Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

28

  We got back to Afghanistan sixteen days after we left. Bagram was my first stop and then the smaller base in Khost, over against the mountains leading to Pakistan. Danny got to Kandahar at about the same time. It would be six more weeks before I got out of the base at Khost, linking up with him and the Princess Patricias, who were OpConned to our brigade on an operation in the mountains.

  By then I was glad to get out of Khost; the mortar attacks from the Taliban were relentless. Entire nights were spent wondering when some overheated little ball of death would fall out of the darkness and reconstitute your earthly presence as a fine spray and a few chunks. You got to know how close you were to that fate by listening to a strange whistling sound turn into a sharp fffft! sound just before the mortar exploded. The sharper the whistling fffft!, the closer you were to becoming spray and chunks.

  For an added treat, they used 107mm rockets that landed inside the base, beginning sometime around midnight. They were like alarm clocks from hell—just when you gave in to exhaustion and drifted off to sleep, wheeeeee-BLAAAM! and you’d be shot out of exhausted stupor, stumbling for cover, not knowing up from down. By the time the tenth one fell just before dawn, conscious thought had been shredded worse than the supply tent on the west side of the base.

  The whole California interlude seemed like a hallucination to me, as if I’d dreamed it. Everything in my existence was in play now. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing back there; in those sixteen days I’d lost the adrenaline-fueled rhythm of war that I’d left with. In its place were memories of Annie that could seep into the most tightly sealed vaults of my mind like a mist.

  And the war had changed too. Maybe it took leaving it for me to notice what was really happening. What had been a wild, mostly improvised attack on the fourteenth century was more than ever becoming the Big Army war, rappelling the sheer face of a thousand-year-old culture with systems analysis, massive numbers, and Burger Kings. And all of it eternally dependent on the raw courage demanded of those few who went outside the wire.

  The roaming of the mountains as Danny and I had done was more difficult now. The command structures in the field were hardening by the month. Vertical Integration was fusing paper trails from the Gods of Tampa down to the lowliest grunt. What we had done only a couple of months earlier was still barely possible, but only when official backs were turned. Or, when the very edges of a court-martial were tested. Which was what Danny was in the early stages of doing.

  Looking out from the Chinook, descending onto the single-ship LZ about eighty kilometers west of Miram Shah, there were signs of what was to come. Strapped into a seat on the side of the big helicopter, I’d drifted into some altered state brought on by the roar of those two screaming engines over our heads. The quilted ceiling billowing slightly above us did nothing to keep out the noise. I was suddenly aware of hands motioning to me. Some of the other Rakkasans were trying to get my attention, pointing to the door gunner, a skinny kid manning a machine gun and waving me over toward him. I stumbled across the metal floor, and holding on to the webbing, I knelt beside him.

  “Pilot wants to know if you’re the guy who was with the Canadians,” he screamed through the roar. I nodded to him and he said something into his intercom. “Hold on,” he shouted to me a moment later and then the Chinook banked to the right. “Coming up at about four o’clock!” He was pointing to something below us, something standing up on the edge of the LZ. “Pilot wants to know what’n hell that is.” I told him and he looked at me strangely.

  Then he clicked on his intercom and yelled, “Sir? He says it’s some guy named Liberace.”

  • • •

  There was still something different about Danny. He loped out of nowhere, like some camouflaged dust devil arriving just in time to save Liberace from being blown into the next valley. Even from a distance I could see the piano key hanging from a chain around his neck. It swung out around him like the talisman it was.

  “She’s always here with me,” he said, holding the piano key up with his crooked finger after the Chinook had landed and we were laughing just from seeing each other again.

  “Liberace would understand that.”

  “Of course he would. I feel that piano key on my skin and then I know why I’m still fighting. He’s the same. Just look at him.” Liberace beamed in that same prancing leg kick he’d been doing for the whole war.

