by Tal Bauer
David, exhausted, paced in Kris’s makeshift office. The strike team’s command center was quieting, the day shift coming in to monitor drone feeds and open-source intel, scoop up phone calls and emails and pick through the raw intelligence from the night’s raids. The strike team, and Kris and General Carter, were going to rest before it all started again at sunset.
“I slipped up. I gave him an opening to reinforce Saqqaf’s appeal for martyrdom.”
“He was always a long shot. Mousa’s a true die-hard believer in Saqqaf’s brutality.”
“We had him on the edge, though. You did. You rocked him hard with the faith angle.” Kris sat beside David on the cot, slumping against the warehouse wall.
David felt Kris’s stare on the back of his head.
“Did you actually pray?” Kris asked, his voice strained.
David twisted. He stared at Kris. “What do you think?”
Kris shrugged.
“No, of course not.” Snorting, David whipped around, paced faster. There was an itch in his bones, a heat in his blood. Four steps took him back and forth across Kris’s small office. The world was still spinning, had never stopped spinning, not since he’d fallen into Mousa’s gaze. Faster, faster. He was going to be sick. He was going to die.
“Even if—” His lips clamped shut. “There’s—There’s no one to pray to.”
Kris stayed silent.
“Not here. Not with these monsters.” David’s voice cracked, warbled. “They’ve ruined it. They all have! Mousa, Saqqaf, Bin Laden, Qaddafi, all of them!”
Memories tore at David. Sunshine and his father’s voice. His little djellaba, a miniature of his father’s. His father’s hand in his, teaching him the prayers. Every chapter opens with the love and mercy of Allah, ya ibni.
“None of this, this shit, is my father’s faith! None of it! He taught me about… submission and gratitude and love and thanking Allah for life and joy and living in peace—” His voice choked off. Heat rose in his chest, behind his eyes, a volcano erupting within his soul, so suddenly he couldn’t tamp it down. “Nothing here, none of what they’ve built, is from Allah. My father would never—”
His voice, his body, his soul, quaked. He couldn’t stand any more. The world was spinning out of control, spinning off its axis, spinning into space. He was ten years old, and his father was on the TV, in a basketball stadium Qaddafi had built in Benghazi.
“This isn’t Islam because Allah has abandoned us! He’s gone, he left, and we’re all just fighting over the Hell He left behind! And that’s fine! I want nothing to do with Him!”
Where was the world he’d glimpsed when he was nine years old? Where was the faith his father had taught him, had shown him through quiet devotion and whispered prayers? Where was the future of warmth, of his soul filled with light and gratitude, secure in the knowledge that he was loved, by his blood father and the Father of all? What had happened to that life? To that love?
Ten years old, and he’d watched his father’s faith, his peace, be turned into a crime.
Days and nights after his father was taken he’d spent in prayer to Allah to deliver his father back to him. To bring them together, to make them a family again. The prayers of a child, the simple pleading, the offers of exchange. He’d be the best Muslim, the best worshipper. He’d never talk back to his mother again, and he’d eat all his dinner, even the disgusting vegetables. He’d always listen to Baba, always. Just please, please, bring his father home.
His prayers were answered by a screaming mob in a basketball stadium and a rope tied in a noose, swinging from one of the bright orange hoops. Thunderous applause, shouts and cheers, thousands of Qaddafi loyalists screaming for his father’s blood. Over the TV, over the live broadcast he and his mother were forced to watch, guns held to the backs of their heads by the Mukhabarat, the roars had faded in and out, overpowering the tinny speakers, the shitty microphones.
His father had cried as they forced him to climb the ladder to the hoop. To the noose. He’d prayed, too, steadfast in his faith until the end, not even stumbling on his tears. David had watched his lips move, had recognized the shape, the movements.
He had memorized the shape of his father’s prayers as he sat at his side, his little body trying to grow into the image of his beloved father.
