by Mike Bond
Finally they slept, half-sitting side by side on the sofa, her head against the shoulder Sophie once had healed. Then on the bed, dressed, under the coverlet. At the muezzin’s first wail she ordered four room service breakfasts, two for each.
At the door he reached out to touch the side of her cheek, the hard bone beneath the soft skin. “Go home. Your dying here does nobody any good.”
She pulled back. “Nor does yours.”
BACK IN DC there seemed no threat of war. The streets busy with people, shoppers with bags of expensive trinkets, newspapers stories about movie actor love affairs and TV shows where people get marooned in fake settings.
Survivor – they don’t even know what that means.
War movies, video games of killing people... War so sickening, horrifying, breaks your heart – how, he wondered sadly, can anyone be excited by that?
An obese young woman passed him, a sweatshirt tented over her vast bulk, on it the words No Man’s Good Enough for This Girl. Don’t you understand, Jack wanted to ask her, when there’s such a fatal disconnect between what you think and what is real you’re headed for disaster?
“FINEST RECON I ever saw,” Levi Ackerman said. “If anyone could do it you’re the one.”
“Rumsfeld’s seen it? Powell? The other Principles?”
“Jack –” Ackerman crossed to his office window. “Timothy’s got data that conflicts with yours. Sat photos, other agents’ reports of WMDs.”
“All he’s got is the Kurds and Chalabi, who say whatever he tells them to.”
“It’s what the President wants to hear.”
“What he said in the State of the Union – that they have tons of anthrax, sarin, and botulism – he knows they don’t! How many times have we told him! He said they have thirty thousand warheads – Christ, they can’t even clean their streets! And Al-Qaeda – Bush says the Iraqis are protecting them – it’s a lie! Why?”
Ackerman rubbed his stump. “Not mine to reason why. Or yours either.”
“I’m not inventing an excuse for war.”
Ackerman looked like an oncologist giving a patient bad news. “You keep a copy?”
“My report? Of course not.”
“Because it didn’t happen anymore. That’s an order from the White House. In three days we go into Iraq. Massive force, killing everything in sight. SF already controls a quarter of the country and if we have to we’ll flatten the rest.”
“Iraq’s an independent country – of course they’ll fight back! But they’ve done us no harm! It’s sick.”
Ackerman sighed. “There’s many ways to think of this. Sure, you can say no war, no war no matter what –”
“I’m not saying that.”
“ – or you can look at it like some people in the Administration do, as a chance to change the world.” He leaned forward, earnest. “Look, we know the Muslim world has been stuck in the Middle Ages, a totalitarian Fascist theocracy with no human rights, no personal freedoms... And an insane determination to control the world...”
“War won’t change that! It just plays into their hands – the West as the cause of all the problems and backwardness in the Muslim world!” Jack shook his head in frustration. “You and I have spent years fighting wars. We know no war changes anything for the good.”
“World War Two? When my family was dying in Treblinka?”
“World War Two was caused by World War One – Christ, you know that!”
“Suppose we knock off Saddam and install a democratic process in Iraq? Suppose we can slowly help the Muslim world evolve into freedom and democracy? Consider it a preemptive strike, against everything that threatens our future.”
“You don’t convince people by killing their families and friends. If we want to change the Muslim world, take some of the billions we’d spend on this war – trillions probably – and build clinics and schools and libraries and all the other things civilization means.”
“That doesn’t sell weapons, Jack. Anyway it’s too late now, the President’s decided.”
“What about the Iraqi people? These poor civilians –”
“President says we’re liberating them.” Ackerman stared at him. “Get over it.”
“Can’t you see, what’s become of us?”
“Soldiers follow orders.”
“Not evil ones.”
“The White House is determined. Don’t get in their way.”
“And all these people will die...” Jack stopped at the door. “Fuck you all, you miserable evil bastards. I’ll find Bin Laden without you.”
“Not likely. Timothy wants you back in Afghanistan, holding Wahid’s hand. Building on our success there, he calls it.”
