by Heather Rose
The compound had traditional dun-coloured walls. Half of our security detail went ahead, assessing the place for threats and traps. When they returned with the all-clear, we entered the home along a short corridor that opened into a wide, central courtyard. It was a beautiful home—or at least it had been. The ornate circular fountain at its heart was dry now. The citrus trees had been stripped of fruit. The mosaic floor and intricate stonework spoke of history. The black flags and the militants armed with M16s at intervals along the walls spoke of now. And there was a cage with a charred body within. A small American flag had been stuck into the corpse.
Instantly I was recalling the film posted two days ago of an American soldier burned to death. He had been the same age as my own son—twenty-seven. They had doused him with petrol and set him alight. He had flung his body against the bars while the watching men cheered. There are many things in my life I’d prefer never to have seen. It comes with the job. We had not expected to find him here. We hadn’t known this was the place.
I glanced at my travelling companion and saw that he was flushed with rage. I breathed and calmed myself. This meeting had been months in the planning. The deal we were here to make was mine, but my mouthpiece was an American ex-president.
The emir was waiting at the far end of the courtyard under an arched ceiling. Ignored, I went to stand in the shade of the rear wall without comment. I was the invisible, irrelevant woman veiled in black cloth. This anonymity is twofold; it provides a strange protection from scrutiny, and it makes it easier to observe people.
The emir and the ex-president sat and were served tea by a boy. The ex-president laid out the terms. We were offering to exchange fifty men for one hundred and thirty-six women abducted into sex slavery.
‘These women are not your concern,’ the emir said to the ex-president. ‘They are not my concern. They belong to the men who own them. They have been bought and paid for. What are you really seeking? You have come a long way.’ He had a lean, bearded face with a beaked nose and dark, inscrutable eyes.
If the world knew we were looking to return Daesh militants held captive, there would be uproar. I had been working on the release of the women for years. This was the last of those still alive, we believed.
A Daesh recruit receives an additional monthly stipend for keeping a sex slave. And the slaves they had taken en masse were Yazidi women. We knew they were broken, diseased and severely damaged. Under the laws of sabaya a man is entitled to rape, beat and punish his slave. Some had been as young as seven when they were captured. They had been slaves now for over seven years.
The caliphate had open passage to the sea through Turkey thanks to President Erdogan, and it was expanding across the Syrian border. So much for Daesh being crippled. This was what the US withdrawal had done. That was the message of the US flag in the body.
I have learned through my years in this role that violent extremists can appear perfectly reasonable even when their extremism has obliterated charity, mercy and clarity. The emir had a political science degree from the London School of Economics but had returned home after the death of his father in Abu Ghraib prison at the hands of US interrogators in 2004. His brothers had disappeared in Fallujah. Our intelligence said he had a wife and two daughters living in Saudi. I knew he had agreed to this meeting because, with access to the sea, everything had changed.
In these situations, I quiet my fear as if it were an animal. Fear is how you get yourself killed. Or you kill someone else. I would have liked to pull out a hidden weapon and open fire on all of them. But I didn’t have a hidden weapon. We had been carefully searched. Not quite well enough to find the tracking device under my skin, but enough to make me feel quietly violated.
More than twelve million people now lived under this regime. I had seen the tens of thousands of refugees made homeless. I knew how many Yazidi daughters had died. In all this, I did not forget what the emir had lost nor the horror he had witnessed. Or how he had chosen to disconnect himself from the world he once inhabited. I would kill to protect my children, I have no doubt of that. But when I saw a man like the emir, I wondered about the power of an ideal. The certainty of a belief. Would I ever kill for an ideal?
The ex-president said, ‘A caliphate without mercy and compassion will never be viewed as anything but a threat to its citizens and its neighbours.’
‘Christians have killed millions of my people without cause,’ replied the emir. ‘What was the war in Iraq if not an assault by a Christian coalition on my people? Where was this Christian compassion when my father was murdered? When my brothers were thrown into a mass grave outside Fallujah?’
This is negotiation. It’s emotional, sometimes predictable and rarely simple.
‘But we share—’ began the ex-president.
‘You think I can help you,’ the emir interrupted. ‘Perhaps I could. But what is fifty brothers when five hundred are joining us every week?’
This was an exaggeration, but in truth we had no idea. If it wasn’t five hundred each week now, it might well be by next year.
‘Our brothers in captivity will find a way of making their deaths glorious. If that is in your prison, or in your streets, then beware. We will restore justice. Because everything we do is for the glory of Allah.’
There was a pause and the emir turned to stare at me. ‘What is this woman doing here? She is saying nothing but you are listening for her.’
‘You know, Emir,’ said the ex-president, ‘that Ms Sheppard is from the UN. She is here to ensure these women are returned home.’
The emir inspected his hands. ‘Perhaps we burn a slave every day until our brothers are returned to us. Perhaps we send out a call to our brothers across the world to also burn a woman every day. We start here with Ms Sheppard.’
Our security tensed. The courtyard stilled. Even the breeze ceased.
My name is not Ms Sheppard but he would never know that. I was simply a long, black-robed vision of woman. All the emir could see of me was my eyes and that was going to have to be enough.
