by Mike Bond
“It doesn’t work, an eye for an eye. We all end up blind.”
The young man found the detonator but the wire was caught under the accelerator and he didn’t dare yank for fear of breaking it. “You said you were Afghani.”
“You’re not at the University anymore?”
“As you know it was wrecked.” The young man slid the wire free. “Professor Younous was killed. In the Invasion.”
Jack glanced from the street down at his hands, old and scarred, hanging loosely between his knees as the taxi jostled over potholes. “I didn’t know Professor Younous was killed.”
“An American missile, the first days...”
“It’s true, the ink of scholars is more precious than the blood of martyrs.”
“You know that saying?”
“From the Hadith. But didn’t Mohammed really prefer the blood of martyrs?”
“Of course... But Mohammed isn’t God.”
“What is?”
“I studied physics because I hoped there’d be a single theory of the universe. Isn’t that God?”
“No misfortune happens but by the will of God, the Koran says. But if God who turns us to evil, if we kill each other in God’s name, how is God not the Devil?”
“God causes evil, says Sura Four. God and ourselves. But Sura thirty-eight says it’s the Devil.”
“It’s all nonsense. If there is a single theory of the universe, it’s love.”
Carefully the young man put down the detonator. “The Koran never mentions love.”
Jack watched the haphazard panoply of Baghdad roll by, happy to be free of it now, the rubble and crowds, the deadly violence and sad music.
In two days he and Isabelle would be in Paris.
And a few weeks later in the Argentinian Andes. Patagonia.
“I’m very sorry Professor Younous is dead,” he said. “I’m sorry everyone is dead... So many beautiful people...”
The young man nosed the taxi around a toppled building that half-covered the burnt shell of an Abrams tank, making Jack wonder if the crew had got out or had they died like so many tank crews do, in searing inferno with nothing remaining but their teeth?
“If God is all-powerful,” the young man said, “why is there evil? If God is not all-powerful, then God is not God.”
“There is evil because God gives us free will. To do good or not.”
The young man shifted into first. “In a single theory of the universe there’s no room for free will.”
VII
ISIS
Quicksand
April 2014, near Esquel, Argentina
IN THE NEXT ROOM his phone beeped. He gently slid his arm from under Isabelle’s neck and slipped from the bed.
“You getting it?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Fuck them.”
“Maybe it’s not them.”
She turned away, silent. He padded into the next room. A two-word message on his phone:
Check in.
Barefoot on the cold tiles he let out a long breath, stared out the window at the pampas grass silvered by moonlight. Took another long slow breath and let it out. Went back to the bedroom.
“It was, wasn’t it?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“So what are you going to do?”
He lay down and pulled up the covers. She turned, facing him. “Jack, what are you going to do?”
Her face was pewter in the moonlight through the window. A death mask, he thought, banished it. But we’re all going to die... what else is there to think about?
Up on the mountain a fox barked; another answered. “I’m not going,” he said. “Whatever they want, I won’t do it.”
“They won’t like that.”
“I’ll call them in the morning.”
“You’re supposed to call now. The minute you get the message.” She turned away, slapped down the pillow under her head. “You’re never going to get away from them. Are you?”
HE LAY THERE till dawn. Sometimes no matter what you did you never got free. You carried around this rucksack of your life and every year it got heavier. Every night more faces crawled out of your nightmares. Even love wasn’t always enough.
In the bathroom he washed his face in cold water. Fatigue felt like ashes in his eyes. Every move of his neck and shoulders caused pain.
He didn’t like how he looked in the mirror. Wearied by all he’d done and not done. Tired of war.
“God,” he said aloud. “I’m so tired of it.”
The mirror didn’t answer, just showed the lines in his face, the worn skin, the gray hairs, the bullet-smashed shoulder and knife-scarred ribs.
He made a double espresso and called the President’s man in Tampa.
“WE HAVE A SERIOUS PROBLEM,” Mike Curry said.
“You always do, you guys,” Jack said. “Your life is a serious problem.”
“We shouldn’t have pulled out.”
“I told you that. Everybody who knew anything told you that.”
“It was the President’s campaign promise to leave Iraq.”
“And look what it got you.”
“This guy al-Baghdadi’s come out of nowhere.”
“No he hasn’t. He’s been building for years while you guys did photo ops and drank champagne at the White House.”
“That’s unfair, Jack. You know it.”
“And now he’s got millions of nasty motherfuckers plus all the weapons you left him.”
“We need to understand the man. Get in his head.”
“Have fun.”
“You interrogated him twice, back at Fort Bucca. Spent seven hours with him.”
“And I said we should never release him. So you released him. And a lot of other bad bastards who’ve been killing our guys ever since.”
“President’s orders. We were all going to kiss and make up.”
“You’re not getting me tied up in this again, Mike.”
“Oh yes I am. This touches our highest level of national security. We have no choice. Nor do you. Because it turns out you’re the only guy on our side who’s ever talked to him.”
“Then you are SOL.”
“All we have is two pix of him! And the face recognition folks aren’t even sure it’s the same guy. We need you to go through the photo banks and see if he’s there under another name. You’re the only one, Jack. The only one we’ve got.”
