National Security

by Marc Cameron

  “I knew you would be ... how shall we put it? ... persuasive... .” Zafir could hear the sheikh’s smile in his words.

  “I am humbled by your confidence.”

  “The board is set and the pieces are ready to move into place,” Farooq said. “I am anxious to open our game ... unless, of course, you have information that dictates I should do otherwise.”

  Zafir fell silent as a platoon of American soldiers—they called themselves Peacekeepers—walked in formation down the dusty street, less than two meters in front of him. They eyed him warily because of his cell phone. Insurgents used cell phones to set off IEDs and holding one in front of an American was a good way to get shot. His throat tightened and he lay the phone down on the bench beside him without a word to Farooq. He took a long, slow breath and forced a smile, waving happily to the passing squad. On the outside he was a picture of calm, a docile lamb wanting nothing more than to comply with the American liberators. Inside, his stomach roiled, aching to cut the throat of the fair-haired boy who brought up the rear. The sheikh’s plan calmed him. The boy and thousands of his kind would die soon enough. In time, even the women of the west—the ones who survived—would find themselves behind the burqa. It was the unquestionable will of Allah.

  Only when the American patrol had disappeared around the corner a half a block away did he retrieve the phone. The sheikh was accustomed to such delays and the two resumed where they’d left off.

  “Allah willing,” Zafir said, “I am prepared to begin my part.” He knew better than to speak openly on a cell phone. The Americans even listened to each other. Though the chance of them picking up his conversations was slim, it was not impossible.

  “You’ve thought it through?” The sheikh was calm, his voice deadpan.

  “I have.”

  “Then of course you have my blessing,” Farooq said, with an air of finality that surprised even Zafir. There was no going back. Zafir caught a hint of newfound respect in his master’s words—and it caused his chest to swell with pride.

  “There is a small problem,” Zafir said. “The boy I spoke with today has been in contact with those who wish to stop your game.”

  “From the West?”

  Zafir gave an affirmative grunt. “There is one player in particular who bears watching. He may try and visit you. Perhaps I should return—”

  “You know that would not be wise.” Farooq chuckled. “We are on a strict timetable now. You have already made your testament. You have everything you need to begin your journey—including more of my trust than I reserve for any other living soul. My friend, I fear the next time we meet will be in the bosom of Allah.”

  “Allah willing,” the Bedouin said. “But for now, let me tell you all I know of a man named Jericho... .”

  After he finished the phone call, Zafir sighed. His master now acted as a friend. It was more than he had dreamed could ever take place. But even as he spoke of fulfilling his destiny in the United States, his satisfaction wilted, dragged down by nagging thoughts of the American whore. She would pay for what she had done. Zafir consoled himself with the fact that he would be the one to exact that payment very, very soon.

  CHAPTER 25

  Fort Worth

  “So,” Carrie Navarro said, popping her hands against the thighs of faded jeans and leaning back in the soft cushions of the leather sofa. “Here we are again. Think it’s worth another go?”

  “If you’re ready,” Dr. Soto said, smiling serenely.

  “I’ll never be ready,” Navarro scoffed, pushing a lock of dark hair out of her eyes. “But I trust you, Doc. If you say I need to watch myself go through this again, then I’ll do it. Some hajji bastard’s not gonna get the better of me.”

  “Very well,” Soto said. “Close your eyes and relax. Let your mind wander freely. I’m going to count to ten... .”

  “Where are you now?” Soto asked a minute later.

  “Some shithole outside Baquba.” Navarro’s eyelids twitched.

  “Carrie, I’m still detecting a lot of anger from you,” Soto said. “I need you to detach—”

  Eyelids closed but fluttering heavily, Navarro laughed at that. “I love you, Doc, but that’s not gonna happen. Let someone yank out a toenail and come around every few hours and rape you ... then see how much you can detach... .”

