by Will Mackin
“I’m gonna have to bring him in,” R.H. said.
This meant that the boy would be interrogated, which, I believed, would yield no useful information, which would then land the boy in solitary while the crying baby tape played over and over.
“Give me another day,” I said.
“A whole day?” R.H. said.
“All right, noon tomorrow.”
A whistle sounded down the road. I turned to find Spot looking my way while holding the door to the briefing hut open. Light poured out the door, casting Spot’s shadow across the road and over the sand dunes beyond.
“You guys going out tonight?” R.H. asked.
“I guess so.”
“Where?”
“Hit,” I said, without knowing for sure. It just felt that way.
O. Positive kicked open the door to the Facility, and emerged with a bucket. He dumped black water with silver bubbles on the ground, releasing the smell of lavender.
“Hey!” R.H. called to him through the chain link.
O.P. slid off a headphone and raised his eyebrows.
“Hang up the NO VACANCY sign,” R.H. said. “They’re going back to Hit.”
* * *
—
A CAGED BULB, the kind you’d hang off the hood of your car while doing a tune-up, lit the briefing hut. We sat under the light on rows of wooden benches. A white bedsheet, which functioned as our projector screen, hung at the front of the room. J.J. turned on the projector, squinted against the light. “We’re going back to Heet,” he said, using the Iraqi pronunciation for Hit. Then he talked us through the slide show.
The helicopters would drop us off at the train station around midnight. From there we’d walk across the tracks and toward the Euphrates on a perpendicular road. We’d take a right this time. Our target was a four-story building on a corner. Actions on target, or those steps taken to kill or capture our enemies within, were standard. We’d pull detainees, as necessary, and exfil southeast. Now J.J. pointed his laser off the bedsheet, circling a spot on the plywood wall beyond. Out there we’d find an area with no tank traps, sinkholes, or barbed wire, where the helos could safely touch down. The last slide said, simply, QUESTIONS. There were none.
J.J. closed the brief, and white light projected onto the bedsheet. Spot stood up in that light, his lower lip packed with chew. He spit into a paper cup and said, “All right. How to put this?”
Events of the last mission had convinced him that things were getting a little too loose. Not just with laser discipline, although dudes were lighting up every moth and bunny rabbit in the shadows, and not only with bullshit on the radio—case in point, last night’s reading of War and Peace over troop common—but with ACTIONS ON TARGET. With our BREAD AND FUCKIN’ BUTTER. And although he shouldn’t have to reiterate our philosophy, he felt the need. “Speed and violence,” he said. And we allowed him to say it again.
How many times had his ass and the asses of others been saved by those two elements working in concert? The answer was unknown and unknowable. We knew that. As the reigning world champions of speed and violence, we knew. So to go in doing one thing without the other, or neither, or to go in half-assed? Jesus.
Dust motes followed Spot as he paced in the light of the projector beam. Nicotine entered his bloodstream through the thinnest of membranes on the inside of his lip. His wayward eye was humming.
These people, Spot would have us know, were trying to kill us. Example: Habbaniyah. Example: Ramadi. Example: Al Qa’im. Goddamn Qa’im in particular, with its remnants of the Republican Guard. Imagine had we not reacted like unconscious banshees there? Imagine if zero shits and zero fucks had not been given?
Spot savored a fresh influx of nicotine, affording us time to imagine what we’d reflexively survived at Qa’im. Which, I tried.
I really did.
Iraqis stuffed rags, blankets, and foam rubber in their windows to protect against who knows what. Heat, perhaps, or noise. Maybe light. We got in regardless.
In a corner room on the second floor of a three-story building in northwest Hit, I backed into a queen-sized roll of foam rubber poking out a window. The window’s sash pinched the roll in the middle, leaving half of the foam extending out over the courtyard behind the house, with the other half protruding into the room. I hadn’t noticed the foam when I’d entered the darkened room. Now it appeared to me on night vision as that which was not space. Across from it, four feathers sat against a wall, having sorted themselves by age.
