by Martyn Burke
“I knew, I knew.”
“Ariana. Where is she?”
“I knew.”
“You knew what?”
“You. All of you.”
“All of you what?”
“She is impure because of you. All of you.”
“Naw,” said Danny, leaning back, looking like he was dealing with someone who just doesn’t get it. “Don’t start with that impure crap again.” Ahmed exploded in a burst of rage and spittle.
Danny held up his hand with the crooked finger. “Remember that night in High Park? When you were looking for her? Remember that night, huh? Sure you do. You remember. All that ‘prostitute’ stuff you were yelling? Well, you know what? Your sister is the purest person I have ever known. Was it tough to live with that? Knowing what you are? And what she is?”
A kind of rage-filled laugh came from Ahmed. “She is married now.”
Silence from Danny. Then: “Kidnapped. Not married.”
“Her husband is here.” Rasped, defiantly. The tinkling had stopped.
“Where?”
It was the first time Ahmed seemed pleased about anything. “Here!” he rasped, motioning with his head toward the loud voices beyond the blinding light.
• • •
When Zadran was brought into the cave, the first thing you noticed about him was the dried blood from his left ear, leaving a trail down the side of his neck, partly framing that bulbous face. Blood was on the necks of several of his bodyguards, who had not held their mouths open when the bomb detonated a couple of thousand feet above their heads. The blast hit with a thousand or so pounds pressure per square inch and blew out eardrums all over the mountain. With his huge black moustache and knifing eyes shrouded by a hedge of black eyebrows that flashed a sign language all their own, Zadran held his hand to his ear, snarling fury at the Americans around him and yet groveling in his own way. It was an art form—attitude and fawning all at once. Uriah Heep, Fagin, Shylock, and all those others I couldn’t keep straight back in high school. He switched back and forth between the two so quickly that he had us all, strangers in that cave, exchanging glances. He was surrounded by a small, jostling, yelling group of his men, all disarmed. They cleared a path for him even though the Americans had backed off so much there was nothing to clear. It looked good, though, and gave Zadran the stamp of importance it was presumably intended to. The huffing and puffing went on until Tom stepped in front of them, drilling Zadran with that spooky gimlet stare of his and casually holding an M4 about chest high.
“Enough,” said Tom quietly.
The jostling and yelling continued at some decibel-overload level. Tom fired a burst into the ceiling of the cave that sent Zadran clutching his ear and those around him scattering in a shower of falling rock. Stillness.
“Much better.”
Zadran was stooped over, his eyes sweeping the room like a scythe. His two-colored turban had been loosened by the earlier blast, and in its unraveling, dignity was becoming an issue.
“Okay, let’s get a few questions answered,” said the wiry man from the CIA, the one who had been interrogating Ahmed. “Why were you meeting with this guy?” he asked, pointing to Ahmed, still strapped to the seesaw door.
The thought jumped through my head: What is wrong here? They never interrogate two guys in the same room! They always split them up and get them to rat on each other. I mean, even the Taliban probably watch Law and Order.
The question was translated for Zadran, who erupted with indignation. “He has never seen this man before,” said the translator in a pale imitation of Zadran and pointing grandly to Ahmed.
“Then what was he doing coming up the mountain with hostages?”
Another blast of indignation, with secondary flare-ups among his entourage. The whole cave reverberated with alpha-male huffing, like Elvis impersonators, only Zadran got to be Elvis here. Which is when I started wondering if the fix was in, if the CIA guys knew something we didn’t and were just playing for theater here.
Danny leaned over to me and said something I couldn’t hear. I didn’t have to. All I made out was “. . . Ariana.”
“What about her?”
“The women they think are—”
“He says to inform you we are on our way to Bannu,” shouted Zadran’s translator, his finger rising through the air like it was cutting a hole. “Crossing the mountain is the shortest way to Bannu.”
Danny stepped forward, saying nothing. Zadran didn’t see him at first and when he did, it was as if he was trying to remember something.
“You and Ahmed know each other,” said Danny.
