Missionaries

by Phil Klay

  “Well . . . yes,” he said, his eyes on the screen. Two of the men loaded a child-size figure onto a stretcher. He kept his eyes on the figure as it made its slow way to the truck, was unloaded, and then the men went back for more, the next time picking a corpse the size of an adult.

  He pointed to the screen. “Regrettable,” he said.

  Jeffie shrugged. “Emirati pilots suck,” he said.

  It was strange. Juan Pablo knew he was looking at the aftermath of a wedding party. He knew this war killed civilians by the thousands. He knew disease would soon claim worse. He knew cholera was spreading from Sana’a to Aden. He knew children were dying of malnutrition and he knew that Hodeidah was the central port for the vast majority of humanitarian aid coming into Yemen. So he knew that as they closed in and choked it off, more children would die. Regrettable, very regrettable. But necessary.

  The Houthis, of course, had killed thousands even before the Emirates and the Saudis had intervened. They fought a dirty guerrilla war, laying minefields indiscriminately, getting six-year-old children to drop grenades in the turrets of tanks, establishing a totalitarian police state in the areas they’d taken over. They were primitive tribesmen, he told himself, their brightest idea the restoration of a seventh-century theocracy run exclusively by blood descendants of Mohammed, the sort of medieval idea Juan Pablo would have found hilarious if it wasn’t backed by Russian and Iranian technology. He shook his head. A bunch of tribesmen who would probably struggle to construct a working electric lightbulb were using wire-guided antitank missiles to blow each other up in pickup trucks.

  This war was only happening because of technology created far away from here. But happening it was. And if they advanced, especially if they managed to take Aden, a port located on a twenty-mile-long chokepoint for a huge portion of the world’s oil shipments, there’d be a global commerce crisis, a spike in oil prices, and disaster for pretty much every country in the world except for poor, decrepit oil producers like Russia and Venezuela. Which meant, even here, what he was doing was related to the security of his home country. In the modern world, everything is related to everything.

  After his shift, he went to his apartment just as the sun was rising, and he called home. It was around nine, Bogotá time, and after a discussion of how Valencia was getting along, they reverted to the usual argument.

  “Why can’t you get a contract here?” She meant a contract working in Colombia. With his old colleagues who’d driven him out, or with Americans, working for interests that were often aligned with, but not the same as, the interests of his country.

  “Maybe I should have stayed in,” he said. “Dared them to pass me over.”

  She sighed. “You would have been passed over.” Sofia had talked to the wives. She knew. “But if you talk to Colonel Carlosama—”

  “I won’t live on his charity.”

  And that was that. He wanted to tell her about his work, about the wedding party, about Jeffie’s comment on the strangeness of their work, but of course he couldn’t. He asked her about her day, about the women who had remained friends with her, and the women who no longer wanted to see her, and how predictable it all was. How Sofia had, in fact, predicted it. Who were true friends, who were not. As she spoke, he longed to be with her, to be able to touch her, see her in real life, not through a screen. It was a longing deeper than any he’d felt during the many long stretches away from her back in Colombia, and he wondered where it came from. He shook it off. This kind of work would not just set him and Sofia up financially. It would allow them to secure something for their daughter as well. If she really did want to go into human rights, well, that work wouldn’t pay. But the money he made here could go into making that lifestyle a possibility for her.

  After the call, he remembered Jeffie’s invitation and walked to the American’s apartment. Jeffie opened the door, and inside it was just him and an open bottle of bourbon. Harsh light came from the windows, which looked out onto drab brown nothingness that stretched in all directions from where they lived, at an air base in the Emirates’ deep south, a region of the country known as the Empty Quarter. It was an apt name. Juan Pablo immediately regretted coming.

  “Guess what I found out.” Jeffie slurred the words as he poured an enormous amount of bourbon into a plastic cup. The room was disorganized. Bed unmade. Papers strewn across a coffee table. An open book with a cracked spine dropped pages-down on the floor.

  “I won’t stay long,” Juan Pablo said. He looked at the book. An Army at Dawn. The cover showed a line of soldiers walking across a scrubby hillside.

