by Will Mackin
“C’mere,” he whispered.
I followed Mike into a room with an open window. A boy sat on his bed.
“I need to go up on the roof,” Mike said. “Can you keep an eye on him?”
“Sure,” I said.
The boy’s bare chest was congenitally sunken. His teeth chattered. Blue night creeping in the window mixed with the red glow of my headlamp to render him purple. I knew the Arabic word for “stand.” The boy stood. His pajama bottoms were printed with soccer balls. I patted them down and squished the pockets. The boy was clean. I told him, in English, to sit back down on his bed, which he did. I showed him how to lace his fingers together and rest his hands on top of his head. We looked at each other, both of us with our fingers laced, hands on top of our heads. I told him to stay just like that.
I found a computer hidden under a blanket beneath the boy’s desk. I removed the blanket and set the computer on top of the desk. It was a work in progress, a kludge of salvaged components, and quite possibly an innocent hobby, though I wouldn’t know for sure until I’d taken the hard drive back to the lab, for analysis.
The boy had mounted a SATA drive on a fourteen-inch aluminum rack, along with a 480-watt power supply. He’d used eight billion of these itty-bitty fucking screws. I removed my micro tool set from my side pocket. Opening its plastic case released the smell of the lab—a mix of acetone and ozone that never failed to calm me. I began unscrewing the world’s tiniest screws with the world’s tiniest screwdriver.
Meanwhile, the rest of the troop was wrapping things up. They slipped past the boy’s room. They crept down the stairs. They lined up in the street, ready to leave. Approximately four billion screws remained. I decided to break the drive off the rack. I bent it up, hard as I could. I pushed it down, same. I bent it up again, this time harder, harder—
BANG!
I thought the door to the boy’s room had slammed shut. But I turned to find Mike in the doorway, smoke rising from his chamber. The boy, still sitting on the bed, looked unhurt. His eyes were wide open, his arms straight up. There was a chip in the cinder-block wall behind him, high and right. Mike didn’t take a second shot, as we were trained to. As was, by then, all but reflexive. He just penetrated the room with his eyes down his sights, and reached into one of the boy’s pajama pockets.
“He’s clean,” I said.
But Mike pulled something out. He flipped it over in his hand. It was a black box the size of a deck of cards. Mike looked for switches, wires, antennas—anything to indicate that it might transmit a signal, activate a fuse, detonate explosives, and bring the whole building down on our heads.
Spot appeared, bottom lip packed with chew, lazy eye twitching. Taking the box from Mike, he performed his own inspection.
“He was digging in his pocket for it,” Mike said.
Spot held the box at arm’s length. “You think it’s a trigger?” he asked me.
Triggers were walkie-talkies, cordless phones, and garage door openers.
“No,” I said.
The three of us turned our headlamps on the boy. His arms, which had lowered maybe half an inch, shot back up, revealing curls of pit hair. Shadow filled the depression in his chest.
“What is this?” Spot asked in his rinky-dink Arabic.
The boy shrugged.
“Get him some shoes,” Spot said.
* * *
—
I KNOTTED THE elastic so the hood would stay on the boy’s face. I looped the zip ties back around so he couldn’t work his hands free. He was twelve, maybe thirteen. Right at the lower end of what we considered fighting age. In his closet were a pair of sneakers with light-up soles, and loafers decorated with brass buckles. I led him out of his room, in the loafers, and onto the stairs, down which he moved like he’d never descended a flight of stairs. I steered him out the front door and across the muddy garden of trampled dandelions. Holding the boy by the arm, I took my place among the troop lined up along the curb.
J.J. signaled, Move, and Zsa-Zsa stepped off on point. Bobby stepped off ten yards behind Zsa-Zsa. Lou waited for Bobby to walk his ten yards. Meanwhile, Bobby stared at a storm drain on the other side of the street. A dull glow, visible on night vision, emanated from the grate. It could’ve just been heat rising off the sewage below, but then again, it could’ve been something else. Something that might climb up into the street and end our unusual streak of good luck. The glow surged, Bobby raised his rifle, and I tightened my grip on the boy’s upper arm. I felt his pulse quicken. Closing on the storm drain, Bobby hit it with sparkle.
