by Mike Bond
Not that I felt sorry for myself. We, the Americans, had invaded Iraq in 2003 without, as the textbooks have it, any pretext. There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, anybody with any experience already knew that.
I’d had no conflict with this shitty, sad little nation. Not a nation anyway, just a bunch of competing territories cobbled together by British and American oil companies.
I’d joined up after 9/11 to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but after barely a year there, when we were starting to win, we’d all been hijacked to Iraq by the GW/Cheney/Powell/Hillary pro-war cabal, and once the Iraqis started killing my friends I’d gotten locked into the conflict. But basically what US troops were trying to do now, when Mack and I had been captured, was to enforce some kind of peace among the battered remnants of poor Iraq, and we had little patience for those fanatics who wished to widen and continue the conflict. And in truth, once you’ve scraped the remains of a good friend off a cratered street you no longer have the desire to be neutral.
It was late afternoon, from the cast of the sun on the opposite concrete walls, when Mack and I were led out to be killed again. It was our fifth “execution,” and maybe this one would be real. I hadn’t eaten in days, my stomach contorted with fear, hunger, and dysentery. No matter how tough you are, how you have prepared yourself for death, it is still terrifying. You think of all the things you didn’t do, all the joys; you misremember the sorrows.
Just Mack and me, shoved down on our knees before the camera as if it were a red-eyed god. Mustafa prancing with a big kitchen cleaver, swearing at us and spitting on our heads and calling us “idolatrous monkeys” and “kaffirs” and shit like that.
My heart thundered in my chest, I had trouble breathing, my mouth full of saliva that choked me when I tried to swallow.
He stood over me. “Say how sorry you are!”
I said nothing.
He kicked me in the face; I kept my balance, head down, saying nothing. Blood was running down the inside of my mouth; I would not spit it out and show he’d hurt me.
“Say it!” he yelled again. “How sorry you are.”
It’s a terrible temptation, when you know you’re going to get hurt, to say what they want; your body begs for it. “I am sorry,” I said, “for nothing.”
He didn’t kick me, instead turned to Mack. “You! You say it!”
Mack hunched, waiting for the kick. Mustafa swung the cleaver down and stopped it just under Mack’s chin. He rested the blade against Mack’s throat, yanked it sideways.
“You!” he called to me, “you can watch this – how I’m going to cut his throat, little at a time, let him drown in his own blood, yes?”
Mack said nothing, facing down. In some silly Hollywood movie, maybe the hero would say, “whatever turns you on” or something “courageous” like that. But in real life, when the blade’s really against your throat, you’re so terrified and traumatized and fighting to keep control and not give your fear away, not give this assassin a reason to gloat or feel good about himself, that you are speechless. Focused in these last instants on the beauty of life and the infinite sorrow of its loss.
Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, the saying goes. Or can traumatize you for life. Make you jump at every passing car or unexpected footstep. Fourth of July fireworks make you feel you’re being shot at, bombarded ... You go to any length to avoid this celebration, hide in the north woods, go abroad, or sit in a cellar smoking grass and listening to AC/DC to remind yourself what we should love most in life is freedom, love and sex, and what we should hate most is fakery, domination, murder and lies.
Mustafa didn’t seem happy with our lack of response. He and his henchmen clearly wanted us to give in, to say something he could promote on the terrorist networks run on Facebook and Twitter and all those fools.
I feared he might kill us out of disappointment or anger, but he seemed almost resigned. Maybe being a terrorist isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In any case, he ordered his fetid acolytes to untie the ropes linking our wrists to our ankles so we could stand.
As they led us back to our concrete coffins, Mack, just behind me, turned as if to call something back to Mustafa, an apology in Arabic, and as he did he bumped against me and in a quick downward motion cut the rope tying my wrists with something pinched between his thumb and forefinger and in the same motion handed it to me.
It took a half-second for me to realize what he’d done, that he’d handed me a broken piece of glass, as slowly, very slowly, the realization traveled from my fingers to my brain. He slapped his roped wrists against my back to remind me that we didn’t have all day here, and though slow on the uptake I did the same, managing also to take a nice slice out of his wrist.
There we were, shambling down this corridor of doom with our hands no longer roped behind our backs. There was one bastard in front of us and two behind; you could smell their bad breath and bad teeth and unwashed clothes the way you can smell shit in the hippo cage at the zoo.
Not that we smelled any better.
We reached my cell, with Mack’s just beyond. It was dark here, confined. One of the two bastards behind Mack fumbled keys at the lock of my cell; there’s always time, in microseconds, to worry is this the best moment, but I didn’t, simply reached around his neck and cut his throat with the glass as Mack grabbed the guy behind him and quickly poked out both his eyes and crushed his chin in one fast jab of his palm while I attended to the guy with the keys. In less than four seconds my first guy and the guy with the keys were bleeding out through cut throats and choking as they tried to yell and Mack’s guy had slumped down the wall toward the floor. I gave him the same throat treatment as the others. We grabbed the keys and their guns – how stupid can you be to let jailers have guns?
“Where the fuck are we?” Mack whispered.