MIDNIGHT IN DC WAS 08:00 IN BAGHDAD. He called the Palestine. How strange war has become; we can chat in its midst. Isabelle answered breathless. “I was dashing out to a Foreign Ministry press conference. They’re allowing more inspectors – everything Bush asked for!”
“Get out now. Don’t make me say why. Please?”
“Come on, Jack. Bush won’t dare attack! Our chief weapons inspector, Dr. Kelly, he’s told Blair there’s no WMD’s. So there’s no possible excuse –”
“Cheney and Bush are pushing this insane story that Saddam was involved in planning 9/11. They’ve just made it up, but Bush keeps repeating it on TV and now seventy per cent of Americans believe it.”
“It can’t happen, this war.”
“It’s going to. So go home. Now!”
“Don’t try to order me! Got to go! Bye!”
He sat with the dead phone in his hand. If she won’t get out it’s her fault.
What if he flew to Baghdad, tried to convince her? Would she leave then?
Don’t order me around, she’d said.
“If you want to make a call,” said a recording in the phone, an annoyed woman’s voice, “please hang up and try again.”
He stood at the window, seeing and not noticing the city lights. Do what you have to do, before what you want to do.
Bin Laden could be anywhere among the hundred fifty million Pakistanis, nearly all fanatic America-hating Muslims. How easy would it be for him to hide?
And one American alone wandering the hills, not speaking the dialects – what chance would he have to find him?
Bring ‘em On
CITIES AFIRE, bloodied bodies, crushing heat of rockets and bombs – relentless and implacable the Americans tore into Iraq. From Kabul Jack hunted the TV for news of Isabelle, even a glimpse of her face.
But all he found was TV commentators with perfect hair, the grinning generals trying to look severe before the cameras, the antiseptic films of rockets zeroing in as if this were a video game and there weren’t thousands of terrified Iraqi draftees burning to death or being blown apart, thousands of frightened eager young Americans soon to be killed or crippled.
We make no judgment about this, the journalists said. We’re just reporting. But isn’t it exciting? Don’t we feel important? For our viewers nothing’s more romantic than war.
How can you feel no shame? he yelled at them. Why do you legitimize this?
Isabelle’s cell phone didn’t answer; he called the Palestine but the lines were down. BBC mentioned an unnamed Independent correspondent in a battle south of Ramadi and he felt a deep prickly fear and went out into the spring rain, hearing its soft susurration and trying to reach her in his mind.
All spring and early summer in Pakistan’s Toba Kakhar mountains he wandered from one hardscrabble farm to the next, asking, “Have you news of Osama?”
The men inspected him with cold distance, not trusting his Afghani accent. One night in a smoky hut a young man with fierce eyes said in English, “I know who you are.”
Jack said nothing. “You’re going to be killed,” the man said. “Osama’s not here.”
“I understand some English,” Jack answered. “What are you saying?”
The man nodded out the door at the wind-bitten hills. “In the morning t
ake the trail down to Qamr-ud. Go back to Afghanistan. People here intend to kill you.”
“I’m looking for Osama.”
“All you’ll find is death.”
AS THE SPRING RAINS turned to searing summer in Afghanistan the Taliban slid away to tend their opium fields and beat their women. The tribal warlords stockpiled their American weapons and dollars, and lauded democracy to the few reporters who hadn’t run away to be embedded with the Americans in Iraq.
He’d heard Isabelle was still in Baghdad. But she doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t mean anything to her. My job is find Bin Laden. He imagined a medieval knight on a hopeless quest dedicated to a woman who barely knew he existed.
Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda weren’t stupid. They had the whole Muslim world to hide in.
GW had pranced across the deck of the Abraham Lincoln in his soldier suit taunting “Bring ‘em on” at the young Iraqis huddled in the ruins of their country. He who had never heard a bullet fired in anger, had never killed anything but tame ducks in a pond, who had dodged the war that killed Jack’s father. He who would never be endangered by such a boast.
And when any country is attacked, weren’t those who join the aggressors called traitors, and those who defend it called patriots? Wouldn’t most Iraqis want to be patriots?