  “You know the Aden screwup?”

  The Aden screwup was when a couple of American mercenaries tried to place a shrapnel-laced bomb in the offices of a local political party, Islah, but instead got into a firefight and alerted the whole neighborhood. The thing had been further confirmation to Juan Pablo that using ground forces here for sensitive missions in Yemen was a nonstarter. They just weren’t good enough. Even though, supposedly, the American mercenaries were all top quality, a Green Beret, a SEAL, and a CIA Ground Branch guy.

  “Turns out the SEAL in the group,” Jeffie said, “well, he left the service after shooting a recruit. Training accident. Left the guy crippled. Now he’s here, fucking our shit up and making twenty-five thousand dollars a month.”

  Juan Pablo sipped the bourbon. It was sweet, and burned pleasantly.

  “Old Crow, General Grant’s favorite.” Jeffie pointed at the bottle the whiskey had come from. “Sit down, sit down.”

  He motioned to a chair positioned toward the window, facing the sun that hung over the empty landscape. Juan Pablo sat, his eyes narrowing against the glare.

  “How many guys here got some story like that?” Jeffie said. “Not like, shot a guy, but . . . something must have gone wrong for most of us. From SEAL Team Six to an Emirati kill squad in Yemen—it’s probably not how he thought his life would go.”

  Juan Pablo didn’t like where the conversation was going. “Are you about to tell me your past?” he said.

  Jeffie shot back the Old Crow and winced as it went down. Then he shivered like a dog shaking off water, and poured more into his cup. “No dark past. I just went bankrupt,” he said. He put a hand in the air. “Kid brother had some issues. Of a medical variety. Well, sort of. Complicated.” Without asking, he reached over and poured even more whiskey into Juan Pablo’s cup. Juan Pablo figured there were at least four shots sitting in there now. He had no intention of staying here long enough to drink it all. But he sipped.

  “Right before the end of shift, they intercepted some chatter,” Jeffie continued. “Turns out the bomb that went stray killed one of Badr al-Dien’s nephews.”

  Badr al-Dien was a Houthi commander. Not exactly a high-value target, but high enough. “I used to work with an American who’d tell me it is better to be lucky than be good.”

  “Lucky, yeah.” Jeffie stared into his whiskey. “Well, when the funeral comes, I’m guessing the two will put together a package to hit the funeral.”

  “Logical.” It was.

  “A wedding and a funeral, we’ll have the whole circle of life.” He said it dolefully.

  “Yes.” Some people had the oddest moral lines. In a country where there was starvation, disease, and wide-scale slaughter of innocents, for some reason air attacks on funerals bothered people. When it came to war, even nonreligious men would start drawing magic circles, declaring this and that sacred.

  “We killed kids today,” Jeffie said, still staring into his whiskey. “Not what I signed up for.”

  Such fastidiousness. “You’re American,” Juan Pablo said. “You’ve killed kids before.”

  Jeffie let out a little grunt of displeasure. Juan Pablo took a sip of the whiskey, and then took a gulp, letting the burn settle pleasantly. He was getting irritated.

  “Have you ever lived in a violent ci
ty?” Juan Pablo continued. “I mean, a truly violent city? Not as a soldier. As a citizen?”

  No. Jeffie had grown up in Northern California.

  “People from places like that only want one thing,” Juan Pablo said. “Order.”

  “Is that why you’re here? To provide order? Come on. You couldn’t resist the check.”

  “I’m paid well. There’s no shame in that. I provide a valuable service.”

  Jeffie nodded. Juan Pablo scowled into his whiskey. This fool, this fellow mercenary, wanted to believe in clean wars with clear boundaries. Such a thing didn’t exist. He thought of his days in Saravena, playing the clown, trying to change the pro-guerrilla culture of the town by seducing the children. Wars are not fought by armies. They are fought by cultures. If the animal you are fighting is communism, then the guerrilla are simply that animal’s claws. Drug trafficking is its heart, coca and heroin the blood coursing through its veins, and poor, angry, ignorant people its hide and the flesh underneath. The Houthis were a different animal, sustained by a different type of blood entirely, but the underlying principle was the same. Your job is not to trim the claws. It’s to kill the beast.