“Feathers” was our code word for women. These four may have been a grandmother, a mother, and two daughters. We’d broken into their house looking for the cameraman who’d filmed the executions of Iraqi police officers. We’d expected to find the cameraman, of whom we had a blurry digital image, asleep in his bed. Instead, we’d found the feathers. I’d also found a military-aged male, maybe sixteen years old, hiding in a third-floor closet. After we’d declared the house secure, we’d corralled the feathers into this corner room. I’d been sent downstairs to guard them.
The grandmother whispered prayers. The mother rocked from side to side. The oldest daughter had a cleft palate. The younger girl asked me, “Why are you here?”
Her eyes appeared blank on night vision, but I felt her stare on me well enough. She wanted me to explain my presence in that room. Or, maybe, she wanted to know why, of all the houses in Hit, we’d chosen to raid hers. I didn’t know how to explain in English, let alone in Arabic, that it had come down to the toss of a coin. Heads was this house, tails the other.
“Why are you here?” she asked again.
“Shh,” I tried.
“But why?”
“Be quiet, dear,” said the grandmother.
A thump sounded through the ceiling.
“What was that?” asked the older daughter.
I’d found the young man hiding in a closet in the room directly above us. Actually, I’d found the young man’s phone, which he’d held while squeezing his knees to his chest in the dark. As the troop’s technician, this was my job during the assault phase: finding phones using a passive homing device.
Tull had picked the lock on the front door and we’d snuck inside. I’d followed the phone’s signal up the stairs to the third floor. I’d chased the signal down the hall and into a bedroom. I’d homed in on the closet and pointed. Two SEALs, Zsa-Zsa and Mike, had pulled the young man out.
Having analyzed the execution videos, I had an idea of what the cameraman looked like. The boy was too young and squat. Furthermore, I knew what make and model phone the cameraman had used, and the boy’s phone didn’t match. Nor did it have any evidence in memory of having communicated with the phone in question. Following procedure, I lifted the boy’s fingerprints, digitally, then searched for their match in our database. The results came back negative.
The boy would be interrogated, regardless. Zsa-Zsa cuffed him, stood him in a corner, and told him not to move. The thump we’d heard was probably the beginning of his interrogation. It was probably his knees hitting the floor.
Through the ceiling, I heard the boy say, “Please.”
“That’s Saif,” said the mother.
“Impossible,” said the grandmother. “Saif is in Baghdad.”
“He sounds far away,” said the older daughter.
The mother held the grandmother’s hand. “Mama, you’re thinking of Ali. Ali is in Baghdad.”
“Be quiet,” I said to all of them, in Arabic.
Back at our outpost, in the plywood hut where we dressed for missions, a list of Arabic phrases hung on the wall. Thumbing rounds into a magazine, I’d study that list: the words for “hands up,” “tell the truth,” “everybody out,” et cetera. The only phrase I could remember, though, was the one for “be quiet.” Probably because every night that I walked across the moonlit desert, or crept through the blu
e streets of Hit, or crouched while getting into position for a raid, I felt like I was making too much noise. My knees cracked, my breath rattled, my ears rang. I’d stop breathing and not move a muscle, yet I couldn’t keep my thoughts from jangling.
“You speak Arabic?” asked the younger girl.
“No,” I answered, in English. I understood Arabic, however, if I paid attention. It was like listening to Zeppelin backward.
I’d first heard the rumors about Zeppelin’s satanic messages back in 1981, when I was in the eighth grade. Jimmy Page, the lead guitarist of the band, had made a deal with the devil in exchange for fame. Satan himself had woven a backward message into the lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven.” Exposure to that message turned listeners into disciples of the Antichrist. I hadn’t necessarily believed all that, but I’d wanted to hear the message for myself. So, one day I put Led Zeppelin IV on the turntable. I found the lyrics in question, shifted the turntable into neutral, and, with my index finger on the label, spun the record in reverse. It took a while to get the speed just right, so that something like a voice creaked out of the speakers. The voice that emerged, however, sounded more like that of a regular person than Satan. But a regular person in a parallel world who, upon finding a door to ours, had managed to crack it open long enough to say a few words. Having tuned my ear to that frequency, I was able to understand the feathers.
