by Bryce Adams
He said, “You were with Abu Mansur. You’re the sniper who covered his retreat from Homs. Where are the rest of them? Why is there a woman on your hood?”
The boy replied, “Dead from gas. We made it to a bunker, but everyone else died by yesterday. Abu Mansur was the last to go.” He pointed towards Celestine, who had freed her hands from under the manifold and was painfully flexing her grimy fingers. “She’s alright. We made her ride on the hood so you wouldn’t shoot us. She tried to help Abu Mansur, but it was too late.”
Ambrose was proud of the kid for cutting through the bullshit and letting himself acknowledge what had really happened back in that bunker. Ambrose added, “By the time we got there, most of them were dead. Abu Mansur and another man had suffered serious lung damage, we think from chlorine gas. He died of shock when she tried to operate on his gunshot wound.” The man made no response, so Ambrose continued, “Before he died, Abu Mansur asked us to reunite the boy with the rest of his militia here in Qusair.”
The soldier didn’t comment on Ambrose’s Iraqi Arabic accent, or ask about their nationalities. “Abu Mansur’s brigade might be somewhere in the city. We evacuated Homs together, but I haven’t heard from them since. They were marching here directly, but I got sidetracked trying to gather more men. Hezbollah is making its stand here, and so must we.”
The boy chimed in, “If there’s fighting, the Abu Mansur Brigade will be in the middle of it. If no one has seen them, that’s because no one else has the courage to go where the fighting is thickest.”
The soldier looked at the kid and paused before responding, “The fighting is thickest right underneath the medium range of Hezbollah’s artillery. If that’s where they went, then that’s where they died.” There was nothing patronizing in his voice, nothing to indicate he was talking with a child. They were soldiers, brothers in arms talking through the best way for both of them to die.
Celestine said, “If the boy’s allies are dead, we’re going to get him somewhere else safe. Does the Free Syrian Army have a refugee center in the area? Where have the civilians from Qusair and Homs been fleeing?”
The ex-officer turned to face her. Ambrose wondered when the man had last seen a woman who wasn’t crying or running for her life. The soldier said, “Nowhere is safe. The civilians flee wherever they can, and it is never enough. Sometimes we fight just to give them a chance to run an extra kilometer on foot. God alone knows whether we’re ever successful.” He looked back at the boy. “I’m here to command the Free Syrian Army, Third Homs Brigade. We are setting up positions on the eastern edge of Qusair. The goal is to bleed Hezbollah until they’re desperate to negotiate. If we threaten to close off their prime transport route from Syria into Lebanon they might withdraw from the war entirely. We can always use snipers, boy.”
The boy replied, “I fight for the Abu Mansur Brigade.”
“By your own account, Abu Mansur is dead and martyred. So are any of his men who fought in Qusair. Help us save some civilians before God calls you home,” the officer suggested.
Ambrose interrupted, “You’re not sure that all of the kid’s brigade is dead, right? How can we find that out?”
The kid responded, “We have radio codes. I can contact them if you give me something with access to military bandwidths.”
Ambrose and Celestine shared another mutual frown, as both of them seemed to wonder why the kid hadn’t mentioned that earlier. Celestine shook her head and said to Ambrose in English, “I’ve been searching through this truck for hours, looking for anything we could use, and there wasn’t much. Those binoculars, the pistol you’ve carried in your belt, that’s it,” she pointed down at the hole in the truck’s dashboard, “Those al-Qaida bastards stripped the truck’s radio equipment, and I haven’t found any handheld units in here. We’re deaf and dumb.”
He nodded, then spoke to the group in Arabic, “We don’t have any way of contacting your people, kid. If the Free Syrian Army has equipment, do you think you can use it?”
The kid nodded, gripping the neck of his rifle.
The soldier looked at the lot of them then ran his tongue under his lip like he had food in his teeth. He said, “Give me a ride to our position in Qusair and the boy may use our radio to contact his brigade. If they don’t respond, he stays to help us.”
