Screaming Eagles

by Michael Lawrence Kahn

  The people around the table purposefully never take off their war clothes; this is their day job and night job, on weekends and holidays. For them, it is a career where they draw a paycheck every month and gladly live on the edge as a way of life. I cannot understand how people willingly volunteer to encounter daily the type of raw fear I’d felt of being discovered when I went to the Iranians’ room. I was dumb, and realize now how close to death I’d been. Even with my previous training, the morning’s encounter has unnerved me and I am badly shaken.

  The various “subversives” are men and women playing at being pimps, prostitutes, road workers, bearded hippies, bums, clean-cut college students, secretaries, and so on. One of the secretaries looks very interesting. My antennae perk up. Not bad looking. I concentrate on her face, figure, mannerisms, and decide she isn’t my type.

  “Jay, Jay? Hey, man, you here with us or what?” Josh is asking for descriptions and colors of their clothes and suitcases.

  “Sorry. Josh, I was thinking of something else.” I blush, embarrassed at being caught realizing that Josh must have seen me looking intently at an attractive woman and spacing out.

  I give them the best description I can.

  Josh looks at me darkly, making sure I understand the message he is conveying that this room is a work area, not a lonely hearts dating service.

  Josh says¸ “While composites and Identi-Kits were being made, fingerprints and forensic found the room has already been cleaned by hotel staff. They’ve booked out, disappeared. Looked for prints and follicles but are too late. Found hundreds of different prints from people who’d occupied the room since their last major cleaning. It’s possible the prints are in there somewhere but I don’ t think it’ll help. Some hairs were found in the shower drainpipe but we’ve no idea how often hotel staff clean it. Unless it was cleaned yesterday, we’ve got nothing.

  He continued, his jaw muscles clenching as he chews his gum. “We’re checking cabs frequenting the area, waiting for their logs when shifts end. Word is out on the street. Deep covers are to report in ASAP. The Wacker Drive bus incident might be connected. Witnesses will be shown composites. Until this is complete, I want reports phoned in every two hours until 10 p.m.”

  He scans the notes in his hand before continuing, “This has the potential of a hundreds-of-killed scenario. You saw what they did. No one came out of the bus alive. Anything, I mean anything that doesn’t add up, call me. Don’t think—just call me. We’ve less than 24 hours to find them. Go earn your paychecks.”

  * * *

  Josh is driving up Clark into Belmont, explaining about Chicago’s ethnic groups and their own special neighborhoods. By talking and asking questions, he keeps me from falling asleep.

  “After Warsaw, Chicago’s the world’s second largest Polish city, population-wise. Same holds true for the Greeks who live here. Only Athens has a larger population of Greeks than Chicago. We have lots of Middle Easterners, but nothing like Los Angeles.”

  He switched tacks. “If we’ve determined that the Iranians have booked out, we send in our print people. Print powder messes a room up totally. If they were still booked in and there was a chance they’d return, we enter with a passkey. Substitute all glasses, cutlery, blankets, soap, and towels. Soap, blankets, and towels would be checked for hair. We lift up the metal drain of the shower and pull out all hair stuck there. Even if a terrorist wipes down every print in his hotel room or wears gloves when he enters, he’ll usually have a shower or stand in front of a toilet bowl. When he lifts a toilet seat to urinate, a man’s hairs fall onto the ceramic rim und if he doesn’t stand right next to the toilet, his hairs fall onto the floor. Follicles tell us blood type, male, female, black, white, and even age.

  “We collect DNA from saliva on beer or soda cans left behind in a trashcan or from sweat on a baseball bat used in a beating. We can even get DNA from blood on a bullet that has passed through a suspect. If prints or follicles are found, we fax the results to the Bureau of Identification in Joliet and also to Washington DC.”

  “How long does it take to get a response? I don’t think we have a lot of time,” I murmur.

