by C. E. Smith
‘Why not just take the picture outside?’ Burkett asks.
Through Nick Nibras explains that the CIA can deduce information from background detail – even the grains of sand and direction of light.
Nibras turns the screen of his camera so that they can see the pictures. He asks them to choose their favorites, as if doing them a courtesy, but to Burkett he seems more like an artist seeking affirmation. Burkett’s face seems to twitch with the shuffle of images. The swelling all but buries his left eye. At random he selects one of the pictures, but Nibras prefers another.
‘He keeps saying you have a distinctive American face,’ Nick says.
‘What does that mean?’
The jihadist provides notepads and ballpoint pens that bear the logo of the Aljannah Hotel. He instructs them to write letters to their families. With his gap-toothed, jaundiced smile, he apologizes for the need to exaggerate the hardships of captivity. It’s important for ransom purposes that they give the impression of extreme discomfort, daily threats to their lives. But not to worry, he says. They aren’t Muslims, so he isn’t committing a sin by asking them to lie. In fact, their lies are in keeping with Allah’s will, since the financial gains will support jihad.
His eyes brighten with sudden realization: Burkett’s bruises will lend credence to their claims of suffering. Perhaps the kids can doctor Nick’s picture to look more like Burkett’s.
‘Kids?’ Burkett asks.
Nick seems confused by his translation as well, but after another exchange in Arabic, he says, ‘Their computer experts are kids.’
‘Our friend from yesterday?’
‘Probably.’
Burkett imagines a chamber here devoted to information technology, servers managed by twelve-year-olds. It comforts him to recognize the social phenomenon of kids knowing more about computers than their elders. Not that Nibras would qualify as an elder. He can’t be older than thirty, but what’s the average life expectancy for a jihadist?
Nibras and Nick fall into conversation. Nick agrees to something, but reluctantly. He stands, his fists clenched at his sides. Nibras sets down his rucksack, raises his fists, and punches Nick in the face. Nick stands still, eyes closed, while Nibras examines the trickle of blood from his lip.
Nibras gives him a consoling pat on the shoulder, and the two men position themselves for another punch. This time Nick staggers backward and places a hand against the wall.
‘You all right?’ Burkett asks.
‘I’ll survive,’ Nick says, dribbles of blood trailing down his chin.
Nibras has him hold the newspaper for more pictures.
‘Tell him to come back in an hour,’ Burkett suggests. ‘Your face needs time to swell and bruise.’
Nibras seems to think it’s a good idea. As soon as he leaves Nick starts writing to Beth. Burkett stares at his own blank sheet. Will they actually mail the letter, or is this merely a way of gaining personal information for ransom negotiation? He’d rather not supply them with any more detail than absolutely necessary.
But to whom should he write? His mother is long dead, his father in a state of senile oblivion. The cousins in Cleveland he hasn’t seen in over a decade.
He considers friends from medical school and residency. Robert Crook, now a dermatologist in Boston. Elliot Spears, who no doubt just completed his fellowship at Emory. He hasn’t spoken to either of them since being cast out of the program in plastic surgery.
All of his recent social interactions – outside his moonlighting job in the ER – revolved around drinking and sex. With some of those women, he could make an argument for a genuine connection – Ellen and Mary, perhaps Carol Ann – but he can’t even remember their last names.
How could he subject some hapless friend or former girlfriend to the stress of being contacted by the Heroes of Jihad?
A name comes to mind: Véronique, the intrepid journalist. She’d probably appreciate the prospect of ransom negotiation.
You might not remember me, he writes.
He tears off the page and crumples it into a wad.
There is always Amanda, though he hasn’t seen her since medical school. He’s kept track through mutual acquaintances, but his information has been spotty at best. He only recently heard about her divorce, probably a year after the fact. He wonders what was worse for her, the divorce or the break-up with Burkett. Selfishly, he hopes for the latter. Or perhaps she suffered most when she broke things off with Owen – the virginal college romance that under Burkett’s influence spiraled into a drama of betrayal and deception.