Ambrose said nothing. He motioned for the soldier to hop into the truck then he drove them into the grey stillness of east Qusair.
As they drove, he looked back at the silent soldier and asked, “You didn’t mention what happens to two suspicious foreigners once we get to your base.”
The soldier shrugged. “You’re white but you don’t seem Russian, which means you’re not working for Assad, she’s just a woman, and neither of you have enough weaponry to help us. I don’t care who you are or what you do.”
* * *
Based on the looks they received as Ambrose drove their truck up to the Free Syrian Army’s base, he thought the rebel commander had slightly misstated things. There were forty armed men flanking the scorched marble facade of what looked like a French colonial era courthouse, and all of them were eyeballing Ambrose and Celestine. Those were hard brown eyes, sunk deep in the heads of hard-looking men. It reminded Ambrose of his second diplomatic posting, in Tajikistan, where he’d met men who fought during the Afghan-Soviet war. Whether they were blue-eyed Russians or green-eyed Afghans, both types of veteran had eyes that told you how easy it was to kill another human, once you’d done it a few times. Practice made perfect, just like with shoelaces. He wondered whether people saw that in his eyes, too.
As the men on the steps stood up with rifles cocked, their commander held up his hands to show that the truck wasn’t about to suicide bomb them or erupt with Assad’s soldiers. Despite his reassurances, armed men soon flanked the truck, with ten of them shouting at once. One demanded to know who they were, another screamed where you come from in broken English, and the rest harangued the sad-eyed commander with similar questions.
The commander’s voice ripped through the commotion like a fire eating oil. “They’re harmless. The boy fought with Abu Mansur, and I’m letting him use our radio to find out whether any of his comrades are alive,” he stood up and climbed over the side of the truck, hopping down with a puff of powdered rock, “I’ll take the boy inside. In the meantime do your jobs: ignore the foreigners and watch out for shells or Hezbollah scouts.”
As the commander and the sniper boy walked under the lintel of that cavernous building, Celestine picked up Ambrose’s red bag from the floor of the truck. He marked how itchy that made a lot of Syrian trigger fingers, but she yelled cigarettes and the men stood down. Soon she and Ambrose were leaning against the driver’s side of the truck, taking in the moonscape of wartime Qusair.
It was all grey, every inch of it. Most of the brick and mortar buildings would have been generic tan, once upon a time, but now they were fire-singed or just covered with ash from explosions in different parts of the town. The buildings had corners missing, or bits of roof ripped off, like massive eagles had swooped down and torn off parts of the city with steel claws. In the distance, they heard an artillery exchange that rumbled like timpani drums in an orchestra. That was the sound of Hezbollah artillerymen pounding western Qusair into powder.
Ambrose knew the bombardment was preparation for a full ground offensive by Hezbollah’s shock troops. Assad’s Syrian soldiers were hopeless anywhere except an open battlefield, but not Hezbollah—a good Hezbollah fighter learned to navigate the slums of Beirut with a Kalashnikov on his back by the time he was a teenager, and just kept getting deadlier as the movement swallowed up more of Lebanon. When the mortars stopped falling, that only meant Hezbollah felt ready to send in its real armed strength, to cut through the Free Syrian Army like a hot knife through butter.
Ambrose grimaced as he thought to himself, Too bad we don’t have any of al-Qaida’s Baghdad veterans on our side. Those fuckers know how to fight.
“What’s so fun
ny?” Celestine asked him as she lit a cigarette from his second to last pack.
He closed his eyes and listened to the shells rain death on west Qusair. “Absolutely nothing. Bad old memories of Baghdad, and how I can’t seem to get away from that goddamned place—“
“—Because you can’t stop thinking about Jamsheed Mashhadi. That’s why you’re not a real operative.”
He looked at her cockeyed and asked, “Operative. You mean a fucking spy, right?”
She glared back over the rim of her glasses, which made her eyes two different sizes cut in half. “Whatever word you want to use. In either case, you’re not it,” she said dismissively.
“I’m not it? Please don’t let my bosses know. I can’t go back to a desk job.”