‘My death would be a very small death, Emir,’ I said. ‘The killing of women will not give you the homeland you seek. The women we want returned are half-dead anyway. Before they die as slaves, they can secure the lives of fifty of your brothers. Consider it a good return on investment.’
‘I repeat that these women are of no value to me,’ said the emir, turning back to the ex-president. ‘What else did you come all this way to offer me?’
‘A seat at the new UN Council for the Middle East,’ I said.
The ex-president was caught off-guard. Everyone knew his position on this. If he had known I would make such an offer, he would never have agreed to this meeting. This resurgent expanding caliphate, emboldened by the shift in US policy, fed by the trade of oil and weapons, was a virus. Some argued that only by giving it recognition, and making it answerable to the global community, would it find its way to human rights. Others, like the ex-president, had invested everything in its demise. But he was no longer in power.
The emir observed the ex-president and smiled. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Your role,’ I said, ‘would create recognition of the caliphate as, if not a country, a state. You are going to need to broaden trade. With your growing population, you need food security and humanitarian aid. Your background in economics makes you the right choice.’
‘Is that so,’ he said.
‘We are offering you the chance to give this land of Allah a voice on the international stage,’ I said.
The emir had taken this palatial home. Perhaps he imagined his grandchildren playing in the courtyard one day. This was revenge for Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. But it was also a celebration of the brothers and sisters who had killed and injured people in London, Berlin, Paris, New York, Sydney, Los Angeles—and all the cities yet to come. The offer was risky but it played to his world view. He believed the EU would falter and the West would fall. If he had to put a timeframe on it, he would have said within ten years
.
‘What assurance can you give me?’ he asked. It was evident he cared little for the men, nothing for the women and, unsurprisingly, a great deal about power.
There was a long pause. Would it work? I wondered and I waited, my eyes down.
‘I am guessing that would be mine,’ said the ex-president at last, although I could see that it killed him to say it.
The emir smiled. ‘One hundred brothers. Fifty women.’
The bargaining began.
Back in the truck, the ex-president said to me quietly, ‘Tell me what we just did?’
I met the trucks transporting all the women home. There were powerful scenes of reunion, but within a few hours each of the women fell into an almost catatonic state. I had warned their families that this would happen. When the enormous effort to survive was no longer required, they would go into shock. Only with time and gentle coaxing, with tenderness and love and family members to lure them back, would some of them emerge, so deep was their trauma. We know this from thousands of women rescued and returned the world over. None of them truly recover. They simply learn to go on, each in her own way. Some kill themselves. Two of these women were only fourteen now, and one of them had been bought and sold fifteen times.
I was at one of the girls’ homes when I heard a strike had destroyed the home of a Daesh leader and a nearby training camp in northern Iraq. White phosphorous was used—an American weapon of choice. The American State Department was vehemently denying any knowledge. The Iranians were being blamed. There was only a handful of survivors and the emir was not among them.
The ex-president rang me. I took his call under a sky of membranous clouds.
‘You could have trusted me, Astrid,’ he said.
‘I did, sir,’ I said.
‘And the caliphate being on the Council for the Middle East?’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, sir,’ I said.
‘I was right to trust you too, Astrid,’ he said.
Later that same day I got a call from my brother, JC, John Coleman, the premier of Tasmania. He said someone had blown up the new Bruny Bridge. He had a war on his hands, a war about progress. There was an election coming and he needed a conflict resolution specialist.
He said, ‘It’s your home, Ace. It’s your island. We need you. I need you.’
He was very persuasive but I resisted.
Then a text message came. It said: Call your brother. Say yes. Tell him you changed your mind.
And suddenly I was heading back to Tasmania.
CHAPTER TWO
Hobart airport. Scene of my great escapes from Tasmania. There, waiting for me, was my sister Max. Not Maxine Coleman, leader of the opposition I can see everyone noticing, but my very petite older sister, hugging me. JC, our brother the premier, had offered to send a driver but Max had scoffed.
‘I’m picking you up, Ace,’ she’d said. ‘Of course I’m picking you up.’ Ace. That’s me. Astrid Coleman.
Elsewhere a political family like ours would be impossible, even ludicrous. But you get used to it in Tasmania. We’re a very small population on a very southern island and we’ve been marrying each other for two hundred years. There are relatives around every corner, and if you meet someone new, it will usually take less than five minutes to work out who you have in common. My brother and sister are the second generation of politicians in our family but Max is the first woman. We are sixth-generation Tasmanians. Everyone knows about the Colemans. Everyone has an opinion about us.
Hobart airport had been made over. No more tractor ferrying bags across the tarmac to an outdoor collection point. Now there were high ceilings, glamorous wall claddings, polished floors, cafes, and two baggage carousels complete with a biosecurity dog sniffing the luggage. Two huge video screens advertised the new art gallery and the convict ruins, and reminded visitors to drive on the left side of the road. Maybe Hobart had become part of the modern world. Maybe. I guess if there were bombs going off, it really had.
