ASSASSINS

by Mike Bond

Do you have somebody here? he wanted to ask her. How crazy. I was afraid you were in danger, he wanted to say, but that was crazy too. “Things are getting nasty. You should go home.” I sound like a dyspeptic uncle.

  She sat on a chunk of marble column from an ancient temple. “Heavens, I was worried about you!”

  He sat beside her on the stone, her dark hair fragrant with sun. “I tried so hard to stop this war –” Their shoulders touched and he pulled away. “Now I’m in the middle of it and don’t know what to do.”

  “Two weeks before the invasion our Chief Weapons inspector, Dr. David Kelly, came back from a detailed inventory in Iraq and told Blair there were no WMDs.”

  “Lots of people on my side told Bush the same thing.”

  “And after he challenged Blair on the WMDs, Dr. Kelly was murdered. An amateurish job, they tried to make it look like a suicide. Took him out in the woods in Oxfordshire and force-fed him a pill and cut his wrist.”

  “So maybe he did kill himself?”

  “No, the vein he supposedly cut wouldn’t have killed him, and though there were twenty-nine empty pill packets beside him there was only one pill in his stomach.”

  “So who did it?”

  “SIS? Your folks? Maybe Chalabi’s thugs?”

  “So you’re in danger, from writing about it?”

  “No, no, it’s out now. BBC did a huge piece, then Blair’s press minister accused them of treason.”

  Jack raised his boots one at a time and tightened the laces. “Tuesday I go out with a Reserve unit. Tour of the battlefield.”

  “The battlefield’s become Iraq.”

  “There has to be a way to help them stop this.”

  “They don’t want to stop.” She watched a dust dervish spin, a desert jinni. “Tell me, what are we doing here?” She turned to him, sun in her eyes. “You and I? No excuses.”

  Out on the desert the wind rolled empty beer cans back and forth. “With all this kidnapping, you should go home.”

  “The Independent wants me to. MI6 doesn’t. I told the paper I’m staying and filing stories whether they like it or not –”

  “To Hell with MI6.”

  She lowered her voice. “SIS wants to make sure Blair knows the truth. Whether he wants to or not. That’s why I’m staying. But you shouldn’t waste time here. Or your life.”

  He drew up his knees, arms around them. “Sometimes I think it’s unstoppable, some huge wrathful catastrophe. Then I think maybe it’s worth one more try – these kids, they’re getting all shot up for nothing.”

  “Fifty Iraqi civilians die for every U.S. soldier –”

  “I signed on to get Bin Laden and AQ. Not this.”

  The low sun reddened her hair, gilding the cartridge cases strewn across the desert. “Maybe we’ll never get him.”

  He put his hand over hers. “If we can’t?”

  “There’ll always be this mess.”

  “We stay in Iraq much longer you’ll be kidnapped and I’ll be killed.”

  She grinned. “There’s always that –”

  “While I’m with this unit –” Why am I saying this? “– I won’t be able to reach you.”

  She reached inside her collar and slipped the black scarab on its golden chain from her neck over his. “For three thousand years this has been with someone... watching over them. Now it can watch over you...”

  “No,” he said, fearing he’d be killed and the scarab lost. Dust caught in his throat; he wanted to kiss her, hold her.

  “Yes,” she answered, settling the gold chain round his neck. “You bring it back to me.”

  He didn’t dare promise. “I’ll keep trying to find an answer, and you keep telling them the truth. Maybe something good will happen...”

  She glanced toward the far walls. “A thousand years ago this was a vast palace. Silken tents, dancing girls in see-through gowns and golden bracelets, wine and song and happy families, jealousies and intrigues and joys and sorrows... Makes me think of that story from the Babylon Talmud, the one O’Hara used in Appointment in Samarra?”

  “Don’t know it.”

  “A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant shopping. The servant comes home terrified, says he met Death in the market and she threatened him. He borrows the merchant’s horse and flees to Samarra. The merchant goes to the marketplace and asks Death, why did you threaten him? Death says she had been merely surprised to see him, because she had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

  “When you’re fucked you’re fucked.” After he spoke he saw her note what he’d said. It somehow made them man and woman again. Not just allies, people who might fuck.

