Last Son of the War God

by Clay Martin

  “One seventy five,” Raoul said. “You can handle that.”

  Kyle gripped the bar, and with a grunt, lifted it off the rack, his arms straining against the weight, his mind swirling with thoughts of Nate Kennard. He slowly lowered the bar to his chest, drew a deep breath, and groaning loudly, pushed the bar upwards, once, twice, then a third and fourth time before his arms began to burn.

  “C’mon,” Raoul said, staring down at Kyle’s face. “One more.”

  Kyle lowered the bar to his chest, then sucked in a breath and emitted a loud “ahhhhgggh,” as he pushed the bar upwards, his arms fully extended. He let the bar drop into the rack and stared at the overhead lights, his chest tight with anger.

  Chapter 3

  That evening, his face lighted by the glow of laptop screen, Kyle sat at the heavy wooden dining table that doubled as his writing desk. He scoured the internet for stories of how and why his friend and photo journalist Nate Kennard had been captured, despite the gnawing suspicion he already knew the answers. Information was coming to light from other journalists who were in and around the area at the time.

  Kennard had been with a British freelance reporter named Eric McCovey, on assignment for the London Telegraph. McCovey had been writing about the weapons flowing to the Kurds and other Syrian rebels fighting the forces of Syrian President Bashir al-Assad.

  Kennard and McCovey had stopped to file stories and photos at an internet café at a small town inside northern Syria and near the border with Turkey. They apparently figured it was safe since they were in rebel-held territory— certainly safer than the areas held by the Assad regime, whose police and army arrested and imprisoned journalists.

  Kyle knew the Syrian rebels were a mixed bag. He’d been in Syria briefly and now tracked the war there from afar. The civil war had begun as a popular uprising in the spring of 2011 with short-lived, pro-democracy demonstrations. Assad responded brutally, as he had in the past, using his secret police and their ruthless military tactics. Civilian militias had formed for self-protection and within months morphed into the Free Syrian Army. Most western powers, especially the US, weary of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had hoped Assad would fall quickly and cleanly. But Russia stepped in to prop up Assad, one dictatorship helping another, and as Syria’s civil war dragged on, the popular uprising degenerated into chaos.

  Kyle knew most news organizations kept their staff out of the mayhem and relied on Syrian reporters. Only a handful of foreign freelancers ventured into the fray, praying they’d make it out alive, but knowing their exclusive stories and photos commanded top dollar.

  What made Syria more deadly than most war zones were the fundamentalist jihadis who had coalesced around a man named Abu al-Bakar. The man was an Iraqi religious scholar, a part-time Islamic fighter, and had served time in a US prison in Iraq. When the US pulled out of Iraq, al-Bakar and his followers became the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

  Al-Bakar took advantage of the chaos and sent his fanatics into rebel-held towns and provinces, hanging people, mutilating women and children, and cutting off heads. ISIS grew exponentially, seizing Syrian oil fields and selling oil on the black market, much of it to Turkey. Flush with cash and weapons, ISIS demanded absolute obedience to its brand of oppressive Islam. They weren’t alone. Other competing Islamic fundamentalist groups like the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate, joined the fray, turning the territory in hell on earth.

  Kyle’s felt sick as the accounts of Kennard’s and McCovey’s capture raised more questions than they answered. One said after Kennard and McCovey had filed their stories and photos and had left the internet café near the Syrian border that day, their translator flagged down a taxi driver to take them to the small guest room where they’d stayed the night before to retrieve their bags.

  Kyle wondered why then, with their gear and gags in hand, the two journalists had not crossed the border into Turkey, but had driven deeper into Syria, southwest toward Aleppo and into the heart of rebel territory. He guessed they’d gotten a tip. But about what?

  Along the way, McCovey and Kennard were forced off the road by a small white van, according to one account. The people in the van must have known who was in the taxi. But how? The taxi driver was a possible source, but more likely it was their translator, their “fixer.”

