‘I said I’m fucking sick of this shitty ass car. We’re pouring a hell of a lot of money into this war, but we can’t get any real cars on the ground. Typical fucking Pentagon bullshit. Right?’
I shrug. I’m not interested in the whining and bullshitting typical of his kind. We haven’t discussed it, but it’s obvious he’s ex-military. He lacks the deadly, quicksilver intelligence of a Navy SEAL, so he’s probably Special Forces. His intelligence is blunt, focused, ruthless. He doesn’t know anything about the Middle East, about the importance of drinking tea, about anything other than the shortest distance between two points. A man made for squares and straight lines, not for the inconsistency, frustration, and patience of the twilight zone.
In the old world—the one that ended less than a year ago, that we already barely remember—his type came in after me, acted on the information I gathered. In the old world, we worked in different shifts. Now we’re working side by side.
‘The interpreter says it’ll take another half hour,’ I say.
I lean back, close my eyes. Let the monotonous sounds, the uneven road, the almost imperceptible irritation rock me into hollow sleep.
It’s nearly dark when we roll into the village. All the villages look the same. Gray, full of stones, gravel, laundry, goats. In the dusk it could have been the one we came from, the one we’re going to tomorrow. Some children running alongside the car shout something that I can’t hear or understand. We are the traveling salesmen of promises and weapons, and we’re greeted like heroes in every corner of this temporary country. Hopes are high, and we’re doing nothing to dampen them. Our job is to enthuse.
‘Is this the place?’ I ask the driver in Arabic.
He nods and slows down at what might generously be described as a dusty little square. Dirty men in ankle-length kaftans and head scarves, carrying a motley mix of weapons, stand in a small group outside one of the little stone houses. They shoo away the children.
My colleague is asleep, so I give his shoulder a hard shake. He wakes up immediately, as if he never slumbered.
‘We’re here,’ I say.
‘What a fucking dump,’ he says.
We jump out of the car and are greeted by the men. We exchange pleasantries. My colleague smiles ironically when he bows but pronounces the greeting phrases perfectly. He has an ear for languages, but not the patience to learn anything other than English. The shadows would have devoured him in a second. He’s uninterested in nuance.
Inside the house, which isn’t much more than a shack with a dirt floor and an open flame, we drink our thousandth cup of tea, and I lie about my country’s intentions. My colleague is uninterested in all this; he wants to move on to the next part. He asks for something stronger than tea, and our hosts pull out a bottle of a brand of whiskey I’ve never seen before. They are intoxicated by victory. Their eyes radiate immortality. Right now, at this very moment, they’ve achieved what they’ve been fighting a thousand years for. They control the borders of their own fictional country. They took Mosul a few days ago and can’t stop talking about heroism, historical relevance. I congratulate them again and again and explain how impressed we are by their courage. I promise weapons. Air support.
‘Air support?’ they say as they always do, the Kurdish word apparently isn’t clear enough.
‘We’ll bomb the shit out of Saddam if he comes up here,’ says my colleague, tired of me always saying the same thing. ‘Translate that,’ he says, nodding to the interpreter, who obeys.
Our hosts laugh, pound each other on the back, pour another glass of that dubious whiskey.
By the end they’re happy with my promises. They want to touch American power for themselves, so we take them to the Land Cruiser.
My colleague unloads the three boxes and opens the first in the headlights.
‘Mortar,’ he says. ‘Three of them. These brutes will blow away any tank you want.’
The farmers who are now partisans, soldiers, freedom fighters, legends bend forward reverently and pick up the weapons. Pass them around.
‘We’ll teach you how to use them later,’ he says.
‘Not necessary,’ say the freedom fighters, the legends. ‘We can handle weapons.’
My colleague firmly takes back the mortar and puts it in the box with the others.
‘We’ll teach you how to use them later,’ he says.
‘Can we see the ammunition?’ say the soldiers.
My colleague opens the second box and shows them the shells. Twenty shells, barely enough for tomorrow’s training.
‘Is that all?’ say the partisans.
‘That’s all we have today,’ I say. ‘But as I said, we will deliver more within the week.’
They mutter.