I understood the dogs in the same way. Packs of wild dogs roamed the deserts of Iraq. I’d see them while sitting in the door of the Black Hawk, next to the cannon, during our long rides out into the night. We’d fly over rolling sand dunes of uniform amplitude, frequency, and moon shadow as the dogs ran in wedge-shaped packs below. The gunner would lead them while test-firing the cannon.
The muzzle’s heart-shaped flame would warm my cheek. Tracers would bend down toward the running dogs, who, leaving their dead behind, would take off in a new direction. We’d touch down in the sand, far from anything. I’d step out the door, my legs half-asleep. The lifting Black Hawk would raise the sand into suspension, creating a golden haze on night vision. Off goggles it’d be pitch-black. I’d wait for the sand to settle, and for my teammates to emerge from the haze. Then I’d fall into formation for our walk across the desert toward Hit, Ramadi, or Fallujah. Along the way, dogs would swoop in from distant sand dunes. They’d climb out of deep, twisting wadis. They’d leap straight out of the pitch-black nothing. And they’d start talking.
The dogs would appear white-hot on night vision. Blue static would crackle in their fur. To the naked eye, they’d look jet-black and oily. Sneezing and baring their teeth, they’d trot alongside us. Earlier that night, as we’d patrolled eastward across the desert toward Hit, one dog had chosen to follow me. When I’d sped up, it had sped up. When I’d stopped to rest, it had stopped, too. During one such respite, the dog had looked at me, and said, “Sometimes sedition, sometimes blight.”
Months later, after I returned home, I looked up “sedition.” I also looked up a poem by Rudyard Kipling called “Boots,” which the dogs liked to recite when covering large distances.
Kipling’s poem is about a British soldier in Africa during the Second Boer War who, as a member of an infantry regiment, endures a forced march across eight hundred miles of hot, shifting sands. The days and weeks spent marching are compressed into lines and stanzas. At the outset of the poem, the soldier seems resigned to his lot. The dogs in Iraq, therefore, chant in time with the march: Boots! Boots! Movin’ up and down again! Then the miles begin to take their toll on the soldier. His heart knocks like a tiny fist; his head throbs under the hammering sun. Day after day, all he sees are the boots of the men marching in front of him. Boots rising and falling. Boots kicking up sand. Boots disappearing and reappearing in a gritty haze. The sight eventually drives the soldier insane. So, by the end of the poem, either the dogs are telepathic or it’s just my imagination whispering, Boots.
I listened for those dogs through the window propped open by the roll of foam rubber while starlight squeezed into the room. It spilled out the doorway and into the hall. Faint sounds of an orderly, if unproductive, search arrived from the surrounding darkness—a dresser drawer sliding open, a closet hinge squeaking. Someone tapped a finger against a wall, hunting for voids. We’d been inside that house for thirty minutes, and if we hadn’t found anything yet, we weren’t going to.
Tull, on his way upstairs, passed the door to the room where I was guarding the feathers. I followed him into the hall.
“Hey,” I said.
Tull turned around. His beard looked like a wood carving of a beard. “Yeah?” he asked.
“Tell Zsa-Zsa to ask the kid about Ali,” I said.
“Who the fuck’s Ali?”
“They’re talking about him in there,” I said, thumbing back toward the feathers. “I think he’s the kid’s brother. But he could also be our cameraman.”
Tull nodded and continued down the hall. I returned to guard the feathers.
“Ali is upstairs, asleep in bed,” the grandmother told me when I walked into the room.
“No, Mama,” the mother said. “Ali is with his family in Baghdad.”
“Why are you here?” the older daughter asked me.
It was almost one A.M. on a Saturday. The insurgents’ grim campaign against the Iraqi police had begun the previous Wednesday. That morning, six cops had vanished from their station in northeast Hit. That night, their bodies had been found in the bitumen mines north of Hit. Thursday morning, insurgents had posted the first video online.
