by Mike Bond
“I want you.” She drifted against him. “Leo wants you.”
“We can’t live for him.” He caressed her hair. “I don’t understand, Sophie, why you love me.”
“I must be drawn to killers. I keep thinking I can change you.”
“Even I can’t seem to do that.”
“The only thing I ask is you quit that job. That you don’t hurt people anymore.”
“That’s all I want, too.” Joy coursed through him. “All I’ve ever wanted is you.”
WINTER NIGHT FOG slid into Kabul, a stone wall on Ahmad’s right fading into nothing, the far murmur of footsteps soft as the pads of leopards. He gripped the two water buckets tighter, their icy handles biting into his palms, tried to hurry but that spilled water so he slowed, picking his way carefully through rocks and rubble.
He put down the buckets, opened the back door of the orphanage, carried them in and lifted them one at a time onto the kerosene-barrel stove. Heat stung his fingers; holding his hands to the flames he fancied he could see through them he’d grown so thin.
“Wonderful!” Galaya said. “You found water!”
His hand dropped on hers.
“We shouldn’t touch.” She squeezed his hand. “If those Taliban see –”
“I love every instant you’re near, the sound of your voice, when you sing to the children, giving them lessons, sitting with a sick one, how the sorrow and suffering never get you down. Why won’t you marry me?”
“We promised not to speak of this!”
“Tell me why!”
She glanced away. “You’ll rue the day I told you –”
“Whatever it is, tell me!”
“Before I came here... before the clinic was destroyed and the French doctor went home, Taliban did things to me. I can’t marry you.”
The sky had crushed his chest. Was the whole purpose of life pain, and love created only to intensify the pain? “It makes no difference.”
“Don’t be blind!” She turned on him. “Of course it does!”
“We can live as if we’re married, all our lives.”
“That’s insane. If the Taliban finds out?”
“Who’s to tell them? Except you or me?”
“IT’S FUCKING HILARIOUS you’re getting married,” Owen McPhee said. “You, of all the hard-assed loners...”
“No choice,” Jack grunted. “Sophie told me to.”
“Can’t imagine why she’d want you.” McPhee bent down for a stone on the gravel path along the Seine and skated it across the River’s dark surface.
Jack slowed his pace to compensate for McPhee’s limp, thinking it was wrong asking him to be here. Showing him he’s alone and I’m not. “That broken leg still bother you? Or are you just being a pussy?”
“Long airplane rides stiffen it. All the way from El Salvador – Christ what a trip.” He scanned the rippling, light-flashing river, the ancient houses of Le Petit Andely. “But it’s beautiful here.”
“You should get out, Owen. Home Office warps us; we can’t be or say who we are; anyone any time can take us down...”
“Know what the new thing is down there?”
“El Salvador? I don’t want to.”
“Escoger un Niño – Choose a Kid. Our military dictatorship sends their soldiers into the countryside at night to yank some family out of their hut, tell the father pick one kid to be executed, right there, or the whole family dies.”
Jack said nothing, walking along the misty quay, the old houses and River beside him. “When we joined up we wanted to do good, remember?”
“Can you imagine? Standing there in the darkness, soldiers and lights all around, and they tell you pick one of your kids to be shot, or they shoot you all? Supposed to deter leftist uprisings. People who earn a dollar a day working for an American banana company...”
“You have to quit, do anything else...”
“You aren’t marrying Sophie, Jack. You’re already married to Home Office. We all are. Like Loxley used to sing, You can check out any time you like. But you can never leave.”
“I am out of it. Fuck the Crusade.”
McPhee limped along. “First time I got married was in Vegas, some fake stucco chapel. Turned out the marriage was fake too. You’re getting married in this beautiful medieval church, so maybe you’ll just stay the old-fashioned fart you always were.”
Jack looked upriver to the Norman steeple, a lance pointed at the sky. “Richard the Lionheart built it when he returned after the Third Crusade, along with that castle up on the hill that he patterned on the five-sided towers he’d besieged in the Holy Land.”