  Fixers were vital to foreign journalists working in war zones and were often local journalists who spoke passable English. In Muslim countries, fixers walked a fine line. Neighbors often viewed them as collaborators with western infidels—traitors to Islam, and as such deserved to die. Most fixers took the risk, however, hoping their work would get them a visa to the US. The lives of foreign journalists were in the hands of their fixers, so good ones were like gold. Bad ones were deadly.

  Kyle drew a deep breath as his stomach soured. He remembered talking with Kennard about a story that had puzzled him ever since he’d been in Libya and written about the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi. Kyle’s story had been about weapons, tons of them, that had disappeared from Libya after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.

  Kyle shook his head to refocus on McCovey’s and Kennard’s demise. After the van forced their taxi to the side of the road, three armed had men leapt from it, and at gunpoint, took Kennard and McCovey, the driver, and their fixer. The armed men were not Syrians because they apparently spoke Arabic with foreign accents. This meant the men in the van were probably Arab members of ISIS or al-Qaeda.

  When he read that the taxi driver was set free, Kyle figured the Syrian fixer had been bribed, possibly threatened, into giving up the two western journalists. Kennard and McCovey then disappeared. Now, six months later, Kennard had been executed on camera by Jihadi John. Kyle felt sick, knowing the hell Kennard and McCovey had endured.

  As he stared at the laptop screen, Kyle’s mind drifted to a day a couple of years earlier when he and Kennard had worked together in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. It was spring and the poppies were in bloom and the Afghan opium harvest was peaking as the fat green bulbs laced with delicate pink petals bobbed atop tall stalks and oozed their precious milky sap, having been lacerated with razor blades.

  Kyle and Kennard rode with the Afghan police to do a story about the country’s token poppy eradication program. They’d eaten a breakfast of eggs and nan, the chewy Afghan flat bread, and savored several cups of black tea inside the provincial governor’s heavily secured compound in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah. They’d climbed into the back seat of a dark green Ford Ranger pickup truck fitted with a double roll bar mounted with a .30 caliber machine gun. The back seat was cramped, but Kennard and Kyle sandwiched themselves inside, letting Daoud, their Afghan translator, a young man in his 20s, sit in the front seat beside the Afghan police driver. The truck was one of six in the convoy that included Afghan soldiers armed with AK-47s.

  The convoy rolled through the capital on gritty roads of concrete and asphalt, slowing through the crowded commercial center, clogged with people milling about the streets, seemingly oblivious to the motor traffic, intent on what they were doing.

  After horn honks and shouts from the soldiers, they were soon rolling along the wide graveled roads that networked the country, raising a thick plume of choking, chalky dust.

  Kyle and Kennard kept the windows open, preferring the breeze despite the swirling dust and heat. About twenty miles outside the city, they encountered a convoy of behemoth MRAPs, the US army’s mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles draped with camo netting and trailed by a cloud of fine dust that hung over the road like tunnel of fog.

  They arrived at a sprawling mud brick farm house set amid a patchwork of fields of flowering poppies on the banks of the Helmand River, a shallow, meandering ribbon of brown water snaking southward from the distant Hindu Kush mountains, now just dark humps on the northern horizon.

  Kyle recalled the historic irony of the region’s lush and irrigated fields fla
nking the river. In the 1950s, in an effort to curtail the spread of communism by the Soviet Union, the US began a decade-long project to establish viable farming along the Helmand River. The river was dammed and an extensive network of canals was dug to direct water to the fields. But the Afghan soil was bereft of nutrients and nothing grew. Except poppies.

  After a decade of failure, the farming project ended. The American engineers and agricultural specialists packed up and went home. But the water and canals left behind quickly became valuable. In the years that followed, Afghanistan became the world’s largest supplier of opium, the raw ingredient to heroin, providing ninety percent of the world’s market.

  Kyle and Kennard had climbed out of their truck and surveyed the scene. A half-dozen gray-uniformed Afghan police took positions at the corners of the sprawling poppy field, their AK-47s at their sides. Several more heavily armed policemen surrounded the Afghan farmer and his two sons, who were backed against the mud-plastered walls of their farmhouse. The women remained, for the moment, inside and out-of-sight.