Burkett’s relationship with Amanda lasted longer than his brother’s – four years compared with three. She came with him to Atlanta, where they shared a small apartment, and she matriculated at Emory two years after he did. Why did she and Burkett stay together so long? Somehow their relationship dragged on even when there was nothing left to sustain it but guilt. No doubt it would have lasted even longer if not for his chronic infidelities. She could forgive him only so many times.
In his memory she sits with a friend in a crowded bar. She hasn’t seen him yet. He hopes to slip out before she notices the scantily clad undergraduate who keeps whispering in his ear. He smiles at something the girl says, urging her toward the exit, and just at that moment, still smiling, he meets Amanda’s cold stare in a mirror behind the bar. Other memories flash through his mind: when she found incriminating text messages from another woman, or the following year when he tried and failed to seduce her away from the classmate she would later marry. But it’s the thought of her face that night in the mirror that makes him quail with shame.
The blank page rests on his thigh. A ransom plea is no way to reestablish contact with an old flame, but for all his sins, he has no doubt Amanda would devote herself entirely to his release. But how could he ask her to take on such a burden, when he hasn’t spoken to her in years, when he’s already caused her so much undeserved pain?
Better just to write to his father, who would neither understand nor care. He’ll ask them to send it to the US embassy in the capital. If they insist on an address, there’s no reason not to give them the name of that nursing home in Atlanta. It’s almost comical to imagine his father trying to communicate with some jihadist through the barriers of language and dementia.
Of course the best candidate for such a letter would have been his brother, his perennial ‘emergency contact’. By impulse he pulls the collar of the Penn State tee shirt over his nose, but the foul odor is entirely his own.
‘You need to write something,’ Nick says, neatly folding the page he’s filled.
‘Will they kill me if I don’t?’
‘Just write a note to your father,’ he says.
‘I don’t want them to know where he lives.’
‘You can use the IMO address.’
‘I’m not writing anything.’
When Nibras returns, he seems pleased enough by the swelling in Nick’s upper lip to take more photographs.
‘Jayyid jiddan.’ Very good. He magnifies the swollen lip on his view screen.
Nick’s letter to Beth fills both sides of the page. Nibras doesn’t seem surprised when Burkett hands him the blank notepad. After less than ten minutes, he returns with an older man they’ve only seen from a distance. Some kind of commander, he wears an eye patch with a thick scar crossing behind it. He holds out the notepad and taps the empty page with what remains of his index finger. As far as Burkett can tell, he’s lost all or part of every finger on his right hand.
Burkett shakes his head. ‘I have nothing to say.’
The old warrior grips Burkett by the wrist, lays the ballpoint pen in his hand, and again taps the notepad.
‘Just make something up,’ Nick says. ‘If you want, I’ll tell you what to write.’
Nick turns and speaks to them directly, taking the
notepad and pen, no doubt promising to get a letter out of Burkett.
‘Tell them I’ll write a letter as soon as I find out who killed my brother.’
Nick hesitates before interpreting, but when he does, he speaks longer than would seem necessary and in a tone far more conciliatory than Burkett intended. He hears min fadlak, or please, and imagines Nick politely arguing that the sickness of grief keeps him from writing, that the best treatment would be knowing who killed his brother. The old man listens with a thoughtful expression, as if he were considering the offer – a letter, potentially worth thousands of dollars, in exchange for some small piece of information.
‘The old man says he’s never heard of your brother,’ Nick says. ‘But if you don’t write a letter, you will shortly join him in Hell.’
13
The next day they’re permitted outside – perhaps a reward for the letters. The courtyard is a welcome escape from that cell and their own fetid odors. Burkett sits alone in the shade and watches as masked men pose for photographs with a grenade launcher.
He ended up writing the first thing that came to mind:
Dad, I’m being held captive, possibly by the same men who killed Owen. Unharmed so far, but give them whatever they ask.