  “I fear you won’t come back,” she said. “You’ll go away and leave me –” She laughed to counteract this. “I mean somehow we won’t meet up again –”

  “I have to give you back your locket.” He pulled her close, her hair soft on his cheek, and she leaned her body into him digging her nails into his neck and pulling him to her like a cat and kissed him, her lips rough on his. “God this is good,” she whispered. “It’s so good to touch someone. Oh God it’s so good to touch you.”

  She pulled his hand inside her camo shirt against her small breast, the nipple hard. “When you come back I’ll be here for you. Any way you want me.”

  Rifles fired, he pushed her down grabbing his M-4 but it was just soldiers shooting at the beer cans on the desert, spiking little pirouettes of dust.

  I don’t want to die, he thought. Not after this.

  SHE WATCHED HIS CONVOY grow small against the desert, its wistful dust plume reddened by the dusk. She reached to her neck where the scarab had been and smoothed her collar, thinking of him in the Humvee’s cabin scanning the darkening hills for death, her black scarab round his neck.

  She hungered to send him a prayer, anything that might protect him, but if you’d stayed in this place long enough you knew prayers had no value, saved no one, prevented no harm.

  On the scarab’s back was a tiny image of Osiris, god of good and of sun, and his wife Isis. But Osiris gets killed, she remembered, by the god of evil and darkness.

  In the line of clouds against the sunset was a camel train from centuries ago, a long line of camels heading east on the Silk Road, and in the clouds she could see each camel’s nodding head, its bundle of goods piled high on its back, and for an instant she saw the whole panoply of human endeavor, the whole falseness and beauty of it, that we could crave so much.

  “I want you to be safe,” she told him. “I want you to stay safe.”

  The Purpose of War

  THEY REACHED A VILLAGE, a bullet-splintered sign, ...ed al Fakhr”, hanging sideways where two dirt tracks merged into a rutted street between two rows of mud-brick hovels with reed shacks behind them.

  “Not what the map says,” Tony Decourt said.

  “Nothing in this shithole,” Jason Ortiz added, “is what the map says.”

  “Hold it,” Jack said and Ortiz braked the Humvee. Tony on his radio tried to halt the others but the comms were down again so Tony jumped out and waved at them. Jack glanced back at the Humvees strung out like geese. “Two men off each of the first four trucks,” he said. “We split up and go through town. Everything’s fine, we call you in.”

  “Nothing here Sir,” Ortiz said. “But desert dogs and garbage.”

  “And fuckin camel sp-spi-spiders,” Brad Wiley said.

  A rifle banged and Jack dove to the ground aiming for motion but the trooper who’d fired waved his hand no problem and pointed to a white goat writhing on the ground coughing great gobs of blood into its whiskers. This is where they get the word goatee, Jack thought madly. “She moved, Sir,” the trooper said.

  “What if she’d been a child?” Jack said. “An old woman?”

  “What if she was a bad guy?”

  “Sorry, girl,” Jack said, and shot the goat through the head, thinking of the family coming back tomorrow after the American sweep, an old man saying, “the Americans didn’t
bring us freedom. But they blew up my town and killed my family’s milk goat.”

  Beyond the village they waited for the Humvees to catch up. “It’s gross,” Ortiz yelled down from his Mark 19. “There’s mosques and minarets in every fuckin town. These people they’re brainwashed by religion.”

  Jack glanced at his watch: 18:35, Sunday – 10:35 on the East Coast, churches full of people worshipping the very things Christ forbade... Others worshipping TV football, the announcers discussing each play as if it mattered, with the gravity of doctors reviewing a complicated procedure. And these kids moving with him through the dusk, all they wanted to do was go back to that world.

  Was that the purpose of war – to give life meaning?

  War is death. And it’s death that gives life meaning.

  AT NIGHT THEY CIRCLED the Humvees like Conestogas, put out sentries and Claymores and dug sleeping holes. Jack felt out of place among these young men speaking freely about why they hated this war. “My problem with these generals?” Tony said. “They love war – what they’ve always wanted. But they most was too young for Vietnam. Never seen combat.”

  “They don’t ha-have no ri-risk sitting in Baghdad,” Brad Wiley said. “They like th-th-that.”

