When Shadows Come

by Vincent Zandri

  He allows the blade to brush his right leg, the sharp edge of the steel grazing against loose trousers. Looking up at him from where I’m lying on the dirt floor, I see that his eye is bandaged heavily, as if the eye has been knocked out of its socket, or cut out. There is a dark red, almost black bloodstain in the area where his eyeball should be. He’s moving his mouth. He’s saying something, but he’s speaking it silently. Until the silence becomes a whisper.

  “I see,” he mumbles under his breath.

  My eyes shift from his face to Grace’s. She too is watching him, her chest bulging in and out in great heaves of breath. I know she’s panicking. She sees the knife. She’s watching it graze his leg. She’s feeling the pain and the burn of the knife as if it were already entering into her flesh. I cannot see her like this. Not when I am so helpless.

  “I see,” he repeats, his voice growing louder.

  Something begins to happen to my eyes then. They are suddenly losing their focus, as I knew they would. As I feared they would. I shift my gaze back to Hakeemullah. His eyes are focused on mine. Deep pools of black ink.

  “I see,” he says again, this time the “see” ending in a long drawn out “zzzzz.” Like “seeeeezzzzzzz.”

  My eyes cut out on me.

  “I see,” he repeats yet again.

  Along with his voice, I make out the sound of water lapping up against stone walls. I hear muffled voices coming from the basement room attached to this one. Faint voices speaking in Tajik. I hear the very distant hint of a motorboat, and I swear, I hear the delicate voice of a songbird.

  I hear something else, too.

  I hear Hakeemullah’s voice. But I no longer hear the words “I see.” Perhaps I never heard the words “I see.” Maybe I was deaf to the actual word he was speaking to me. Because if I concentrate . . . if I listen closely, I know for certain that he is not saying “I see.”

  No. He is saying something else entirely.

  He is saying, “Aziz.”

  Chapter 71

  “Aziz.”

  When you are undergoing bouts of temporary blindness for which there seems no cure, your hearing becomes acute. The words coming from the mouth of a man who appears to have kidnapped your fiancée will sound like “I see.” But he is not saying “I see.”

  He is saying, “Aziz.”

  A part of my job in Afghanistan was not to fight with the rebels, but to speak with them, to negotiate with them, to try to make them understand the process of peace without terror or the trading and distribution of heroin. Like I’ve said many times before, combat should be waged only as a last resort. In doing so I was able to pick up some Tajik and some Arabic. Not a lot, but some words and phrases here and there.

  One of these words was Aziz.

  It means Dear One.

  Boots shuffle on the gravel floor.

  Just a couple of steps.

  The steps move away from me, not toward me. When I hear the faint sounds of struggling and screaming through a duct-tape gag, I know Hakeemullah has approached Grace. I know he is doing something to her and that I can’t possibly come to her rescue. I am helpless and useless.

  I am blind. I can’t move.

  I close my eyes as if this will help shield me from what he is doing to her. I somehow see her gagged face, though I don’t want to see it. I try to turn off all my senses, all of my abilities to see something without the use of my eyes. I want to be blind and deaf. I want my sense of smell and taste to disappear. I wish for my heart to stop and my brain to cease functioning. I want imagination to be erased and my ability to paint a vivid picture of what is happening to my Grace only a few feet away from me on this cold damp floor.

  God in heaven, I want to die.

  From where I lie on the floor on my side, I hear Grace thrashing about, her torso and legs slapping the hard-packed earth like she’s a fish that’s suffocating out of water. I try gathering up all my strength, use it to shove my body forward in her direction. But a boot heel connects with my shoulder, pushing me back. Tears pour out of my blind eyes. My lungs have become two overinflated balloons about to burst.

  Until the room falls silent.

  Chapter 72

  The noises coming from Grace have suddenly stopped. No longer am I able to hear her body thrashing about. No longer can I hear her muffled screams and gasps. I no longer register anything other than stillness and calmness.

  I can’t help but think the worst: Hakeemullah has killed her.