“Don’t know. Let’s find Mustafa.”
“We do and we never get out. We get him later.”
“Let’s get him now.” I knew this was crazy but I had to do it.
“No!” Mack grabbed my arm. “Let’s put on their clothes.”
It astounded me I hadn’t thought of this. We stripped two of the three dead guys, tugged on their black pajamas over our own clothes, wiping off the blood as best we could, squeezed all three into my little coffin and locked the door.
At the end of this insalubrious corridor was a stairway that led to a door bathed in sunlight, and a minute later we were on a back alley in the wilds of Mosul, two more ragged Arabs in the throng.
“Where’d you get the glass?” I whispered as we padded along in our Arab flipflops.
“Some poor bastard left it in my cell. He was using it to write goodbye on the wall.”
Watching for pursuit we made our way west toward the coalition zone, where we were almost shot by a nasty bunch of SAS who then hugged us nearly to death, poured a bottle of Oban down our throats and conducted us through low-level fire to our own nearest and dearest CO, ruthless Major Larraty, actually in tears to see us.
Twenty-one minutes later we led a group of fourteen SF back exactly to that building where we’d escaped, only to find it empty. Even the three corpses we’d left were gone.
No blood.
No Mustafa either.
At that moment I hardly cared, I was so happy Mack and I were free and alive. Then two weeks later when we were told that Mustafa had been killed by the French Foreign Legion north of Mosul, we were relieved and gratified. We didn’t know, then, that it was another guy the Legion had killed, and that Mustafa had lived to slaughter many more people in the years to come.
And now in France I’d lost him once again.
And Mack and Gisèle too.
Sure Death
“DOCTOR DEATH is not on the flight from Teheran anymore,” Thierry said.
“He’s changed flights,” Anne said.
“Or h
e’s under another name? I’m looking at the manifest now. There’s a Marcus Sulla ... Italian businessman. Traveling from Teheran to Paris.”
Sulla I remembered was a powerful and ruthless Roman general and politician. Marcus could be Marcus Aurelius, two centuries later Rome’s greatest emperor. But lots of Italians use those names. “Keep looking.”
—
AT 20:45 I hit Les Andelys. Alone, in the Beast as promised. No wires, no transmitter, just my Glock and Kabar clipped under the Beast’s back fender, my iPhone, mike and earbud in my pocket so I’d be there for their call. Plus my normal smelly self. Sweating because I was so scared.
So many times I’ve risked death. You have to do it with a certain confidence. But now I wasn’t confident. I truly feared I wasn’t going to survive. Or Gisèle either.
Anne and I had exchanged goodbyes in our usual tough way. We’ve had a few nice fucks, I’d said, and now I’m going to die.
I’ll find you in the next life, she’d answered. We’ll live in peace then.
The pain in her eyes was atrocious. I held her face in my hands – how like the human heart our face is – distilling into this last look all my love for her and for all of life, praying for her to be happy, live deeply, the kids too ...
I felt bad for sneaking out on Thierry, Tomàs and Harris. But they would’ve somehow wired me, tagged me, backed me up. And Mustafa’s people would’ve known, particularly since they were tracking us. And everybody would’ve died.
On my left, the Seine was high and silvery under the nascent moon. The ancient stone houses along its banks glistened in the ancient yellow streetlamps. King Richard’s island loomed huge and dark amid the roiling water. I thought of the couple who’d lived there in that beautiful solitude then died at Auschwitz, their paintings stolen by the Germans.
The world seemed a very dangerous, predatory place.
Highway to Hell on my phone. “It’s me,” Gisèle said.
“Holy shit it’s you.” I could barely speak. “Are you okay? Is Mack?”
“Drive on Avenue de Gaulle toward Grand Andely.”
As I did a set of headlights swung in behind me, and then a motorcycle’s single beam.
My heart was thundering, sweat running down my wrists. You have to manage this fear, I told myself. Or it will kill you.
It’s very hard to manage fear. To stop shaking when you’re terrified. The cold fire in your gut that keeps rising up your throat. Your knees so weak it’s hard to push down the accelerator.
“Take the next road to the right.”
This one I knew, it headed past the fountain blessed in 791 by Queen Clotilde, wife of Charlemagne, the grandson of Charles Martel who had defeated the Islamic invasion at Tours. The road turned up the hill east of the town. There were lots of lonely curves with a long drop on one side.
The headlights stayed behind me. I began to hope what would happen next, and yes, at the top of the hill Gisèle said, “Turn right past the soccer field.”
Ahead there was only one place: King Richard’s castle.
Chateau Gaillard.
Gaillard means tough, robust, often used for large, fearless men. It was Richard’s most advanced castle, based on what he’d seen in the Holy Land and like the one where he’d been imprisoned at Dürnstein in Austria.
And now I was driving toward it with my high beams picking out the white blossoms of the cherry trees on both sides of the narrow road.
We entered the forest, dark and high, my headlights tunneled as if undersea. I feared this was a runaround, and now they’d send me somewhere else. The road turned left down a wide, open hill with Chateau Gaillard on the crest beyond it.