  Danny took a laminated contour interval map out of his rucksack and spread it out on the ground. “Ratlines!” he said exuberantly in some way that made no sense. He was almost laughing. “Your Special Forces guys gave us a company-level briefing last night.” He was pointing to a contour line. “We’re here. And there’s a ratline right here.” His crooked finger had moved across the map, pointing to a town called Neka, and then tracing a route almost from where we were, through the mountains and into Pakistan.

  Ratlines were what some of our guys had started calling the unmarked routes through the mountains between the two countries. They were sort of the Ninjas’ highways, which meant that at best they were glorified goat trails through hellish terrain that no sane person would ever want to be on. But the Taliban used them all the time, moving in whatever direction suited them at the moment.

  “Almost an entire tribe is on the move.”

  Suddenly I knew where this strange euphoria was coming from. “Zadran?”

  Danny nodded. And then went back to studying the laminated map. Ariana, or some spectral incarnation of her, hung around him in a way that had never happened before we went to L.A. “I’ve been thinking. Constance said it’ll be different when I meet her. I’m wondering exactly what will be so different—what I’m missing.” He was unconsciously running his fingers across the piano key as if it was a chain of beads, the kind the warlords always carried loosely in their hands.

  “You think Ariana’s one of the people on this ratline?”

  “Don’t know. The intel we got said whole families were on the move.”

  “Omar?”

  “Who knows?” He thought about it for a moment. “Probably,” he said.

  • • •

  It was called Operation Jukebox. It got the name because the battalion commanders had decided that, for a little money, Zadran would play any tune you wanted to hear. And the consensus was he was moving back from Miram Shah in Pakistan to his Afghan base near Khost, where someone from his tribe had told him the CIA operatives were debating whether or not to pay him any more money. To Zadran’s way of thinking, he was automatically due a few million, give or take, merely for the honor of letting him play us off against the Ninjas. So Zadran was trekking back to this side of the mountains in order that Yankee dollars could rain down on him in a deluge.

  Which, on the surface, was a perfectly viable strategy they’ll teach at business school someday. Because at a time when the CIA was running around the mountains with trunks of cash, loyalty was definitely a marketable commodity. Even if, as in Zadran’s case, it had a shorter shelf life than a carton of milk.

  We were one of three recce teams, each taking a different elevation of the ratline. The whole idea was to do what the Predators overhead couldn’t: try to figure out what Zadran was planning. Officially, Danny and I had been tasked with reconnaissance and surveillance. If things got hairy we would attack and then call in air support, waiting until reinforcements got to us. At least that was the plan.

  It was a difficult trek we made. It became a grim, destined march through the freezing cold, climbing up into snow and then descending, following a camel path down into a dirt-road village. The headman of the village greeted us suspiciously and then invited us into his earth-brick compound. The compound was a kind of medieval fort on a smaller scale, with high walls that had little openings for shooting down at attackers, and a steel door big enough to drive a pickup truck through.

  Everything was mud-colored beige except for the doors and window frames, which were almost turquoise. We entered, shoeless, into a large room with log
beams protruding from the ceiling overhead. Sitting on the thick rugs scattered around the room, we had sugary tea brought to us by weathered men with white or gray beards with pakol hats and the baggy shalwar kameez outfit that was almost the uniform there. There were maybe a dozen of them, silent, turbaned men who muttered among themselves and examined us as if we might be some kind of prey.

  They were surprised that Danny could speak enough Pashto to carry on a conversation, and soon the headman was leaning toward Danny and talking quickly.

  “Basically, they hate us,” he said, smiling for the benefit of our hosts. “They’re all tied in with Zadran. But we are their guests, so they are honor-bound to extend hospitality to us. So they won’t attack us now. And probably not even after we leave. They think we might be useful if they decide to go to war against another tribe.”

  We left and descended quickly through about a dozen contour lines into a spectacular valley, green and crudely terraced, with towering, snow-capped mountains off in the distance. The riverbank fell away into a deep, narrow chasm, traversed by a bridge of a dozen long logs laid side by side over the roaring water far below. Two men were whipping a white mule loaded with wood strapped to its sides. It was clumsily traversing the logs, braying in terror and slipping until it crossed the bridge and then bolted awkwardly into a field full of opium poppies.