‘But if the Iraqis get here before you do?’
‘Then we’ll bomb the shit out of them,’ says my colleague and turns to the interpreter. ‘Translate that.’
The farmers laugh, shake their heads.
There’s more ammunition for their Russian weapons in the last box. They’re disappointed. They were hoping for more. The glow in their eyes burns less intensely. But it burns.
The farmers, partisans whisper among themselves. Weapons training is settled. The late dinner is eaten. The tea is replaced by bottles like my colleague’s. They’re excited and eager. I see my colleague’s movements slowing down, his face relaxing. He’s been drinking constantly, consistently since we arrived.
The interpreter shrugs.
‘They want to show you something, it seems. But I don’t know what.’
In the end they all agree, they take us by the hand. Intoxicated. Their disappointment over the mortars was apparently temporary. They’ve become soldiers, freedom fighters, temporary legends again. They lead us out through the village. Over moonlit gravel and stone, through darkness and silver. To yet another collection of small, low houses, stinking of goats. Maybe the buildings are storage or barns. In front of one of them stands a bearded legend, a partisan. A Russian machine gun hangs from his shoulder. A barely burning cigarette sits in the corner of his mouth.
He drops the cigarette on the gravel, stomps it out, and opens the warped wooden door to let us in. The lights from the men’s flashlights hop and shake in the darkness, making it hard to focus. The stench is unbearable. Animals and something else, something more acrid. Finally the flashlights focus on a pair of sacks in the far back corner, as far away from the door as you can get. Three of the men go over to the bags and kick at them, scream at them, tear at them.
The sacks move, moan, shrink. The men lift them up. Two boys, barely eighteen, with smashed-in faces, wearing torn, baggy uniforms. Two terrified Iraqi boys.
The legends laugh and spit on the boys. Swear at them in Arabic. The interpreter turns to us, shrugs.
‘They say that the prisoners are refusing to talk. That they claim they’re just infantry soldiers.’
I shake my head.
‘That’s because they’re just infantry soldiers. What do they want them to say?’
From the corner of my eye I see my colleague disappear out the door.
I catch up with him at the Toyota. He’s fiddling with something. The hood is up. There are jumper cables hanging around his neck.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I say.
He doesn’t answer. Reaches into the engine with both hands, grabs hold of the battery, and lifts it straight up and out. Sets it down in the gravel.
‘Help me out here,’ he slurs.
‘Why?’
Even though I know.
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he says.
He looks me in the eye. A new radiance. A flash of naked sadism. The metallic sound of the jumper cables when he smacks them together.
‘Some of this straight to the cock will loosen our Iraqi friends’ tongues.’
‘How fucking drunk are you?’ I say. ‘They’re just a couple of infantry boys who got left behind in the retreat from Mosul.’
‘If you don’t wanna help me you can wait in the car,’ he says and bends down to grab the battery.
My control seeps out of me like leaking oil. I see his eyes dance. There’s nothing to say. No argument that will work.
I loosen the Glock in my belt. Feel its weight in my hand. Wailing coming from the stables. Loud voices. Blows. Where the hell is the interpreter? The driver?
‘I’ll give you one last chance to put that goddamn battery back in the car,’ I say.
He turns his head in my direction. Shakes it. Spits on the ground in front of me.
‘Well well, you’re quite the little, fucking cunt, aren’t you,’ he says. ‘Just like your little whore in Damascus.’
I hit him in the nose with the barrel of the gun. Hear the crunch of bone and cartilage. See the blood pour out onto the gravel. I’m straddling his chest before he even has time to put his hands over his face.
‘What the hell did you say?’ I say. ‘What the fuck do you know about Damascus?’
My mouth tastes like metal and endorphins. There’s no turning back from this. I press the barrel of the Glock to his eye, forcing the back of his head into the silvery, bloody earth.
‘You got your little whore killed,’ he hisses. ‘Got her blown to smithereens…’
‘Shut up!’ I bellow, pressing the gun even harder against his eye. Then someone lifts me straight up and back. Hands grab hold of mine. The Glock is ripped out of my hands. I see the farmers bending over my colleague, see them lift him up. Keep him upright, away from me. He spits blood into the gravel, sniffling and shaking his head. Hisses.