We each had a device mounted to our rifles that generated sparkle—i.e., an infrared spotlight with a laser at its center. We used it to illuminate targets, and to see into dark places we otherwise couldn’t. Bobby’s infrared spotlight, for example, brightened the depths of the storm drain. His laser skipped across its heavy iron grate. Below the grate, shadows opened and closed like doors. Waves appeared in the infrared beam, diverging from the laser like ripples from a stone dropped in a lake. Which was the opposite of what I’d observed the night before, in Qa’im.
Our target building in Qa’im was like a cubist interpretation of a target building: its cinder blocks were stacked precariously; its windows appeared to be an assembly of fractured windows. After the gas cans blew—further destabilizing the walls and shattering the windows for good—small-arms fire rained down from adjacent buildings.
I was standing off the corner of the target building, waiting for Spot to send me in, when the ambush triggered. I took cover in an alley overgrown with ragweed. By the sound of the onslaught—AKs clattering, RPGs whistling in—we were surrounded and outnumbered. Any second, I figured, the enemy would press his attack. Rounds hit short, spraying dirt. Gunmen shouted to one another, roof to roof. Something moved in the alley across the street. I sparkled, and there was Spot with my laser on his chest. Infrared waves converged, as if Spot were drawing energy from the cinder-block wall he leaned against, the ragweed that partially concealed him, and the cool night air above. Seeing me, Spot signaled, Come.
Spot covered me as I ran across the street. Glass crunched underfoot. Bullets ricocheted off the pavement. I ducked into the alley and leaned against the wall opposite Spot. I remained standing and fired one way while Spot knelt and fired the other. I felt his rounds zip past my abdomen. Smoke poured from the broken windows of the target building. The enemy’s rooftop shouts grew anxious. Spot and I fell into an on-and-off rhythm, like men working on the railroad. Our rifles clanged like two sledgehammers striking the same metal spike. I either killed a dude on a roof or he ducked down in the nick of time. A door opened up the street from the target building, and J.J. appeared.
I covered Spot as he ran to J.J. Spot and J.J. covered me. I followed them through the door and into a living room. The three of us vaulted a couch. We crashed into a kitchen that smelled like meat about to turn. A woman, upstairs, screamed. Spot reached to open the back door and an RPG detonated in the living room behind us. Firelight illuminated the kitchen. I could see in J.J.’s and Spot’s faces that we might not make it. Both of Spot’s eyes were fixed on the same point. He counted, One, two, three, then flung open the back door. We ran into an alley, firing at windows, doorways, and shadows on all sides.
Now Hit was shaping up to be something of a milk run. Or so I thought until I saw the infrared waves, in Bobby’s sparkle, reversed. Did waves diverging from the laser mean that we were fucked? Or was it waves converging, à la Qa’im? Had we, in fact, been fucked at Qa’im? It could’ve been so much worse. Lou had taken a nail in the thigh, which he’d yanked out with a pair of pliers on the helicopter ride back to the outpost. He’d held up the nail, bent and bloody, for all to see, before chucking it out the helo’s open ramp, into the night.
Bobby stopped sparkling the storm drain and continued walking up the street. Lou, not even limp
ing, stepped off behind Bobby. It was uphill, maybe a quarter mile, to the intersection where we’d turn south toward the highway, the railroad tracks, and the desert beyond. J.J., still standing under the shot-out streetlight, took another drag of his imaginary cigarette. Then, all at once: Lou sparkled a pile of trash; Zsa-Zsa sparkled a bedsheet hanging from a rooftop clothesline; and Tull sparkled a ground-floor window, making it surge like a portal to another dimension.