  The smoldering remains of a compound destroyed by the Hellfire missiles were at the base of a large hill. Through the blossoming smoke, a door could be seen clinging to shattered hinges as it swung, creaking in the low flames. We moved cautiously past the ruins. A mumbling sound came from somewhere in the smoke. An old man with a long beard, dyed bright henna-red, sat in the rubble. His toothless mouth was moving as if he was chewing air. At his bare feet were animal skins, some filled with a thick brown paste. Opium. Or maybe hash.

  I motioned to Danny, who nodded and slowly edged closer. Both of us were doing 180s, waiting for the Law of Unpleasant Surprises to kick in. But the old man was alone, sitting there mumbling to himself. When Danny said something to him in Pashto he didn’t even look up. He simply waved his hand dismissively as if he was tired of some long-running argument and kicked at the goatskins around his feet, spilling the brown paste out onto the ground.

  “Gramps has been sampling a tad too much of his own product,” said Danny, quietly looking around. The whole place had a Night of the Living Dead aura to it.

  We got out of there, leaving the old man suddenly coming to life, yelling madly into the wind.

  The sun plummeted.

  The warm twilight glow of the distant peaks settled into a coolness that we fought off with the chemical packets in the MREs. For a while we hunkered down on our little plateau encampment, listening to the radio traffic coming in. Off in the distance we could hear the alternating whine and roar of an AC-130 gunship whose radio chatter was what passed for tonight’s Top 40 countdown here on the murderous edges of the Clash of Civilizations. The AC-130 Spectre was an airborne platform of sheer hell, capable of firing rounds the size of toothpaste tubes down onto the heads of obstinate Ninjas.

  It was flat-out eerie, lying there in the pristine night with the entire universe once again playing in wide screen in that Ultimate Drive-In of the night sky above our heads. And on the double bill tonight, vying for attention with Orion, the Milky Way, and Venus, was this AC-130, the flying boxcar from hell off in the distance, rattling through the darkness, providing special effects, lighting up a whole map quadrant.

  But the really freaky part was the voice on the radio, a woman’s voice from the AC-130—call sign Zinger. Now I know we’re supposed to be past all that in these post-liberated times, but a few socially recessive genes in the middle of my brain were arcing at the thought of a woman—who really sounded more like a girl—piloting that plane, raining down death in the night.

  Zinger had one of those naturally bouncy and somehow youthful voices. She requested confirmation on coordinates from the guys on the ground. One of them, the attack controller, sounded like they’d done business before, calling her Sugar.

  “Sugar this,” came the reply from Zinger. “Waiting for orders.”

  I was trying to think of whose little sister that voice reminded me of.

  Tracer bullets hosed down the darkness, and Zinger’s voice notched up a little when someone on the ground radioed, “We are taking heavy fire. I-6 is hit.” A moment later another voice from the tactical command post miles away cleared Zinger to go in hot. Instantly the night was stitched with flame. Over that radio, Zinger again sounded to me like someone’s kid sister working the taxi dispatch office. Then she annihilated whatever had been targeted in a series of minor fireballs.

  I couldn’t get the thought out of my head: Little Cindy or Tiffany or Ruthie. The thought of sis up there pouring 105mm cannon fire down into some Ninjas just plain stuck. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz wiping out whoever was behind the curtain with machine gun fire.

  Can’t help it—that’s the image.

  “Ariana,” said Danny out of nowhere. He had drifted into his own space right there in the middle of that light show going on out there. The attack controller was yelling into the radio, telling Zinger to be advised that her guns were hitting fifty meters from the tree line.

  “What about Ariana?”

  “We’re listening to a woman piloting a plane in combat.”

  “And?”

  “Forget it.” Silence. “She’s out there. Somewhere.”

  “You really think she’s with Zadran?”

