Whisper

by Tal Bauer

  “Don’t make me go,” Behroze whispered.

  “Behroze…”

  “I want to stay with you.” He laced his hand through Dawood’s. “Let me fight. Please. I can, I can. Bismillah, I can.”

  “Behroze…” Dawood pulled him close. Hugged him, as if he could merge their atoms. “Fighting is not what I am going to do.”

  “You’re going with those men. With the black flags.”

  “I’m going to be their teacher. Like I was your teacher.”

  “I still want to be your student.” Tears rolled down Behroze’s cheeks. “I won’t run anymore, I promise. I promise to Allah, I won’t run away anymore. I will always stay at your side. Please, please just don’t send me away.”

  There was a unique pain in breaking a child’s heart. A very specific anguish that shattered the soul. He felt the moon fall from the sky, felt the sun reverse its course. “You won’t be safe, Behroze.”

  “I’ll do everything you say, I promise.” Behroze’s sniffles turned to sobs. “I promise, I promise.”

  Dawood hung his head between his shoulders. What was right? What did a shattered child need? Distance, a life far away, safe from war? Isolated, and with a hardened heart, with no family left in the world for him? The qala would care for him, of course. But how dark would his heart turn? Left alone?

  He knew, he knew what that felt like.

  But to bring a boy into a viper’s nest? Into a war?

  Where was the worse sin?

  Behroze was on the cusp of teenagerhood. Could Dawood help him cross that threshold, shape him into the man he would become? What did he know about boys becoming men? He’d had to make that journey alone, with only American television and high school to help. A million miles away, another lifetime. What could he possibly do now?

  “If you come,” he said carefully, “you must never pick up a rifle. Never, ever. You are not to become a fighter, Behroze! Your jihad is of the heart! Do you understand?”

  Behroze nodded, his body shaking too hard to speak. He pitched forward, collapsing into Dawood’s arms. Dawood felt his tears run down his neck, felt his sobs against his skin.

  They moved out the next day, to link up with the rest of Ihsan’s fighters. They were making a press across the border, heading south.

  Into Afghanistan.

  Afghanistan was a faded memory to Dawood, pictures in random sequence, scattered like postcards on the floor. He remembered half moments, frames from movies that felt like another person’s life playing in half-second loops. The sounds of the drone bay. Ryan’s scowl. Helicopter blades whirring, the tremble in his bones as the helos lifted off. Kris’s laugh. The light in his eyes. The warmth of his body in their shared bed. Morning kisses tinged with coffee and exhaustion.

  A blast that burned his soul. Pain, so much pain. Thirteen still, unmoving bodies on the ground.

  Kris. He hadn’t moved after the blast. He hadn’t moved once.

  Dawood pushed the memories away, smearing them across his mind.

  He was not that man any longer.

  Those memories belonged to someone else.

  Kandahar City was a reflection of the soul of Afghanistan.

  The province of Kandahar was an arid, desolate waste, as if the sun wanted to blast the land from the surface of the earth. The homeland of the Taliban was a place of extremes, of blinding light and too-thin air, of choking dust and lifeless, empty horizons.

  Kandahar City was a fortress, an outpost in the endless stretch of nothingness. From nothing came a harsh and brutal siege fortress, a city built upon suspicion and the distrustful gaze against outsiders. A city that had turned its back on the world long ago, convinced that only danger came from the outside, that Others were not to be trusted. That there was no future outside the city’s walls, or in trusting anyone or anything.

  Ihsan and his fellow units linked up in the warrens of Kandahar City. The streets were dusty, unpaved, the inhabitants even mistrustful of such things like concrete and asphalt for they were of the outside world. Kandahar City had been a no-go zone for years for the CIA, for the military, for NATO.

  Walking through the city felt like walking back in time, to Dawood.

  With the odd juxtaposition of rifles and AK-47s, RPGs and homemade bombs sharing space with donkeys and bazaar stalls. Women in blue burqas whispered through the streets. Dawood’s heart ached for them, for the secrets they kept beneath their layers, for lives they could only half live. There was nothing in the Quran that required women to don anything close to the burqa. The requirement for modesty in the Quran spoke to men first, admonishing men to dress modestly as well, and to lower their gazes, to respect, to the ends of the earth, all women. Where had this come from, the imprisonment of half of humanity behind silence and cotton?

  The first three generations that follow the Prophet will be blessed. And following that, the Muslims will lose their way. They will be confused, and take hold of evil things, and wickedness. The human soul is prone to darkness in the absence of Allah. Man will lose his balance between the good of Allah and the darkness.

  Dawood followed Ihsan to the jihadist quarter of the city. Held his hand over his heart as he was introduced as Imam Dawood. “I am also a medic,” he said.

  “Allahu Akbar,” Ihsan said, grinning ear to ear. “The Doctors Without Borders hospital has pulled out of Kandahar Province, and we have had no one to take our wounded to. Truly, Dawood, our meeting was meant to be.”

  Ihsan gave him and Behroze a room in one of the many mudbrick homes the jihadists occupied in Kandahar City.