“This ain’t Dark Side of the fuckin’ Moon laser light show!” Spot radioed, and all the sparkles went dark.
* * *
—
SUNRISE, BACK AT our outpost: decelerating rotor blades cast zoetrope shadows on the LZ. The pilots unstrapped, the gunners folded belts of 7.62 into ammo cans, and the troop walked toward the huts. I unassed the trail helicopter, then assisted the boy in the same way I’d assisted him from the curb outside his home, through the streets of Hit, across the highway and railroad tracks, and into the desert, where the helos had picked us up. Now I guided the boy, still hooded and zip-tied, to crouch under the dipping rotor blades. We met J.J., Spot, and Mike beside the twisted and rusty hatch of a bombed-out ammo dump.
“You seen him fucking around in his pockets?” J.J. asked me.
Spot held the box, which was somehow blacker in daylight.
“No,” I said. “I was taking his computer apart.”
“Little something called situational awareness,” Spot said. “Heard of it?”
Spot’s bad eye stared directly into the sun. He handed me the black box to take back to the lab.
“And what the fuck happened with you?” J.J. asked Mike.
“I missed,” Mike said.
“Then what?” Spot asked.
“His hands were up,” Mike said.
The wind blew, the ammo dump’s rusty door creaked on its hinges, and I saw inside. Sunlight slanted through multiple bomb holes in the roof.
Spot said to J.J., “I guess we shoot once, then wait to see if the target’s had a change of heart.”
“I guess so,” J.J. said.
From the ammo dump I escorted the boy north along the outpost’s only road. Plywood huts lined either side. We passed Spot and J.J.’s hut, Lou and Mike’s. We yielded to Zsa-Zsa, in his silk robe, on the way to the shower. We sidestepped the tractor tire that Tull liked to flip end over end while working on his core.
I didn’t pull on the boy’s arm, and he didn’t try to break free. He just put one foot in front of the other, as he had for the entire journey from Hit, moving not too fast and not too slow. And never once had he veered off course, even during that long stretch across the desert when I’d let go of his arm. Where any other detainee would’ve booked it and I would’ve had to chase him down, the boy had simply walked right alongside me, hooded and handcuffed, the brass buckles on his loafers flashing in the starlight.
The boy was, without a doubt, the most cooperative detainee I’d ever had to walk out of anywhere. After we’d reached the pickup zone—a hard patch of dirt three miles west of Hit—I’d sat him down on the most comfortable rock I could find. I’d given him fresh water and pound cake from my escape-and-evade stash. I’d even thought about calling the terp over to help me explain to the boy what was about to happen, right before it happened.
The helicopters had dropped out of the sky with a hellacious screech. We were sandblasted, mercilessly. The boy had panicked and tried to run, and though I couldn’t blame him, I couldn’t let that happen, either. So I’d dragged him under the spinning rotors, kicking and writhing, as sand got in my eyes and tears rolled up my face. I’d tossed him into the bird like a bale of hay. Then I’d jumped on top of the boy so he wouldn’t slide out the open door as the helo made a climbing turn toward the outpost.
Once we were level and headed southwest, I’d propped the boy up against the cockpit firewall, facing aft. I’d sat at his feet with my legs hanging out the door. I’d watched the sun rise and daybreak brighten the face of the boy’s hood. Power lines had flashed below the helicopter’s skids. Goats had run in counterclockwise circles in their pens. Above, a flock of cranes, scared by the helicopters’ noise, had tucked their wings and dive-bombed us, missing the rotors by inches.
At the north end of the outpost’s solitary road was the Facility, where we kept the detainees, though not for long. Just a day or two, usually, or whatever time it took to run a few interrogations. Those who we considered guilty were transferred to a higher-level institution outside Baghdad. Those who we deemed innocent we’d drive east to within walking distance of the highway; then we’d release them with as much water as they wanted to carry, and twenty bucks so they might negotiate a ride home. Those men must’ve told their stories, which must’ve been repeated by others, which meant that the boy might’ve heard them. Which meant that he might’ve known about the helicopter ride and the walk down this straight, dusty road. He might’ve also heard that at the end of the road, we’d climb three stairs and enter a stuffy room that smelled like bleach. Now we stood in the Facility’s lobby. The door banged shut behind us, and the boy jumped.