  “Omar’s somewhere here too.” We watched the patterns of flame in the night, some linear, others irregular. From here it sounded like the sky was some huge piece of cloth being torn.

  “I’m worried,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “About virginity. And other stuff.”

  I watched for a moment to see if he was making some kind of weird joke. “We’re watching a rerun of the Armageddon show and you want to talk about virginity?”

  “Yeah.” He was as serious as I’d ever seen him.

  “Virginity’s complicated.”

  “Yeah.” Silence. “What if she gave birth?”

  “Wanna run that by me again?”

  “Zadran would go crazy when he found he wasn’t getting a virgin. Crazy she could handle. Maybe. But what she couldn’t handle is what he would do if he found out she was pregnant.”

  “Why are you thinking she was pregnant?”

  “Constance. She said she heard a baby crying.”

  “It could be any baby.”

  “It’s not,” he said. With complete certainty. “I been thinking about it for all the months and years since I saw her. Wondering what our last night was all about. We always used to take all kinds of precautions. She even had a girlfriend who was giving Ariana her own birth control pills for a while. But that last night was different. Nothing.”

  “You think she wanted to get pregnant?”

  “I don’t know. She could be killed for it.”

  Zinger had gone off station and an Apache helicopter named Wild Monkey had come in, its chain gun cutting up the sky. Somehow it seemed all so far away.

  I wished I had not known what I knew now.

  Just the thought of a child, Danny’s child—if he or she even existed—set the whole survival equation ablaze. And would demand recklessness from Danny. It sent scenarios and premonitions rocketing through our solitary corner of darkness.

  • • •

  At daybreak, we awoke and stepped into a postcard. The rising sun caught the snow on the distant mountain peaks, and the lushness of the valleys at the lower elevations had the feel of an oasis. Glassing the hills, there was little sign of the carnage of the night. Only a few black scars on the earth and a charred tree on the far side of the valley gave any hint of what had happened. It all invoked the Inverse Law of Horror and Beautiful Places: The more picturesque the scene, the more terrifying what happens there.

  India t
eam came up on the radio. They were the second of the three reconnaissance teams and were reporting in. Saying that Zadran’s people were closing on us, descending on the path beside the river at about two contour lines an hour. “Be advised, they may have shadows,” India added. “About a hundred meters above the main party. Cannot confirm.” There was nothing to do but wait. Breakfast was a couple of cans of Chef Boyardee tossed into a C-4 fire and then cracked open with Ka-Bar knives. Speaking about inverse laws, there has to be one for food and where it’s eaten. The fanciest restaurant in Beverly Hills cannot equal the culinary splendor of Chef Boyardee served charred to the ravenous at six thousand feet in a war zone.

  Suddenly I dropped my can of Chef Boyardee and ran for my rifle.

  On the western side of the highest hill, a cavalcade of humanity made a jostling appearance. Coming through the notch between the hills, hard against the rushing waterfall, were a group of men wearing baggy shalwar kameez outfits swaddled in bullet belts, and carrying AK-47s. Some of them wore suit coats and matching vests, which was a little like seeing your banker dressed for a shootout.

  We made no attempt to conceal ourselves as more of them poured over the notch. They were fewer in numbers than I had thought, maybe a hundred and fifty men, women, and children. The bankers in bullet belts were in the lead, and behind them was a curious concoction of epochs. A few donkey-driven wooden carts with rubber-rimmed, spoked wheels carried supplies, jostling over the rutted path beside the river. On the last of those carts, seated on mounds of cushions, was Zadran like he was in some royal carriage.

  “He probably can’t even walk, not after what happened to him,” said Danny, leaving out the details. He was busy setting up the spotting scopes. The scopes could pick out details from five kilometers. “A couple of guys on motocross bikes,” he said, peering into one. “They must be his outriders. You know, like the Queen has all those guys on horseback looking like they’re dressed in chrome and bouncing all over when she goes out in that gold carriage? Well, Zadran’s got his two scraggly motocross guys covered in mud.”