The Good Son

by Michael Gruber

  “Who?”

  “William Craig, the electronics billionaire. It is astounding, you know? Your mother has no regard for her own safety but surely a man of such acumen might have considered it foolish to ride without adequate security into the most terrorist-infested place on earth.”

  “Maybe he wanted the thrill, like those rich guys who like to break records, ballooning around the world and like that.”

  “Perhaps,” he said and gave me a funny look. “But his character is not, after all, our most pressing concern at the moment. You seem to be taking this disaster very well. Aren’t you worried about her?”

  I shrugged and answered, “I don’t know. Maybe I’m in shock. It doesn’t seem real yet. Maybe it’s just a ransom gang after Craig and they’ll let the others go.”

  I kept thinking that, telling myself it was true, and we sat there for hours together, not speaking, one or the other of us going for food or to the john, the other staying put, watching the tube, until the kidnappers delivered their tape and the station played it. There she was with the others, surrounded by masked men with guns. There was a statement by a man in a ski mask. After the routine condemnation of the infidel Pakistani government and their crusader allies, and the routine grievances, the murder of innocent civilians by the military forces thereof, the torture of prisoners by the authorities and the Americans, he declared that the present act was meant to provide hostages against these infamous behaviors. The captives would receive decent treatment, unlike the brothers rotting in American and Pakistani prisons, but should any more innocents be massacred by the infidels, on each day that such an event took place, one hostage would be executed. God is great! All the masked men waved their weapons and shouted this too, and the camera did a slow cruel pan across the strained and exhausted faces of all the hostages.

  My father was like ice then, strangely enough; it was me who howled and cried like a baby on my father’s shoulder. And while I was crying, with the tears and snot running down my face, all I could think of was them taking her out on some hard-baked patch of ground and cutting her head off with a sword. I’d seen it done in Afghanistan more than once. The fuckers who cut people’s heads off now aren’t that good at it; it’s a lost art, one of the many things the Muslims have forgotten how to do, not like the glory days of the caliphate, when they had professionals. It turns out that beheading with a sword is harder than you would think.

  My father comforted me awkwardly, like you do a child who’s bumped his nose. We’re not close. I still blame him for the way he behaved during the previous family disaster; forgiveness doesn’t come easy for me. So I pulled away from his hugs, a little abruptly, and we sat there watching the tenth rerun of that fucking tape, me thinking it was the last sight I’d ever have of my mother alive.

  After a while he picked up the remote and muted the television. He said, “Will you be all right? I want to make some calls.”

  “Who are you calling?”

  “Well, family first. Nisar may know something, with his connections in Islamabad. We’ll see if he can find out anything that’s not for public consumption. Rukhsana too. She has sources as well, from her work. And Seyd, although I doubt I’ll get anything from him outside of the official line from ISI, especially if… no, I won’t think about that, not yet at any rate.”

  I asked him what he didn’t want to think about.

  “Well, you know these mujahideen groups up in Swat and Kashmir and so forth all have Inter-Services Intelligence connections. Suppose an ISI-sponsored group carried out this kidnapping?”

  “But why wouldn’t that be a good thing? Seyd could help get them out.”

  “Oh, Theo, I’m talking about Seyd. He’s my little brother and of course I love him, but he is a monstrously ambitious and ruthless man, who has always felt that having a famous apostate for a sister-in-law put a blot in his copybook. I don’t say he would be happy to see Sonia decapitated on television, but he would not weep bitter tears either. No, we will get no help from Seyd. My greatest hope is that he will not actively hinder plans to rescue them, if any.”

  “I should go over there,” I said.

  “And do what? Wander through the hills calling her name? Don’t be foolish, Theo!”

  I gave him a hard look, but he stared right back at me, which was a bit of a surprise. I guess in the lives of fathers and sons there’s a moment when the kid understands his father is not some kind of god but just a guy and then he has to decide whether he likes him or not, and, if not, how he’s going to handle it. That came a little too early, in my case, and while I’ve always treated him with respect, more or less for my mother’s sake, I’ve always considered him something of a pussy, and fairly early on I arranged another father for myself, a man of unimpeachably violent barbarian credentials, every little boy’s dream.

