The Girl in Green

by Derek B. Miller

  ‘That sounds tricky,’ Louise says, turning off the radio.

  Märta explains her gambit in Sinjar. How she needs to contact the kidnappers because of the time pressure, but how she fears surprising them and what the consequences might be. Better for them to reach out first. But she can’t risk waiting for them. She has to make decisions without sufficient information or basis for judgement. Some call this ‘leadership’. She considers it a failure of preparation, analysis, policy, and systems. You’re only on your own once you’ve been abandoned.

  So she has to improvise. She says she knows a family in Kursi. If ISIL has a facility there and it’s staffed, she reasons, they’ll need to shop for food and supplies periodically, just like everyone else does. And since there aren’t many places to do that, people in town will know where they go each day. ‘I’m going to write an email,’ she explains, ‘and send it to the family I know there. They’ll give it to the son, and the son will drop it off at the market. It will be clearly marked for the hostage-takers. I don’t think this will place the shop owner at risk, and if it does, he can say he was given the letter by the IRSG.’

  Louise thinks it’s too risky.

  ‘I know a good man with the Iraqi Red Crescent in Mosul,’ she says. ‘He can deliver the letter to the shop. You don’t have to put the family at risk.’

  ‘I thought the ICRC and the Iraqi Red Crescent weren’t getting along so well these days.’

  ‘We’re not, but I know who’s who. His name is Sharo. He’s Assyrian. He’s a medic, and knows the area well. He can deliver the message. I think he’ll say yes, too.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘He loves his motorcycle.’

  ‘I don’t see the connection.’

  ‘The road that winds from Route 47 into the mountains is one of the twistiest mountain passes in the world. His wife doesn’t let him go riding there, because she says he takes enough risks with his job. This would make it his job.’

  ‘How far is Mosul from the mountains?’ Märta asks.

  ‘About an hour and a half, if all goes well.’

  ‘Assuming he leaves immediately,’ says Märta, ‘and gets there without incident, and they get the letter on arrival, which is a long shot, we’re talking two hours from now. That’s a lot of time with the clock running down.’

  ‘It’s your call, Märta. I think Sharo has the best chance. The Red Crescent can get through. We should use it. If you screw up the approach in a scenario like this, you screw up the entire operation. These things are very delicate. There’s no room for heroics.’

  ‘I’m not convinced the Red Crescent or anything that sounds remotely connected to the West has a reputation with ISIL.’

  ‘Me neither. But better to use Sharo and a legitimate regional actor than some boy.’

  ‘We’ll be putting one person at risk to save another.’

  ‘Märta,’ Louise says, becoming visibly agitated, ‘I’m spending time talking to you about your team rather than prepping my people for the influx of refugees from across the border. What we’re doing here is diverting emergency resources from their sanctioned purpose to clean up a mess that shouldn’t exist.’

  ‘Yes,’ Märta says. ‘All right. Can I use your computer? I’ll write the letter. I don’t want to waste any time. You can send it to Sharo from here via email.’

  Märta launches Word ’98 and looks at the blinking black line on the simulated white paper.

  ‘What do you think it should say?’ she asks.

  29

  ‘François Armand?’ says the voice on the phone.

  ‘Yes, Clip, it’s me. Bonjour.’

  Clip is British and comes from London. He has a Sandhurst affectation and attitude and, like Tigger and Herb, is in his late forties. One quality that Tigger appreciates in Clip is that he listens.

  ‘I received and reviewed all your briefings and notes,’ Clip says. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong about any of the following points. Looks to be ISIL, but we’re not sure?’

  ‘ISIL is what we are supposing. It could be al-Qaeda, and it could be that there is no difference between the two. It could also be someone else.’

  ‘If we’re lucky, this will be an express kidnapping. They’ll ask for a reasonable sum that you can pay, then you pay it, and we call it a day and debate the ethics afterward. Have they contacted you?’

  ‘No. No one has reached out to us at all. And this worries us,’ Tigger says, adjusting the phone and putting the call on loudspeaker so Herb can listen. ‘If they killed them right away, this would have made sense. Contacting us for money, that would have made sense, too. But the silence? The possibilities are endless. We’ve had to wait before, in the Philippines with Abu Sayyaf. They tested our nerves, and they won. I hate waiting.’

  ‘The Arab boy, Jamal. He’s yours?’

  ‘Herb and Märta are especially protective of him. Märta knows his family well. There was an incident when she saw his brother die. We are supposed to keep a distance, but sometimes our humanity interferes with our humanitarianism. It is a failing that is our most redeeming quality.’

  ‘And among the hostages is a Brit and an American. Have you notified the embassies yet?’

  ‘In writing, yes, but it’s before office hours here, and I don’t expect a reply until after 8.00 a.m. So, Clip … what do we do?’

  ‘We establish the crisis-management team.’

  ‘Yes. It is me, Herb, Märta, and you. Märta is the decision-maker.’

  ‘Good. Next we need a communicator. The decision-maker does not talk to the hostage-takers. Only the communicator does. We don’t know what language the kidnappers speak. We’re assuming Arabic?’

