ASSASSINS

by Mike Bond

  Kâbil offered God a sheaf of his worst corn, while Hâbil the little ass-kisser gave up his fattest lamb. God’s fire came down in a tornado from Heaven and consumed the fat lamb, but didn’t touch the corn of Kâbil. Kâbil turned with righteous anger on his brother saying, “You have shamed me. I will slay you.”

  Hâbil the spineless fool taunted Kâbil, “God only accepts the offerings of the pious. Even if you raise your hand to slay me I won’t raise mine at you, for I fear only God.”

  So the Devil showed Kâbil how to kill Hâbil, by crushing the head of a lapwing between two stones. But once Hâbil was dead Kâbil stupidly felt guilty, for a long time carried the stinking corpse of his brother on his back. Till God sent down a raven to kill another raven and scratch with his claws a hole in the earth to bury it, showing Kâbil how to bury Hâbil. And the children of Kâbil inherited the earth.

  If God hadn’t wanted this, how could it have happened?

  AFTER HIS FATHER DIED Jack had taken an evening paper route that paid ten dollars a week toward the family’s expenses. The first February the snow was so deep he delivered the Kennebec Journal to second story windows, a scarf over his face to cut the minus-thirty cold.

  After he delivered the last paper to an old farmhouse at the end of an empty road he had a choice. It was dark, the wind fitful in the trees. The safe way was back down the long road under the stars, then north till he got to the road going home. The short way was to cut behind the farmhouse barn, down a deep gully and up the other side and through the forest and across a field to the road going home. It was lonely and dark, and Death waited there. And he made himself do it, night after night.

  Now in New York he did the same thing, walked the most dangerous streets late at night, right hand on the combat knife in his coat pocket – waiting for what?

  “Something’s eating you,” Sophie said. “You’re going back to how you were.”

  He tried so hard to not be aggressive, yet the more he tried the more she accused him. He woke at night reaching for a knife or gun that wasn’t there. One night a man walking ahead of them spit on the sidewalk and Jack slammed him against the wall so hard his head cracked. “You want a dirty place to live? Go back where you came.”

  “I can’t stand it any longer,” Sophie said when he caught up to her. “You’re going to kill somebody.”

  He wanted to fall on his pinstriped knees on the filthy sidewalk. “I try not to.”

  “It’s like rabies. Once bitten, you can’t shake it, you need to bite people.”

  “I wasn’t always that way. It’s something I learned.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Trying to avenge my father’s death?”

  “So who killed him?”

  “Some Vietnamese.”

  “What about the men in Washington who sent him? Who created a horrendous war out of nothing?” She went on alone into the darkness.

  He stayed behind her till she was safely home then wandered the streets, walking off his anger.

  At a noise behind him he dropped into a fighting crouch but it was only a rat scurrying for a drainpipe. It reminded him of something – what?

  Rawalpindi. Bandit dropping a dead female rat at his feet. The little ones that starved.

  You never realized how alone you’d been till you had a dog. An ally. True to the death.

  Am I only good for killing?

  Why was he so angry? He’d been taught, taught himself, to be that way: You’re never safe, you never will be. Hezbollah, the Palestinians, Hekmatyar, the Spetsnaz... Never need anything you might have to do without.

  The man who killed his dog. The men who killed his father. He wanted to fall weeping on the sidewalk, fought it off.

  Vengeance is the poisoned meat you feed your enemies. But that you must then eat yourself. Who said that?

  He found himself far downtown, looking up at his offices in the North Tower. Why am I this way? When other people have created magnificent things like that?

  Windows on the World

  “THEY’RE TOO YOUNG!” Galaya screamed. “Please don’t take them!”

  “Veil yourself,” yelled the bearded man, “before I kill you.”

  “My husband’s out seeking food, he’ll be right back –”

  Their flashlights tossing shadows across the huddled children, the Taliban snatched the ones they wanted, skinny boys in flimsy underwear knock-kneed and squinting in the darting light, hands across their groins.