His mother had screamed when they shoved him from the ladder’s rungs, let his body swing. The Mukhabarat agents in their home had let her hide her face. But a ten-year-old boy was old enough to watch, to experience the seconds that stretched for hours, the minutes turning to years, to an eternity that still lived in the base of his brain. Hands had held his head forward, forced him to keep his eyes open.
The drop from the hoop wasn’t long enough. His father struggled to breathe against the noose. Someone grabbed his legs, hung from him. Pulled him down.
He’d watched the rope stretch.
And the crowd wailed, wild with exultation. With a mob’s delight, and the glee of being safe from the wrath of Qaddafi’s mercurial mercy. They screamed for his father’s death, and screamed for their own lives.
It was not the first, and was not the last, televised execution Qaddafi put on.
But it was his father’s.
He’d been murdered for the crime of loving Allah more than he loved Qaddafi. He’d loved Allah with his whole heart and soul, and the only thing he’d wanted in his life was to share that love with his son and his wife.
No one and nothing had saved him from the pain, the humiliation, of his murder. He’d lost control of his bladder, his bowels, as he died. David’s last image of his father, the best man in his life, was a piss-and-shit-stained djellaba swinging on the end of a rope, eyes bulging, tongue protruding, tears and snot smeared over his once-proud face.
No boy should see their father, their ideal, struck down, destroyed by hatred and violence.
Somehow, he fumbled enough words for Kris to understand, for Kris to get it. He watched the truth hit Kris, the weight of David’s confession, a truth he’d never spoken aloud, not once since sneaking out of Libya’s sandy desert, smother Kris’s soul.
Evil, the truth of it, was a weight that a soul could barely carry. They’d already shouldered so much together. When would they break? When would the world, and all of its evil, shatter them?
Kris’s jaw dropped. He reached for David, stumbling, falling himself, as if they were now together in freefall, in the vortex of evil destroying the world. His lips moved soundlessly as he tried to find words, find something to say. “David…”
“I want—” Tears choked him. David grabbed Kris, tried to hold on. Tried to stop falling. “I want my father’s faith—”
I want my father.
There was a permanent hole in his soul, in his life, and nothing could fill it. His father had been ripped away from him.
He clung to Kris, burying his face in Kris’s chest, as his bones collapsed, no longer able to carry the weight of a man who hadn’t mourned his loss. His baba, the man he wanted to become, the man he looked up to more than anyone else in the world. His faith in Allah had shattered that day, and the pieces, the refuse of the first ten years of his life, had blown like litter through his existence, debris that kept piling up against his heart.
Had Allah been murdered that day as well? In David’s soul, and also the world? Were they just continuing to murder Allah every day since, every incarnation of evil in the world another blow against Allah and His love? Could even the Father of All stand against so much hate and so much evil? Something was broken, fundamentally broken, in the universe. What if it was Allah that they’d broken?
Had their hatred finally killed God? Was that why He was gone?
What would his father say about this world, if he’d lived? He needed to know. He needed that guidance, his father’s presence in his life.
What would his father make of the man he’d become? The choices he’d made? The man he loved?
Would his father have ever looked at him with hatre
d? Would he ever have called him a sinner, a kufir, a disbeliever? Set against the horrors of the world, all the ways big and small that people could inflict horror and anguish on each other, was David’s heart beating for Kris so evil? Had Allah made him this way? Or was it just emptiness and chaos, his genetics aligning in one of a million different possibilities?
David had always put his faith in biology, in genetics, in his high school science teacher who had belabored the point, over and over, that being gay was not a choice. It was who you were, how you were made. David’s friends on the soccer team used to joke that Mr. Whitley talked about gay stuff so much because he was gay, obviously gay, with his skinny body and his pastel button-downs and his lilting voice.
But what if he’d seen the truth about David, and maybe others, and he’d spent the nine months he’d been given as their teacher trying to give them a gift that they’d cling to for the rest of their lives?
How did anyone feel loved for who they were, in the face of so much agony? How did anyone reconcile the world with a dead and absent God?