  “Okay, Carrie,” Soto said. “Calm down, sweetheart. If this is too difficult for you, we should wait until a better time—”

  “There’s never gonna be a good time to go through that kind of hell, Dr. Soto,” Navarro whispered. Tears pressed between dark, clenched lashes. “I said I trust you and I do. Besides, I’ve got more to worry about that just myself here.” She clutched her knees until her knuckles turned white. “So, let’s do this thing... .”

  Chibernat Village, Iraq

  The duct tape used to cover Carrie Navarro’s eyes was crooked, revealing the tiniest swath of light along the frayed bottom edge. She awoke to find herself facedown, hands drawn together and bound cruelly behind her back. Shoulder blades pinned together like a trussed bird, her entire body was one raw bruise. Her head was on fire and her feet felt as if they’d been beaten with a pipe. She tried to move her aching jaw but found it impossible because of a thick cloth gag that held her mouth in an agonizing half-open position. A swollen tongue did little to salve her cracked lips.

  Wincing from the shooting pain in her head, she rolled up on one side enough to peer around the concrete cell through the narrow slit in the tape. The rough tile floor was awash in blood and urine. The sudden realization that the odor around her was the smell of her own filth sent her stomach reeling. She had no idea how long she’d been unconscious, but judging from her cramped muscles, she assumed it had been a while.

  The squealing metal creak of a heavy door caused her to catch her breath. She pressed her cheek back to the cool stickiness of the floor, watching heavy black boots approach across the tile. A bucket of icy water drove a scream from her lungs.

  “Good,” someone chuckled in accented English. It was a man’s voice, full of contempt. “You are awake.” Another bucket of frigid water followed.

  Carrie cringed in shock, wriggling away until her back hit a wall. She tried to scream, but with the cruel gag could muster only a pitiful gurgle. She peered through the gap in the tape as the black boots approached her again. A bronze hand, little more than a claw, missing all but a thumb and forefinger, reached toward her face.

  “I will now untie you,” the voice said. “Clean yourself at once.” He might as well have been giving commands to a dog.

  He removed the gag first, then without warning he ripped the tape from Carrie’s eyes, yanking out her eyebrows and most of her lashes in the process.

  “Son of a bitch!” she screamed, moving her jaw back and forth now that it was free.

  “You have a fire,” the man said. He was tall, with a mussed beard and a wild mane of long, black hair that matched his sullen eyes. “I have yet to decide if that pleases me.”

  She recognized him as the man who’d pulled out at least two of her toenails with a pair of pliers upon her arrival, tormenting her until she’d passed out.

  As Carrie’s eyes became accustomed to the stark white light of her cell, she saw two more buckets of water, along with a towel and a coarse bar of gray soap. Three other bearded men stood leering in the open doorway.

  As usual, Carrie let her temper get the better of her.

  “Afraid you can’t handle me all by yourself?” She rolled to a sitting position and dipped her head toward the door. “Is that why you brought your creepy little friends?”

  “Oh, rest assured, little dog. I can handle you fine all alone.” The man punctuated his words with a swift kick that caught her square in the joint of her hip.

  Carrie gasped as waves of pain and nausea engulfed her. “Bastard!” she spat, coughing until she gagged.

  The man scratched at his beard, smoothed it, thinking for a moment, then kicked her again. “I kno
w the meaning of these words you use,” he said. “You will soon learn better than to call Zafir such names. You may call me a great many things—your master or your tormentor ...” He smiled. “... even your lover. But you must keep a civil tongue in your mouth or I would be most happy to tear it out by the root. And I assure you, in my country, this is no empty threat.”

  Carrie swallowed hard, trying to regain her composure. It was amazing how pain cleared the cobwebs from her muddled mind. It was as if she could see the pure evil that made up the man standing in front of her.

  “How about some privacy while I wash?” she said, rubbing her wrists. “I thought you Arab men were all about covering your women.”

  Zafir sneered. “That particular nicety is reserved for pious Muslim women. The way you dress in your tight pants and transparent shirt, you may as well be naked at all times. Surely a man can not be blamed when his passions are inflamed around a woman of such wanton behaviors.” He threw her a tattered cotton rag. “Now, I will not tell you again so nicely. Clean yourself at once.”

