by Bryce Adams
The end came half a mile down the old road, when a boulder ahead of him exploded into yellow powder. Ambrose felt his hands react too quickly in response to the blast, and before he knew it he’d flown headlong over the handlebars of the goddamned thing. He watched hunks of broken asphalt rush up to meet his face and end him, only to feel a jolt of wonder as his body told gravity to go fuck itself. Halfway through the air his hard won martial artist’s reflexes took over, and he hit the ground in an almost elegant tumble. The bike hit a boulder and whirred out its death rattle, but Ambrose stood up and brushed himself off, unscathed except for a bruise on his left shoulder and the feeling of fresh grit in the cut above his eye.
On the sides of the hill above him were five well-armed men wearing colorless frayed robes that blended in with the arid dreariness, offset by a few black and white Arab keffiyah scarves that hid their faces. Those without keffiyahs showed off wild beards and fresh-looking scars. Ambrose didn’t imagine many teeth hiding in the mouths behind their thin, chapped lips.
He smiled and raised his left hand into the air. With his right hand he picked up the red tote bag and tried not to telegraph that his entire plan went to shit if someone discarded that bag in the dirt. As soon as it was slung over his shoulder he raised his right hand, too.
None of the fighters made a sound. They just watched him from their perches with the wary eyes of mountain goats during hunting season. Ambrose imagined them looking at his face: tanned but still pale European skin, sandy blonde hair, bright blue eyes beneath light eyebrows. He smiled wider, showing them what white teeth looked like. A couple of the fighters adjusted their grips on their guns, and another man spit loudly onto a rock. So far so good: they hated him.
Ambrose addressed the fighter closest to him, saying, “I’m Ambrose Hayes. Take me to your leader.”
“You shouldn’t be smiling. This isn’t smiling time.” His Arabic was thickly accented, and Ambrose couldn’t place it, beyond noting that it wasn’t from a major dialect like Egyptian, Iraqi, or Syrian. That made him just another violent foreigner using Syria as his playground. Maybe he and Ambrose could start a club.
“Sorry. I smile when I’m nervous. This is a good time to get nervous, right?” Ambrose asked.
All five men were moving down the hill towards him in unison, despite having not exchanged a word amongst themselves. The man who had spoken was about three feet from Ambrose now. He had two parallel scars running the length of his left cheek, and a divot where part of his right jaw must have once been. Other than that blank patch, he had a short black beard shaved bare around his upper lip, like many devout Muslims emulating Muhammad’s supposed grooming habit. Even in the heat and dust, his burnt-coffee eyes didn’t blink as often as they should have.
The man leveled his Kalashnikov at Ambrose and said, “Sure, be as nervous as you wish. Just stop smiling. It belittles us.”
Ambrose dropped the smile. “Fair enough. Now may I see your leader?”
“Yes?”
Ambrose raised an eyebrow. “No offense meant, but I doubt the local commander of Syrian al-Qaida is out stomping around in the hills ambushing Americans on dirt bikes. He’s probably back in some bunker wearing a black ski mask and making bootleg Internet videos full of Quran quotes,” Ambrose observed.
The man breathed out slowly and something hungry filled his eyes. “American?” he asked.
“Born and bred. Now take me to your leader, and don’t shoot me up before you’ve at least had the chance to videotape my beheading.”
“We don’t behead people anymore. It offends some of our sympathizers.”
Ambrose laughed, “That’s not what I heard the other day, but fabulous. Now take the American to your leader. I’ve got a deal for him.”
Ambrose braced himself for an ass-kicking that didn’t materialize. Instead they led him on foot through rough yellow hills made of sliding shale held together by nothing but the roots of blue-grey thorn bushes. It reminded Ambrose of the year he’d spent at the U.S. embassy in Tajikistan right after that country’s civil war. He wondered whether it was possible to have a proper civil war without shitty, barren hill country for a conflict’s most psychopathic guerrillas to call home.
He tried to talk a couple times, but that just made the other men nervous. Whenever he opened his mouth, they shot their eyes upwards at the sky, then outward over the sides of the other hills. Only the one man would answer him, and he limited his responses to single words like “soon,” and “yes.” Were they near the camp? Yes. When would he see their leader? Soon. Soon? Yes, soon.