He struggled to breathe, dragging in ragged breath after breath. He was shaking, quaking, as if his soul was about to burst apart. Kris stroked his hair, pressed his lips to David’s temple. He hauled David to him, pulled him into their cot. Wrapped his arms and legs around David, holding him as close as he physically could.
David wanted to crawl inside Kris, press their souls together. Reunite with Kris in the way they were meant to be, before time, when Allah had made them as one. He believed that, to the marrow of his bones, the center of the atoms that made his being.
But if he believed that, if he believed he and Kris were the same soul made by Allah, then what else was true?
Could Allah give him Kris and take his father?
Could both be true?
What did that mean?
Damn it all. Damn Mousa, and Saqqaf. Damn the president for invading Iraq. Damn Bin Laden, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and the nineteen men who hijacked four planes on September 11. Damn Qaddafi. Damn all of the hatred, all of the anguish, that had set the world on this path, had twisted lives and history and faith, had killed Allah and scattered all hope until no one could find the truth anywhere, no matter how hard their heart beat or their soul bled.
The one, the only man, who could have ever found the answers, who could have ever put the world back together, had lost his life in a basketball stadium, swinging from a rope as a crowd cheered. He’d loved too much, too strongly, for the world, especially a world that had killed God. His death had created a void, a black hole, and David imagined all the love, all the light in the world disappearing into the void his father’s life had left behind, like water disappearing down a drain, spiraling away into nothingness and infinity.
David had watched it through his tears on TV, the day the world killed the one man who held Allah in the center of his heart.
Joint Strike Force
Sunni Triangle, Iraq
June 2006
“Hey. We’ve got something on the drone feed.”
The sun was still up. Kris blinked, bleary eyed. He and David were tangled in his cot beneath his plywood desk. The Iraqi sunlight burned through the blinds, through the sheet Kris had tacked up to block out the spears of light.
Groaning, David face-planted in the cot as Kris struggled to his feet. Carter’s deputy, a Special Forces captain, kept his gaze purposely up, not looking at the two of them entwined, half naked. It was too hot to sleep in anything but the bare essentials. David wore his tiny running shorts, black nylon that hugged his upper thighs. Kris slept in his briefs, outrageously colored neon and brilliant patterns that cupped his ass and crotch. The captain turned in the doorway, giving him privacy.
For a military that had beaten out modesty in basic training and that treated nudity as commonplace as being fully clothed, the privacy granted to David and him felt like a shun. Carter had insisted that he be given a private office and private space to sleep and had quietly put out a gag order on discussing him and David. It was the biggest open secret in the strike force. The man leading the hunt for Saqqaf was as gay as the day was long.
“Imagine Saqqaf’s face when he finds out it was a gay guy who tracked him down,” Kris heard once in the mess, two Special Forces soldiers with their heads together, eyes flicking toward him.
Kris grabbed his black fatigue pants and pulled them on, threw on a black t-shirt. “What’s going on?”
“We have movement on the spiritual advisor.”
Kris tossed David’s pants at him. “Gotta move, babe.”
Since Mousa’s slipped confession about Saqqaf having a spiritual advisor, Kris had devoted a huge amount of the strike team’s intelligence collection and targeting toward finding the allamah.
Sheikh Jandal was a kunya, a jihad name that translated as the Sheikh of Death. They went through everything, every phone call, every email, every possible lead. Religious leaders across Iraq were fractured, most decrying the savagery and violence of Saqqaf, his bloodlust and his fanaticism. But some celebrated the ‘Son of the Desert’, the ‘Emir of the Resistance against the West’. They focused in on those imams, put them under the microscope of the US intelligence machine. Undercover officers went to their mosques, listened to the sermons. Watched them, everywhere they went, followed by the drones that hovered over the country.
The captain filled them in on the way to the command center. “One of our drones monitoring imam delta-seven tracked him leaving his house this morning. He ran his errands, dropped his kids off at his wife’s mother’s house. Standard behavior.”