The war went on, and on. In the Afghani fields once drenched in blood the red poppies danced; it was going to be a good opium year. In Kabul now were hamburger stands and bars, more whorehouses than mosques; you could buy an AK for a handful of dollars. The opium lords drove Hummers and took over people’s homes and bought whatever girls or boys they wanted. The opium went out the old way, across the Hindu Kush, or in planes out of Uzbekistan, and a month later hit the streets of New York, London, Moscow and LA. “I was wrong,” Wahid told Jack when they met by chance one day in Kabul. “Capitalism is a good thing.”
15:20, a day in November, the sky grim. When the satphone buzzed Jack was standing in a bitter sandy wind questioning five farmers caught up in a sweep near the Pakistan border. “Morning, Levi,” he said. “You’re working early.”
“Iraq’s not going well,” Ackerman said after a moment’s silence. “They want you back in Baghdad, talking to people like you did before. Then to go out with some of our units, see what’s going wrong. They need some ground truth, Jack.”
“Who’s they? Timothy? Rumsfeld? Powell? I only wish they were in a Humvee with no armor going into a firefight, instead of some poor kids from Michigan or Georgia.”
“Timothy’s got one. A yellow Hummer. Drives it to the White House every day.”
“At least it’s the right color.”
Ackerman snickered, ten thousand miles away. “We’re getting into quicksand in Iraq. There’s no viewpoint we can trust. You’re American but you speak the lingo, understand the culture... Tampa’s begging us for on-the-ground shit.”
“Since when do they care about Intel? It’s their war, let them rot in it.”
“They’re not the ones dying, Jack. Bush doesn’t care how many guys we lose, how much it costs, for him it’s an ego thing. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice – they’re nuts, but we can’t change that. The change has to come from the JCs – they’ve got to see they’re being fucked over again like Vietnam, by a bunch of scumbag politicians.”
“Our Joint Chiefs? They’re finally getting to play with all their Tonka Toys. They should be happy –”
“Tenet’s with us, Jack. He knows it’s a clusterfuck.”
“He backed up Powell at the UN, nodding every time that asshole lied about WMDs. When the French Foreign Minister told Powell to his face he was lying, that there were no WMD’s.”
“He got set up by Cheney – the Niger letter.”
“Since when does the CIA Director get set up by an obvious fake?”
Ackerman cleared his throat, taking his time. “When your Dad died I promised myself I’d always watch over you, try to help you any way he would’ve wanted –”
“You got me into West Point. Before I fucked it up.”
“You got you into West Point. I just let them know you were coming.” Again Ackerman cleared his throat. “Could you talk to your old sources in Iraq? Then go out with some of our units, not SF but National Guard, see how the situation looks? Just a SITREP, we can really use it. We’ll be reminding the Principals, the Joint Chiefs, Here’s the guy who was right before, who you ignored before, and here’s what he says now – that kind of thing.”
“Fuck them.” Jack shook his head as if Ackerman could see. “Fuck you too, Levi.”
“Don’t do it for me. Do it for those kids from Michigan or Georgia. The ones in Humvees with no armor.”
FROM A SHATTERED BALCONY Jack scoped for snipers in the ruins of Najaf. Two weeks he’d been in Iraq and already knew there was no exit. Ambushes, mines, car bombs, hit and run. Vietnam again. You can slaughter them by the hundreds of thousands but they will eventually win. As Colonel Sama had said nearly a year ago: Our cities will kill you.
The cordite smog of automatic rifles lay thick in the air. Beyond the broken-toothed buildings bodies bobbed in the Euphrates under black-red skies. Fires from A-10 bombing runs spat up sheets of flaming air that writhed like tormented demons.
A random round wailed off the sheet metal over his head. He grunted with displeasure and crawled along the balcony to the stairwell, crablegged down to the CP.
“Can you believe this?” Colonel Eames glanced up from his laptop. “That picture of Bush at the Thanksgiving dinner last week – handing out this huge turkey to the troops? Turns out it was false. A plastic turkey.”
