Escape from Baghdad!

by Saad Hossain

  “Dead?”

  “All of them. Butchered in the street like dogs. The shell of your big car lies in a fronted garage in Shulla.”

  Hoffman shut his eyes. “I was afraid of that.” He looked ready to cry.

  “So rise up now, soldier,” Mother Davala said. “Throw off this sheep’s clothing and show yourself true. Like you, my children lie slaughtered, my sisters taken, my house razed to the ground. Yet we still stand. It is time to strike back at the betra—”

  “Wait a minute. You want me to kill Behruse and Sabeen?”

  “Of cou—”

  “Are you crazy? I don’t want to kill them,” Hoffman said. “I love Sabeen. I want to marry her.”

  “Pardon me, boy?” “Yeah, I love that girl,” Hoffman said, “There’s this little snoring sound she makes when she’s napping in the car.”

  “You are serious?” Mother Davala looked stunned.

  “Yeah, it’s the cutest thing.”

  “She left you for dead and killed all your men,” Mother Davala said.

  “Sure, we’re gonna have to talk about that,” Hoffman said, “and Behruse is gonna get fixed. Don’t get me wrong. Plus he might have to get with Dog Boy here. But—”

  “Do you know who these people are?” Mother Davala demanded.

  “Sure, this Avi character is like a thousand years old,” Hoffman said, “and he’s been looking for this Lion dude, some kind of old grudge or something. It’s like Battle of the Titans, man. Oh, and they want the watch that the professor’s got. It has some kind of immortal life secret thing in it. Yeah, we gotta stop Avi for sure. Can’t have him going around living forever and shit. I mean, he’d like take over the world or something. But Sab’s not like that. I mean, she’s really pretty and even when she was like thinking about killing me, she just couldn’t do it. I mean, there’s a heart underneath all that.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “Hey, when we get out of here, can you take me to a store? I wanna buy some flowers.”

  For the first time in almost six hundred years, Mother Davala was literally bereft of speech.

  “I’ll kill them all,” Kinza said. “Salemi and every man living who was in the room when they cut Xervish. Every man who burnt down that house. And then I’m going to start killing old men. I’ll kill every old man in Shulla, every old man in Baghdad if I have to. If Hoffman is dead, you can add that to my account too. I’m not running anymore.”

  And then he sat back, exhausted. His face was a pasty gray, eyes rimmed with fever, the skin taut over his bones, hands trembling as he tried to drink his broth. There was nothing left in this thin, broken man. His words were laughable. Yet whenever he looked at Kinza, Dagr saw the bodies of dead men piled up in grenade-charred rooms, saw the fire from the awful burning of Salemi’s house. He smelled the blood and heard the Makarovs barking. And so he said nothing and prayed for God’s forgiveness.

  “It is not easy to kill the Old Man,” Afzal Taha said. “It will not be easy to even get to him. The entire neighborhood is designed to hide and protect him. There will be Mukhabarat, mercenaries, random street thugs who don’t even know whom they are working for. And Salemi took hostages from the safehouse, more friends of yours, I think.”

  “Salemi thought he was safe too,” Kinza said, in a hoarse whisper. “Everyone thinks they are safe.”

  “And whom can we count on?” Afzal Taha asked. “You three are half dead, even worse off than me. I’m beginning to have grave doubts.”

  “You think that will stop him?” Hamid laughed bitterly. “You think logic operates anywhere in this entire fucking circus?”

  “You were free to leave a long time ago,” Kinza said.

  “Leave? Leave? Fuck you, Kinza. I’ve been shot thirteen times since you fuckers took me in. Thirteen times. I’ve lost two fingers, four pints of blood, and just recently I’ve got two cracked ribs, never mind the cuts, bruises, and internal organ damage—”

  “What the hell are you complaining about? You’re walking around, aren’t you?”

  “The entire fucking Republican Guard didn’t see this much fighting during the war,” Hamid said. “The entire fucking fedayeen didn’t go so far out of their way to get killed.”

  “You know, Hamid, for a torturer, you’re getting damned squeamish,” Kinza said, “plus you weren’t exactly stellar back there.”