When the translator used Ahmed’s name, the puzzled look intensified. Zadran shrugged and grew more irritable.
“You know who I am,” said Danny.
“He says he has never seen you.”
“Sayyid Shah’s apartment. In Canada. With Omar. And Ahmed.” Danny motioned to Ahmed strapped to the door. “And their sister. You were there. You know them all.”
Still clutching his ear, Zadran looked from Danny to Ahmed and then to the cluster of Agency men and back again. Something in him faltered. Only a few people there noticed it. Ahmed saw it.
“Canada?” Zadran rasped out the word in an accent so thick it came out Keh-NAH-de.
Danny nodded.
Zadran suddenly smiled, as if now he had someone to go up against, one single opponent. An opponent he knew could do nothing to him. He broke out laughing. He stepped toward Danny and snapped his fingers in the air. One of his men instantly produced a big leather pouch from which Zadran removed a plastic cover, aware that a dozen weapons were trained on him. Which made him smile even more. His eyebrows arched so that his face seemed cinched around that enormous nose. “Yes! Yes!” he said, taking out a photograph of himself in front of a traffic-clogged street with dusty brick apartment buildings. “Me. Jam-sen!”
“Jameson Avenue,” Danny said.
“Yes, Jam-sen. Me-you!” He held aloft another photo. Danny, Omar, and Zadran were side by side in a room.
“Let me see that,” said the Agency man, scrutinizing the photo for a moment before turning to Danny. “We need to talk.” The photo was whisked away by Zadran, playing the role of magician building up to a sleight-of-hand finale. He held up a photo of a barely recognizable scowling man with a multicolored turban and a moustache the size of a squirrel, sitting cross-legged on carpets and cushions. Beside him was a young woman in a green dress and a big pink headscarf. She had an expression frozen somewhere between terror and confusion.
“Me! And wife.”
There was a silence that was somehow deafening. Or maybe I was just imagining the inside of Danny’s mind.
“Ariana. My wife! Me!”
Danny started breathing in short, jagged bursts as if he was having trouble breathing. “Fuck you! She’s not your wife. You kidnapped her.”
Zadran didn’t need to have it translated. He laughed until he almost shook. He was winning. “Me? No! Omar give me!” he said, pointing to Ariana. “Omar! He give!” Then he turned and said something to his men that yielded laughter and chattering.
The Agency man turned to the translator. “What does he say?”
“He says, ‘This poor boy.’”
• • •
There was no way to hold Zadran there. The Gods of Tampa had suddenly awoken and decreed that, treacherous as he was, he was still Our Ally. And had to be allowed to leave. Someone in the pantheon had inhaled the fumes from Washington. A little double cross here and there shouldn’t stand in the way of the Greater Good. A few embezzled millions shouldn’t cloud the Big Picture. And throw in some rumored cache of Stinger shoulder-fired missiles that he was supposedly hiding, and the Be Nice factor trumps all. The decision had been relayed before he even entered the cave. From then on, it was all just theater and we were the spear-carriers, the Rosencrantz and whatshisname of the piece.
Zadran swept out of that cave, knowing he had just served up a full-course
banquet of marinated shit and we were his official tasters. He knew—that malevolent old prick—what none of us yet knew. He had figured out that even the most corrupt link of the geopolitical chain needed to be protected by those tugging on it. Otherwise you’re only left with a bunch of round metal links attached to nothing.
America loathed him/America loved him. It was all the same. There was nothing we could do about it. And he knew it.
The final cut-bait order from the pantheon came in on one of the Em-Biters, those little radios that Tom and some of Team 590 carried like they were there to balance the weight of the chewing tobacco pouches. So Zadran just sifted out of there, that fuck-you, yellowed-piano-key grin growing by octaves. Danny yelled at everyone standing still in that cave, telling them that Zadran could not be allowed to leave. And then found himself crosschecked by a rifle when he got too close to Zadran.