Outside the airport, as we walked to Max’s car, the air was still the same over-oxygenated blast, the sky aqua with high cumulus clouds and a chilly breeze blowing in from the west. It was November, late spring, with a Tasmanian summer on the horizon. I hadn’t spent a summer in Hobart in ten years. I’d been home less than a handful of times since I left for university in 1981.
Surprisingly, Max didn’t mention politics on the drive into Hobart from the airport. Not right away. She behaved as if I was simply home for a visit and such visits happened almost regularly. We began with my children (Tavvy and Paul) and Maxine’s cats (Paul and Tavvy). And, of course, our parents.
‘Of course, she will have to move one day,’ Max said, referring to our mother, ‘but for the meantime Phillip is an angel, as you know. Although I think he misses Dad and even blames himself for not being there when the last stroke happened. Mother had insisted he sit with her while she had her nails done.’
‘Should I feel guilty?’ I asked.
‘Because you weren’t here? Or because you’ve left all this to me?’
‘Both,’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘It’s the way it is,’ she said. ‘And you’re here now.’
A whole shopping precinct that hadn’t been there on my last visit had sprung up on the highway from the airport. Outdoor stores, carpet stores, hardware and brands I didn’t even know.
‘It’s been dry,’ I added, observing pale paddocks sprouting new subdivisions on the left with houses and units in muted greys, browns and creams. All my life, farmlands had accompanied the highway into the city. Now a low-level sprawl of stucco, corrugated iron and paling fences slid by beside us.
‘It’s dry everywhere,’ said Max. ‘Up north too. The Midlands is already struggling. We’re right down on the water reserves. It’s going to be a tough summer for farmers. And it’s going to bugger up the hydro.’
‘Wasn’t Tasmania running on diesel?’ I asked. Clean, green Tasmania was technically one hundred per cent hydro-powered. Until the rain stopped falling.
‘Yes,’ said Max. ‘All through last summer. And back in 2016. Plain stupid. Cost taxpayers a bloody fortune. And it’ll happen again. Using the last fifty years to predict rainfall is as about effective as using eye colour to predict baldness these days. It’s only a matter of time before the rest of Australia gets their renewables sorted and there won’t be the premium for what we send out of the state. Meanwhile, Tasmanians are paying so Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane can keep their air conditioners on. They’re not big thinkers, his lot, as you know.’
This is one of those landmines in my family. They’re not big thinkers means JC is not a big thinker. And he’s my twin. I have learned to stay mute at times like this, step around the IED and move on.
We topped the rise and the mountain came into view. I took a breath and my heart did something warm and wobbly. Mount Wellington ascends behind Hobart, a slumbering bear of purple slopes, glades, streams, towering gum trees and delicate ferns. It’s the great wild magnet for everyone who lives on the city’s slopes. Every Hobart resident knows to look west, back over the mountain, to assess what to wear for the day.
Our father had taken us walking on the mountain through every season as children. We’d stand on Sphinx Rock and stare down at the city and the river, and he’d quote poetry to us. Kipling.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too …
What he was giving us was a recipe for public life, but we hadn’t known it back then. I hadn’t seen him in a year, not since his last trip to New York.
‘Have you got time to go see Dad together?’
‘I can’t today. I’m sorry, Ace, I’m due back. But it’s only a walk from JC’s. I know he’d love to see you.’
‘Will he know who I am?’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘And
it’s not easy.’
‘Any change?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I told him you were coming. He seemed pleased. It’s bizarre how well he communicates, considering.’
As we crossed the Tasman Bridge over the Derwent River, I glimpsed the arc of something huge beyond the distant palomino hills to the south. It had to be the Bruny Bridge.
‘So there it is.’
‘Yep, can’t miss it,’ said Max.
‘It’s huge,’ I said.
‘That’s one of the problems.’ Max gave me a wry smile.
‘So who’s the likely bomber?’ I asked. I’d had the whole thirty hours of travel time from New York to Hobart to think on this, but heading home so suddenly had made me feel tired in a way I hadn’t acknowledged for a very long time. I’d planned on catching up on a few movies but, in the end, I’d finished some paperwork for the person taking over my role at the UN and slept.
‘Maybe someone in the BFG. The Bruny Friends Group.’
‘Cute name,’ I said. ‘They’re shack owners, yes?’
‘Lots of them. But they’re residents too. The BFG tends to attract the new arrivals, not the people who’ve had a place on the island for a hundred years—although a few of them have joined the cause. But the really vocal members are the sea changers and tree changers. “Climate change refugees”, they like to call themselves. Burned-out corporates. Lawyers, media people, a few actors. I’m sure you know the trend. Buy an old Federation home with a bit of land. Seems incredibly cheap after London or Sydney. Get a few bees. Plant an orchard or a vineyard.’
‘Get a Fowlers bottling kit. Go to a cheese-making course …’
‘Yes,’ said Max. ‘They’re everywhere.’
‘They’re in Maine too,’ I said. ‘And upstate New York.’
‘Well, they’re a big part of the Bruny and channel population. And they’re highly organised. Led by Gilbert Farris, as I’m sure you know by now.’
‘Did you read Homogenocene?’