  “All prints have been computerized nationwide, so we can get responses in a couple of hours instead of days. It’s the same with Interpol. Everybody owes everybody favors. This is a favors business we’re in. Police, politicians, and criminals are the industries that thrive on doing favors and calling in markers when favors are needed. You want something done in this town or any other just call a politician, a cop, or a crook. Five will get you ten, it’ll be done. Depending on the weight of your marker and what the person believes he or she can get back in return, determines how fast they’ll work.”

  “Josh, you guys are lucky I’m not president of this country, because the only way to fight terrorists is if they capture one of ours, we capture two of theirs. They kill one of ours, we kill two of theirs. They kill ten, we kill twenty. That is the only language and currency terrorists understand and fuck those who say we mustn’t go down to their level, and take a higher road.” I am wide awake now, adrenaline coursing through my veins once again.

  “I agree with you completely. We study various countries’ methods of how they fight internal terrorism. A few countries have definitely got it right. I met one of the Consulate hostages in Washington about three months after he’d been released. He’d attended one of my seminars, and suggested we have a drink afterwards. He’d been doing continuous debriefing of what had happened before, during, and after he was released, testifying to maybe the thirtieth select special committee who all asked the same questions, who all got the same answers, and who all did nothing,” Josh said.

  “By the time I got to the bar, he’d already started his fourth whisky. I have no idea why he started telling me something about what he obviously had not told the committees because I never read about it in any of the official documents. This guy was working for one of the security firms that are independent private contractor companies. They are not government employees, but hired to do guard and security work, ex-Marines, ex cops; you know the sort of guys I talking about. I have never discussed this with anyone else. I know you were in Teheran, Jay. I have not checked out anything about you. I gave you a promise and have always honored it. All I’m going to ask you is if what the guy told me could have happened or not.”

  “Go ahead, Josh. Let’s have it and I’ll decide then, OK?” I answered.

  “Fair enough. Here goes. Within the first week of Khomeini arriving in Tehran, something new occurred at the Embassy. If Iranians were suspected of spying for America, they were killed and their bodies thrown over the embassy walls. The body over the wall was a statement, a way of thumbing their noses at the Americans sticking Carter in the eye and saying, “Fuck you and your American spies.” Each morning, it was his job to walk around the embassy grounds with a ‘death squad’ and check if any American informants had been killed.

  “If an American informant had been executed, then his job was to try to save the others who had been working with the person killed. Usually, he took them to safe houses or, if those too had been compromised, he brought them into the embassy until they could be smuggled out of Iran. The death squads picked up the corpses; most had been severely tortured and were missing limbs. Corpses were rolled in to body bags, which were supplied by the Iranian police, and placed outside a back gate of the embassy in an alley that ran alongside the building. He would phone the police, speak to a special division commander, and a garbage truck—less conspicuous to people living in the area than an ambulance—would pick up the corpses and take them to a morgue.

  “When the guy was taken hostage, he was separated from the others as he was not a consular diplomat. There were five other non-consular officials. They, too, had been locked up in different parts of Teheran. The guards never touched him, gave him three meals a day to be eaten with a wooden spoon, as they did not trust him with a knife and fork, and no one ever spoke when they came in
to or were near his cell. They would look him in the eyes, and not give him his food until he lowered his eyes. He figured that he was in Evan Prison solitary. He could hear muted screams through the walls, and this continued day and night. He concluded that the people screaming were being interrogated.

  Josh glanced my way, I nodded, and he continued. “Day after day, all he could do was stare at three walls, a roof, a floor, and a locked door. He was given nothing to read, no paper and pen to write. He remembered a movie of a solitary prisoner befriending a mouse, or bird, or it might have been a cockroach. He saved crumbs and pieces of his food, placing them in corners, under his bed, on the floor. Every morning when he woke up, he immediately checked to see if they had been eaten. He craved company so badly, he would settle for any form of contact. He knew they were killing him with silence, solitary confinement, mentally psyching him to know that America had forgotten him, know that he was of no importance, insignificant, forgotten, and manipulating him to know all hope was lost and his future was small.