  I thought Farid would’ve crumpled under this disaster too, but he hadn’t; he was standing tall. It was me crumpling, and it pissed me off.

  “You know, I have some contacts too, in the hills,” I said, snapping.

  I couldn’t read the expression on his face. Shame? Sorrow? I’ve never really talked to my father about what I did between the ages of nine and seventeen, up in Afghanistan, but he knew, or could imagine it, and I know he thought it was his fault, my entire fucked-up life. So that was between us, like a big black sack of garbage stinking up the room, and there was a silence and then he looked at his wristwatch and said, “I must call now. Will you be all right?”

  I said I would and he left and I turned on the sound again and flipped through the channels. After doing this for a while I learned that the group claiming responsibility was called al-Faran, which some expert commentator explained was a blowback from the Kashmiri jihad, an organization the Pakistanis had set up to give the Indian occupation grief but which had now joined with the general insurgency in the Northwest Frontier Province. The guy said that this bunch was distinguished for their media savvy and had pioneered a small but growing videotape niche market: decapitations of kidnapped Westerners. Wonderful.

  The hostage tape produced a lot of media activity, mainly because of Craig, and we thought it was a good thing for us because no one was paying much attention to the other hostages. My mother’s peak of fame had been a couple of decades ago, and she had never gone in for the public intellectual business: no interviews, no talk shows, no magazine articles about the plight of women in Islam, and so forth. She hadn’t even had an author photo on her books, so the upshot was that for all anyone knew she was a regular Pakistani-American writer and no big deal, and we were anxious to keep it that way.

  A senator who wanted to piss off the administration about its policies in South Asia organized a hearing about what, if anything, the government was going to do about the three-and-a-half captive Americans-Craig and some missionary couple and Mom-and they brought in a few undersecretaries who told elaborate lies-What, a rescue? Oh, shit, no, senator! We respect the territorial sovereignity of our ally Pakistan; we would never think of going in there even if we knew where they were, which we don’t-and they stood a major general up who underlined that point: there’s nothing harder than a rescue mission in hostile territory, especially with faulty intel; remember the Iran fiasco, we don’t want another one of those, oh, no.

  As it happens, the unit I work for was founded right after that fiasco just so we could do shit like that on the sovereign territory of whoever, but they didn’t ask me and anyway we don’t officially exist.

  Within twenty-four hours after the hostage tapes aired, we understood that as far as the Pakistanis and the Americans were concerned, the hostages were on their own. Nisar reported a stir running through the highest levels of the Pakistani government; generals had approached him in strictest confidence about moving large sums of money offshore. Everyone felt the loss of face. A party of foreigners, including an American billionaire, snatched in daylight from the heart of a district supposedly under tight army control? Questions in parliament, angry edit
orials from opposition papers, everyone a-tremble about what the Americans were going to do.

  Which was nothing, as it turned out. Rukhsana found out from a usually reliable source in the U.S. embassy in Islamabad that the Pakistani government had been assured that no incursion whatever was being planned or even considered.

  The worst thing about an event like this, besides the hell of not knowing what’s happening to the victims-the loved ones, as they always call them-is that life goes on. Traffic flows, the noble buildings still stand whitely there in Washington, people go to their jobs and eat and to bed, and after the shock is a little past, so do the not exactly bereaved, carrying on in a suffering somewhat worse than an actual death in the family, because of the torture of hope.

  Me too. I thought I would go nuts if I had to hang around the house, so the day after they showed the hostage tape I went to my regular PT session and sweet-talked Brenda Crabbe into filling out a report that said I had got all the benefit out of PT that was there to be got and, if the docs agreed, I was good to go.