  He has cut her with that knife. Cut her neck. Perhaps even beheaded her. Did it while filming the act for the Internet with a digital video camera. Maybe even his smartphone. Will my decapitated Grace show up on YouTube for the world to see, much to their horror? To my horror?

  God have mercy on our souls, for we know not what we do . . .

  I try again to shimmy my body toward hers. But now, in the silence, I’m not even sure which direction to move.

  I am a failure.

  I am death.

  I make out the cloth-against-gravel sound of a body shifting itself, then rising up off the floor.

  Footsteps.

  I smell a musty odor. A raw, organic scent. Like old clothes that have not been washed in ages. I breathe in the faint odor of incense and spices. Cooking spices. Then I sense a body lowering itself beside me. Not so close it touches me, but so close I can almost feel its heart beating.

  “His name was Aziz,” he whispers. “Dear One. And he was my son. My only son. You ordered an airstrike on my village. You killed our elders. You killed our animals and destroyed our homes. You killed our women. And you killed my little Aziz. My Dear One. You took his life and you broke my heart.”

  I see what’s left of the face of the boy I killed. Bits of flesh mixed with a mash of blood, brains, shattered bone, and black hair. But I also see him carrying a bomb meant to kill me and my men. See the detonator gripped in his hand, his thumb only a half second from depressing the trigger. This man is his father. But the father is a hypocrite. Because he must have wanted the boy to die. And now he has killed Grace in revenge for doing what I needed to do to prevent my men from dying.

  “My Dear One is an angel now,” he goes on. “He resides in a paradise you cannot begin to understand. I wanted you to know that. I wanted you to know how it feels to lose something so precious, Nick.”

  I feel the click in my brain.

  Karen . . . her car being dragged out of the river, her body still strapped to the driver’s seat . . . Karen, pregnant with our child . . .

  Tears push up against the backs of my eyeballs. The fury, building up inside my soul, like a boiler fire being stoked. I want to kill this man. Tear him apart with my hands.

  I say, “I’m no stranger to death . . . the death of someone you love with all your heart. And you are no better than me. You strapped a bomb to your son. You killed him. Not me.”

  “It wasn’t me. It was the elders who insisted upon it. They had to hold me back while they strapped that bomb to his chest. I kept praying to God that the bomb wouldn’t work, or that you and your men might arrest him before it was detonated. Instead you shot him . . . You fucking shot him in the face.”

  “His thumb was triggering the device. I was almost as close to him as you are to me now.”

  “And you shot him dead.” He’s crying now. “You stole the life from my Dear One. And you know what? You know what makes it even more tragic? I would have done the same thing. It’s what we were trained to do. But that didn’t make me hate you any less. So when I had the chance to make you suffer, I took it.”

  He falls silent for a moment while I begin to make out his panted breaths. From down on the floor, I can practically smell the salt in his tears. But then he says, “Ask yourself this question, Captain Nick Angel: Why am I not dead yet?”

  Grace . . . I thrust myself forward, reaching out for her. But he stiff-arms me in the sternum, shoves me back. I feel the blade tip suddenly pressed up against the underside of my neck.


  My head spinning, heart beating, breaking. “Okay, I’ll play the game, asshole. Why am I not dead yet?”

  “You don’t remember me, do you? It’s okay, you’re not supposed to. Rather, you’re not supposed to remember much. None of us are. Even I still don’t recall most of what happened, most of the past. But then, that’s the way the program was designed. So that none of us remembered a thing. But what they didn’t bank on was that one day, the memories would begin to return. One day, we would slowly but surely start to remember everything. And when that happened, we would begin to talk. We would become liabilities.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  The blade tip presses harder, breaking the skin, drawing blood.

  “You’ll know exactly what I’m talking about once you remember. But then, you’ve already been remembering things, haven’t you? Something goes snap inside your brain and a little bit of memory emerges. It’s not a pleasant experience. More like one black hornet after the other landing on your forehead, stabbing you with their stingers. Only with each painful sting comes a new memory. Déjà vu, triggered by another person’s touch, or his voice, or his smell. Even your blindness is a symptom of what can happen when the memories begin to return after so many years.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” I bark.