  The farmer and his sons watched helplessly as the diesel engine of a sturdy gray tractor roared to life, belching black smoke in the still morning air, and backed off a low, flatbed trailer. The farmer was in his fifties, Kyle guessed, with a deeply creased, brown leathery face and a smudged gray skull cap on the back of his balding head. His soiled white shalwar chamise hung loosely from thin shoulders, the shirt tails dangling to his knees and covering blousy pants. Badly scuffed leather shoes, the heels broken down and laces missing, covered his feet like makeshift slippers. His two boys, young teenagers, were similarly dressed, their eyes wet with tears dribbling down their brown cheeks.

  Speaking through Daoud, Kyle asked the farmer what the poppy harvest was worth. The farmer looked at him with glistening dark eyes and barked out a number. About $5,000, Daoud said, the family’s annual income.

  “Why do you grow the poppies?” Kyle asked.

  The farmer shrugged. “Why does anyone grow anything?”

  “Why don’t you grow wheat?” Kyle asked, which was what the Afghan government said it wanted the poppy farmers to do, mostly at the insistence of the US and other foreign militaries occupying Afghanistan.

  “Wheat takes too much water,” the farmer said, shaking his head slowly. “And, there is no money in it.”

  They turned back to the tractor, which had lowered a steel frame fitted with multiple plow heads onto the ground at the edge of the field. The engine revved and the knobby back tires of the tractor rolled forward, the plows biting deep into the damp soil, uprooting the green and flowering poppies, turning them under.

  Kennard had trotted ahead of the tractor to photograph it, capturing shots of the oncoming tractor with from within the midst of the poppy stalks. He’d then held up his hand for the tractor driver to stop. Kennard climbed behind the driver and motioned for him to continue as he grabbed his Nikon D-5 for video. The tractor driver shifted gears, the engine revved, and the tractor resumed its slow grind through the field.

  Sounding like rocks striking the hard mud plaster, bullets smacked the farmhouse walls, followed by a staccato crackle of automatic gunfire. Kyle instinctively ducked and turned to find the source of the shots: an irrigation ditch skirting this and other poppy fields.

  The Afghan farmer flinched, and with his sons disappeared through the blue painted doorway and into the mudbrick house. The lethargic Afghan soldiers and remaining police leapt from their trucks and knelt near the house, returning fire.

  Kyle shouted at Kennard, who’d not heard the shots over the growling tractor engine, his eyes mashed against the viewfinder, his left hand gripping the lens. Kyle and Daoud scrambled to take cover behind a green pickup.

  Moments later, a half dozen of the Afghan police humped along the edge of the field toward the source of the shooting, clutching their weapons. At the edge of the field, some paused to shoot, laying down a barrage of protective fire, and were followed by a cluster of other policemen, who advanced keeping low, then crouched and fired, holding the attackers at bay.

  The movement had drawn Kennard’s attention. He flicked off his video camera, stuffed it into his camera bag, and leapt from the tractor to the freshly plowed earth, tumbling to the ground. Kennard scrambled to his feet and stumbled from the field to join Kyle behind the pickup truck.

  Kennard was panting. “What the fuck?”

  “Someone doesn’t like the government tearing up poppy fields,” Kyle said.

  “Taliban,” Daoud said, then pointed over the bed of the truck to where figures with dark turbans near the river were shooting at the on-coming police and soldiers.

  “I’m going after them,” Kennard said, his eyes wide.

  “You got what you need,” Kyle said. “This story isn’t worth taking a bullet, Nate.”

  But Kennard was already gone, sprinting after the assaulting force, bent low, his camera in hand, the strap wrapped around his forearm. “Shit,” Kyle muttered, and drew a deep breath. He turned to Daoud, nodded, and said, “let’s go.” They humped along the edge of the field, following Kennard.

  Flashes sparked from the barrels of AK-47s at the far edge of the poppy field, forcing Kyle, Daoud, and Kennard to dive to the dirt. Breathing heavily, sweat dripping down Kyle’s forehead, he waited until the firing paused. Then nodding to each other, the three scrambled to their feet and joined the police, who’d taken cover behind the remains of a washed away mudbrick wall that paralleled the irrigation ditch.