“Send them to me.”
“You know we can’t... We’ve set up a crisis team in the new Embassy in Baghdad, devoted only to al-Baghdadi. Very smart, very hard, total resources. We need you there.” Curry lowered his voice. “Just a month, Jack. Then you go home and we’ll leave you alone.”
Jack thought of mentioning Isabelle’s pregnancy, to explain why he couldn’t go. “What do you mean, alone?”
“If you do this, we won’t ask you again. Ever. For anything.”
HE MADE ANOTHER ESPRESSO and sat on a creaky cane chair on the terracotta terrace and watched the mountains turn gold with morning. A warm breeze brought odors of new grass, dew-damp soil and flowing water. The Andes so much softer, gentler than the Hindu Kush. The pampas more fertile, sunny and alive than the superheated deserts of Iraq.
Isabelle came out with her coffee and sat beside him.
“They said just a month,” he said.
She looked away, at nothing. “They lie.”
“And after this never again. I’ll be free.”
“And you believe them?”
“They worked this out between them, your guys and mine.”
“I bet they know I’m pregnant.”
Jack thought of her doctor at the clinic in Esquel. Of course. “I do a month in Baghdad, then we’ll be free. Forever.” He looked out at the golden grasslands, the white clouds. “They’re creating a virtual al-Baghdadi. See how he responds. So they can develop strategy.”
“The strategy should’ve been to never leave Iraq.”
“Tell that to the President.”
Though you could blame the President for leaving Iraq in 2011, in reality the president to blame was the one who invaded that poor country in 2003 on trumped-up, false Weapons of Mass Destruction charges. It amazed Jack sometimes that GW, Cheney, Powell and their other cronies were still walking around free and not in jail.
And now this President wanted to kiss and make up with the Islamic world. Who’d played the fiddle while Libya burned, Tunisia, Egypt, and now was playing the fiddle as Syria caught fire. Who had gone to Riyadh to bow down to a ruthless, bloodthirsty Saudi dictator whose country funded every Islamic terrorist organization it could find.
Guys like us, Owen McPhee had said years ago, the night before Jack and Sophie got married, before McPhee went to Nairobi and the Muslims killed him, we’re not supposed to lead normal lives. Our job is to protect other people, so they can live a normal life. In Lebanon, Syria, Paris, anywhere. Iraq.
Trouble was, Iraq’s like quicksand. The President should have known.
Once you’re in you can’t get out.
AND HE’D NEVER get away from Home Office, Isabelle had said. Was it really true? Would the time ever come when he’d done enough?
You could say it started because his father was a soldier. If you love your Dad, and if he’s a good Dad, then you want to be a soldier. And if he gets killed it’s even worse: now you have to avenge him. And you miss him so bad that every night, lying in bed in the dark Maine woods, you think your ten-year-old heart is going to break.
But you never tell anyone. Not even your Ma, silent, austere yet devoted amidst her own infinite grief, this indescribable harrowing of the heart.
And the two of you soldier on.
Since then, in over thirty years of war – Afghanistan against the Soviets, then Lebanon, Africa, Afghanistan again, Iraq, the other places he never thought about because he’d supposedly never been there – what purpose?
He looked out on the bright Andes, seeing every little crinkle of beech forest, the huge crests taunting in their pure whiteness. Had he made a difference?
Had he made a better world? With all the lives it cost?
Many times at the risk of his own life he’d tried to minimize that cost. And many times at the risk of his life he had protected, and even helped to save, his country.
What would have happened without him?
Who would have lived? Who would have died?
And now was he going back into this one?
Ettabe’e Allah
FROM THEIR TERRACE you could see all the way down the bluegrass river valley to the Andes foothills and then up the peaks behind them, gray-green with beech forests then stone then vertical rock and ice trailing clouds of sparkling snow.
The air was cool and the grandeur of the land extended forever. Eastward three hundred miles of grassland to the sea. To the south grassland, peaks and a thousand miles of desert to Tierra del Fuego and the Magellan Straits. To the west these vast mountains blocking off the sky, to the north more grassland and hills, then vineyards then jungle.
The house was small but fitted them perfectly. A kitchen with a fireplace and wood-fired cook stove, a square porcelain sink and cold water faucet. A living room with another fireplace, leather furniture, books in Spanish and English and a view south across the endless pampas. A bedroom with a double bed, a bathroom where you filled the tub with buckets of hot water from the kitchen cook stove. And two hours from the little mountain town of Esquel, where you could find anything any human could possibly need.
You could argue they still weren’t free but for now he’d take it.
WHEN CHECK IN beeped on Jack’s phone they’d been there eighteen months and Isabelle was four months pregnant. To Jack each day had seemed almost compensation for the bad years, that and the warm sun that melted into his injured shoulder and brought it peace. The river you could drink from, the glossy grass dancing in the wind, the blue glow of the Andes sun, this little house of adobe walls, blue shutters, bougainvillea and terracotta floor tiles was maybe what you found in heaven, if you were very lucky. Where you could find the path with heart.
And now a child. Barefoot in the grass, the words came to him. Naked in the sun.