  “This is a good war,” he said. “Who is on our side? In our operations center we’ve got Americans and Israelis and Emiratis and one Colombian. We’ve got resupply from the United States, arms from half the globe, and if you look closely, see who is supporting this war, directly or indirectly, you will find that what sits behind us is the entire civilized world. And on the other side, we have men and women raised in tents, in a debased culture of rituals and poverty and sacred texts that half of them are too illiterate to read, sending out suicide bombers and laying land mines that will maim and kill for generations, and for what? So they can install the great-great-great-great-grandson of a desert preacher’s cousin as king? I am on the side of civilization against primitive nonsense.”

  He did not add that this was a sometimes lonely side to be on, even in his own family. That his wife and daughter believed in primitive nonsense, in rituals and sacred texts, and it was an embarrassment he hardly liked to consider himself.

  Jeffie laughed and shook his head. “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Kids, though. Kids.”

  Jeffie, who had done support for air missions over Serbia in the ’90s, served in Iraq and Afghanistan, suddenly had qualms. Why? Because the quality of the video feed on their drone was good enough to show off a child’s corpse. Americans are so very sentimental. Fingers in every conflict in the world, but then they get histrionic about a random dead child and think that makes them a good person.

  “Well,” Juan Pablo said, “you and I improve the precision of the Emirati targeting? Yes? I suspect there are, in the end, fewer dead children because you are here.” Silly. A scrap thrown to Jeffie’s conscience. But it seemed to comfort him. Maintaining morale is just as important for mercenaries as for any other kind of soldier.

  * * *

  • • •

  The conversation stayed with him during his next shift, as he tracked a running battle in a town north of Aden. Friendly armored forces versus rebels who rarely appeared on-screen or gave the opportunity for a successful air strike. Mostly, those in the operations center had just watched on the screens as small boxy shapes spat out little flashes, and then the walls of little buildings crumbled.

  It was like he’d said. Civilization versus primitivism. Those armored vehicles could have come from almost anywhere in the civilized world. He’d seen American MaxxPro and Oshkosh M-ATVs here, but also Finnish Patrias, South African RGs, even French Leclerc tanks, though he couldn’t make any of those out on the screens before him. If the resolution was good enough to make out individual weapons, he knew he’d see representatives of even more countries. Singaporean 120mm mortars, Serbian Zastava machine guns, Belgian FN minimis, Chinese M80s, and an assortment of small arms and heavy ordnance from Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Brazil, and more. The buildings they were destroying were made of local stone, or soil mixed with straw, or burn mud.

  Yes, it was an ugly little war. But with the right perspective, there was something majestic at work here. The rebels, whether they were fully aware of it or not, were threatening a main artery of civilization—the Bab el-Mandeb strait, one of the world’s most important trade routes. And so civilization, which had never cared much for desert tribesman, had come here and shown its steel.

  The day of the funeral, a surveillance team was emplaced in a nearby building to provide eyes on the mourners. They waited. The team radioed about people coming in and out of the building where the funeral was to be held. About “no weapons.” About “military-age males,” which means any human with a Y chromosome tall enough to piss in a standard urinal. They waited. The early arrivals came. Still no weapons. They waited. Then as the funeral was about to start, a convoy of vehicles arrived. Visual confirmation. Weapons. They were in business.

  A photo popped up from the surveillance team. Visual recognition software gave it a 63 percent match on a member of Islah. Not who they were expecting, but a target.

  The OpsO called the general. Minutes ticked by. The general called back. They’d send in ground forces. Colombians in cordon, local Yemeni forces making the arrests. They waited some more, watching the movement of the ground forces on the map.

  “This is a better mission than I thought,” Jeffie said.