  “The guy could not remember if he had been confined for a month or six months. Then thoughts of suicide became an urgent passion, the most important part of his imprisonment became trying to find a way that he could commit suicide. If he succeeded, he would have beaten them at their game, showing that he was in control of his own destiny, not them. But they never gave him that chance.

  “He lived and he was flown home. However, the locked secrets that clogged and churned in his brain never went away. They were there when he awoke in the morning, his eyes fixing automatically to the corner of his bedroom, to see if something had arrived that he could befriend.

  “I was the first person he ever told about the situation, and I didn’t believe him. I thought he was a spiraling drunk and needed to go to AA meetings. I suggested this to him as diplomatically as I could. He gave me a long stare, said nothing, got up, staggered out the door, and I’ve never seen him since.”

  I paused, took a deep breath, and said, “He was not a drunk. You were the first person he told the truth to. The committees heard the bullshit they wanted to hear because like you, if they would have heard his story, they would not have believed him. This foul cloud of evil toward humanity was crafted and spawned by the Iranians.”

  Josh effortlessly navigates through the Chicago traffic. “This year, Saudi Arabia, a country of only five million people, less than half the population of Chicago, publicly beheaded 94 people. They’ve been averaging about fifty every year before this. The executioner uses a sword made of solid gold and the population is encouraged to watch the spectacle. Special buses from villages as far as a hundred miles away are supplied free of charge so villagers and their children can ride in.

  “Bringing children is very important-it ensures that the next generation’s is law-abiding. By doing so and publicizing it, Saudi Arabia has been relatively crime free for many years now. Would I live in that country and have my head chopped off because I was guilty of adultery? No way, but it’s an interesting theory and for them, it works.”

  We drive around searching and stopping continuously. By two a.m., I am falling asleep, resting against the window of the car. Josh is fresh, wide awake, whistling tunelessly. He has replaced the gum with a toothpick, which sticks out between his teeth.

  We’ve visited bars, coffee shops, restaurants, hotels, flophouses, even the YMCA, looking for a group of five or any new arrivals. I haven’t seen any men who look even remotely like the ones from the hotel room.

  What I do see, though, is a different underside of the town that I live in. Chicago is a battleground where ordinary people trapped in desperate poverty try to function and stay alive while being surrounded by gangs. This is just like Teheran, where committees controlled certain parts of that city, but in Chicago, these same committees call themselves gangs.

  Josh shows me the building where two ten-year-olds dropped a five-year-old child from the twelfth floor window because he refused to steal candy for them.

  Kids belonging to some gang control staircases and stairwells, guarding their territories all night long. The territory consisted of a number of floors or the whole building, depending on the strength of the gang. The kids smoke, sniff, and inject, high-grade or low-grade crack cocaine, or any drug to which they have easy access.

  They are at their most dangerous when they need their next fix and leave the staircases looking for money. No one living in the projects opens their door when someone screams, begging for help. They look through the peephole and may see someone being killed outside the door.

  No policemen go into the projects at night.

  “Would you say Chicago has a drug problem, Josh?” I ask, bone weary.

  “You’re obviously setting me up with a loaded question like that. Okay, I’ll bite. We’ve got one hell of a problem with no possibility of fixing it, ever.”

  The neon reds and greens flash across our faces. “Don’t say ‘never,’ Josh. When you fly into Singapore, they hand you customs forms to fill out. In big red letters, there’s a sign printed on the customs entry that reads, ‘The importation of drugs and the dealing of drugs is punishable by death.’ Ten years ago, I was there on business and had been following the case of an Australian husband and wife and a Frenchman who had been caught selling, and were sentenced to be hanged.

  “Amnesty International, the Pope, the UN, and our Congress all went ballistic appealing for clemency. The three were still executed. Singapore is one of the few countries in the world that today still doesn’t have a drug problem. How do they do it? Simple, on the anniversary of the hanging, for a week their local television stations replay the lawyers and prosecutors arguing, then the sentencing in the courtroom and finally, they show the hearses leaving the prison gates. The final scene is the hearse off in the distance. A caption comes onto the screen, ‘The dealing of drugs is punishable by death.’”