“Soon” turned out to be the entirety of the afternoon and on into evening. Ambrose’s beaten up sweatshop Nikes were killing him, and the rest of him was covered in layers of sweat that had dried and been covered in yet more sweat. At least they let him keep his T-shirt wrapped around his head. The al-Qaida fighters shrugged off the rough terrain, directing all of their attention skyward. Whenever someone knocked a stone off the path and sent it tumbling down the hillside in a cloud of dust, they all stopped and hunkered down while their eyes flitted panicked across the horizon. With each stop it took somewhere between five and twenty minutes to get them moving again, although no one ever spoke to get them back on their feet; it was more like a gestalt sense of danger passing, the way field rabbits must collectively decide when the hawk’s shadow has truly passed them by. After a few hours of that pace Ambrose understood why they hadn’t beaten him into unconsciousness in the canyon where they found him: they would’ve had to carry him the entire way.
Finally, they crested a goat trail and looked down into a valley surrounded by electric green fields. Underground springs bubbled up to feed waving fields of barley and bumper crops of vegetables. Donkeys milled around the fields, stopping only to eat the crops at their leisure. It was the first wholesome scene he’d witnessed in Syria, and it was still dead wrong. Farmers didn’t let donkeys eat their fresh crops. Not over their dead bodies.
There were men milling around twenty-odd red brick huts located in the center of the fields. Each house probably could have fit three generations of Syrian farmers, but the families were nowhere to be seen, unless they had put on the same sort of colorless robes worn by his captors and carried Kalashnikovs while they tended their crops under a black flag that whipped rhythmically in the hot wind.
Ambrose narrowed his eyes as he looked at the black banner of al-Qaida’s jihadists, muttering, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.”
The burnt-eyed man answered, “Yes. Truth is truth.”
A rifle butt struck him behind his left knee, and he gasped as he went down hard in the dirt. Ambrose choked down the instinct to fight back and braced himself for the next hit. It came in the form of another rifle butt swung right at his chest like a baseball bat.
It connected with a crunch, his lungs lit on fire, and Ambrose passed out.
* * *
He awoke in a dark shed that smelled like goats, blood, and shit. There was also the sweet mildew reek of hay kept in a dark place, but that didn’t seem as significant as the blood or the shit. His first inward breath was agony. He breathed in reflexively, but stopped halfway through as a white-hot nail seemed to drive itself through his breastbone. He didn’t immediately think it was broken, but another few pounds of pressure from that rifle butt and things might have gone otherwise. He drew in his breath as a little hiss. No one was watching, so he didn’t mind whimpering a little.
“Don’t hold back—just let the pain wash over you. It’ll get better as you breathe more.” It was a low woman’s voice, speaking in English with a smooth European accent.
Shit, he thought. Someone was watching.
He tried to take another breath while she asked him some type of a question, but he passed out again from the pain.
* * *
He woke up when a swarm of bees attacked his torso. A thousand stingers hit him at once, injecting gram after gram of toxin into his body. He felt the pain sink
through his skin and into his bones. He didn’t know bees could do that. What the hell type of stingers did these things have?
Oblivious to the blinding pain of trying to breath, he took a huge breath and opened his eyes in shock. There weren’t any bees, but there were two jumper cables attached to his chest above the nipples. They bit down hard into his skin, and he felt the flesh sizzle beneath their copper teeth. Just as the horror of reality sunk in, the pain stopped. He heard a generator power down with a sleepy whistle, and then the gooey sound of a moan falling senselessly out of his own mouth.
His upper lip was sticky, and a taste with his tongue showed Ambrose that he was bleeding like a stuck pig from both nostrils. He tried to wipe his face and discovered that his hands were bound behind him, followed by individual strands of pain in his wrists that told him his captors had used some type of wire to tie him down. The wire was warm, suggesting that his wrists were bleeding too. How long had he been unconscious? How long since the woman’s voice?
The woman.