  Though every muscle screamed at the slightest movement, Carrie resolved then and there that this man would not witness her pain, no matter what he did to her. She rose up on both feet. Wobbly at first, she used the wall to steady herself. It took all her strength just to put her weight on one foot and peel off her soaked khakis. Defiantly, she dropped her filthy underwear to her ankles and kicked them toward the door where the three wide-eyed guards ogled her. She pulled her shirt over her head to find that her bra was already missing. Deep purple lines covered her left breast. Raw bruises blotched her hips and legs.

  Concentrating to control her breathing, she strode past Zafir to the two waiting buckets, where she scrubbed herself with the rough soap before pouring the contents of each over her head. This water was warm so she assumed he actually wanted her clean. It sickened her to think why.

  Scrubbed pink, she stood naked in front of Zafir letting her arms dangle, unwilling even to fold them lest he think she felt the need to cover herself. She had nothing to be ashamed of. This was his doing, not hers.

  “There now.” He licked his lips as he took a step closer to her. “Things are much different after one has bathed. Don’t you think?”

  Carrie shrugged. “I’m not covered in blood and piss, if that’s what you mean. But you are still a bastard.”

  Zafir doubled his fist and hit her hard in the mouth, knocking her against the wall and loosening her front teeth.

  He knelt beside her, clawing at her injured breast with his gnarled hand. “You sing like a whipsaw for now,” he said. “Let us see how you sound after I have spent some time teaching you... .”

  Left with nothing to cover herself but a thin cotton shift, Carrie found herself hounded and pestered by the man at least twice a day. She was bound hand and foot almost constantly, freed only when allowed to relieve herself and wolf down a few hasty mouthfuls of bland rice to give her energy before he came to visit.

  Early on, a younger guard, barely in his twenties, had thought to spend some time with her. He’d snuck in and promised her he would bring her some extra food if she was nice to him. Zafir caught them before the naïve boy had even begun. Carrie passed out from the beating, but she never saw the boy again.

  Days turned into weeks, which melted into months, until she lost all track of time and space. Her only world was a bit of rice and the constant raw anguish of knowing that any echo in the hallway outside her door meant a visit from Zafir. And those visits never failed to bring pain.

  She learned his triggers, gauging his moods by the way he approached her, the way he held his crooked mouth. He alternated between the brutality he considered intimate and bouts of unbridled rage, dragging her naked from one end of his bedroom to the other by her rapidly thinning hair.

  At first, she’d thought to placate him, to stop the kicking and ease the pain, but she soon found that no matter how hard she tried, her conscience wouldn’t allow it. In the end, she merely defied him no matter his mood and let him choose if he wanted to rape her or beat her. More often than not, he did both.

  Each and every time, when he was finished and still panting, she looked into his black eyes and called him a bastard.

  Carrie had no way of judging how much time had passed. She’d lost a tremendous amount of weight. Her bones jutted out like an inmate in a concentration camp. Her hair was beginning to fall out in clumps, and though she had no mirror, she couldn’t imagine he’d want to keep her around much longer. Every day she asked herself if fighting back was worth it. Every day she struggled to make peace with the fact that she’d never see her mother again, that her last sight on earth was the snarling face of Zafir Jawad.

  Just when she’d decided to stop fighting and resigned herself to death at the hands of this sadistic madman, something inside her changed. One night, alone in the dark on the cold tile floor, with no sound but the constant echoing drip of her latrine drain in the corner, she lay on her coarse mat of quilts and decided she wanted desperately to go on living. She couldn’t put a finger on why, after so many weeks of hopelessness, and couldn’t help but wonder if the feeling was fate’s way of telling her death was just around the corner.

  Zafir didn’t visit that morning or anytime that day. One of her guards slid an extra helping of stale rice and a fatty bit of lamb under her cell door. For the first time she could remember, she squatted on the floor and ate in a sort of relative, flinchy peace. Every evening for the next week she ate the extra food her unseen guards provided, then curled up on her rags and spent a shivering night, waiting. She dreamed alternately that Zafir had come to her again or that he had died a brutal death. Each time she awoke, her stomach knotted in fear and she had to crawl to her latrine hole in the corner to vomit away the tension of anticipation.