  But he pushes that blade against my neck. The pain is sharp and breathtaking. At the same time, something is happening to me . . . the shadows once again revealing themselves. Lying on a gurney in a brightly lit room, a strange uniformed woman doing something unspeakable to my sex, while white lab-coated men look on . . . Bare chested outside in a gravel-covered yard that looks like it belongs to a max security prison. I grip a fighting knife in my right hand. So does my opponent, who lunges at me, plunges the blade into my shoulder . . . Lying in fetal position on a padded floor, the cacophony of battle piped in so loud my eardrums bleed . . . A baby-faced man strapped to a table, as a board is shoved in his mouth, and I pour water from a bucket down his throat. Do it with a smile on my face . . .

  Three soldiers, one of them me, trapped inside a basement surrounded by concrete walls. We’re naked from the waist up, strapped to chairs, electrodes hooked up to our skin, bright lights shining in our eyes, loud heavy-metal music blaring, the lab-coated men standing behind a thick glass embedded in the wall, monitoring us . . .

  I sense now . . . no, that’s not right . . . I know these flashes of memory are not imagined. They are not delusions. They are not lifted from a movie or a book. They are not the hallucinatory product of the PTSD. They are the cause of the PTSD. They happened to me.

  The shadows are real.

  “We were friends once. Don’t you remember? We served together, along with Heath Lowrance in Operation Desert Storm. Third Battalion, Seventy-fifth Ranger Regiment. We were good soldiers. Good fighters. Better than good. Perhaps even fearless. You remember, don’t you, Nick? I was the Afghanistan-born young man who’d moved to the States as a teenager and now, I was a US citizen who took up arms in the battle for freedom. My name was not Hakeemullah then. It was Benjamin Sobieck, a name adopted by my parents, who wished for us to be as Western and American as possible.”

  It’s coming back to me now. Fast. As if his words are the catalyst I’ve needed all along. A tall, wiry man of dark complexion. He’s wearing the uniform of an American soldier. An Army Ranger. He’s smiling, holding his hand out for me. Another man, also tall. He’s got black hair, and big brown eyes, and although a scraggly beard covers his face, he has a boyishness about him that is infectious. Lowrance. The three of us sitting in a Kuwaiti bar not long after combat, cheering our victories.

  Then ten years later. It’s only days after two airliners were used like ICBMs and deliberately crashed into the Twin Towers. I see us being choppered to a secret site, where we meet with a man inside a trailer. He’s tall, groomed impeccably, and always smiling the smile not of a happy man, but that of a diplomat. But he is no diplomat. He is a CIA agent who wishes to recruit the three of us for a project that is so top secret, there is no record of it anywhere to be found. That man is David Graham.

  “Project MKUltra,” I whisper, my Adam’s apple bobbing up and down against the blade tip, my stomach doing flips, knowing that not only is my past coming back to me, but it might be indirectly responsible for Grace’s death. “I remember now. They resurrected Project MKUltra in the wake of 9/11. The things they made us do to one another. To test us. Our resolve, our guilt . . . our memories. Waterboarding, hand-to-hand combat, electrical torture, sleep deprivations . . . fucking electroconvulsive shock therapy.”

  “They transformed us into something every army wants, Nick. Modern, twenty-first-century assassins with an almost superhuman ability to dish out death and to withstand torture.”

  Downtown Baghdad, behind enemy lines. Dressed all in black, gripping a fighting knife. I’m coming up on a man from behind, plunging the blade into his side, muting his mouth with my free hand. When he’s down on the ground, I slice his throat. From ear to ear. . .

  I see a dozen killings just like this one.