“That fits.”
“Yeah. It fits.”
“After I visit the locals I’m going out with some Reserve unit. Company Commander named Mudge, Major Elwin Mudge. Heard of him?”
Still watching his computer screen, Eames shook his head.
“I’m supposed to see what kind of situations they’re getting themselves into.”
“That’s easy. They’re the ones taking the casualties these days.”
MORTARS HAD HIT Ibrahim’s refinery, and the crude pipeline had been blown. One of the diesel storage tanks was still burning. “We can’t put it out,” Ibrahim said. “Our men get shot by snipers.”
He was thinner, weary black circles under his eyes. “We can’t get food or pay our people. My wife’s sister and her husband and two kids were shot last week because they didn’t stop at a checkpoint. My son’s school was blown up. Every school, hospital and museum pillaged and burned. I told you –”
“And I told them.”
“Killing thousands of people, destroying whole cities and towns, you’re turning the whole country against you. The whole Muslim world. My son’s nineteen. Three of his schoolmates have already joined the fedayeen. Good middle-class kids. I keep begging him not to, but some day he will. Soon he’ll be killing your Marines. Or they’ll be killing him.”
Jack thought of the young man in Baltimore Orioles jacket when he’d waited for Professor Younous in the Physics Building. Pearl Jam the kid was listening to. And worrying about some physics problem. “Together, Ibrahim, Americans and Iraqis,” he didn’t believe it but said it anyway, “we can work this out.”
“I’m sorry, my friend. I can’t support or defend you anymore.”
HE GRABBED A RIDE with a National Guard engineering unit headed to Ramadi, guys with thick glasses and potbellies outlandish in their new desert camo. They handled their guns inexpertly and were uncomfortable in their helmets. Jack felt sorry for them and wanted to be far from them if something happened.
They crossed a wasteland of blasted mud-brick villages, shattered palms teetering over withered canals. Bullet-pummeled vehicles sprawled along the road: burnt-out cars and trucks, a semi on its back, its load of wheat spilled randomly, two contorted Humvees like moths burnt by a flame. A stench of rotten bodies, corpses chewed by dogs and ravens, a blackened car whose occupants had crawled into the ditch to die.
The men looked out, impassive, on this wreckage of a nation. “I didn’t want to be here,” one said. “But now people are shooting at me. I have to kill them or they kill me.”
“I never seen anything like this,” said a big black sergeant with a gap in his front teeth and wideset ears. “Long as I live I’m going to remember this time.”
“Yeah,” the first laughed. “Long as you live.”
IN RAMADI he tried to reach Colonel Nureddin Sama at the base but the phones didn’t work. He asked the US clerks in the commandeered office but no one knew about any Iraqi officers.
He took a patrol of three Humvees up the road to the house below the white water tank. He could see the goat track undulating over the hills toward the abandoned farm where a year ago he’d met Sama and his desert greyhound.
He pulled the cord on the gate and a bell clanged inside the house. A woman in levis and a black blouse came out, closed the door behind her and crossed the garden to the gate. Forty-five and beautiful, with tanned features, a black scarf, and wide brown eyes.
“I’d like to speak to Colonel Sama,” Jack said, conscious of his accent.
“You’ll have to find his grave.”
“He’s dead?” he blundered stupidly.
“You should know.” She stared at him with hatred. “You’re the ones who killed him.”
HE FOUND ISABELLE in Samarra with the Black Watch near the ancient palace. “Oh hello,” she said, coming out of a tent to shake hands as if they’d once crossed briefly and now chanced to meet again. Cupping a palm over her eyes she smiled up at him against the sun. For a moment he wondered if she’d found someone, an officer in the Black Watch, and felt embarrassed and strangely pained. She took his arm. “Let’s walk.”
“It’s all mined. Beyond the perimeter.”
“I know where.” She walked on, tugging his arm. “Heard you’d come back.”
“Three weeks ago. Been trying to call you.”
“Oh that mobile’s knackered. I’ll give you my new one.”