  “The guy had a heart condition,” Hamid said. “He was two months from dying. You can’t expect me to…aw fuck it. We should get some vests.”

  “What?” Dagr asked, surprised out of his comatose state.

  “Vests,” Hamid said. “You know, the suicide bomber ones with the detonators.”

  “You want to wear a bomber vest to a gunfight?”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” Hamid said. “They don’t blow up without the detonator.”

  “Hmm, vests wouldn’t be bad,” Kinza said, leaning forward, exhaustion apparently forgotten. “We can always bluff with them, and if everything fails, we can just blow it all up.”

  “Right, half those Mukhabarat fuckers will shit their pants when they see us in vests,” Hamid said. “Trust me. I know these fuckers. They act all tough and CIA, but when some peasant in a homemade bomb suit walks up, they all piss themselves and run.”

  “And we need a sniper. Where’s Mikhail?”

  “Dead or with Salemi,” Dagr said. “And we dragged him into it.”

  “Ok, we’ll get him back,” Kinza said. “Dagr you’re the tank, again. We’ll need a lot more firepower this time, I think.”

  “Yeah, it’s a whole neighborhood this time, not one fucking house,” Hamid said. “Mortars and bombs, I think. Maybe a car or two rigged with IEDs.”

  The Lion, who had been staring at them in bemusement, finally managed to edge into the conversation. “Are you all insane?”

  “You’ve been hiding too long, Druze,” Kinza said. “You want to kill this guy, right? We’ll go right down his throat and kick in his door.”

  “Can you get some guns, Druze?” Hamid asked. “I’m making a list here.”

  “Ye-es,” Afzal Taha said, after a long pause. “Yes, I’ve got all the guns in the world.”

  “Behruse, you fat fuck, he’s gone!” When Sabeen was truly angry, she resorted to two things: foul language and waving her gun around. It was, Yakin reflected, both terrifying and exciting at the same time. Hassan Salemi would have burst a blood vessel. There was nothing in the imam’s lexicon to even describe a woman like Sabeen. If he was thinking by now that he had allied himself with the devil, this display would have easily pushed him over the edge. Hassan Salemi wasn’t the big man in town anymore, however. He was off sulking and plotting, and Avicenna felt no need to pander to him.

  Yakin, with all the carefully honed instincts of a turncoat, had found it prudent to slowly detach himself from Salemi. Not only was the casualty rate in Salemi’s camp prohibitively high, he also knew from experience that the man called Kinza was a murderous bastard who took things very personally. This lunatic, despite everyone’s best efforts, was still very much at large and might be inclined to hold a grudge against the barbarisms practiced upon his friend.

  According to the new strategy, Yakin simply took to following Behruse around. Behruse was an affable fat man, fairly high in Avicenna’s command and therefore unlikely to meet the enemy on the field. By running his menial errands and assiduously plying him with compliments, Yakin was able to squirm into his circle fairly quickly. And now, as was their wont, Avicenna and Sabeen treated him like the furniture, or some sort of barely tolerable pet-type creature.

  “Yes,” Behruse said, dejected.

  “The door was blown open, and he’s gone,” Sabeen said. “Also that other test case. Both of them are gone. What the fuck were you doing?”

  “I had a guard posted outside,” Behruse said. “He’s gone too.”

  “You’ve lost the American,” Avicenna said. “Well done. Why did you not kill him, Sabeen?”


  “I—” For once, Sabeen seemed at a loss for words.

  “Eh? I thought you wanted us to keep him alive?” Behruse asked.

  Avicenna was staring at Sabeen. “I must not have been clear. I believe I wanted him alive as long as he was useful. And controlled. Having him roam around at will is neither, is it?”

  “He was to be our leverage with the Americans,” Sabeen said. “I had him pinned for all the murders.”

  “Do you know something interesting, Sabeen?” Avicenna said. “I made some queries about this Hoffman. No American agency or service acknowledges him. He appears to be a bumbling idiot criminal deserter. Yet he’s traipsing around Baghdad with impunity. He is getting into sensitive information with impunity. He is getting out of locked rooms with impunity.”

  “He’s a fool, grandfather, an infatuated buffoon,” Sabeen said with a wave of her hand. “You can’t spend five minutes with him without realizing that.”