“Check-in!” I yelled through the wool blanket that separated the lobby from the cells.
Five detainees—most of whom I’d walked out of one place or another, all of whom had been with us since before Qa’im—knew what “check-in” meant. They started hissing their ventriloquist hiss, a neither-here-nor-there sound that served as both a means of communication and a form of resistance. Here, the hiss was meant to welcome the boy, while also letting him know that he wasn’t alone. Its message was unmistakable. Soon enough the boy would be practicing in his cell—projecting his hiss across the room at first, then through the wall, then around the corner and into the future. So that years from then, after the war was over and I was home for good, I’d lie awake next to my sleeping wife, with our children dreaming in their own beds, and I’d hear it.
“Hello!” I yelled over the hissing.
The interrogators, O. Positive and R. H. Negative, emerged through the wool blanket. They took in the boy’s pajamas, loafers, and overall scrawniness.
“Little young, don’t you think?” R.H. said.
“Yankee Two likes ’em young,” O.P. said, referring to me by my radio call sign.
“He was acting funny,” I said. “But I don’t think he’s bad.”
“They’re all bad,” O.P. said.
I heard a hiss right behind me, but I knew better than to turn around.
“What’d you find on him?” R.H. asked.
I produced the black box. O.P. took it out of my hand to see that it had no headphone jack, no speaker/mike, no charge port. He discovered, as well, that the black box weighed more than expected. And he might’ve noticed, furthermore, the harmony of its rectangular dimensions. Which, I’d later learn, obeyed the golden section; that is to say, side A was to side B as B was to the sum of A and B.
O.P. returned the black box to me and said, “If that thing ain’t bad, then I’m Mother Teresa.”
* * *
—
THE ICE MAKER had been a Christmas gift addressed to ANY SOLDIER. Positioned on the floor next to my cot, it played a lullaby. The tap rolled open, water poured from the tank into the freeze tray, and the heat exchanger kicked on. This was just a loop of copper pumped with Freon, but it purred loudly enough to drown out any tire flipping, forklifts, or mortar attacks outside. Days the interrogators played the crying baby tape over and over, it muffled the cooing, fussiness, even the screams at the end. The water froze, and a stainless steel auger turned to break the ice into half-moons. The ice slid down a chute and rumbled into the hopper. After several cycles, the hopper was full. The machine beeped softly, and its red light blinked.
I carried the hopper, full of ice, through the wool blanket that separated the sleeping area from the lab. The clock on the wall said eight. Starlight shone t
hrough the seams of my hut. The black box and the hard drive were on the workbench, where I’d left them before I’d gone to bed, around five. The hard drive, I’d discovered, was blank. Scattered about were all the tools I’d used to test the black box: gausser/degausser, car battery, jumper cables, acid bath, sledge. There was the jammer that I’d used to radiate the black box, hoping to elicit some response. All of those tests were negative.
Now I carried the hopper outside, under the clear night sky. The tiniest sliver of the waxing moon was visible. Gemini, Taurus, and Canis Major all looped around Orion, whom the Milky Way cradled in one arm. I dumped the ice on the ground by my steps.
R.H. hollered, “Hey!”
I walked across the road to where R.H. stood, behind the fence of the exercise yard. On the far side of the yard, detainees were lined up hip to hip. They walked slowly backward while combing the sand with their fingers. The boy was in the middle of the line. I watched him stand up to examine a rock that he’d discovered. He held it close to his face while turning it over.
“What’d you find out?” R.H. asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Nothing?”
I didn’t think it was worth explaining my theory: that aliens had sent the black box to earth as a listening device, and the boy had just happened to stumble across it.