  Tony’s closest friend, Brad was a sparse young man with a quick stutter, the kind of kid that back home whom Tony the cop might catch for speeding. “I don’t understand w-war,” Brad had said last night. “Like the Ci-Civ-Civil War? I’m from Mississippi but I don’t see this thing about black and whi-white.” He’d glanced at Tony. “You’re black and I’m white, but you’re more like a brother to me than an-an-an-any-anyone.”

  Tony’s self-effacing smile. “Yeah you my brother too,” and Jack felt a sudden warmth for him. If I do one thing in this horror show, he told himself, I’m going to bring these men home.

  He tried to imagine Tony’s life as a cop in Pueblo, Colorado, the little split-level home, the girl seven and boy nine, Tony’s wife staying busy, waiting.

  He’d fallen again, Jack realized, for war’s oldest trick: a month ago he’d hadn’t even known these men and now he’d die and kill for them, anything to get them home alive. They were no longer strangers but people with lives they wanted to live, with loved ones, fears and aspirations. Captain MacAllister, a burly cheery Santa of a man whom the men called “Mac” unless senior officers were near, was no longer just a face but now someone that Jack liked to sit with in the quiet times drinking coffee and talking books and folk music, motorcycles and trout fishing. Mac ran a Kinko’s in Oregon and had joined the Guard years ago after a flood had hit part of his town, and the Guard had come in and saved it. “I joined up to help the American people,” he said one night. “Not to kill people in some foreign place just to steal their oil.” He tossed his coffee on the ground. “Oh for a Starbucks double espresso right now.”

  Protect each other: the universal soldier’s rule. And on the other side the Iraqis in their bombed-out basements trying to shield each other against the Cobras’ 20 mm uranium-clad bullets, hadn’t they made the same subconscious pact?

  What his father had once taught him he’d relearned in Afghanistan: an officer puts his men first. But if an officer is responsible for the lives of his men, what does he do when an incompetent commander orders them unnecessarily into danger?

  Which is the greater duty: to follow orders no matter how unwise, or not to put your men in harm’s way without a valid cause?

  ISABELLE STAYED IN HIS MIND like a lost battle. How could he care about her so much when he barely knew her? Did this horror heighten the hunger for love? Was that the purpose of war?

  I’ll still be here for you, she’d said, Any way you want me.

  But by not looking out for her, wasn’t he doing what he’d done with Sophie?

  Isabelle wasn’t Sophie. He couldn’t protect everyone. His job was get Bin Laden.

  But Bin Laden wasn’t here. And instead of hunting him he was stuck in a Humvee in the desert trying to protect a bunch of guys who wanted to go home and watch football.

  Strange how death made even the mundane seem glorious.

  How could he love Isabelle when he loved Sophie?

  How can you love someone who’s dead?

  “DEEP ABIDING FAITH is what you need,” Major Elwin Mudge said. “To see the purpose in this.”

  “What purpose?” Jack said.

  Mudge glanced at his watch. “Nine p.m.”

  “You mean 21:00.”

  Mudge unwrapped a silver-foiled package of peanut butter cookies and began to munch them. “I mean to get the men in for prayer.”

  “Some are on watch. The ones on next watch are sleeping. The rest are beat.”

  “It’s prayer that bonds us all together, gives us God’s power...” Mudge squinted through dusty glasses into the darkness beyond the Humvees, and turned to his XO, a tall saturnine lieutenant named Krass. “Call the sentries in.”

  Jack dispersed his squad into the desert to replace the sentries Mudge had ordered in. “That man Mudge,” Tony said, “he know nothing. He a car salesman.”

  “Motion on the perimeter!” Brad yelled. “Ten o’clock.”

  It moved fast, a quick shadow. “Don’t fire!” Jack called.

  It was a wild desert dog, yellow eyes in the moonlight. Jack walked across the sand, oblivious of mines, of snipers beyond the berms between the canals. “Come here, pup,” he called. “You wouldn’t eat an MRE would you? No I suppose not. Hey Bandit, what do we give this guy?”

  Tell him get lost.

  “He’s hungry. Can’t you see?”