When they’d gone to the clinic in Esquel the doctor had offered to tell them the baby’s sex, but they’d both said no. “A golden child,” Isabelle had said in Spanish. Un niño eldorado. “We don’t care boy or girl.”
At night however Jack kept seeing Sarah on the last day of her life, arguing about braces, Leo throwing the football so hard and straight, on his way to West Point. Then Sarah came to him one night and said, Don’t worry. Please don’t sorrow.
The night before the phone beeped they’d talked about staying. The place was rented but maybe they could buy it. Or there were so many other beautiful little haciendas in this vast and fertile junction of mountains and grasslands.
“What if we stayed here?” he’d said. “Raised the kids?”
“Kids?” She patted her belly. “There’s just one.”
He interlaced fingers with hers. “What if, God willing, we make more?”
FOUR HOURS LATER his phone had beeped. Check in.
“No way you’re going,” he’d said next morning when they argued about it.
“So I’m supposed to stay here, two hours from anywhere, to get fat and pregnant while you go kill people? When I want to kill them too?”
This made him chuckle. “Honey I care about you.”
“I’m going. Get over it.”
He laughed, loving the set of her chin, her blazing eyes. “It’s a quickie. In and out.”
She patted her belly again. “How do you think I got to look like this?”
FROM ESQUEL it was two hours in a six-seat Cessna to Buenos Aires then 23 hours on Turkish Airlines through Sao Paulo to Istanbul, then another three to Baghdad. On the four a.m. armored ride from the airport the city seemed half-deserted, dirty windblown streets and skulking cars, the wind bitter and tasting of dust. The Embassy zone was lit like a space station, guards, bunkers, halogens and concrete, an armored citadel adrift in a hostile sea.
“If I’m coming back,” Jack had told them, “Isabelle will be with me, and we want to find an apartment somewhere.”
“We don’t recommend that,” they’d answered.
“It’s part of the deal. We can both pass for locals... I don’t want to be in a compound full of Americans if I’m trying to find an Iraqi.”
“Whatever turns you on,” they’d said laconically.
Jordan Feist was still station chief – no small accomplishment in this era of shifting loyalties and strategies. He seemed more constrained, even more worried than before when he met them in the conference room on the third floor of the Embassy HQ. “It’s like being in a fine house on the edge of the sea, and you see the tidal wave coming, that it’s going to destroy the house, destroy all you’ve worked for all this time.” He leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees. “And you can’t do a thing to change it.”
“There’s still talk, Panetta’s for it, to bring back the troops.”
“Never happen. Not while Obama’s here.”
“So you have to hold on,” Isabelle said. “Till he’s gone.”
“That’s three years away. By then ISIS will have the whole country. Plus most of Syria and part of Turkey.”
Jack nodded. “And part of Lebanon.”
“Depends on Hezbollah.”
“But now he’s waking up, Obama is?” Isabelle said, “about ISIS?”
“I wouldn’t say he’s waking up,” Feist countered. “He’s being told about it.”
“But he okayed putting this team together,” Jack said. “That’s what Mike Curry told me from Tampa.”
“But,” Feist raised a hand, “this is independent.”
“Meaning whose?”
Feist smiled. “Ours.”
“What combat assets?”
“None.”
“None?”
“We const
ruct al-Baghdadi’s profile. Interpret him, try to locate him. But everything we learn we feed to the Iraqis.”
“No special units?”
“The President says no.”
“So if we locate this guy, we can’t go get him?”
“Half the Iraqi Army sides with al-Baghdadi,” Isabel said.
“So we have to be very careful,” Feist smiled, “who we tell. And what we tell them.”
“Obama’s planning what he does after leaving office.” Isabelle said. “That’s why he’s always kissing ass with the Hindus and Muslims. Wants to be president of the world.”
“So,” Jack said, “does al-Baghdadi.”
THE HOTEL GOOD NEWS was not far from the Tigris and the Embassy, a six-floor concrete stack with four apartments to a floor, an antique elevator that often refused to stop at the floor you wanted, with a black metal cage door that opened and closed reluctantly, and on the ground floor a yellowish lobby with a few drooping plants, an old Sunni man sleeping at the desk and a dispirited restaurant of unreliable propriety.
But they had a bedroom, living room, kitchen and a bath with a shower that worked, good Wi-Fi and even a land line. From the bedroom and living room windows you got a glimpse of the Tigris, and here on the back streets the dangers of car bombs and missiles was less.
LIKE ALL MASS MURDERERS, al-Baghdadi was a coward. An itinerant preacher from the Samarra area, he had spread many stories of his courage but had never been in battle, said he had a doctorate in Sharia law but did not seem to understand it, told millions of people to obey him as the voice of Allah, but this was a position to which he, and not Allah, had appointed himself.
From interrogations of other terrorists they learned nearly nothing, for he was as much a mystery to his own side as to the Americans. And as Mike Curry had said, only two photos of him were in existence, and they didn’t seem to be the same guy.
According to testimony from a purported childhood friend, al-Baghdadi had been a quiet and introspective child who did well in school, was able to remember even the tiniest fact, could see in his mind every page he’d read, and find therein proof for whatever he said.