  The truck outside gunned its engine. Where, she wondered frantically, do they find fuel? The Taliban were hustling the boys into their clothes, saying, “C’mon, you’re going to be a man” and “You’re old enough now, this is what it’s like,” and she grabbed one kid as they went by the kitchen and shoved him down behind the stove, from where he looked up at her with astonished fearful eyes.

  “Keep still!” she hissed. It was Yusef, their kid for years, who last year she’d saved from typhus. A Taliban came through the kitchen curtain and yanked Yusef up by his hair, the boy trooping wordless across the kitchen with this man’s fist in his hair. “I’ll teach you to hide like a woman!”

  She sat crying in the middle of the kitchen floor. A little girl tugged the hair back from her face, repeating to her, “It goes away, it stops,” another purposefully jostling twigs into the fire, a third digging cupfuls of rice from a burlap bag into a pot and pouring water over them.

  “What happened?” Ahmad whispered when he came in.

  “They took all the boys over ten. Madrasah.” She turned away from the pain in his eyes. “If we could find a bus? Drive it across the desert to Peshawar with the rest of the kids?”

  “A bus? They’ve all been used for troops.”

  “A truck then. Put the kids in back –”

  “Even if we did, Pakistan has closed the border.” His body felt powerless, his mind numb. The Taliban would return, maybe in five minutes, a day. He went outside, aching to turn back, grab Galaya’s hand and run, leave the kids –

  Oppress not the orphan, the Koran said. But when had he done so?

  He walked purposefully through the darkness. At night the Taliban shot at any sound. In these rubbled alleys the mines so hard to see. With a screech something burst underfoot – cat. He caught his breath. Go ahead of me, he begged it. Set off the mines.

  A green muzzle flashed and a bullet smacked beside his head spattering brick. He dove among broken walls and squirmed head-down along the shadows, tearing elbows and knees, halted gasping then ran at a crouch along a battered wall past the Haji Yaqub mosque to the old bus depot where the Taliban trucks were parked.

  Quieting his breath he waited outside the wall till he heard a guard walking back and forth mumbling a Sura. Then he crawled silently as he could along the wall into the depot.

  There was only one way to drive a truck out – through the front entrance where the guard patrolled. The last truck in the first row was a canvas-backed troop transport, far enough away that the guard might not hear him. He could see the guard now on the far side by the wall, a moment’s rosy glow against his young face, rifle slung loosely off his shoulder.

  After a while the guard stopped pacing and sat against the column on one side of the entrance, his features occasionally lit as he sucked on his khief pipe. Ahmad tugged a brick from the edge of a shell hole. When he reached the entrance the guard was still sitting with the rifle across his lap. Ahmad moved closer.

  How do you do this? He smashed the brick down on the young man’s head. The brick shattered; the guard grunted and leaped forward, fell on his face. Ahmad grabbed the rifle and drove the butt down on the young man’s head; with a clatter the magazine fell off and he tried to shove it on but it wouldn’t fit. He dragged the young man into the shadows and clutching the gun and magazine ran to the truck.

  Now how do you do it? In an American movie once he’d seen them reach under the dashboard and cut some wires and put them together and the engine started. He ran to the wall an
d scuffed along it till there was a tinkle of glass, picked up a piece and ran back to the truck.

  The Taliban could already be at the orphanage, have Galaya. He yanked at the wires, sawed through three and joined them but nothing happened. He found another wire under the dash and cut it, kept linking them in different ways till suddenly the truck lurched forward, banged, and died. He touched them again and the engine caught and he drove fast out the gate.

  The street was black. He drove slowly, no lights. The truck gasped and died. He sat a moment in the dark fighting back tears, tried it again but it would not catch. Risking a match he glanced at the gauges. The fuel gauge showed empty. There was an empty twenty-liter fuel can and a piece of plastic hose in the passenger footwell. He grabbed them and ran back to the depot. The guard was gone.

  He ran to the last truck, could not find the gas cap. There – under the bed of the truck. He slid in the hose and sucked on it till the diesel fuel came gushing into his mouth, spit it out and turned the hose into the can. When his own tank was full and he had an extra full fuel can in the cab he drove slowly back to the orphanage.