“Hilarious they call it that.”
“At the Point I studied all Richard’s battles. He was a tactical genius. But by pulling out when they could’ve won the Crusaders left a vacuum that got filled by Islamic hardliners who drove the Muslims into the dark ages they’ve been in ever since. Now we’ve done the same in Afghanistan...”
“How you got thrown out of the Point – why’d you try to kill that guy?”
“In Maine? I just beat him up. He’s still alive.”
“You got three months in jail.”
“He poisoned my dog.”
McPhee shook his head: no end to human evil. “After this,” he nodded at the ancient houses leaning over the black River, “New York is gonna seem weird.”
“New York’s always weird. But it’s where I need to be in the oil business. And the emergency room work here was driving Sophie crazy. Amazingly, Doctors Without Borders decided to open a New York office and asked her to run it.”
They walked a while in silence. “When you getting married again?” Jack said.
“Marriage is like a hand grenade... Sooner or later it goes off and anyone near gets wasted. Being your best man is dangerous enough for me.”
“If there’s a God, we must be a source of unending hilarity... Imagine, all he had to do was set up two kinds of us, male and female, and he could keep us preoccupied forever, craving and not getting along with each other...”
“Or killing each other in his name –” McPhee halted, on the balls of his feet. “Bush is bringing in all his cronies from when he ran Home Office. Half of them don’t know shit and the rest are plain evil.”
“So who’s getting payback for Lockerbie?”
“Everybody knows the Libyans did it but that the Iranians ordered it to get us back for nailing their Airbus. Bush won’t punish them; he’s going to hassle Qaddafi.”
“Doesn’t help the people who died. Or those who love them.”
“Word is the Russkies are pulling out of Afghanistan. Any day now.”
Jack watched the river. “I just want to be married, have kids, live a normal life.”
“Guys like you and me, Jack, we ain’t meant to live a normal life.”
“HELP ME TAKE IT OFF,” Galaya said, “this horrid thing!” She squeezed the burkha up and over her head. “In the market I nearly fainted.”
Ahmad slid it from her and dropped it on the floor. Underneath she wore a gauzy purple gown slippery in his fingers. “On the outside,” he whispered, “we must seem to be the most Taliban of all.”
“But here we don’t have to...” She shook her hair from side to side, freeing it. “Tonight we’re going to feed the kids, then you and me. And drink wine.”
“Wine?” he laughed. “What a strange thought!”
“I found some. In the ruins of the old Soviet press office.”
He held her to him, kissing her neck. “You’re not supposed to go there.”
“Who’s going to tell? Our orphans?”
He kissed down her pear-like breasts, the tender nipples, could smell her sex. “If the word got out –”
“The Taliban can’t see inside us, can they?” She reached down for him. “But you, you can feel inside me. Can’t you?”
“I can taste you, feel you, smell you... It drives me crazy, loving you.”
“We must be careful. If I get pregnant
the Taliban will kill me.”
V
Desert Storm
Saddam
April 1990
“WE CAN AFFORD IT,” Sophie said. “And since we have to live in New York...”
Jack paced the huge empty loft, dust on his shoes. It was true – in the two years since they’d been in New York he’d made enough money; she was making a good wage too. He peered through a window at the traffic and wet umbrellas on Christopher Street five stories below. Dead flies hung in a spider web across a corner of the glass. “It’ll cost thousands to fix up.”
“There isn’t much to do, really,” Mrs. Gopkind said. “That’s the nice thing about a loft – you put the dividing walls up anywhere you want... you can say, here’s the bedroom and there’s the living room and –”
“We need three bedrooms,” Sophie said. “We’ve got a son and baby daughter, and want more kids.”
“Two thousand square feet,” Mrs. Gopkind waved a pink-gloved hand at the cobwebbed ceiling, splintery beams, broken panes and rotten windows. “If it’s an inch.”
“Eighteen-sixty,” Jack said. “I just measured it.”