  At dawn of the sixth day of what she began to call her awakening, the staccato sound of gunfire popped outside her room. Loud booms echoed from the cavernous hallway, sending showers of dust skittering down concrete walls. Carrie drew herself into a tight ball on her mat, thinking that at any moment, she would become the victim of a stray bomb. She’d heard American planes overhead many times before. Sometimes they dropped their ordnance nearby, but none had ever ventured this close.

  Mortars whumped and whistled in from nearby positions. Grenades exploded for what seemed like an eternity, bending the walls and showering the room in dust. Then she heard voices, American voices rich with New York accents and twangy Southern drawls. Her eyes filled with tears when the door flew off its hinges and five American soldiers in full battle gear filed in to the room.

  The men looked like camouflaged giants in their helmets and flak vests. The entire line froze in their tracks when they saw her.

  Carrie looked up weakly from her quilts. She blinked her battle-worn eyes at these beautiful men in disbelief. “I hope you kicked some Iraqi ass,” she croaked through chapped, swollen lips.

  “You bet we did, ma’am.” A slender soldier whose name tag read CARTER winked. He handed his rifle to the man beside him and shrugged out of his flak jacket long enough to remove his uniform tunic and drape it tenderly around Carrie’s trembling shoulders. She’d forgotten how little her flimsy cotton sheet actually covered.

  Specialist Carter knelt beside her, taking her gently by the hand. “Ma’am, are you able to walk?” he said in a rough-hewn Southern voice.

  “Are you from Texas?” she asked.

  “Wichita Falls,” Carter nodded.

  “Wichita Falls ...” She began to sob.

  “If you’ll come with us”—Carter helped her gently to her feet—“we’ll get you out of this place.”

  The shooting had stopped by the time the soldiers escorted Carrie outside. Two Army medics tried to put her on a stretcher, but she refused, opting instead to leave her horrible prison as she thought she never would—alive and on her own swollen feet. As she stepped from the shadows of her prison into the long rays of early morning sunshine, to draw her f
irst breath of fresh air in over three months, she noticed an open CutVee truck with a bed full of handcuffed Iraqi men. To her surprise, one of the prisoners was Zafir. He slouched in the back, pitiful and beaten, surrounded by his comrades and trussed just as he had trussed her with his hands behind his back.

  As she walked to her waiting armored Humvee, Carrie veered away, making straight for the truck. Specialist Carter reached to stop her, but she pulled away, stepping out of the camouflage tunic to stand boldly and nearly naked beside the prisoner transport. The morning breeze pressed the thin sheet against her breasts and the jutting bones of her hips. A huge orange sun rested on the desert floor behind her, marking the starkness of her silhouette.

  “Hey, bastard!” she shouted in a hoarse croak, loud enough the entire compound could hear. “Yeah, I’m talking to you, Zafir.” Tears streamed down hollow cheeks as she strode closer to spit in the Bedouin’s face. “You think you can conquer me with that teeny little thing you call your manhood? You think you can beat me down with a few weak kicks, you piece of camel shit!”

  Zafir stared at his feet, red-faced, fuming. The other men in the truck snickered under their breath; one even went so far as to elbow him in the shoulder.

  “Well, I got news for you, mister,” Carrie continued her rant. “You couldn’t conquer a roach. It’s no wonder you had to keep a slave. No good Arab woman would take you to her bed without a few kicks to the head.” Carrie leaned in, but kept her voice elevated so no one would miss a word. “You only did one thing like a real man this whole time I’ve been here.” She stepped back and pulled the tattered sheet up to reveal her swollen naked belly. “I’m gonna have a baby, you son of a bitch—your baby. And guess what, if you haven’t killed him from kicking the hell out of me every day, he’ll never know what Islam is! I’ll raise him to fight your kind. In fact ...” She leaned closer to spit again, her voice rising to a screeching crescendo. “I’m gonna name him Christian!”