When we went outside into the blindingly blue light of three thousand meters elevation on a clear, sunlit late afternoon, we all blinked in the glare, stumbling into all that death and perfection. Zadran was already a hundred or so meters down the eastern side of the mountain, on his way to Bannu in the wildest part of Pakistan, when he sent his translator back with a message. It was for Danny. “Tell the boy,” Zadran’s message said, “that I beat her when I found she was a whore.”
Danny stood there like he had grown into the granite. Absolutely still and blank. “And something else,” said the translator.
I said it for Danny, who was suddenly mute: “What?”
“You will never find her. He has her in a hidden place.”
On the side of the mountain, Zadran could be seen waving to us, and laughing.
The sun set like it fell out of the sky.
16
The artichoke. In other words, one of my mother’s letters—you’d have to peel away the outer layers endlessly until you got to the core of what Annabelle was saying. You’d read the artichoke for about the tenth time but by then you were more uncertain about what the hell she was saying than when you started. It was just layers of maternal encryption. I mean what mother ever writes: Just remember that dignity and sex always collide. Or how about: Let no one slip a laxative into the Moral Code I have instilled in you. Sitting there on that frozen mountain, with dead guys dug into it in their new little graves, the ones with the long poles sticking straight up and the skinny, ragged Islamic banners flying from them like some used-car lot of the dead—it gets you thinking. Especially when their replacements are already out there, waiting to kill you, and your mother is talking about laxatives in the Moral Code. Just remember—moral diarrhea is just as smelly as the real thing.
But that was not the part of the letter that required the real code-breaking skills. That part was always about Annie. It was like that in every goddamned letter. Annabelle had a genius for maternal payback, leaving rapier slashes across your soul as she showered you with a hard rain of love and concern. A month ago her letter had a newspaper photo of the Boo-Two! Annie and Susie, with Hugh Hefner at some nightclub. Both of them looking lacquered, with rictus smiles that simply were not Annie. It just wasn’t. But this latest letter was the complete negative image—jammed with whole pages of the National Enquirer with big parts torn out and a Post-it stuck beside each jagged void saying, “I didn’t want this to upset you, so I tore it out.”
Me upset? God forbid. Reading about the tedious love lives of Hollywood stars and—this part (fill in your own blanks about the Boo Two) censored. I sat staring at it and then held the jagged void in the middle of the National Enquirer up into the Afghan air, framing those graves with Brad, Jen, Angelina, and Britney.
“What are you doing?” That wasn’t the real question Danny wanted to ask.
“Gimme your sat phone.”
“I need it.”
“What if I need it more?”
“Constance. I need to call her.”
“So do I.” He didn’t respond. “Annie,” I explained.
He looked at me for a moment. And then passed me the phone. “Batteries are low.”
I dialed the number on the other side of the world. The number on another of my mother’s Post-its, the one under the notation Highly recommend you do not call this number!
From across the world, the female voice that answered the nonrecommended number exploded into the sat phone with a laughing, shrieking, giggling “HELLO?” My silence produced another “Hello?” this one irritated and surrounded by loud male voices.
“Is Annie there?”
“Who is this?” Silence. “Oh fuck,” said Susie Boo.
“I want to talk to her.”
“Don’t you ever leave the fuck alone?”
“No. I don’t.”
“Aren’t you in bumfuckistan or somewhere?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, we’re in a limo, dude. And your vibes don’t fit.” Spat out in a voice strained through steel wool dripping in daiquiris.
“Put Annie on the phone please.”
“We’re on our way to Vegas and—” The earpiece suddenly filled with voices, and out of the audio maelstrom I was sure I heard Annie cut through it all, and I wanted to imagine her grappling for the phone.
“Hank?”
“Hi.”
“Oh . . . oh god . . . I thought . . .”
“Hey. I miss you.”
“Oh Jesus I—” Her sister was yelling something in the background. “I’m with some people.”
“What people?”
“Please . . .” She was crying. “Some new . . . new friends.”
Suddenly there was a jostling sound and a man’s voice came on the phone. “Hey pal, get your own fucking party.”