  “The situation speaks otherwise,” Avicenna said coldly. “Perhaps you are the fool, Sabeen, you and Behruse both. Perhaps you are infatuated with him. Six months ago, I had Taha in my grasp, I was about to find the watch, and no one knew I was alive. Now I don’t have Taha, some two-bit criminal has my watch, the old witch is riled up, I have to deal with Salemi, and your fucking Hoffman knows my face. Do you think this is under control, hmmm, Sabeen? Do you?”

  “No,” Sabeen said, defeated by his cold will. “What do you want us to do?”

  “We must find and kill the peons who burnt Salemi’s house. Kill them, and take the watch. That is the most important thing,” Avicenna said. “Hoffman is worrying me. He knows all of us. He can place all of us. He knows where we live. He knows about Dr. Sawad and Geber and all that ancient history. We will have to negotiate with him, I think.”

  “I can handle him, grandfather.”

  “No,” Avicenna said. “No. He’s done something to you. Don’t go near him.”

  “I can spread the word if you want,” Behruse said. “We want to talk. He might turn up.”

  “Yes, do that,” Avicenna said. “But do not underestimate him again. And call the Mukhabarat. I want protection doubled here. I want absolute calm. I do not wish to leave Baghdad, but if there are any more fireworks, we will have to.”

  “Leave? Surely you’re overreacting,” Sabeen said.

  “Do you think I have survived for a thousand years by making explosions in the streets and firing guns in the air?” Avicenna was livid. “Do you think no one will notice a massacre in Salemi’s house? Do you think this is the time to take part in a pitched battle? I’m telling you, get me my watch, and then we’re getting the hell out of here.”

  The Druze safehouse was under a very old mosque, a relic of the Baghdad of the Caliph Harun ur Rashid. In 1258 A.D., the Mongols had sacked Baghdad, massacring up to a million people and destroying almost the whole city, including its famed libraries and universities. It was the end of the Golden Age of the alchemists, the end of the caliphate, a most emphatic end to Baghdad. That dream city, home to all the knowledge of the world, torch bearer of the new science and philosophy, was gone utterly.

  The Mongols had taken the books from the libraries and used them to block the Tigris, creating great soggy bridges of ink and paper. It had amused them for a time, watching the scholars throw themselves into the water in despair. The world up to this point had never known a more terrible race than the Mongols.

  The Mosque of the Red Corner was reputedly one of the few buildings that had survived, by some accident surely since Mongols did not spare mosques by rule. Still, after the weeklong raid, things returned somewhat to normal. The new governor, by order of Helugu Khan, brother of the Great Khan in Karakorum, set down to rebuild the city and try and knock it back into some sort of profitable venture. The Mosque of the Red Corner served as a prison for some time, then as a bureaucratic headquarters, and then as a tax office, before finally returning to its primary function.

  In the course of all of this, the city had somehow been infiltrated by the Druze. In times of chaos, many secret sects descended upon Baghdad, vultures on the bloated corpse of the caliphate, to steal treasures or books or to cement power in the new city. Thus, the Mosque of the Red Corner was one of the humblest, but oldest, Druze quarters in the city, a most hidden place run by a very old imam still faithful to the precepts of the caliph Hakim.

  This saintly old man recognized the signs of the Druze and led them down into the cellar, which was a small room stocked with foodstuff. Under a hidden trapdoor, there was a subbasement, which was a kind of walk-in closet filled with guns: semiautomatics, machine guns, mortars, grenades, and an old RPG, plus rifles with sniper scopes and boxes of ammunition. They were still in their original boxes; American, French, British—a last chance saloon for lost weapons, like forlorn prom dates sitting in corners, waiting, waiting. Kinza saw them, and something in his expression flickered. A calm acceptance came over him, as if some decision had been settled. The fever tremor left his body. He limped into the room.

  “I don’t understand this,” said the Lion. “There is no plan here, no advantage. What am I missing? How many countless men are we facing?”

  “Don’t ask me. I never wanted any of this,” Dagr said, leaning over the steps. The smell of gun oil made him nauseated.

  “He can barely walk. He’s half dead with fever. Is he mad?”