  ‘We’re assuming Arabic. That, and perhaps English. It is the lingua franca these days.’

  ‘You have someone?’

  ‘No,’ Tigger says. ‘Herb wanted to do it, but Märta said no. She thinks my accent and his will give us both away.’

  ‘She’s right. I suggest a village elder. Also, accents are a problem with the Arabs. They have a remarkable understanding of where people come from and what it implies. You mustn’t get that wrong here. Once you choose someone, you let me know. Just remember that the purpose of the communicator is to isolate the decision-making team. It is essential that no one be put in a position to have to make decisions while talking to the hostage-takers. He’s merely to pass along messages from one party to the other. This leaves us plenty of time for deliberation and strategic decision-making.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Just to be sure, you three want to take point on this? Because we can take over if you want.’

  ‘No. We’ll do it. We know the environment. We can better sense the actors.’

  ‘Then our role at Firefly will be to serve as your backup team on decision-making. We’ll question you. Probe you. Second-guess your judgements. Test you. Make sure your decisions are reasonable, even if we can’t prove they’ll work. You follow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We need an open channel at all times, and that means redundancies. I’m emailing you all’ — Tigger and Herb can hear Clip shuffle some papers and click some keys — ‘a set of solutions on email, SMS, phone, Skype, and Thuraya satellite phones. There’s no reason we should lose contact.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘The Iraqi government?’ Clip asks.

  ‘We’re afraid to tell them where our people are,’ Tigger says. ‘They might be more interested in where the insurgents are, which would be unhelpful.’

  ‘What about external communications?’

  ‘Nothing. We are keeping this quiet. We figure that if the hostage-takers know they have an audience, it will empower them.’

  ‘Good. You should still have some statements in the works, though, for different contingencies. I recommend the crisis team not d
irect that. Farm it back to Geneva,’ Clip says. ‘Let me know when the communicator is selected.’

  Sharo is a motorcycle medic for the Iraqi Red Crescent. His facial hair is so extreme, so unruly, so expansive, that his wife likes to tell her friends that she hasn’t seen him in years.

  He has slender shoulders and long arms. He imagines his legs as the physical extension of the Yamaha XT’s 41mm telescopic, oil-damped forks, soaking up each bump in the road and each bump in life.

  The 600cc motorcycle is Sharo’s one joy beyond his three remaining children. It’s a ’93 model, and when he rides it — high off the ground, with a view over traffic, and further into the future than other people can see — he feels the way he is supposed to feel when he prays. Sharo does not lack faith, and he puts his trust in the words of the Prophet, but he does not feel the euphoria that others seem to feel. He lost his eldest son to a killer who was robbing him. Sharo stood and prayed as the corpse-washer prepared his son’s body. He did not believe, when he closed his son’s eyes, that God was great. He only felt that God was big.

  But riding a motorcycle is great. When he wears his open-face helmet and sunglasses, he hears only the sound of the wind and the rumble of the single-cylinder engine. He floats with the birds, which do not feign to understand the ways of man below them. The air tickles his face as the breeze tickles his whiskers. To turn into a hairpin on a mountain pass is to forget the loss of his boy, to forget the state of his country, to forget his fears for his daughter’s future and the impossible sadness of his kinsmen.

  To ride is to focus the mind. It is to be present and feel that — briefly, if for the moment, and maybe never again — a man can control the speed at which the future will meet him.

  Carry a letter to Sinjar?

  Yes.

  You’ll need to hurry.

  Good.

  Be discreet. Take it to the market. Talk to the grocer. Ask how the foreigners get their food. Have it delivered with the food. Come back.

  Yes. Good. Right away.

  I emailed it to you. You printed it? It reads legibly in both Arabic and English?

  I did not read it. I don’t want to know what it says. But I see the text is black and clear through the paper.

  Ride carefully.

  Always. Yes. Thank you, Ms Louise.

  Don’t thank me, and don’t make me tell your wife where you went. I have enough problems.

  Yes, Ms Louise. Thank you.

  The military may take action today. She told him this.

  Sharo fuels the bike, wipes the drops of the clear petrol from the cap onto his soiled trousers, and lets the bike warm. Then he’s off.

  He rides west, chasing yesterday, like an old man who is not ready to let another day slip by. The sun warms his back. He could almost be happy again if only he could close his eyes long enough to disappear entirely, but alas, he must open them again too quickly so that he can see the road, and this is what keeps him bound to life.

  There is only one turn off Route 47 into the town of Sinjar at the base of the mountains. And now, there before him, is one of the most majestic roads on the planet. He knows, as he takes the turn, that he is one of only a few men in the history of this new earth to ride this road by motorcycle. And of those, no other man has ever appreciated it more.

  He has never left Iraq. He has never seen the Stelvio Pass in Italy, with forty-eight hairpin turns up the Alps, or the Trollstigen serpentine in Norway, with its eleven famous bends at an incline of almost ten degrees up the mountain. He knows of these only from books. He dreams of these Occidental legends the way Westerners dream of magic carpets from the East. What he does know, in front of him, by the grace of God, are ninety-four hairpin turns from Sinjar to Gune Ezidiya in only twenty kilometres.