  He and Galaya ran from room to room waking the children, shuffling them in blankets into the truck. Two-twenty a.m. With luck they could be in Pakistan by dawn.

  The truck’s one headlight jiggled on the bumps and cast a sallow jerky glow over the road and the barren huts and rocky fields along it. Twice jeeps came the other way but no one stopped them. “Light another one,” he said.

  “Three left,” Galaya said. The match snapped in her hand, but in its brief glimmer he’d seen the gauge was under a quarter full. He’d put in the extra twenty-liter fuel can in Jalalabad; this was all they had. And going uphill used it faster.

  On the upslopes the truck popped out of gear so he held the gearshift with one hand and steered with the other. Through the spiderweb bullet hole in the windshield he watched the sky lighten. The engine died; he coasted over the top of a knoll and on the downhill it caught again. On the next uphill it stopped.

  The stars were paling. With Ahmad leading and Galaya in the rear they walked single file up the road and reached the border as a tiny yellow sun edged over the white peaks.

  The Taliban guards by the crossing gate sat by a fire of plastic bottles and chunks of tire. “Show us your departure permit,” one said.

  “We’re from Charikar,” Ahmad said. “No one gave us a permit.”

  The guard adjusted his AK. “Go back to Charikar and get one.”

  Ahmad glanced behind them. “The kids can’t walk that far.”

  “God will protect them.” The guard lowered the AK. “Go.”

  “Please,” Galaya said through the mouth grill of her burkha, “let them through.”

  “Don’t speak, woman.” The guard turned his back, knelt to the fire.

  “I could be your sister.”

  He tossed his head, waving her off. “I’m taking the children through,” she said. “Shoot us if you like. If you think God wants that.”

  “Wait!” Ahmad cried, but she bent under the crossing gate, beckoned the children. She held the gate part way up as one by one they ducked under and walked up the road. Fearing a bullet between his shoulders Ahmad followed the last child into Pakistan.

  Safe. Ahead a sea of tents, rickety tables of merchants selling rice and barley, trinkets and guns. Tears ran down Ahmad’s face. “Let’s find the children food,” Galaya said.

  By evening the children were bedded in two large tents, their bellies full of barley. He and Galaya lay side by side. He found her hand. “Tomorrow I’ll talk to Doctors Without Borders. Maybe meet someone who knows our friend the doctor.”

  He heard a rustling, one of the children settling in no doubt. A hard hand gripped his mouth, a blade at his throat. “Silence,” the voice whispered.

  Galaya whimpered once. The hands yanked him up and twisted a sash over his mouth. In the semidarkness someone raised a knife in front of him. “Make one tiny noise,” he said, “and the woman dies.”

  One on either side they hustled him between the silent tents on which the moon gleamed softly, down the hill past the embers of cooking fires, the quick steps of Galaya and two others behind them. One went ahead to bend down the barbed wire, standing on it with his rifle pointed at them as they crossed back over it into Afghanistan.

  “A HUNDRED MILLION,” McPhee took a handful of peanuts off the black glass table between them, “is what they say you could’ve made off the Gulf War.”

  “Buying crude long?” Jack shook his head. “I told you back then the idea was sick.”

  McPhee got comfortable in his leather armchair, glanced out the glass wall at the first headlights on the streets 110 stories below. “Clinton’s signed a new Directive, to kill Bin Laden. In Home Office it’s Ackerman’s.”

  “Why just Bin Laden? There’s a hundred million wannabe Islamic terrorists out there. Another hundred million Wahhabis, God knows how many other crazies.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Clinton knows Bin Laden was ours?”

  “Not yet. And he doesn’t know the Bush thing.”

  “The Bush thing?”

  “Protecting Bin Laden.”

  “Goddamit maybe I should tell him.” Jack finished his Lagavullan, signaled for another. The day had begun with Leo’s complaining about school, Sarah arguing with Sophie, then three cancelled crude contracts, staff infighting, a sick secretary, and a tanker caught in a storm off Spain and two days late for delivery to Esso’s Fawley refinery in England. “What do you want from me?”

  “Ackerman asks can you visit Wahid, try to learn where Bin Laden is.”