  Breaking into a residence in Ramadi, slicing the throat of a man and his wife while they sit at the dinner table, stealing a satchel of documents, stepping over a crying child as I make my escape into the night . . . Five Saddam loyalists down on their knees outside a junkyard up in Kurdish country. I pull the trigger on each one of them, without hesitation, without prejudice, without feeling . . . Setting fire to a hilltop barn doubling as a weapons depot in northern Afghanistan, my 9mm gripped in my shooting hand. Shooting each robed man as he exits the structure. Head shots, all of them . . . A nighttime raid on a Taliban hideout, a single grenade taking out a dozen leaders . . . A village I am ordered to bomb by command. The village houses a little boy who is turned into a bomb. I neutralize the boy with a head shot . . .

  That’s why I have never missed a conflict in more than two decades of near constant war. I’m an assassin. I am conditioned for war. Conditioned to kill. Conditioned not to feel any of it. Until I killed Aziz. Until I killed Hakeemullah’s boy.

  He smiles. “Amazing how the floodgates of memory burst wide open when those big, impenetrable doors are given just the slightest nudge,” he says. “You see, the CIA knew that the wars we would face in the coming years and decades would not only be extremely difficult, they would be never ending. They would take a special brand of soldier. Because, after all, what better way to fight a fanatical fighter who embraces his own death than with another fanatical fighter. Which is why they developed a soldier who could kill without prejudice and guilt, who could withstand torture without breaking, could employ torture without compassion. You see, it’s the humanity in us that makes us poor killers. It’s the revulsion, the guilt.”

  The pressure of the knife blade against my neck relaxes just a little.

  “A soldier who would be immune from the dreaded PTS fucking D,” I say.

  “Operation Perfect Concussion. It was a secret revival of MKUltra after that program became illegal in the 1980s. It utilized sub-aural frequency blasts to erase memory. Sensory deprivation, drugs, isolation in order to achieve selective amnesia. They worked on altering our personalities so that we would become attracted to war and battle rather than repelled and crippled by it over sustained periods of time . . . even decades. We became perfect killers with the ability to engage in military activities without memory of them, so that in the event of capture and interrogation, the events could not possibly be recalled. But what it resulted in, in the long term, was delusional disorder and acute psychological repression.”

  “They tried to make us inhuman.”

  “We tortured one another in that hellhole down inside the tombs of that secret site. Did unspeakable things.” He grins. “That scar on your shoulder. We were made to fight one another. With our bare hands, our teeth . . . with knives. I stabbed you out in that hot yard, and you fell. I could have run the blade across your neck and killed you off then. I would have thou
ght nothing of it. Perhaps if I’d succeeded then, my village would be whole, and Aziz would still be alive.”

  “I went back to war again and again. After my first wife died.”

  “Each time we were subjected to the violence, the torture, the conditioning, we were whitewashed of our memories. Then, when it was all over and we were physically recovered, we were made to go our separate ways. You went back to war. Lowrance entered into the Special Forces. I became a double agent of sorts.”

  “You went back to Afghanistan.” A question.

  “Not as a traitor, but to infiltrate the Taliban. In turn, I would deliver crucial information back to the CIA. I was still following orders. But after a time, I chose to break away from my keepers and fight for my Tajik people. I changed my name, renounced my US citizenship, and fought the new enemy. The same US military who had trained me to be a killer without remorse.”

  “Are you telling me we met on a battlefield as big as northern Afghanistan by chance?”

  “I’m telling you that it’s possible you were sent to kill me. After all, what strategic relevance did my little village on the hill in the middle of nowhere hold for you? Now that our memories were returning, it’s possible the CIA decided to eradicate us, one by one.”

  “And you,” I say. “Did you recognize me on the day I shot your boy in the village? Did you know that was me when we visited the afternoon before, and tried to speak with you about giving up your weapons?”

  “I recognized you,” he says, nodding.

  “Why didn’t you just kill me then?”

  “Let’s go back to my original question of why I haven’t killed you yet.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe you want to kill me out of a personal revenge for your son, but then you don’t want to kill me because we were friends once. Brothers in arms. That sounds awfully sentimental. But if you’ve harmed Grace, I won’t be so sentimental. I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”