  I was hungry too. All the time in that shed.

  “Before I rescued you –”

  I can’t believe you didn’t step on a mine. First time I was ever impressed by a human.

  “C’mere, pup,” Jack called. “Don’t listen to Bandit, he’s full of shit.” He knelt, the chunk of MRE Chicken Alfredo hanging from his fingers like a dead rat.

  The dog dashed forward, snatched the MRE in fast teeth and darted into the night. Like the fedayeen, Jack thought. How we going to kill them? And why?

  NIGHT WAS FADING. The wind died, the air cold and thin as if seeping into space. High in the west pink contrails caught the sun – a fighter group heading north. To the southeast a wide black column from a burning pipeline tilted far into the sky, twisting south toward the Gulf. A fuel convoy rumbled west, guarded front and rear by Bradleys, a Cobra flitting over them like a herd dog with cattle.

  Soon the desert filled with motion: trucks kicking up orange dust, fighters streaking east, guns twinkling like Christmas lights, Cobras dropping TOW missiles, their machine guns roaring, the gray sun smeared by the smoke of explosions. Weariness weighed on him.

  Human hearts had turned evil, we so easily did what normally would horrify us. In America you see a person killed by a car and for weeks you can’t get it out of your head; here you see a charred Iraqi family on the roadside and you barely notice.

  WHEN HE’D FIRST COME to Iraq he’d thought it could never be a trap like Vietnam. In the jungle the enemy had had perfect widespread cover. Here was just desert, rolling hills and bleak cities. But to win, he was learning, you had to destroy every city, every town, every rock in the wasteland where a man could hide.

  A pair of A-10s came in dropping phosphorous bombs that bloomed into vast infernos filling the village and sky. We’re eating MREs while right in front of us people fry alive. “We just here till the ‘lection, Sir,” Tony said. “President can’t look bad before the ‘lection. Then maybe we can go home.”

  “Some of you may not like being here,” Major Mudge told them. “But we’re only human and have to follow God’s will.”

  “Hey wait a minute,” Tony laughed. “God didn’t will this.”

  “God wants this false religion punished. If we don’t do it who will?”

  “One thing I’ve learned as a cop,” Tony said, “is killin’s the worst possible solution to a problem. Ain’t you Christia
ns discovered that?”

  Short and stout with a bland round face, button nose and colorless hair, Mudge was an accountant for the KIA dealership in Fort Hays, Kansas, “Finest place on God’s green earth.”

  Perhaps, Jack thought, because Mudge had spent most of his life looking out on the endless horizontality of central Kansas his soul had told him the world was flat. And thus his disdain for science: it contradicted his impression of the world. And wasn’t this a normal response to a world that’s changing too fast? Isn’t that what Muslims did too?

  Because Mudge was company commander Jack tried to not let the men see how he scorned him. Yet more and more he caught himself taunting him – “But Elwin, the dinosaurs lived sixty million years ago – how can the world be six thousand years old?”

  Mudge checked his watch. “God created the world six thousand and eight years and ninety-one days ago. All those fossils, God just put them here to test our faith.”

  Falluja

  WHEN A MARINE ATTACK on a village southeast of Ramadi got pinned down, Mudge’s company was called forward to support it. From the rear Mudge sent Mac’s platoon into the village. “We in the shit now,” Tony Decourt said.

  The last Iraqis had retreated into a schoolhouse and playground. Two LARs had fired thousands of Bushmaster rounds into the school and Cobras had dropped TOWs that shuddered the earth and spouted clouds of dust and concrete and flesh.

  Jack crawled ahead of Mac and two of his men along a classroom wall. An A-10 came in fast and low and the school convulsed as another rocket hit. Mac bent his head and Jack wondered bizarrely was he praying for the poor souls trapped in that inferno. “Stay here!” Jack sprinted forward to a fallen tree. A rocket whacked into the classroom behind him.

  “No!” Decourt yelled. “Who sent in that fucking locate?”

  “Hold them!” Jason Ortiz was screaming into his radio. “Hold the fucking rockets! Hey Jack the comms are down!”

  Another rocket hit the classroom wall where Mac and his men had taken cover. In the roar and blinding white flash the world congealed, came apart.