  “What for? We won’t hit him. We don’t ever do what we say, do we? Remember in the Gulf War how Bush incited all the Nassiriyah Shiites to rebel against Saddam, then let him chopper them to death? Thousands of them? Then how we incited the Kurds... and let Saddam bomb the shit out of them –”

  “That was Bush. The Saudis told him they didn’t want Iraq to be a democracy, make them look bad.”

  “I’ve never told you about this – still can’t. But imagine a situation where we’ve been hit by terrorists, like in Lebanon. Lose lots of people. And one of our guys goes in and finds the terrorists’ base. Tells Home Office the next day. And Home Office does nothing...” He shook his head. “And now you want me to intercede again? With Wahid?”

  “You heard what happened? With Saddam?”

  “I’m outside the loop. Where I want to be.”

  “We recruited a bunch of his top officers, to take over when we do a coup d’état. They all had phones, direct lines to Home Office.”

  “That was stupid.”

  “Turns out Saddam’s intel guys have been studying all our coups, and figured us out. They arrested, tortured and executed the whole bunch. Then one of Saddam’s intel guys calls Home Office on one of those phones, says “All your men are dead. Pack up and go home.”

  “That is awful. Like when we fed the Shiites and the Peshmergas to him.”

  “Every war has its expendables. Christ, you know that.”

  “Every time we kill people for some strategic reason we’re assassins.”

  “Churchill and Coventry?” McPhee watched a wisp of fog flit past the glass wall. “Ever count all the people you know you’ve killed? I’ve killed at least sixty, maybe a hundred, if you include probables.” McPhee chewed his lip. “It’s why we crash and burn, guys like us. The drugs and booze, the shitty lives on weird little islands –”

  “I haven’t crashed and burned.”

  Wearily McPhee shook his head. “I hope you never do.”

  Beyond the glass the fog shifted and folded about itself, reflecting and shimmering. McPhee glanced up. “Jesus! Is this building moving?”

  “Supposed to. Bends with the wind.”

  “Spooky.” McPhee raised a finger. “You know about the Saddams?”

  “Him and his sons? So what?”

  “I mean S-A-D-M – Sp
ecial Atomic Demolition Munitions. The Soviets’ friendly backpack nukes.”

  “We’ve got the same damn things. The Davy Crocket, the W-54 – one man can carry it in a suitcase, in the trunk of a car, leave it somewhere and blow up a whole city.”

  “The Soviets still have a shitload. And a lot of them have vanished.”

  Jack sat back pinching the bridge of his nose. “What about it?”

  “Bin Laden has some.”

  “You’re not going to get me back Inside, Owen. Not for anything.”

  “There are things our country asks us to do –”

  “Like they taught us in Sin City: Some orders are immoral to obey.”

  “Yeah? Which ones?”

  “The ones that do unnecessary harm.”

  “That’s a nice idea. Necessary harm.” McPhee tapped his ring on the table edge. “Clinton and Gore aren’t like Bush. They want Bin Laden.”

  “We’d just let him go...” Jack finished his whiskey. “Every day I thank God for my wife and kids. Every meal I thank God that I’m alive to eat it.”

  “You got a great family. You and Sophie are so close... Maybe I’m jealous?” McPhee chuckled to cut the seriousness of what he’d said. “Not that I believe in marriage.” He stood. “Speaking of Sophie, here she is!”

  She dropped her raincoat on a chair, hugged McPhee, kissed Jack and sat with her hand over his. “What I don’t understand,” McPhee said to her, “is what you see in this guy –”

  She ordered a Guinness. “He’s not who he seems.”

  McPhee drained his glass. “And Doctors Without Borders?”

  “Growing fast. Seems to be no end to suffering in the world...”

  “Horrible, the way the world is,” McPhee said agreeably.

  “Most of it caused by wars.”

  “Too bad it’s foggy,” Jack said. “No matter how many times I come here I still get blown away by the view.”

  “Windows on the World,” McPhee said amicably. “We’re high enough to see half the damn way round it.”

  “What people don’t say,” she said, “is how beautiful these towers are. Imagine building two whole cities in the air. When two thousand years ago we lived in caves.”