“That was the third jolt; you slept through the other two. That either makes you as tough as a mule or as stupid as a donkey,” The scarred man observed, sitting on a metal folding chair a few feet away, illuminated by the light of a single swinging bulb that was so old it gave off coffee-colored light. There might have been other men there, but Ambrose couldn’t see them through the tears in his eyes.
“Donkeys aren’t stupid,” Ambrose said.
“What?”
“Donkeys,” Ambrose repeated, “They’re not stupid. Far from it. Smarter than horses, smarter than mules, damned near as smart as pigs.”
“Pigs?” the scarred man with burnt-coffee eyes said back..
Ambrose spit out some blood onto the table, near his captor. “Yeah, the delicious fucking animal that you’re too stupid to eat.”
The scarred man bared his teeth, revealing a sliver of tea-stained canine. “You’re not making this easy on yourself, American.”
Ambrose used the biting pain of the jumper cables to counterbalance the more worrisome pain radiating from his cracked sternum. “Ambrose. My name is Ambrose. And let’s be real, here: the Muslim world would be a lot happier if you’d quit acting like Jews and eat some pork chops.”
“Us. Acting like Jews.”
The generator whistled, and Ambrose felt himself ride the lightning. It was no longer a half-asleep tingle of bees stinging him. Instead, it was a moment of hyperconscious awareness that every muscle in his body was in open revolt against him, coaxed onward by thousands of electrical volts that sent smoke coming off of his chest and half-melted the cheap fillings in his teeth.
The generator whistled sleepily again, and the shock subsided. He preferred the electricity to how he felt afterwards however, once his nerve endings calmed down enough to remind him how excruciating his pain-induced hyperventilating had been on his torso.
The scarred man sat quietly, examining the grit beneath his nails, as Ambrose collected himself enough to get out something good. He had to deal with the pain in his chest. He could never confront Mashhadi with a rib cage that felt liable to shatter with a single hit. He finally said, “Turn off the generator and save yourself some diesel. It’s time to take these clamps off me and get my little red bag out; otherwise, no deal.”
“Deal. Still you talk about this deal,” his torturer mused. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, looking nonplussed. Then he nodded, and a pair of disembodied hands emerged from the shadows to remove the clamps.
“Good. Now my little red bag,” Ambrose indicated. The clamps had been holding in the pain, somehow. Now Ambrose felt four screaming lines of second-degree burn where the clamps had been. He started crying again, but flared his nostrils and refused to let out as much as a whimper.
His bag appeared out of the same shadows that lurked beyond the reach of the dingy hanging light. The scarred man held it up so Ambrose could see it, then dropped the thing on the ground in front of Ambrose’s feet. It landed with a puff of dust.
Ambrose frowned. “My hands are tied.”
“Yes.”
“So I need you to open the bag for me and get something out. Or untie me and I’ll do it myself.” Ambrose cleared his throat and swallowed the mixture of blood and phlegm that had been dripping down the back of his esophagus.
The other man leaned forward with his arms on his knees, clicking his tongue a bit as he took in the American’s burns and bruises. “Whether I look in that bag or not, you’re lying to yourself if you think there is a deal. You have nothing we want. Nothing,” the torturer promised.
Ambrose cleared his throat again, tasting the tang of blood between his front teeth. “Your commander will disagree. When is he coming?”
“The commander is busy—you’re not the only rat we’ve trapped today.”
“Is the other rat also a CIA agent? Tell your commander to stop fucking around with whoever he’s caught and get in here—I’m going to liven up his whole year.”
The torturer snapped, “The other man doesn’t concern you: he’s an infidel and he’ll die, just as you will. He just volunteered to go first.”
Ambrose pictured some poor South Korean doctor captured from a refugee camp, nipples tied to his improvised torture-generator. Then the image drifted away, replaced by a photo of a small woman with glasses and sharp, dark features. Don’t hold back—just let the pain wash over you, she’d said.
“Fine,” Ambrose replied, “You and I can deal then. You are allowed to do that, right? Now pick up my goddamned bag.”
The scarred man growled and picked it up, holding it by the strap with a single thumb. “And now?
“And now you open it, and tell me what’s in there.”