  This is one of the greatest and most exciting rides on earth.

  Pity about the politics.

  But take it slowly. There is no rush. There is work to be done. And every turn, every straightway, is a breath of life to be cherished.

  For an hour, there is no death.

  For an hour, there is joy in the hearts of all children.

  For an hour, his body becomes one, uniting the physical world with the spiritual. For an hour, he is alone with his memories and with the spirits of those who have passed before him, and they ride with him, and they sing together about the love that once was and will continue, so long as there is a person left alive to remember it.

  For an hour, Sharo rides.

  Sharo stops riding at a town that is unmarked on the map and has no signpost before it. The hard-cased panniers of his bike are holy white, marked with a red crescent. It is quiet when the engine stops. There are no cars moving through the town now. People seem to have disappeared. He does not blame them, given the way the Yezidi have been treated by Saddam and by the Sunnis in Mosul, and the pressure put on them by the Kurds. They are alone in this world, having only themselves as comfort. Why greet a stranger?

  There is a dirty blue-and-white awning extending from a square building. In front, there are fruits in crates. The thin steel door to the shop is open. Sharo removes his helmet, which is also marked with the crescent. He sees the shopkeeper, standing, behind the counter.

  ‘Salaam alaikum,’ he says to the man.

  ‘Alaikim as salaam,’ the man replies, without warmth. His accent is unfamiliar to Sharo. He knows that these people speak a language other than Arabic, but he does not know it.

  In Arabic, he says to the man, ‘Your shop is quiet now.’

  The man nods. ‘It is quiet.’

  ‘Other times, I imagine, it is busier.’

  ‘At other times.’

  ‘Perhaps there are strangers who enjoy the hospitality of your shop.’

  ‘We have many visitors. Sometimes we visit them.’

  ‘I see,’ Sharo says. ‘Perhaps the women or the children carry food on these visits. Perhaps in those baskets by the door?’

  The man looks at the baskets that people use as they shop. They are handwoven and worn. ‘It is a practical and expected way to bring what needs to be brought,’ he says.

  ‘If a letter were placed in such a basket,’ Sharo says, ‘a letter that never touched the hands of the basket-carrier, and that letter fixed more problems than it caused, might it be carried?’

  The man does not speak. Sharo looks behind the man at the shelves, and asks for a packet of Western cigarettes.

  The shopkeeper takes the cigarettes down. He says, ‘Two boys from a nearby village were murdered in Mosul for smoking in front of Muslim men.’

  Sharo takes a cigarette from the packet, puts one in his mouth, and hands one to the shopkeeper. He lights them both with one match.

  ‘Then it was a black shame on them for not welcoming and protecting those boys who were guests and should have been treated with all the honour, the understanding, and forgiveness and mercy that God demands. I would never forgive such a thing. But I would try not to misplace my anger. These are the times we live in. Which is why we help each other when we can. That way, decent people can enjoy honest pleasures, and the wicked can go their way.’

  The shopkeeper blows out the smoke and looks at the basket. He gives the most subtle of nods.

  Sharo places the letter in the basket. The man immediately fills it with supplies, and then calls a woman from the back room. He says something in a language that Sharo does not understand.

  A woman appears. Sharo nods to her, but she does not acknowledge him. He does not take offence. He does not know their ways.

  Sharo pays twenty times what the cigarettes are worth, and then leaves. If his front wheel does not slip on sand on the way down the mountain, if the bombs do not fall around him as he commands the turns, if a car does not run him off the road on his way down, and if he has luck and the will of God on his side, then for one hour more he can
ride and be free.

  The woman who collects the basket is dressed as a Yezidi woman, not a Muslim one. Concessions are made to the existence of the foreigners, but the Yezidi are too proud and too formal in their ways to concede everything. They have been here for millennia before the Muslims. Perhaps, with the aid of the god Melek Taus, they will remain here — in peace — after the Muslims have gone.

  She walks down stairs carved into the rock. She walks beyond the edge of the village to where the valley stone rises, and where the waters run fast and unhindered in the winter beneath the thin ice that collects here. She walks to an old, long-forgotten building. An Ottoman fortification from World War I, it is made of stone and concrete. It is a garrison building. She does not want to know what happens here. She prays it will someday be gone, but she has no expectations that her prayers will be answered.

  Without uttering a name, without making a sound, she knocks three times on the steel door and then turns to leave before it is opened. There is no need to wait. She knows she was being watched the moment she entered the small pass that leads to the only two outer doors — one to the left and into the main building, and one to the right into the dungeon.

  If they did not want her to come this far, she would be dead already.

  She walks back the way she came. She has two kilometres to go. She is old now, and tired, but this is what her body has learned to do. Before the building vanishes into the mountain behind her, she hears a door open, and the sound of the basket scraping against the earth before it is taken into what she imagines is Hell. And why wouldn’t she? Where else would the devil live?

  30

  Thomas Benton is alone, his shoulder causing him so much pain that it dominates his attention and infuses itself into his hallucinations. The only question that holds his mind together is Why am I here? If he can answer this, before the end, he will have achieved something and given himself permission to die.