‘It should have been you. You know that don’t you, faggot.’
We leave the village early the next morning. It’s raining. Drizzling. Behind us we’re leaving three mortars, twenty grenades that won’t crack armor, a few rounds for their Kalashnikovs, and two abused Iraqis. We’re leaving our memories behind too. The blood on the gravel. What was said and what wasn’t said. There is never any alternative except to keep going forward.
I turn around. My colleague is already asleep in the backseat. An improvised bandage and the stench of a hangover are the only reminders of yesterday. My thoughts are still racing. I think about the rumors and gossip. What the Iraqi on the ferry in Stockholm didn’t want to tell me. What I didn’t want him to tell me.
I think about the wide eyes of the baby, about how I abandoned her. About how nothing will ever fix that. I think about the rooftops in Beirut. The heat and the resistance of the trigger. I think of all the things we have to trust in when trying to keep the world from ending. The shifting alliances. I think about the plans for destruction that I gave the Iraqi that frigid evening, the Christmas decorations reflecting in the water, in his glasses. All part of an arrangement that has now been inverted.
I think of the farmers we just left behind who will be executed as soon as Saddam turns north. I think we never do what we say. We never keep our promises. We always end up sacrificing the ones we set out to rescue.
Brussels, Belgium
How the hell had they found him again? That was the question that kept running through Mahmoud’s mind since, still shaky, he’d fled into the subway after the chaos of the morning. How the hell was it possible? Were they following him yesterday? To the African Museum and then to the hotel. If they had been following him, they must have been invisible. He’d chosen the hotel completely at random. His picture was not in the Belgian media as far as he knew. He’d stayed away from the Internet, hadn’t used his phone. It didn’t make sense.
Mahmoud bought a Coke and a pan pizza from a hole-in-the-wall at the Gare Central. The pizza was hard as a brick and seemingly stuffed with glue and gravel. He continued down onto one of the platforms. It was constantly present: the stress and paranoia. As if he were on a stage. As if everyone were looking at him, inspecting him, waiting for the right moment to strike.
He couldn’t go on like this anymore. He had no direction, no goal except to hide. He was completely passive, reactive rather than active.
As things stood now, it was hard to imagine how he could take less initiative. Something had to change. He sat down on a bench and waited for the next train, jiggling his legs nervously. Beside him, he heard a man in a suit swearing in English about having no cell coverage.
Mahmoud froze. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before.
Filled with new energy, he shoved the remains of his sad meal into the nearest trash can and hurried up the stairs and back through the urine-stinking tunnel he’d just come through. He followed the rusty signs to the toilets in the basement of the central station.
He paid thirty cents to the forbidding woman at the door. The two coins clinked against the worn porcelain dish on her picnic table. The stalls were empty and surprisingly clean. He chose the first one, locked the door behind him, and lowered the toilet lid. Wriggled his backpack off. He emptied out its contents onto the toilet lid. Passport, wallet, mobile phones and batteries, the PowerPoint presentation and the program from the lecture. Underwear and socks. A shirt and a T-shirt. A Pocket Edition of
Torture Team
by Philippe Sands that he’d been reading when he fell asleep on the plane. And also Lindman’s wallet. He went through it quickly. An American Express, one VISA. Not even a gold card. Two hundred euros in bills of twenty. A driver’s license and a receipt for a storage locker in Paris. Mahmoud stopped. Picked up the receipt again, turned it around. Lindman mentioned that he’d hidden something in Paris. Was there any better place than a storage locker? Maybe it was worth a try. He slipped the receipt into his own wallet and continued rummaging through the contents of his backpack without knowing exactly what he was looking for. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to be among his things. He felt the pockets of his backpack and the pockets of his clothes. Nothing. Finally he turned the nylon backpack inside out.
And there, at the bottom left corner, something was held in place by black tape. He tore off the tape excitedly and held the object up in the cold fluorescent light. It looked like a high-tech matchbox, completely encased in hard plastic. A GPS transmitter. That was how they’d managed to follow him, how they’d found him at the hotel.