  He had no idea what to do for the boy. He hadn’t had a father at Behroze’s age, didn’t have a model for how to take care of him. But he did know how the loss of a father shattered the soul, and how a boy without a future, and with the knowledge of evil in the center of his heart, was a crumbling sandcastle, a tree in the desert stripped of its bark by a punishing sandstorm.

  He placed Behroze’s prayer rug beside his. He bought Behroze a djellaba, the same as the one he wore, day in and day out.

  Behroze slept beside him, still a frightened boy in the middle of the night. When mortars fell, or jets screamed over the city, he wailed, terror seizing hold of him as he clung to Dawood, senseless cries of horror as he replayed memories of the mountain burning, of the sky falling.

  It took a year for him to sleep on his own.

  Kandahar City

  Two Years Before

  The day Abu Dujana arrived was a normal one for Kandahar City. Gunshots rang outside the city walls. Military helicopters swirled around the sky. Spies walked the streets, slinking out to report back to the NATO military base nearby. The Belgium forces were in command at Kandahar Air Base, and they left Kandahar City alone, for the most part. Heat and hatred swirled in the air, resentment turned outward from the city walls, against anything and everything that threatened their lives.

  “I hear you have a new imam,” Abu Dujana said to Ihsan, after greeting him, sharing the bonds of brotherhood. “And that he came from the mountains of Bajaur.”

  “Brother Dawood, yes.” Ihsan beckoned Dawood to join them. “Brother Dawood is a blessing from Allah. Our paths were meant to cross.”

  Abu Dujana’s eyes narrowed. “Tell me. What do you know of a stranger brought to the mountains, years ago, by brother Al Jabal?”

  “He’s dead. He died in the mountains.” Dawood’s heart pounded, palms slicking. ’Bu Adnan had said the mountains were Al Jabal’s biggest secret. That he would never, ever, risk his family. Dawood was supposed to be a ghost after Al Jabal died.

  “Brother Jabal was my closest friend. He confided everything in me. Everything.” Abu Dujana stepped closer, frowning. “Your accent, brother, is strange. Where are you from?”

  “Libya.”

  “The stranger in the mountains was from Libya as well.”

  “Brother Dujana, what is this?” Ihsan interrupted, shaking his head. “What are you saying? What stranger?”

 
“You remember when Brother Jabal and Sheikh Zawahiri conspired with Brother Hamid to strike the CIA at their base, years ago? You remember the spy Brother Jabal captured?”

  “The spy was tried and executed.”

  “No, Ihsan. The spy lived. Brother Jabal took him to the mountains. He hid him with his father, and he told me he’d go back one day. That after the dust settled and the CIA had forgotten about their spy, he would drag him back out and begin the real trial.” Abu Dujana lifted his chin, smiled. There was something predatory in that smile, a wolf that had cornered its prey.

  “Brother Dawood?” Ihsan’s trembling voice, his confusion, spanned years, his gaze wavering over the knife blade of uncertainty, of betrayal, of a thousand questions that had no answers.

  “I told you,” Dawood whispered. “He is dead. Maa shaa Allah, everything that he was, Allah remade. The stranger—to Allah, to the brothers—no longer exists. I swear it.”

  Ihsan hissed, inhaling like he’d been stabbed through the back. Like his world had been flipped upside down. “You—”

  “Everything of me is for Allah now. In shaa Allah, I exist only for Him. He knows the length of my life, the weight of my heart. My sins. And I have given everything to Him to judge. It is in Allah that my heart now finds rest.”

  Ihsan swallowed. He looked down. Exhaled, his breath shaking.

  Abu Dujana gripped his shoulder. “Brother Dawood. Allah calls you now. There are things that only you can do. Knowledge that only you have. Will you help us, brother? It is Allah’s will.”

  You must follow the path Allah has laid out for you. He held Abu Dujana’s gaze. Black fire burned in the depths of his eyes. Black fire that reflected the anguish of the mountains, the distilled agony of a Muslim soul. That promised change.

  Something inside Dawood awoke.

  “What would you have me do?”

  Kandahar Province

  Afghanistan

  Dawood rose from his prostration and sat on his knees. “Allah, forgive me,” he whispered. “Have mercy on me. Strengthen me. Pardon me.” His breath faltered, his whispers dying on Afghanistan’s harsh wind.

  Abu Dujana kneeled beside Ihsan, whispering his own prayers. Soon, they would move out, cross the border again, head to Peshawar. Ihsan and Abu Dujana were about to embark on their mission.

  And Dawood on his own.

  For two years they’d planned. Everything came together slowly. Dawood watched the patterns, watched the ripples of history moving forward and backward in time. Watched his path straighten, the steps before him made clear by Allah.

  He offered up a final prayer, a private one, the words of an old imam from centuries back circling his heart. “Allah, make the best of my life be the end of my life, and the best of my deeds the last of them. Make the best of my days the day that I will finally meet You.”

  Looking right, he performed the tasleem, gave blessings to the angel on his right shoulder, and then again to the angel on his left. “As-salamu alaykum wa Rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu.”