“Everything that you left in it will be in there. Unlike you, we are not thieves,” the man said while unzipping the bag.
“Right. Do you see a piece of grey metal in there?” Ambrose tried to keep the eagerness out of his eyes.
The torturer looked into the bag, humming, “Metal. Metal. Yes, there’s something metal in here. A grey brick. Some kind of recording device? What is it?”
“Not for recording. It’s a small transceiver. It broadcasts out a message at regular intervals on an American military frequency. Want to know what that message is?” Ambrose asked.
“It doesn’t look like any kind of communications equipment—more like a cassette player.” The man turned Ambrose’s mp3 player over in his hand, looking for any clues that would reveal its function. There were few: Ambrose had the earbud headphones hidden in his front jeans pocket, which the Qaida fighters hadn’t searched. He’d also taken out the batteries: it wasn’t about to light up any time soon. He asked, “What is this little screen, here? How do I turn it on?”
Ambrose shook his head furiously. “Like I said, it is on. And you don’t want to touch that little screen, or the buttons next to it. That’ll bring up a manual override on the GPS reader’s coordinates, and then you risk disintegrating both of us.”
“What?” The torturer held the mp3 player back a bit further from his face, like it was an old grenade that he no longer assumed was a dud.
Ambrose raised his eyebrow like a condescending science teacher and repeated, “I said, don’t play with the buttons near the glass screen, because I don’t want to be disintegrated any more than you do.”
It was tough work, keeping the right combination of tension and confidence on his face as Ambrose made his pitch. The entire plan would fall apart if his scarred captor recognized the thing as an mp3 player, or if the man just didn’t care about dying. It was a hell of a gamble, but it was the game Ambrose had agreed to play when he hopped on that motorbike.
It all hinged on his pet theory that explained men who fought for groups like al-Qaida, or Jabhat al-Nusra, or whomever the hell his captor belong to: they weren’t dangerous because of their training or battlefield cunning. Those were the sorts of things that made disciplined armed groups like Hezbollah and the Taliban so formidable.
What made al-Qaida, a group of international misfits worshipping a dead Saudi rich kid, dangerous was the exact opposite thing: they were backwards and ignorant to the point of being lethal. It’s easy to kill, and almost as easy to die, if you don’t know a goddamned thing about the world outside your village, and your entire perspective on the world depends on what a self-proclaimed holy man screams into your ears.
The question was whether Ambrose had gambled on them being too ignorant—after all, his mp3 player was a knockoff Indian piece of shit worth fifty dollars, tops. If his captor had ever been to the Indian Subcontinent, he’d probably seen one. But then again, he hadn’t immediately recognized it, and Ambrose wasn’t dead yet.
“Disintegrated?” The scarred man asked as he took a whiff of the mp3 player, maybe searching for the scent of explosives. “That was your plan, infiltrating our camp with this bomb? Perhaps you’ve heard that we’re good with bombs. This thing will be dismantled in five minutes,” he tapped an edge of the mp3 player across his chin, “Dismantling you will take longer.”
Ambrose faked a sigh. “I told you, it isn’t a bomb, it’s a transceiver programmed to broadcast GPS updates at regular intervals.” He cocked his bloodshot blue eyes upward, toward the sky beyond the roof of the hut. “Guess what picks up that broadcast.”
The scarred man ground his teeth together, thinking, before saying, “Some satellite, maybe a GPS relay. The type you use in Afghanistan.”
Ambrose coughed on some blood then answered, “Close.” He smiled, revealing teeth stained pink. “What else do we use in Afghanistan?”
The man was too leathery to turn pale, but Ambrose still thought he saw the man’s insides twisting into knots. The scarred man whispered his response, “A drone. You’ve got a Predator drone following you.”
Ambrose shook his head, never breaking eye contact. “Not a Predator; I brought a Reaper. Twice as long, five times the firepower, capable of circling in a fixed position for forty-eight hours before refueling. It’s only been following me for eight, plus however long I’ve been knocked out.” Ambrose had never served in Afghanistan or interacted with the Air Force’s drone corps, so calling his bluff “bullshit” would have been an insult to bullshit.