  The following day I drove down to Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia to return to my job. Fort Belvoir is a sort of military mall that the army uses to house units that they can’t figure out where else to put, stuff like the Defense Logistics Agency and the Institute of Heraldry. Soldier Magazine is there and so is the Tactical Intelligence Support Detachment, which is us. You would think that an organization as secret as the TISD would want to stay anonymous, but no, we have a sign and a shield too, a sword cutting a chain and a Latin motto. I showed my special ID to the guard at the desk and he ran it through his computer. My army records are completely fraudulent. I’m supposedly serving in some regular unit somewhere if anyone wants to look, which suits me okay. I’m kind of a fraudulent character to begin with.

  I went in to see our first sergeant, whose name is Cheney, Ronald D., although everyone calls him Dick and blames him for Iraq, in one of those boring jokes that stick to any unit. Big guy with a narrow horse face and a dimple in the middle of his chin, a lifer like me. The first thing he said when I went in there was, “What’s wrong with your eyes? They’re all red.”

  I said something about getting soap in them in the shower, and he asked me how the PT was going, and I said I should be yelling hoo-ah in a matter of weeks. Then I asked him where our guys were and he said, “Team One’s in Iraq; Team Two’s in Afghanistan; Team Three’s in transit somewhere, they didn’t tell me where yet, but I’m guessing Pakistan; and Team Four’s on stateside rotation for rest and training. Did you hear about Claiborne?”

  “Not hurt?”

  “Shit, no. He’s leaving. He came in here and I had his reenlistment papers all ready and he said to run them through the shredder; he was going to take a job with some security outfit. Blackwater or one of those.”

  “That’s fucked up,” I said. “God, Buck Claiborne! Why would he do something like that?”

  “He said they were going to pay him over a hundred grand a year plus benefits, and no army chickenshit either. He didn’t say anything to you?”

  “No. He was always talking about telling the service to go fuck itself, but I thought it was just talk. Well. That’s a kick in the ass.”

  “Roger that. Funny he never mentioned it. You guys were pretty tight.”

  Yes, we were. Buck Claiborne saved my ass when the house fell on me. He was probably the largest person ever to successfully complete Special Forces training, which tends to favor moderate-sized people like me. I was a little hurt that he hadn’t told me he was getting out. I don’t have many close relationships with the men I work with, but I thought he was an exception and I was obviously wrong. I wanted to change the subject.

  I said, “I guess we weren’t that tight. By the way, has there been anything down about this terrorist kidnap yet? The Craig thing?”

  Cheney said, “No, nothing. That’s up in Pak, no?”

  I said it was. Our unit is descended from the one that rescued General James Dozier in 1981, when the Red Brigades snatched him. Organized for tight coordination of comint and action, we led the carabinieri commandos right to the apartment where Dozier was being held and they rescued him without firing a shot.

  If no one had alerted us on the kidnapping it was more bad news. If it wasn’t us it was probably nobody, which meant the U.S. was really not going to lift a finger.

  “Could you keep your ears open on that, Top? I’d like to know if anyone gets an alert on an op, anything they have going to spring them.”

  He didn’t reply for a moment, looking me over. “Sure, no problem. What’s your interest?”

  “Oh, one of the victims is someone I know,” I said, and then I said I’d sure like to go downrange and he said, What, you can’t wait to kill again? and I said, Yeah, it’s an all-consuming need. He laughed and said I was getting pretty short myself, and was I planning to do a Claiborne when my enlistment ran out next month? and I said, Oh, sure, like they’d let me go. As a matter of fact, reenlistment is a formality with me; the army has this little catch that they can extend you indefinitely if you have a vital skill essential to national security, which I do with my languages and cultural knowledge of South Asia, so I might as well get the re-up bonus. I am a well-paid slave soldier, like a Mameluke or a janissary.

  We bullshitted for a while about army stuff, and he gave me some paperwork to fill out, and as I was leaving he said, “You know, I saw an old pal of yours the other day, Captain Lepinski, only he’s a major now. They assigned him to JSOC staff, the fuckhead.”