“Until?”
“Just past noon, the imam diverted from his usual path and started driving through four separate Baghdad neighborhoods. He executed a series of turns and curbside stops, backtracks and pauses.”
“He was checking for surveillance,” David said.
The captain nodded to David. “We think so. He drove onto the Baghdad highway, but pulled off on the onramp. One minute later, a blue pickup truck pulled in behind his original car. He drove away in the blue truck.”
“A car swap.” Kris’s heart pounded.
“Yes sir. We’re following the truck now. It’s heading north, leaving Baghdad.”
They badged through the electronic locks and swept into the command center. The lights were dim, but the monitors along one wall were bright with live video. Black-and-white images, thermal scans, high-def video footage. All feeds showed the same image. A blue pickup driving along the highway.
Banks of analysts and drone operators worked in long lines before the main monitors, tapping away at their laptops and working the radios. David peeled off, heading to the back where five coffeepots percolated twenty-four hours a day. Kris joined General Carter, still shaking off his own sleep. He’d rushed in, wearing his PT shorts and his Army undershirt, crisply tucked in. Kris had never seen the general so underdressed.
“Caldera.” Carter nodded to him. “What do you think?”
“The behavior is consistent with someone attempting to shake surveillance and throw off a tail. Whatever he’s doing, he doesn’t want anyone to know.”
“Think he found our undercover agents? Think he’s spooked and is running?”
“He could be. But someone on the run doesn’t spend hours trying to shake a tail. They run, as fast as they can.” Kris watched the pickup drive on, miles of highway disappearing beneath its tires. The sun blazed down on Iraq, burning away shadows. Everything was brilliantly lit, perfect clarity. A desert day beneath the harsh sun. A day for revelations.
David appeared at Kris’s side with two cups of coffee. They watched, expectancy hushing their voices, their breaths, as the truck pulled off the highway and wound through the countryside northeast of Baghdad. Palm groves and farms blurred past the monitors.
“Maybe he’s just going to visit a farm,” one of the analysts offered.
“And shake a tail to do so?” Kris scoffed.
“Maybe
he’s going to the Iranian border. It’s only seventy miles away.” Carter arched one eyebrow.
“Saqqaf despises the Shia, and this imam supports him. He’s stirred sectarian violence for months. No way he goes to Iran.” Kris pursed his lips. “He’s going to meet Saqqaf.”
Carter hmmed.
The truck turned, heading for Baqubah. Analysts sprang into action, pulling up all information that they had collated on Baqubah. Who was who, who was there, what attacks the city had suffered. How many informants they had on the ground.
“He’s stopping,” David said. “Another vehicle is approaching.”
A white sedan pulled alongside the truck. The imam hopped down from the truck and slipped into the backseat of the white sedan. Both vehicles drove off, sand arcing behind their tires as they sped away in opposite directions.
“It’s him. It’s definitely him.” Kris’s blood turned searing, burning the inside of his body. This is it. We’re going to get Saqqaf. His gaze met David’s. David’s eyes were wide, as round as dinner plates. I’m going to get him. For you.
Carter shouted orders, calling for air support and for the Special Forces team on standby to get in their choppers and get ready to go. It was a thirty-minute flight from their base to Baqubah, if they left now.
Every monitor was filled with the white sedan driving along the desert road. “He’s still heading north,” an analyst narrated. “Moving at thirty-three miles per hour.”
“What’s out there?” Carter barked.
“Three villages. A handful of ranches. Not much, sir. We haven’t spent much time looking. There was nothing strategic there, we thought.”
“Well, we thought wrong.”
The white sedan pulled off the desert road at the village of Hibhib. Built around an oasis, the village was a shock of green situated in the rocky hills and dusty north of Iraq. Palms and ferns crowded the ground, jockeying for position. Houses were low, whitewashed and blocky. The car kept driving, passing through the village.