  The shooting stopped. After a few moments, Kyle lifted his head. What looked to be Taliban fighters, men dressed much like the farmer and wearing turbans, were beating a retreat, the Afghan police firing after them. But the attackers weren’t done yet. They scrambled into the weathered ruins of another old farmhouse, nothing more than a square of low and weathered mudbrick walls, and returned fire, forcing Kyle, Daoud, and Kennard again behind the wall.

  The air popped and snapped with automatic fire from the police AKs, then stopped again, leaving Kyle’s ears ringing. He was tempted to glimpse over the wall again, but didn’t, knowing his skull would be a target.

  An Afghan policeman trotted up from behind carrying an old Russian-style rocket propelled grenade launcher, generating a burst of excitement among the Afghans, who shouted and pointed to the mudbrick walls about fifty yards away where the Taliban fighters hid. Kneeling behind the protective wall, the policeman lifted the RPG to his shoulder, took aim, and with a ferocious whoosh, the missile-shaped grenade shot out, trailed by a spiral of white smoke, then exploded into the low mud wall protecting the Taliban, reducing it to dust and dirt.

  The policemen cheered, thinking it was a direct hit. For a long moment, silence. Kyle waited as a warm breeze blew and looked at what remained of the waving, chest-high stalks of flowering poppies in the adjacent fields. Poppies were tough and resilient, he mused, like the people who cultivated and harvested them. Gunfire suddenly erupted from the Taliban position, the air popping once more, forcing the Afghan police and army to hunker down.

  After a couple of minutes of silence, Kyle peeked over the wall. The Taliban shooters were fleeing, having made their statement against the Afghan national forces.

  As Kennard followed the Afghan forces firing at the fleeing Taliban, Kyle looked back at the poppy field. The tractor had continued to plow the field, undeterred by the shooting, where the dark, freshly turned soil contrasted with the pale dirt and dust of the sun-dried land surrounding it. With just a few stalks still standing, waving defiantly in the breeze, destruction of the poppies was over. Ten minutes later the soldiers and police returned and stated the obvious: Taliban had fled.

  Back at the house, the farmer wrung his hands, his eyes wet with tears as he viewed his mangled poppy crop, his livelihood and life destroyed. The plows now raised, the tractor chugged out of the field and back onto the low trailer.

  Kyle tugged o
n Daoud’s sleeve and nodded toward the police chief, a man with stripped epaulettes on his shoulders. Daoud called out to the chief, a thick-bodied man with no neck, shaved and rounded cheeks, and a thick, black mustache. Hands on hips, the chief narrowed his dark eyes.

  “Why was this field targeted and not the others we passed?” Kyle asked.

  The chief lifted his gray cap from his head and ran a meaty hand over his thick black hair. “I am not the one who makes that decision. You need to talk to the governor’s office.”

  Eradication was supposed to push the farmers away from the poppies. Instead, it drove them into the arms of the Taliban, who controlled much of the opium trade. Farmers like the one whose field had been destroyed, Daoud explained on the return trip, got loans from the Taliban to grow the poppies and were obligated to sell the raw opium paste to the Taliban. In return, the Taliban protected them. Opium was their financial lifeblood.

  “What will happen to this farmer if he’s obligated to sell his opium to the Taliban?” Kyle asked. “Won’t they kill him?”

  The chief shrugged. “It is a risk that farmers must take if they make deals with the Taliban.”

  Later, back at the hotel inside the governor’s compound, Kyle, Kennard, and Daoud sat on the stone steps in the cool of the evening. Daoud said the farmer’s field had been selected because he was being punished. He was probably a relative of the local Taliban commander. Plowing the poppies sent a message to the Taliban: we know who you are and where you and your relatives live.

  “The police know who’s growing and buying the opium?” Kyle asked.

  Daoud smiled and nodded, embarrassed at the truth. “Everyone makes money from the opium. The government, the police, the army. And, of course, the Taliban.”

  “So everyone is in on the opium trade?”