  I am more awake now, so I continue. I decide to pull Josh’s chain and see how far he will let me pontificate, “Look what’s happening to our kids here in Chicago. They’ll kill their own grandparents, rob, murder, you name it, and they do it to get money to buy more and more drugs. When Martin Luther King was in jail, he wrote that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. So, tell me, Josh, which is the greater injustice—the dope dealers who sell kids dope and have them hooked for the rest of their lives, or to hang the sellers of those drugs?

  “Those bastards are controlling our lives. They force most of us to activate an alarm as soon as we go into our homes or get out of our cars, in case some junkie is high or is desperate to get high and our door is unlocked. Kill the sellers the same way as they do in Singapore. Then the next generation of kids won’t terrify us like this generation does. If I were president, I’d force each municipal area to have a billboard on all major highways leading into their town that says, ‘The importation of drugs or selling of drugs in this municipal area is punishable by hanging.’ I’d get Congress to pass special legislation that if someone is convicted of selling drugs after he is caught cold doing so, no twenty years of appeals before you’re executed—execution will be within thirty days. My motto would be ‘Drugs are death. You deal death, you get death.’ Josh, you told me earlier you were not a betting man. What do you want to bet that you wouldn’t have a drug problem if you implemented my idea?”

  I am on a roll. Josh hasn’t said anything or made any kind of response. He is either not listening to me, or maybe is absorbing some of what I am saying. “I’d even take it one step further. I’d confiscate all their assets, freeze their bank accounts, sell their houses and cars, and use that money to establish and finance de-tox centers. Anyone working for the dealer, even if he or she doesn’t sell, would face a minimum of 25 years in hard-time prison. Guilt by association would make it tough for the dealer to recruit workers. I would even pay bounty hunters to bring them in dead or alive. Let’s see then if you still have a drug problem. Obviously our legal system would go into cardiac arrest wit
h my suggestion, but the rambling of one tired son of a bitch is about all that’s keeping me awake.”

  Josh doesn’t answer. Glancing sideways, his broadening smile goes unnoticed by me, as I lean back against the car seat rubbing my eyes.

  * * *

  At 5:00 a.m., Josh drops me at home. I fall onto the couch fully dressed, and am asleep immediately.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Chicago, 7:59 a.m.

  “Daddy, Daddy, just one more time before we get to school, please?”

  “Sorry, sweethearts, we’ve arrived. Tomorrow, I promise, cross my heart.” The door of the limousine opens. “Come on, both of you, don’t forget your homework.”

  The mayor and his two daughters get out of the car. Holding hands, the three walk toward huge ornate gates at the entrance of their school. Years before, the wrought-iron gates had been donated to the school by the mayor’s father. He, too, had been mayor of Chicago for many years. The bodyguards were used to this routine and had been instructed by the mayor to let him walk to the gates with his daughters alone.

  Today, they’d picked up the Governor of Illinois ten minutes earlier, for he had to appear at a fundraising breakfast with the mayor in about half an hour. He sits in the back seat of the car reading the Tribune newspaper and pauses, waving back as the little girls turn to wave to him.

  This is the mayor’s private time with his kids, and the media usually leaves him alone.

  A woman is walking her dog. A man on roller-blades, skating fast, maneuvers expertly around a woman pushing a stroller. One of the bodyguards had been to the Bulls play-off game the previous night and is describing a three-point play in the last two seconds. Though the bodyguards talk, they make sure the mayor is always in their line of vision.

  They watch the mayor bend down so both little girls can hug him. He walks back to the car, the back door still open, is held by a bodyguard. The man on roller-blades weaves past one guard standing in front of the car. He has a large knapsack on his back, using his arms vigorously to give him more speed. He aims his momentum at the mayor, who’s about to climb into the back seat.