“Anyway,” Mrs. Gopkind said, “it’ll be a dream to fix up. Not that expensive, either.”
“I worked construction, summers in high school. I know how much it costs.”
“So you’ll know just how to do it,” Mrs. Gopkind said agreeably. They left her fiddling with her keys and went round the corner to the White Horse. “You’re being such a pain, darling,” Sophie said.
“We should be putting all the money back into the business, not into this.”
“Okay.” She slid her Guinness glass in wet circles on the table. “We’ll just keep living where we are... The trash chute by the kitchen window, the elevator by the bedroom wall, those marvelous cooking smells... And the language lessons one gets just sticking one’s head into the hallway. Particularly late at night...”
“You win.” He kissed the palm of her hand. “I’m so lucky to have you.”
“YOU KNOW ME,” the voice on the phone said, “but don’t say my name.”
For a moment Jack couldn’t place it. “Hey! Where are you?”
“In town. Have to see you.”
“It’s been months... How are you?”
“Tonight, midnight. Washington Square, Fifth Avenue. By the Arch.”
Feeling vaguely immoral as if planning some assignation, Jack watched Sophie take off her bra and panties and slide into bed. “Going out,” he said. “Take a walk.”
She scanned him over her reading glasses. “This is new.”
“I always used to walk at night, when I can’t sleep.”
“There’s lots of things you used to do you don’t do any more.”
McPhee was parked by the Arch in a white Taurus with Florida plates. “Why can’t you be like a regular person?” Jack said as he slid into the passenger seat. “Call up a few days ahead, come for dinner, all that?”
“Regular stuff’s finished, Jack. We’re going to war.”
Reflexively Jack scanned the empty street, the dark buildings, the yellow streetlights, all of it suddenly sinister again. “Timothy sent me,” McPhee said. “Said do whatever it takes.”
“I’m not going back Inside.”
“Remember what we did? Drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan.”
“Yeah, and now the country’s ruined. This new group – Taliban? Means student in Pashto. Killing for God.”
“Listen to me, Jack! Now the Berlin Wall’s down we’re gonna do the same thing to the rest of the Soviet empire... Already we’re starting on the Middle East.”
“Starting on?”
“Who were the Soviet allies in the Middle East?”
“Syria, Iraq, Yemen, sometimes Egypt.”
“Only one produces any oil.”
“Iraq? Nearly four million barrels a day. World’s second largest reserves. So what?”
“And the world’s lowest field development costs. The Rumaila and Kirkuk fields alone are almost forty billion barrels. Wouldn’t it be nice to own that oil?”
“It’d take thousands of casualties to root out Saddam – for Chrissake he’s our creation –”
“We make ‘em, we break ‘em.”
“I wonder what must go on in Saddam’s head. At first he’s just some local thug. Then Iraq’s new Prime Minister – what was his name – way back in –”
“Abd al-Karim Qasim,” McPhee said. “In ‘59.”
“Because Qasim won’t sell us Iraq’s oil fields, we hire this thug Saddam to kill him... and even though Saddam fails to kill him, we soon overthrow him and put Saddam in his place... That was a Mobil, Bechtel and BP deal...” Jack paused, trying to remember. “Then we gave Saddam the list of all the people we wanted dead – all the educated elite, the scientists, doctors, professors, lawyers, all the Agency’s usual suspects...”
McPhee huffed, looked away, knocked his West Point ring on the steering wheel, the old Point expression Don’t argue, do what I say. “Bush wants the crude price to go up. Remember, the Saudis own him.”
“You don’t have a pretext.”
“We will. We need you back Inside, Jack. With your Arabic, your knowledge of these people, their refineries, and now with your position in the oil business...”
“What pretext?”
“Remember your Art of War: To defeat your enemy, first make him arrogant? What if we’re reminding Saddam how Kuwait was part of Iraq before the Brits grabbed it in World War One? Get him dwelling on Mesopotamia, the empires of Sumer, Assyria, Babylonia?”
“He’d know we’re planning something.”