  Juan Pablo shook his head. Jeffie was pleased they wouldn’t be bombing anyone. Instead, the ground forces would round up the funeralgoers and send them to secret prisons where they would be tortured. It was nice to know that all it took to calm Jeffie’s nerves was to introduce one minimal step from the actual ugliness of the job.

  Minutes passed, the visuals remained the same. Juan Pablo saw Jeffie scratching out longhand division, estimating the remaining fuel on the drone. A convoy pulled up to the funeral. More weapons. The surveillance team radioed that they’d spotted an Iranian ATGM. Jeffie began typing on a keyboard, sending emails back and forth with a JTAC, who promised to reroute some F-15s. And then the Colombians came on the net, and the plan changed.

  “Dos urgentes, dos rutinaria, nada muertos,” came a calm voice. They’d hit a mine, taken injuries, and identified more mines ahead. Juan Pablo briefed the OpsO and the OpsO called in to brief the general and they waited. The surveillance team called in and identified a building separate from the funeral hall where most of the men carrying weapons had gone.

  Juan Pablo called over the OpsO.

  “Alternatively,” Juan Pablo told him, “we wait for the funeral to end, and then hit the fighters’ building once the principals reunite with their security.”

  The OpsO nodded and called back to the general for guidance. They waited.

  Meanwhile, Jeffie circled the fighters’ building. It was a multilevel structure with a courtyard. The surveillance team claimed they’d observed only men and boys carrying weapons going in and out so maybe it was clear of civilians. It should be clear of civilians. In theory, the guidelines they operated under would demand better intelligence.

  As he waited, Juan Pablo watched the image of the target. It was soothing. At first glance, it was a static image, but then you noticed that it was shifting, ever so slightly, as the drone circled and its sensor camera rotated to keep fixed on the building. He wondered what was going on inside. And what was happening in the nearby building, at the funeral? He didn’t know what a Muslim funeral was like. Were they all the same? Or did Yemenis have particular customs? In all his time watching Yemenis die on video screens, he had not once talked to a single Yemeni, or even seen one in person. They were a notional people to him, defined not by experience but by a few articles he’d read, by talk among his fellow mercenaries, and by a few opinion polls he’d sought out to learn about their retrograde beliefs.

  Were they as motivated by primitivism as he thought? Was this war of attrition they were fightin
g grinding down their resistance, or would it spawn pockets of resistance, deep enmities, nonnegotiable hatred? What were they like? He didn’t know. It wasn’t necessary to know for a campaign like this, which was one half war and one half extermination.

  Confirmation came from the general and Juan Pablo let out a breath. Hours of tension building up were soon to be released. Meanwhile, Jeffie was on the radio with the ground team.

  “Can you sparkle the building? No, not now . . . but . . . yes . . . good.”

  If the ground team could sparkle the target, they were set. A perfect mission. Normally, an Emirati pilot in a jet hooked up with a SniperPod would have to shoot a laser onto a target for another jet to fire on. And since the Emiratis tended to fly as high as possible to avoid ground fire, they weren’t the most reliable.

  “Okay, movement,” Jeffie said. There was nothing on the screen for a moment and then figures emerged near the target building. “Yeah, now. Sparkle it now.” He switched to a different radio. “You should see it now.”

  Juan Pablo closed his eyes, took in the hum of the operations center. He wondered if the men who were about to die were capable of appreciating everything that went into their deaths. An American mercenary was aiming a laser at the instruction of an American pilot operating a Chinese drone. They were communicating over an encrypted frequency routed through a Canadian aircraft mounted with Swedish surveillance technology, bounced from repeater hub to repeater hub to the main air-ground tower at their air base in the Empty Quarter. The drone pilot, in turn, was communicating with an Emirati fighter pilot in an American aircraft armed with a laser-guided bomb capable of being launched from nine miles away and forty thousand feet up and still detonating within ten feet of its target.

  He heard someone clear the pilots hot. Was it Jeffie? It didn’t matter. He knew, as everyone in that operations center knew, that in another country miles and miles away from them men of another religion and another way of life breathed their last. They knew, and the ground team knew, and the pilots knew, but no one else.