qaeda big shot. He’s got two sons over here.”

  • • •

  The range was quickly dialed in at 2,438 meters alpha two-four-three-eight . . . farther than anyone had ever attempted in any war zeroed to two-zero-zero-zero as the elevation fine-tune ring was adjusted and movement compensation factored in muzzle velocity 2,590 feet per second and wind calculations four minutes hard right. Through the scope fine-tuning to match numbers, the three captives were being lashed up the mountain, clubbed by rifle butts whenever they fell.

  “Crosshairs center mass.”

  “Roger center mass,” as the countdown went on like the last moments before a space launch.

  That crooked finger feathered the trigger and all breathing stopped.

  It was so numbingly different from mere everyday war with its usual maelstrom of death and destruction in all the screaming chaos and random madness as the beast devoured thought and made any act almost accidental.

  Time ceased to have any delineation and instead flowed seamlessly, drowning out the unheard ticking. Through those scopes, in some way creation and destruction come together as Zen in whatever universe the mind finds itself at that moment. Alpha and Omega. Life, and now death, in that moment of knowingly turning away from reason and humanity.

  In other words, it came down to God the Creator, the Destroyer, in one man’s finger.

  The lead captor went down first, sort of slumping over when the bullet hit, as if he’d suddenly gone to sleep. The second guy, the one with the rifle butt that had battered the teacher, was more horrendous, kind of a watermelon-hit-by-a-baseball-bat explosion, which, apart from the sheer spewing spectacle of his head exploding, defied the bloody physics of war. If a human head is about sixteen inches in diameter, even the best match grain ammunition can only hold to an accuracy of about nine inches per thousand meters. And this mountain trail was way over twice that far.

  The third captor—the skinny fanatic with the goofy eye—instantly became a cat looking for a tree as dogs closed in. Covered in another man’s blood, Ahmed went into a screeching fit of terror. In the silence of the scopes, you had to imagine the bellowing shriek that came out of him from twenty-four hundred meters away, spinning around, looking for this source of unimaginable terror from above. In a move of sheer instinctive survival, he grabbed the battered teacher and held him in front of himself like a rag doll shield, not sure from where this vengeance was coming.

  “What now?” said Danny, taking his eye from the scope for a moment.

  “Wait,” said Tom. “He’ll screw it up somehow. He always does.”

  Through our scopes, Ahmed’s roiling panic was telescopically compressed as he clung to the teacher for the moment before the two terps began swinging their bound fists at him, raining down wildly uneven blows until the man fled, bellowing silence across all that distance.

  “You got a clear shot,” said Striker, looking through his binoculars.

  Danny remained motionless, his crooked finger on the trigger.

  “You got a clear shot,” Striker said again, his voice rising in volume with each word. Still, Danny remained eye to the scope, motionless.

  “Something wrong?” Tom said, not in a pleasant way.

  Danny leaned back like he was thinking of something. “He’s done. I don’t need to take him out.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Tom.

  Through the various binoculars and scopes we all saw the two terps and the teacher tumble down the mountain, running in a different direction from Ahmed, out of range of any possible aerial bombardment. At which point Tom nodded to his radio operator.

  “Break, break, break!” screamed the radio operator into his mouthpiece.

  • • •

  It was as if the mountain blew up. A single B-52, an F-16, and two Apaches provided destruction in varying degrees of precision. The shock waves pounded you like a huge fist and then a plume of smoke billowed volcanically from the other side of the mountain as the Special Forces guys rode in to make sure that there were still men left to interrogate once Atif and the Afghans overran it.

  Danny’s call rang down around them as they mounted the horses. “Don’t kill him!”

  “Anything else?” someone called out.

  By the time we packed up Liberace and got to the other side of the mountain, the plateau was charred for as far as we could see. It was like the world suddenly turned black with flecks of color moving through it: a ragged red neck s
carf on a staggering, insensate Taliban whose eyes were rolling, a woven green-and-orange saddle being dragged by one of Atif’s men, and a lone surviving green banner flying above a recent grave. The earth was steaming. Moving across the plateau toward a cave in the side of a small rise, I stopped twice, lost in the acrid fumes of explosives and blood, baked together in a fine mist that made it like some version of Hades with the damned stumbling all around. Occasionally you’d stumble over one of the Taliban, fallen, limp and intact, his innards obviously rearranged by the massive blasts, mouth open and moving, eyes staring at the ground like a fish would stare at a dock it was on. Danny was ahead of me, plunging through the fumes toward the shattered opening of the cave where the Special Forces troops were quieting their roiling horses.