That video showed six cops, blindfolded and kneeling at the edge of a pit, as a hooded gunman went down the line, shooting each man in the back of the head. Our analysts had traced the video’s origins to an Internet café in the south end of town. We’d broken into that café on Thursday night.
The café was the size of a broom closet. Two computers were jammed atop a school desk inside. I’d sat in a little kid’s chair. The ghost drive I’d used to copy all the files had chirped like a sparrow at a birdbath. It had whirred like that same sparrow shaking water off its back. The download had taken a lot longer than I’d thought. Meanwhile, the dogs, waiting for us on the edge of town, had remained silent.
Back at the outpost, early Friday morning, I’d sifted through the files that I’d ghosted from the café. I’d found the original file of the first video. Then I’d searched for other videos taken by the same phone, ones that had been downloaded onto the café computer but not uploaded onto the Web. That was how I’d found the second video—recorded on Thursday morning, according to the time stamp—which appeared to show the execution of a seventh cop.
The second video begins in the cop’s kitchen as the insurgents struggle to remove him from his breakfast table. I counted four insurgents including the cameraman, who, it seemed, had inadvertently begun recording during the melee. Most of the scene in the kitchen is a blur, except for a brief look at an oval of flatbread on a green plate and a peek at steam rising from a coffeepot on the stove. “Fuck your sister,” the cop says, seemingly through his teeth. Next comes a long stare at a puddle of milk on the kitchen’s linoleum floor, accompanied by sounds of the cop choking. Then everybody files out the back door.
Brick stairs descend into a brick courtyard. The cameraman almost shuts the camera off, thinking he needs to turn it on, but it’s already recording. Realizing his mistake, he says, “Shit!”
The cameraman focuses on the seventh cop, breathing hard and bleeding from his nose. He’s kneeling before a thick vine, heavy with blue flowers. An insurgent, at the edge of the landscape frame, holds up something for the cop to read. The cameraman zooms in on the cop’s face. The cop’s green eyes scan the text. “Out loud,” the insurgent tells him. The cop looks directly at the camera, and says, “Here I am in my little garden with morning glories.”
The cameraman drops the phone, and it lands lens down on
the bricks. The resulting darkness is maroon. A pistol fires. Shoes scuffle. “You missed it!” says one of the insurgents. “Fuck me,” the cameraman says, picking up the phone. It records a split second of morning glories creeping over a wall, then a tall cloud, in the background, tinted pink by the sunrise. The cameraman shoves the phone into his pocket while it’s still recording. The video goes dark again. The audio continues, though, with sounds of the cameraman running behind the other insurgents—into the kitchen, through the house, and out the front door. A getaway car idles roughly. The cameraman climbs in. Doors slam, and the insurgents drive away.
Gears grind and brakes squeal. The insurgents drive for less than a minute, without talking, before they come to a puttering stop. The cameraman gets out. “Peace,” he says to the others, and the car door closes behind him.
The cameraman’s brothers-in-arms drive away, shifting into second, then third. The cameraman, I imagine, must’ve watched them go. He must’ve wished that he’d had the chance to explain what had happened, back there, with the camera. He must’ve wanted to hear his comrades say that it would be fine, that there’d be other chances. During the getaway, the cameraman would’ve watched them closely for signs of lost trust. Perhaps they’d shown no signs, they just wouldn’t return. While the cameraman considers this, the audio features static. Then a gate with a metal latch opens and closes. The cameraman removes his phone from his pocket. There’s a flash of him with the rising sun in the background; then the image steadies on a patch of hard dirt. The cameraman realizes that he’s been recording this whole time. “Fuck me,” he says again, and the video ends.
Rewinding just five seconds, to the part before the patch of hard dirt, where the cameraman’s silhouette flashed, I’d discovered a cellphone tower standing behind him. Intel found five such towers in Hit. Knowing the height of those towers and the position of the sun in the sky at that time of day, they were able to triangulate five possible locations for the cameraman. Cross-referencing those locations onto satellite imagery, they’d discovered that two of them were in gated courtyards with dirt surfaces. Zsa-Zsa had flipped the coin to decide which one we’d go to. I’d called heads as it ascended.