“Park in the lot below the castle,” Gisèle said.
“I’m not walking into that. It’s a trap.”
“No one will bother you there. We have their word.”
Instead I pulled the Beast off the road where a skinny path switchbacks up to the castle. “Where are you?”
“Run!” she screamed. A thump on flesh, hiss of a fallen phone.
“Where are you? Say it quick!”
“Stables!”
I leaped out, grabbed the Glock and Kabar from under the back fender and ran up the hill. It was very steep and open and anyone with a night vision scope could have hit me easily.
They didn’t. For an instant I halted, gasping, to check my back trail then dashed left uphill into the trees and sprinted to the ridge. The castle was now in front of and below me, huge and unassailable on its vertical promontory over the Seine. But a string of trees led down to its left side, the tall wall where over 800 years ago the French attackers had climbed to the privy holes at the top and squirmed through them, and so took this impenetrable castle from within.
The privy holes at the top of the wall hadn’t been used in hundreds of years. The stone blocks of the wall varied between one- and four-foot rectangles, and over time had developed nice creases between them where the medieval mortar had eroded away.
After having downclimbed the wall of Anne’s apartment building, chasing the guy who’d come to kill her, I was less uptight about heights. And here I had good finger grips and toeholds and soon climbed the wall’s 150 feet, wormed through a privy hole and hid in a dark corner of a meurtrière – the slot where you fire arrows down on unruly visitors below.
My phone vibrated: Gisèle. “They still want to do this,” she half-sobbed. “Once you show yourself in the courtyard, they let me go. I can run down the hill and disappear into town. Then you will give yourself up to them.”
“Agreed.”
But I was already above them and they didn’t know it. They’d expect me to come from below up the open hill toward the outside walls. But I’d already be in the stables, hunting them.
I crossed forty feet of open stone blocks to a parapet that circled the inner walls, and cautiously scanned the open land below down to the road. I saw no sign of anyone nor any cars in the lot.
The rough stone under my palm was cold and wet with Seine fog. The few yellow lights of the town below blinked in and out of the mist, the ancient stone façades appearing and vanishing as in a dream. Even at this distance you could hear the Seine rushing madly along its banks, making everything else more dangerously silent.
I had to know how many of them there were. And where were the ones whose headlights had followed me?
In the best of all possible worlds you take each one silently so the others aren’t warned. In a shootout usually everybody loses, and Gisèle would be the first.
If there were three of them it might be possible. Five would be too many. Sure death.
From where I stood a stone staircase dropped to the next level, a broad paved inner courtyard. Below that in a narrow stone trench were the stables. Eight hundred years ago they had been chiseled out of the solid rock beneath the courtyard, ten of them.
The trench of the stables had two staircases back up to the courtyard, one at each end. If I came down either I’d risk being seen. It was a twenty-foot drop from the courtyard to the stable floor, enough to risk an ankle that would screw up the whole deal.
It was another climbdown.
A cascade of ivy snaked up the corner of two walls. I didn’t want that to hold on to; it’s too frail and wouldn’t carry a person’s weight. But by descending the wall next to it I’d be more difficult to see.
Staying in the shadows I circled the courtyard to the wall of ivy. Below, at the far end of the stables, a dark form crossed the white limestone of a stable entrance. Wishing I’d brought night goggles, I slid along the wall to the ivy and climbed down beside it to the floor of the stable trench.
There were ten stable openings cut into the stone. I’d have to check each one, hoping to kill whoever was there one by one. In which was Gisèle?
The moon came from behind a cloud, splashing the trench with
light. I ducked back against the wall till the clouds returned. With the Glock in my right hand and the Kabar in my left, I cleared the first three stables, nothing inside but rank stone, old straw and bad memories.
Three dark shapes crossed from the far stable to the stairs up to the courtyard, then up another level to the parapet, where they leaned out over the wall scanning the open slope below.
Within a minute they’d realize I wasn’t coming up the hill and my chance of getting Gisèle would be gone. Ducking low I fast-checked the following two stables then heard a voice from the next, in Arabic, “Kill the dirty apostate,” or something like that. “Yes,” she answered in a bruised voice, “you do that.”
“What, slut, you don’t believe me?”
Then two other voices, from the further stable.
Gisèle was alone in this one with a nasty proselytizer. I slid to the door, dropped to the ground and glanced around the corner.
In the penumbra all I could see was a shape standing before another reclining form.
“It is written,” the voice continued. “And still you don’t believe?”
“Tell me.” Her voice changed. “Come closer, teach me to believe.”
I was across the floor in less than a second and drove my knife deep into his throat and pinned him to the floor till he bled out and stopped twitching and choking.
“I saw you, in the corner,” she whispered. “That’s why I said what I did.”
I held her for an instant, gloriously happy. “How many others?”
“Three in the next room. Plus whoever’s looking for you down below.”
She was pinned spread-legged against the wall by barbed wire tying her wrists to two rusty steel rings in the walls. Two more coils of barbed wire from her ankles to steel pins in the stone floor.
I unwrapped her wrists and she pushed down her skirt and bent over to unwind one ankle while I did the other.