  Even through the fumes you could see the pale guy in the filthy white robes and black turban. “Ahmed,” yelled Danny as he charged forward toward the man who looked completely terrified.

  • • •

  It was not the way failed martyrs were rumored to be—blazing defiance at infidels, invoking fate and Allah all as one. Instead, stripped of his robes and turban, shivering in the moist heat of the huge carved-out cave and sobbing uncontrollably, Ahmed lay tied to the planks of wood that hours earlier had been the door to the cave. The whole cave was lit by ChemLights—the kind ravers waved overhead at rock concerts back home. They were now nestled in water bottles that became makeshift lanterns, giving the blasted-out rock-face walls of the cave a weird yellow and blue glow as faces loomed out of the darkness. There were new men who had suddenly descended from the fabled black helicopters, in this case ordinary Apaches. They were CIA operators, men who had fought their way across eastern Afghanistan in the months after 9/11 and were impatient to get on with it. Dressed in a collage of improvised combat gear, they were barely welcoming and cared nothing for credentials, certainly not of the snipers who made this moment possible. “I know him. I need to talk to him,” Danny had said, forcing his way into a circle of hard stares. Only the grudging intervention of the Special Forces guys like Tom kept us anywhere around the terrified, convulsing figure of Ahmed, tied to that door and being moved slowly up and down like he was on a seesaw.

  One of the new men pulled up a packing crate and sat very close to Ahmed, whose wandering eye seemed to have come unhinged, flailing in its socket. “You have the choice. You can either answer our questions. Or we will make you answer them.” The man was older than the others, perhaps close to fifty, wiry with arms that showed a lifetime of physical activity, and a taut, almost sad face slightly hollowed at the cheeks. He was smaller, and had an unruly thatch of tightly cut steel-gray hair that had thinned slightly at the center. “Do you understand?” Said quietly, almost politely.

  Ahmed shook so hard his nod was barely distinguishable.

  “Good. You obviously understand English.”

  Again the same shaking, as if Ahmed was freezing in that humid, steaming cave.

  “What’s your full name?” As the digital record light shone solid red.

  “Ahmed Shah,” was the burbled reply, through lips bubbling with flecks of blood and saliva.

  “Where is your brother, Omar?”

  Ahmed’s lips were clenched and quivering. Sweat poured off him as he shook his head fiercely and gave a strangled little squeal.

  “We’ll try this once again, Ahmed.” Said so soothingly you’d almost think it was a shrink talking to a patient. “Your brother, Omar, sent you to do this, didn’t he?” More clenched mouth and closed eyes. “He is really the one, isn’t he? He calls the shots. C’mon, Ahmed, we know. He’s tougher than you are. Tougher than your father even. You’re not really cut out for this. There’s no shame in that.” It was almost a practised pause that followed. Calculated for maximum effect of what followed: “Your father’s dead. You know that, don’t you?”

  Ahmed went wide-eyed, straining against the ropes that held him. His good eye blazed and the other one darted from side to side. He shrieked something none of us understood and then spit in the face of the man talking to him. The whole cave went silent; all murmurs ceased and the man stared off into space, Ahmed’s spit trickling from his forehead. Slowly, the man untied a small neck scarf he was wearing, wiped the spit from his forehead, and spoke to no one in particular. In the green-and-blue ChemLight illumination, all tension seemed to have drained away from the man. His voice was somehow distant, almost serene. “My cousin John was my hero. You know what it’s like to have a hero when you’re nine years old? And he’s fifteen? You know why he was my hero?”

  The man waited patiently for some response from Ahmed, who shook and shivered, looking straight ahead.

  “Do you know why he was my hero?” the man repeated quietly. Still not looking at Ahmed.

  Ahmed managed to force his head into a back-and-forth, spastic shaking motion.

  “Because he showed me how to throw a spiral. Do you know what a spiral is?”

  More spastic head shaking.

  “It’s the way you throw a football. Most nine-year-olds can’t throw real spirals. But I could because of him. Trivial, huh? Making such a big deal out of it. But what was really the big deal was that he loved helping us. At the time he showed me how to do it he was the biggest football star in any Boston high school. And then at Michigan. He could have turned pro. He could have done almost anything.”