All the best,
Ryan.
As an afterthought he wrote, I love you. Of course he wouldn’t have said that under normal circumstances, not ever to his father, but his captors might be less inclined to torture and murder him if they see him as a loving son.
A completely ridiculous letter, he thinks. His father at his prime would have found it laughable, an embarrassment. But he doubts the letter will actually reach him.
They’ve been given clean clothes: baggy, brightly colored shirts and pants down to their calves. Sitting in the courtyard, Burkett slips off his running shoes. Without socks it’s only a matter of time before he develops athlete’s foot.
Nibras and several others have gathered under the awning. The boy who struck Burkett has set up a laptop on a crate. The grenade launcher, momentarily forgotten, lies in its foam-lined case. Burkett looks across the courtyard, where Nick stands with the single other prisoner, Tahir, a lawyer from the capital apparently being held because of his family’s political influence.
Nick too seems to have noticed the grenade launcher. But what can be done? The prospects are bleak for a single missile against twenty Kalashnikovs in a walled compound.
Cheers draw Burkett’s attention back to the group. They are watching some kind of video on the boy’s laptop. His eyes find Nibras, who lifts a hand inviting him to come and watch.
With Nick he wavers at the periphery of the huddle. The video depicts a series of suicide bomb attacks, with a soundtrack borrowed from some action movie. Graphics enhance the shaky footage – a circle or red arrow marking the suicide bomber or targeted Hummer. The Islamists shout praises with each explosion.
Nick turns and walks away. Burkett should follow, but he stays, even for the grainy magnification of a severed arm – probably belonging to the bomber himself, but that doesn’t seem to diminish the glee it inspires in the jihadists. The video concludes with a glossy montage culled from some Hollywood film – Muslim swordsmen slaying Christian knights.
One of the jihadists is wearing Burkett’s Penn State tee shirt.
‘That’s my shirt,’ he says.
Nick isn’t there to interpret, but it is clear the man understands. He must have gone into their room and found the shirt in the pile. Begrimed and threadbare, it has little value. Perhaps he sees it as a token of conquest. Or maybe he meant the taking as provocation.
He’s old enough for a beard the length of a fist, the way the Prophet Muhammad wore his. He points his Kalashnikov at Burkett’s chest.
‘Keep the shirt,’ Burkett says, raising his hands and backing away. He shouldn’t have said anything – at least not so soon after the movie, the heroic murders fresh in the man’s mind.
Nibras comes over and talks his friend out of pulling the trigger. Burkett notices Nick at the door of their chamber and realizes he must have witnessed the entire exchange.
An execution takes place the following day. Burkett and Nick hear the gunshots from their cell. Later in the courtyard they recognize the severed head of Tahir, the lawyer from the capital, propped on a sheet for photographs. The body hangs upside down and drains into a bucket. It is Nibras who dips a brush into the bucket and adds to the scriptural graffiti covering the walls.
Just yesterday, Nick says, Tahir had described a recurrent dream – the dream – in which he was summoned by a bearded man in a white robe. It is the same dream Christian missionaries have encountered all over the Muslim world.
‘He’s with Jesus now,’ Nick says.
At this hour the massive pine trees outside the wall cast the entire compound in a pleasant shade, but today Burkett and Nick prefer their dim chamber. They prop open the door to ease the stench, which has grown worse by the day.
‘Would they ask us for letters if they planned to kill us?’ Burkett asks.
‘You shouldn’t be afraid of death.’
Burkett hears nothing in this beyond smug condescension. He resists an impulse to lash back. Of course he’s afraid of death, of being decapitated on video.
An image flashes before him – the barrel of a Kalashnikov, that boy in the courtyard. Why did the boy choose Burkett rather than Nick? Perhaps even he could see the difference between them. Perhaps he recognized in Nick a fellow fanatic buoyed by the promise of everlasting bliss. What then did he see in Burkett? A coward? It is easier to kill a coward – easier to kill a dog than a man. Maybe this is the advantage of a child soldier. He is old enough to use a Kalashnikov but too young to know the difference between cowardice and a reasonable fear of death.