“So suppose then our Ambassador tells him we don’t intervene in regional disputes? That if he takes over Kuwait that could level the balance with the Saudis? And then we entice his Republican Guard into the Kuwaiti desert and nail them from the air?”
Jack watched a slim man walk a white poodle cross Ninth Street. “For years he’s been our ally –”
“I was at Halabja two days after he gassed five thousand people.”
“With hydrogen cyanide we gave him.”
“Doesn’t matter. Saddam’s evil.”
“So are all the oil rulers we’ve set up in these countries. So are we.” Jack noticed his exhausted reflection in the windshield, couldn’t see past it. “This is insane... Anyway, it’d take you months to mobilize.”
“There’s going to be a big fuss in press conferences about how dangerous he is.”
“Crude prices will go crazy. You could fuck up the economy of the entire fucking world.”
“You should start buying crude long, Jack. You can make real money.”
Jack looked away. Had it all come down to this? All their determination and love of country, all the deaths and shattered lives? Had it all been for money? “Please, Owen, you should try to stop this...”
“Too late. The big guys are already buying in – Exxon, Shell, Texaco... Do you know how many billions even four months of high crude prices will add to their bottom line? Shit, of course you do...” He grinned. “Timothy’s begging for you.”
Jack watched him. “Remember why you and I joined up? And Sean and Gus?”
“Sure,” McPhee made a self-deprecating smile. “To pertect the free wurld,” he mimicked.
“The colonels in Argentina? Pinochet in Chile? El Salvador? The contras?”
McPhee drummed fingers on the steering wheel. “Oil’s getting short and we have to get what’s left. And we need Middle East bases. This war does both.”
“Bases for what?”
“For later: Iran, Saudi.” Shadows of the streetlight cut across McPhee’s face, a white-black mask. “We have to protect our way of life or they’ll take it from us. Freedom, openness, imagination – brilliance, commitment –”
Jack wondered for an instant what his life might have been if he’d never returned to the Death Mountains with the Strelas. Never lost Loxley. Never killed Sophie’s lover. Never been s
hot in the shoulder, lost Bandit. Never met her. “It’s a sin, what you’re doing.”
“Religion’s written by the winners, Jack.”
“There will be no winners...”
“All this’s between you’n me, baby.” McPhee jabbed him. “But remember – I was first to tell you.”
Climbing the stairs to his Christopher Street loft Jack wondered what McPhee had meant.
The first to tell Jack that he’d end up back Inside?
Or that the United States would soon be at war with Iraq?
Need to Know
“IHAVE SURPRISING NEWS,” Suley said.
Wahid grunted. “You often think you do.”
“Last week in Kabul I went by the orphanage where that spineless fool Ahmad kept me. He hasn’t obeyed the edict. Hasn’t sent all the boys to the madrasah. Even worse.”
Suley liked to stretch out his stories, make himself important, the little popinjay. Wahid motioned for him to leave. “I’m thinking of more important things. Battles, changes in the law. People must be controlled to create a perfect Islamic republic.”
“I saw a woman there... Your brother’s living with a whore.”
Wahid said nothing. Then, “You should not have told me.”
“The truth should always be told. Whatever filthy secrets, perversions, the Devil’s dealings people do –”
“How did you learn this?”
“Long ago I killed three Pashtùn in a cellar. I told you this when I first came to you. They were holding a woman and doing it to her. One left his rifle on the stairs. I killed them. And now, when I was checking the orphanage... it’s the same woman.”
“It can’t be. That Ahmad would take...”
Suley leaned back, his eyes narrow under deep lids. “Suppose it were known that the Eagle of the Hindu Kush has a whoremonger for a brother? What would that make you?”
After Suley left Wahid sat thinking. The desert people long ago told how Kâbil and Hâbil, Cain and Abel, each had a twin sister, and God told Adam to order each to marry the other’s twin sister. This Kâbil would not do, wanting his own sister because she was more beautiful. “So you each make an offering to God,” Adam said, “let Him decide.”