She kept going, “You’re not it because you’re romanticizing our work. You live in a world where spies waste their decades of training just scheming against one another like archenemies. That’s not what we do.”
He looked at the ground and hid his thoughts with a smile. “That’s not what we do?”
“No. What we do is no different than any other military or diplomatic assignment. A soldier doesn’t waste time thinking about what any individual enemy fighter is planning, and a diplomat doesn’t let his life revolve around the ambassador of a rival country. It’s distracting, and that makes it dangerous. Jamsheed Mashhadi is irrelevant to this mission beyond the fact that he’s the man Iran sent to weaponize a lethal arms cache. Let him try to do his job and we’ll stop him as an incidental part of our larger objective: seizing and destroying those arms. At any rate, he’s dead; al-Qaida tortured him to death after you freed me.”
“Oh, that’s right.” He lit another cigarette.
“What’s right?”
He ditched his smile and looked straight at her, forgetting how much he liked the angles of her face and that goddamned husky accent. “I freed you. Now tell me how I freed you.”
She shared an honest, tired smile and said, “You walked into the place unarmed and bluffed.”
Ambrose nodded. “Goddamned right I did. I walked into an al-Qaida camp armed with a cheap mp3 player and sprung an Israeli spy with nothing but half-forgotten bullshit from the Wikipedia entry on unmanned military aircraft. So tell me, Lemark: was that going to be possible with the bullshit detachment you’re talking about?”
“It was…” she looked away from him and took a drag, “It was insane, that’s what it was. I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole life. Even as we were driving away, I kept looking at you and asking myself what in the hell kind of mind could do what you’d just done.”
He agreed, “Next time you start telling me my business, take a second to pause and remember who you’re dealing with. And if you’re about to tell me about Jamsheed Mashhadi, take two seconds.”
Celestine pushed him, “The fact that you’re insane doesn’t mean I’m wrong. And don’t forget for a second what’s happening here: you are here to help me carry out my mission, and my mission is to stop the transfer of a nerve gas arsenal to enemies of You-Know-Where.” She stopped short of pronouncing the magic word “Israel” that would’ve sent an armed Syrian guerrilla into the stratosphere.
He’d had enough. He spun at full speed and had a finger pointed at her face before she had time to blink. “Fuck your mission. You still don’t get it—you people lost the second the Syrian civil war began. Unless you send in ground troops, you’ll never stop this anarchy long enough to make sure assholes like Hezbollah can’t get things like Tuva from bigger assholes in Syria and Iran. As for Tuva itself, wake the fuck up: they’ve got too big a lead, and we don’t have enough intelligence to stop them,” he snarled.
He jammed a trembling thumb in his own chest, ignoring the pain that rippled out from his sternum. “Wayne wouldn’t bring a fuck-up like me out of retirement just to be on hand for that kind of failure. He called me here for one thing and one thing only: Tuva lured Jamsheed out of the shadows, and Wayne knows we may never get another chance at him,” he leaned back against the truck, shocked at how bad he was trembling, “So fuck you and your mission. Just get out of my way so I can kill the Iranian and get home to my cat.”
Celestine Lemark began the longest drag in the history of modern cigarettes, while her eyes took him apart and didn’t bother to put him back together again. She finished inhaling, then let the bluish smoke pour out of her crooked mouth like fog rolling off the horizon of a black ocean. “Fuck you, you cheap assassin.”
The cigarette fell out of his mouth as his voice cracked and he screamed, “I am not an as—”
Rebel soldiers behind him yelled: airstrike! airstrike!
Before Celestine could even drop her cigarette, Ambrose grabbed her and pulled her into the courthouse entryway. They almost didn’t make it, as both of their feet slipped in the piles of shale rubble. Outside, past the marble pillars, they heard the chuff-chuff cough of an old plane engine chewing through the air. All around them, rebels recited verses from the Quran while others prepared their meager RPG stockpile.
Celestine cocked her head and said, “Not an airstrike. Those aren’t fighter jet engines.”