How did his brother face the final gun? He fought to the end: that much was obvious from the bruises on his hands, the fractured metacarpal – the so-called boxer’s fracture. But what happened between the fighting and the shooting, when he lay incapacitated by the blows? Perhaps he was unconscious, dying from shattered ribs and a collapsed lung, so that the bullets came as a relief, if he felt them at all.
From somewhere comes a verse: To die is gain. Perhaps those were the last words in his brother’s mind.
Owen would have wanted to stare into the eyes of the man killing him. Did the man look away? Or did those criminal eyes take in the very last light of Owen’s life and then resume their interactions with all the meaningless light from elsewhere? How unjust that the person least deserving should carry the memory of Owen’s last moment. Perhaps it is one of the soldiers outside, even the jocular Nibras. If only Burkett knew the man. If only the eyes were marked somehow by what they had seen.
Nick bows his head and faintly whispers, but Burkett can’t discern the words. They are sitting against the back wall, as far as possible from the door and Tahir’s body outside.
‘Are you praying for our freedom?’ he asks.
‘No,’ says Nick, opening his eyes.
‘Then what are you praying for?’ He’s unable to keep the irritation from his voice. ‘Do you want them to kill us?’
‘I’m thinking about James and Peter when they were imprisoned.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘An angel opened the prison doors and led Peter out into the street.’
‘What about the other guy?’
‘James,’ he says. ‘He was put to death.’
Burkett’s nose in a glass of bourbon would block the growing stench of Tahir’s blood. He imagines pouring three fingers, neat. He would take a moment to breathe it in before the first sip.
He turns to Nick. ‘Do you smell the blood?’
‘What blood?’ Nick gives him a skeptical look. ‘From all the way across the courtyard?’
Burkett wonders if it’s ano
ther hallucination, or perhaps the aura preceding a seizure. He looks at his crotch, half expecting to lose control of his bladder. But of course he wouldn’t be conscious of it till afterward.
‘Are you all right?’ Nick asks.
‘No,’ he says.
A flurry of nausea sends him bounding for the door. What little he’s consumed – rice, bread, water – surges from his mouth. Kneeling in the doorway, he is aware of the headless body maybe fifty feet away, but he refuses to look at it.
‘Feel better?’ Nick asks.
Burkett drags his forearm across his mouth. With a reeking sigh he slumps against the wall. He can no longer smell Tahir’s blood, so his answer to Nick, if he cared to give him one, would be yes, he feels better.
14
Nibras is ranting against the western news media – the anti-Muslim bias, the obscene photographs. Just this morning, an American reporter and a photographer were given a limited tour of the compound while Burkett and Nick sat bound and gagged in their cell. Nibras would have killed the journalists, or at least forced their godless newspaper to pay a crippling ransom, but their escort, a relation of Mullah Bashir himself, had sworn a vow of protection – a vow that would have obligated him to die before letting his guests come to harm.
‘Even a prophet’s family has fools,’ says Nibras, who suspects that the journalists were in fact CIA operatives searching for the American prisoners or scouting the compound for a planned raid. They were blindfolded for the journey, their phones and computers left behind, but their camera might have held some tracking device. The prospect of a rescue operation might have given Burkett hope, but he remembers the Aljannah disaster, the helicopter in the pool, and feels almost relieved when Nibras announces the plan to transfer him and Nick to another location.
For the trip they wear blindfolds under burqas and ride in the back of a Chevrolet SUV. Burkett’s blindfold, an abrasive scarf that smells of human sweat, slides low enough that he can see through the mesh window of his burqa. Nibras sleeps in the passenger seat while the driver navigates a series of unpaved mountain roads, passing ramshackle huts and slowing for mule carts and livestock.