  The man stopped talking, staring off somewhere. The others in that cave, all of us, wondered in silence.

  “But the truly amazing thing was that he stayed my hero way after we were both grown up. Do you know how rare that is? John became a doctor. Most of his time he spent working overseas. In war zones. Hellholes like this. Not many people help in this world. But John did.”

  For the first time, the man looked at Ahmed. With a cold, hard look, one drained of everything. Ahmed shook violently, strapped onto that door.

  “And then one day not long ago, he got up before dawn at his home in Boston, caught a plane for Los Angeles, and was blown to bits about an hour later when it hit the building in New York. And when I think of what he was and then look at you and your brother or your father, wiping your spit off my face is a small price to pay for why I am here today. I asked to come here. You know that? I went to my bosses and begged, pleaded to be sent here just so I could do things like this. They told me I was too old for this stuff. But I told them, “No, I’d just be there to do what any nine-year-old would do.” They didn’t understand that. But you do, don’t you?”

  Ahmed looked up, writhing and sobbing, trying to form another bubble of spit in his mouth, nodding his head as he did.

  The man uncoiled, pounding that rolled-up, spit-covered neckerchief straight into Ahmed’s face, slamming him against that wooden door with two ferocious blows. Then he grabbed Ahmed’s hair, yanking his face forward toward the laptop that was thrust in front of him. “Okay, asshole, spit at this.” The screen on the battered laptop filled with an image. It was the blasted body of Sayyid Shah, Ahmed’s father, frozen in a rigor-mortis contortion with an arm halfway across his chest as if shielding those dead, open eyes from the stares of those looking down on him. “Two days ago. On the other side of Khost.”

  Ahmed stared into the laptop and shrieked incoherently, straining at the ropes that pinned him to the door. The man kicked a support out from under the wooden plank and it swung down with a jolt, a seesaw with all the weight on one end. Ahmed’s head was lower than his feet. “Where is your brother?”

  The shrieking continued.

  The man nodded and another of the new men poured water on Ahmed’s face so it went into his mouth and nose, causing him to choke and flail his head around. “This is for John,” said the man. “Even though he wouldn’t want me to continue.” Pieces of cotton were forced up into Ahmed’s nose and more water poured into his mouth, which created an explosion of spray when he gagged.

  “I have another way,” said Danny, stepping forward. “Stop.” At that moment the little maple leaf f
lag on Danny’s shoulder might as well have been etched in flashing neon. They all looked around, irritated that an outsider was there in the cave.

  “Get that guy out of here,” someone said. Danny had planted himself not far from the sputtering, gagging Ahmed. For a moment, the chain of command within the cave seized solid. No one quite was sure who should make the next move.

  The move was made outside the cave, by others. An Em-Biter radio crackled with urgency. And some kind of commotion sounded, coming from beyond the shaft of blinding sunlight where the door had once been. Voices rose and fell, with names called out. The CIA man rose from beside Ahmed and hurried into the shaft of light. Others followed. Only Danny, Tom, and I were left in the cave with Ahmed. With his head pinned to that door, he looked around with that one eye flickering until it settled on Danny. For a moment he froze, straining against the ropes, and then everything within him let go. All the tightness, the shrieking ceased and in their place came a look of mute confusion.

  “Hey, I got a treat for you,” Danny said, loosening the ropes around Ahmed’s torso. “Not a fair fight, this one, huh? You being cinched up and all.”

  He unpacked a small knapsack as he talked, almost uninterested in Ahmed. He took out the little speakers and his Walkman, hooking them up, and then, when he hit Play, the cave reverberated with tinkly piano music. “‘Stardust,’” said Danny helpfully. Ahmed closed his eyes like his face was being cinched backwards. “Ma’aazif. That’s what you called it, didn’t you? Music.”

  Tom looked confused. “What is this? A fucking dance club?”

  “Liberace.”

  “Am I missing something?”

  “Ahmed? Is he missing something?” said Danny. “Hey, let me turn the volume up a little more.” The whole cave felt like a wind tunnel experiment on chimes. The tinkling was deafening. “You like Liberace, Ahmed?”

  “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful,” Ahmed yelled, his feet still tied to the planks of the door.

  “It’s the same music your sister played. More or less. Piano music,” Danny said.