  “It won’t make a difference,” Dagr said. “When the fight comes out, it makes no difference at all. Just stay behind him.”

  “What?”

  “He’s a berserker, see?” Dagr said. “With Kinza, life is the enemy, really. He wants the world to be still, and when it doesn’t comply, he’s willing to force it. Don’t worry. After a while, it just becomes normal. I always thought violence wasn’t the solution. But then, look where we are. It certainly buys you some space. When the rage comes, just stay behind him, that’s all. I used to be scared all the time. But even that gets old.”

  “You are frightened?” Afzal Taha looked puzzled. “You defied all these men for no reason. You attacked Salemi’s house for no reason. You held the watch.”

  “I used to have a family, Druze,” Dagr said. “Three years ago, I had a daughter and a wife and a job. We had enough money, friends. We used to worry about promotions and schools for the little one, and cholesterol. My wife used to worry about getting fat. Do you know that? She used to look in the mirror backwards with her head screwed damn near all the way around and keep asking: Am I fat? Am I fat? Three weeks ago I would have died to get those worries back again. If I could, I would fill my head with those worries. I would breathe them into my lungs. I would smother myself with them and die laughing. But then you have to wake up. Reality isn’t there anymore. What do I have left? The world is gray to me, Druze. What would I miss that is so frightening?”

  “You have no hope then?”

  “Hope? Not that kind. I think I’ve finally realized that. The clock will never go back again. That life is over,” Dagr said. “Whatever happens now, I can never return to that. We’ve waded through blood, Druze.” He glanced down into the darkened cellar where Hamid and Kinza stood in silence, stripping guns, their conversation one of metallic clicks and ratchets, with no disagreements. “Two friends left in all the world. What’s the point of running now?”

  “And I have none,” the Druze said. “After centuries, half my brain scooped out and no friend left alive. You’re right, professor. What’s the use of running now?”

  Dagr sat back. It was the second time he had impressed himself before this half-god. He had, in effect, convinced the Lion to give up. The cost of it was another matter.

  35: BORN IN FIRE

  BACK IN THE BLACKWATER TRUCK, THE FOUR OF THEM CONTORTED into a miniscule space, crammed in with guns, bullets, bombs, and more. Dagr sweated in the corner, cradling large packets of explosives, literally shivering with fear despite the immense heat. It had taken a lot of persuasion to get the truck driver back on boa
rd. As it were, he barely got them past the checkpoints, refusing point blank to go anywhere near their target location.

  “You’re crazy,” he said, as he drove off. “I heard what happened before.”

  Kinza smiled. “This time will be much worse.”

  Then, ensconced in a roadside café, replete with shishas and mint tea, they plotted.

  The entrance into Avicenna’s neighborhood was a narrow street, wide enough for single lanes of traffic. Dagr could see that the flow of cars was being subtly discouraged. A heavy food cart stood at the mouth, and there were a knot of rough-looking men by the stall, pretending to eat dinner and drink tea. Motorcycles had been parked around it, taking up half the street, choking both ways of traffic into a single narrow lane. There was a snarling traffic jam, swearing, threatening, and then stoic indifference. People parked their cars haphazardly and walked.

  It was not such a huge inconvenience. Further down the street, the way narrowed even more. Alleys branched off onto either side, all of them dead ends. The street itself took a left turn and continued onward, reducing in width until it was barely four feet across. It was a neat solution, a self-contained neighborhood, the houses acting as enfilading barriers. Near the center of the mass was Avicenna’s own house, on subtly high ground, like a citadel. Satellite imagery from Google earth revealed that, from the air, the whole neighborhood looked, in fact, like a fort, with a curtain wall of houses, narrow avenues for movement, and a number of strategically placed tall buildings that would serve very well as towers.

  “See the covered truck on the main road,” Hamid said. “That’s theirs too. They can block the entrance of their street by just backing it up. Thirty seconds. Probably a machine gun under the tarp.”

  “Funny, I was hoping we could ram a car right down that street,” Dagr said. “What about snipers?”

  “Two flanking towers,” Hamid said. “Left and right. Plus the men by the cart are all armed, six of them at least.”

  “Do we have to use this street?”