  I said, “I’m glad to hear it. You can always trust the army to reward good work. What’ve they got him doing?”

  “I don’t know. Shuffling paper. Personnel assignments, the usual shit.”

  I thought that was a good thing to learn about Lepinski, because the Joint Special Operations Command staff is the outfit that cuts all our orders. I said, “Well, he probably won’t kill anyone doing that.”

  I sat down at a spare desk and looked over the crap that had accumulated for me during my time away from the unit, the usual army chicken-shit, but there was one item that drew my interest. It was an evaluation form for a course I’d been to just before the operation that had got me hurt, a course about how to handle a situation where terrorists had got hold of a nuclear weapon.

  I recalled it pretty well, although it must’ve been six months back. I’d been called in to see Captain Stoltz. Brian Stoltz is not a bad guy for an officer, he’s a wiry little son of a bitch like me, fair but cruel. I wouldn’t say we like each other, but we get along. He’s a runner-set some kind of record when he was at the Point-and likes to take us running carrying heavy equipment. His nickname in the army is Flyin’ Brian, but we usually say the Fly. Mine is Ice, as in Ice Tea. Billy’s was Rowboat. Is.

  I knocked and walked in and saluted and he sat me down in a side chair and asked me how I was, by which I knew I wasn’t in trouble and he was going to stick me with some pain in the ass that someone had passed down the line. So after the chat, he said, “Congratulations, you’re our new CBR NCO.”

  I said, “Thank you, sir. I appreciate the honor.”

  He said, “And fuck you very much. There’s a course, starts tomorrow.”

  I said, “What kind of course? I already had CBR training.”

  “This isn’t a bullshit course,” he said. “It’s about nuclear weapons, very high level. I’m going too.”

  I asked him if I should be worried and he said the brass was and had sent the word down that every unit with clandestine insertion capability had to have one officer and one NCO down to the company level familiar with the design and appearance of nuclear explosives.

  He said, “I can see their point. I’ve never seen a nuclear weapon. Have you?”

  “Sure. They’re pointy at one end and have a little screen with red numbers on it counting the seconds down.”

  “Uh-huh, and they have the spooky girl’s voice, This device will detonate in… forty-three seconds… for
ty-two seconds. Well, apparently not, so they started this course. Be here at oh-six-thirty tomorrow, BDUs, bag for three days.”

  “Where’s it at?”

  “They didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. It’s local because we got ground transport.”

  The next day we drove off into the Virginia woods to some no-name facility. They had us in pretty nice quarters, a campus kind of arrangement, with maybe fifty people taking the course, three-quarters military and the rest various kinds of civilians. I had the sense it was a CIA site, but I could be wrong on that. Stolz went off to a higher-level course with the officers, and I went to what I guess was the dumbed-down version for the NCOs.

  Basically it was all about nukes, a little history with some films the general public doesn’t get to see: some background about how they work, how an amateur would go about making one, some sketchy stuff about how, if we found one, to make sure it didn’t detonate, various means of sensing the radiation they give off from a distance, and some information about the government operations devoted to preventing bad guys from getting nukes and what would happen if they did get one and we had to go in and take it away from them.

  They had a guy named Morgan come down from the National Security Agency to talk about communications intel-he ran a special section at NSA that did nothing but listen to intercepts and filter them for any sign that nuclear materials had gone missing-and a woman from something called the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, which was responsible for recovering lost or stolen nuclear material, and which I’d never heard of, and she went on about the various forms of nuclear material and how hard or easy it was to make something that would explode from the various types. A man from Langley gave a briefing about al-Q capabilities in this area, and about the ease and difficulty of stealing nuclear material, and how the bad guys would handle it, and there was a special mention of terrorists who were supposedly nuclear experts, and there were pictures, in case we ever ran into one of them at the mall. The main one I recall was named Abu Lais, but they didn’t have a picture of him yet.