“I have.”
“Well, quit horning in on ours when these broads are on the meter.”
“What meter?”
“Go fuck yourself.” The line went dead.
Highly recommend you do not . . . !
Who else could get me to make a call like that? Annabelle is such a genius.
• • •
Sometime later that night Danny left, sifting into the darkness unseen.
In the commotion on the mountain with so many different units, all reporting to their own command centers and their own nationalities, his absence went unnoticed. A note on the drag bag we used said simply Back soon. Don’t wait up. Inside the drag bag everything seemed to be there—at first. The big McMillan rifle, the suppressive fire weapon, the tripod, the scopes, all of it was there. But I kept pawing through, thinking something was missing, some weapon I could not remember was not in that tangle of metal, plastic, and composites.
Two nights later, from inside the folds of Gore-Tex, came a crackling, muffled “Reaper One, this is Dark Side. Do you copy? Over.” In the infinite darkness I was flung, spring-loaded, out of my nocturnal fog and I grappled through the sleeping bag for the radio but suddenly heard someone quietly responding, “Reaper One. Over.” It was Danny.
“Dammit, where you been?”
“Out there,” he said, his voice coming through on the radio sounding as bored as a guy ordering a cheeseburger in the drive-thru line. Out there, as in: out there in that infinite blackness of varying degrees of savagery stitched together with isolated acts of countervailing nobility. Wandering alone among the turbans, a pasty gringo out for a stroll out there. Like a walk in the—
“Where, out there?”
He came back into our camp hours later. “Man, I’m tired,” was all he said. And within seconds he was gently snoring under those jagged beams of starlight.
Before dawn I was awoken by a muffled voice coming from the depths of the sleeping bag next to me. “I need to know. Is she okay?” It was Danny talking into the sat phone. Silence. “You’re sure?” More silence. “I just did something bad. But good too. For her I mean. I hope it helps. I need to know. Is it going to help?” More silence. “Awesome. Thank god. So, tell me, am I going to be with her? I mean, some day?”
&nbs
p; I whipped the sleeping bag off. “You’re talking to Constance?” He waved me away, his arm flailing like a bird trying to take off with one wing tied down. “No! Please you gotta—” He looked at the phone. “How can she tell me that and then just hang up?”
“Tell you what?”
“To make an appointment.”
“She always tells you that.”
“She thinks Afghanistan is somewhere near Palm Springs.”
“Get real.”
“We got to get over there.”
“We are over there.”
“I’m talking about Hollywood.”
“Where were you for the past two days?”
It was as if he hadn’t heard me. “Don’t you want to know your future?”
I thought about it for a while. “No.” I went back to sleep.
Minutes before dawn, the sky filled with Chinooks extracting Team 590. The guys with John’s cousin, the Agent, had already vanished. The whole plateau was silent, empty. Inside the cave were the burned-through ChemLight bottles littering the place. The seesaw door that Ahmed had been tied to was still there. But Ahmed was not. The litter and crap all over was positively eerie.
Sometime after the sun had warmed us out of our insulated jackets, I checked that drag bag again. Everything was still there. But something had been added, returned, really, to the bag. It was a small-caliber Russian SV-99 weapon, good up to a thousand meters. The kind of weapon that might damage but not necessarily obliterate. Depending on the skill of the shooter, of course.
Exactly!—the skill of the shooter! Skill, as in being able to hit a small target—moving from somewhere within the far end of that “about a thousand meters.” And if he was anything, Danny was skilled. Rumors flew in several different languages. Rumors about a ghost that had recently roamed the mountains. An avenging spirit with wings that flapped as it leaped across the ground.
After he was hit, Zadran was said to have been carried the last part of the journey on a stretcher, borne aloft by frantic men stumbling toward the medics in Bannu. He was said to have sustained a catastrophic wound below the waist. A bullet fired from some hidden place, from somewhere no one saw, had struck him on a part of his body he refused to let others see. It was known that the loss of blood spewing from his groin area nearly killed him.