Ambrose poked his head around the bullet-pitted marble pillar and looked out. “Then what the hell is that?” he asked.
“That,” one of the rebels said, pointing into the sky past Ambrose’s head.
It came in low over the buildings to the west, cutting through the plumes of smoke that were all that remained of west Qusair. As its silhouette gained shape they saw a battered old miniature cargo liner the color of dirty seawater, gliding low towards their position.
Ambrose said, “No external weapons, no explosions in its wake, no gun in the nose. Yeah, it’s unarmed.” He narrowed his eyes and looked into the smoke. He saw something shimmering beneath the belly of the plane, a bright white cloud rippling through the air like whitewater as it poured from the ugly bastard’s cargo hold.
The plane passed over them with a sick mechanical grumble, leaving fluttering papers in its wake. Celestine walked out and Ambrose followed her, along with the rest of the Syrians.
She picked up one of the pages and blew soot off it. Then she read it aloud, “People of Qusair: do not be afraid. The elected government of Syria is here to save you from the war criminals and jihadists who call themselves the Free Syrian Army. Stay in your homes, lock your doors, and we will free you by nightfall,” she spit like a man, then cackled for a moment before saying, “Wait until the people of Qusair see the elected government of Syria send in Lebanese guerrillas waving the Hezbollah flag.”
Ambrose looked into the sun. He couldn’t tell its exact position through the brown and grey haze of battle, but he figured it was late in the morning, since the kid and the ex-officer had taken their sweet time getting back from inside the courthouse. Nightfall was seven-ish hours away at Syria’s Mediterranean latitude, but he doubted it would take Hezbollah nine hours to sweep through the rebel defenses.
“That was the final warning. Now Hezbollah does their thing,” Ambrose said.
Celestine crumpled the flyer and stormed towards the rebel headquarters in the courthouse. “Like hell they do.”
Ambrose winced with chest pain as he yelled after her, “And now we suddenly have a plan to stop that?”
She was already inside the dark building, and her voice echoed like a ghost’s moan, “The Mossad doesn’t train us to roll over and die. If Hezbollah has focused all of their troops at Qusair, that means that they’re distracted and the weapons are unguarded. I’m going to find them, and I’m going to destroy them.”
He looked around with clenched teeth as the Syrian fighters perked up at the word “Mossad.” A shell volley exploded close enough to suddenly sprinkle fine grains of concrete down on them and make Ambrose’s ears violently decompress like he’d come up too quick from diving. He cursed and hurried into the building after her.
“Celestine, wait!” he yelled from beneath her on the twisting marble staircase
that led to the upper floors. He huffed, smoker’s lungs catching up with him.
She spun on the landing above him and pushed the black hair out of her face. There was contempt in her eyes, reminding him of what she’d said to him outside: he wasn’t a professional. She yelled something about a radio, just as more shells exploded even closer to the building. Now men were running up and down the stairs like worker ants with a rainstorm nearing their hive. Celestine had taken off again, and Ambrose had to fight his way past the flood of armed men to keep up with her.
His body stopped halfway up the stairs. His wounds were back, and they were tired of giving him a pass on the pain he’d earned. His chest burned where they had clamped the jumper cables to him. His ribs were sore where police in Latakia and jihadists in the wilderness had beaten him down. His wrists were flaky from blood where they’d tied him down with wire, and he had yet to figure out a good way to bind those wounds. The throbbing in his torso grew irresistible as he climbed the stairs, until his body forced him to acknowledge that he’d aggravated his injured sternum to the point that something gave out as he reached the first staircase landing.
He threw out his left hand to stabilize himself against the railing, but couldn’t know whether he’d even touched the thing, because his nerves didn’t register contact with the cold marble. When his eyes told him that they had connected, he watched in horror as his left hand once again danced like a half-crushed spider. The truth had rarely seemed so self-evident: he was a twitching, burnt, broken wreck. He wasn’t a professional, and he wasn’t the right man for this mission. Gideon and Celestine understood that, and Wayne had probably known it too, even if the Israelis were the only ones honest enough to say it.