  And then he was done. He stayed kneeling, though, for a moment. He’d finished his last prayer service for the brothers. Soon, they would separate, go down their different paths. Find their different ends.

  You must follow the path Allah has laid out for you.

  After he rose, Ihsan and Abu Dujana gathered the brothers around him. Ten in all, young faces, eager to embark on the mission. They wore mismatched camo jackets and cargo pants, black-and-white scarves tied around their necks. He, too, wore the garb of a fighter. Gone were his prayer robes, his djellaba.

  Abu Dujana smiled, urging him on. He was supposed to make a speech.

  He swallowed. Inhaled slowly.

  “To be a Muslim is to live with a pain that sits in your soul. A pain the rest of the world cannot know. It is Muslim pain. To have everything of our greatness ripped away. Everything of our history, destroyed. The world once saw us as people to admire. To love. But now, the world sees only ruin.” He took a breath, a shaking inhale. “I know what it’s like to be hated for who you are. To have your life dictated by others, and your choices, your path, made for you. There is a rage that lives inside us, brothers. There is a rage that screams, ‘we will prove everyone wrong’. We are more than this.”

  Murmurs. Ihsan’s eyes glittered. Abu Dujana nodded, fury and passion in his gaze, in the way he looked at Dawood. Like Dawood was the answer to his prayers.

  “Yallah, this is Muslim pain,” Dawood whispered. “And we will not feel this pain any longer.”

  Cheers rose, breaking like waves over the ghost lands of Afghanistan. The brothers fired their rifles into the air. Shots echoed, cries of Allahu Akbar mixing with private dua, prayers offered to Allah. Abu Dujana pocketed his audio recorder. Dawood’s message would go out to the whole world, soon. His stomach clenched. Who would hear his words?

  Behroze waited for him, standing apart from the fighters. His big brown eyes stared into Dawood’s. No longer was he small, underfed and slight. He gazed into Dawood’s eyes as a young man. A scraggly beard, a young man’s beard, dusted his cheeks, his chin. “Imam,” Behroze said slowly. “I still don’t understand.”

  Everyone had their mission, their destination. Except for Behroze. He was to go to Islamabad, stay in a house Dawood had scraped and saved for. Once, he’d had a home on the other side of the world, a place of peace, grand and expansive. What he was able to give Behroze was a one-room square made of concrete and tin, with no running water. But it was a home, and it was what he could do. The rest of his meager savings, he sent to an imam at a madrassa and asked for Behroze to be taken in, taught to be a scholar, to follow in Dawood’s footsteps as an imam.

  “Your jihad has always been of the heart, habibi. To love, when it feels like love is impossible. To love like Allah does, continuously, eternally, with no conditions.”

  “Why are you leaving?” For a moment, Behroze wasn’t a young man, verging on the cusp of adulthood. He wasn’t the young man who had devoured what Dawood had taught him. He was the boy from the village again, his lip quivering as Dawood stitched his arm. Held him as he sobbed. As he curled close and wailed when mortars launched, or fighter jets screamed overhead. “Why must you do this?”

  There were no answers for Behroze, not now. He handed Behroze a piece of paper, folded tight. “Check this email, habibi. Check it every day. One day, you will have your answers.”

  A single tear slipped from the corner of Behroze’s eye. “You make my jihad so much harder, Baba. Why—” His lips clamped closed. He rubbed away his tear.

  Dawood dragged him close, enveloping him in a father’s embrace. “Look to the moon, habibi,” he whispered. “We will always be under the same moon.”

  “In shaa Allah,” Behroze whispered. “Please, please tell me when you’ll return?”

  Dawood stayed silent.

  “Your name will always be on my lips and in my prayers.” Behroze stepped back. His face twisted, his struggle exposed for everyone to see. His eyes gleamed, shining, wet.

  “As will yours, habibi.” It seemed he was destined to leave, always be separated from the ones he loved. Was this another outcome of the path Allah had given him? Endless goodbyes, endless broken hearts?

  “It is time!” Abu Dujana’s cry broke over the brothers. “Brothers, it is time!”

  Behroze lifted his chin. He clutched the Quran ’Bu Adnan had given to Dawood and tried to bury his heart. He walked away from Dawood, toward the convoy that would take them over the mountains and back into Pakistan. Into his future.

  You must follow the path Allah has laid out for you.

  Kris. Dawood closed his eyes. The moon hadn’t risen yet, but still, he whispered to him. Soon, we will be together again. This life is drawing to a close. This path is winding to its end. And, after everything, my only hope is you.

  Chapter 28

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Virginia

  September 7

  1800 hours

>   Deep breath in. You can do this. Deep breath out.

  Did he want to do this?

  Part of him did.

  Kris badged back into CTC, a bag of takeout Chinese in one hand. The center hummed, constant soft chatter flowing between workstations in the dim light of the two-story monitor banks along the front wall. He headed for Dan’s office, above the rows and rows of analysts plugging away.

  Dan stood behind his desk, his back to the door, arguing on the phone. Kris leaned into the doorjamb, blatantly eavesdropping.

  “Ryan… Jesus, I’m working on it. I know, I know. The dump from Islamabad scares the shit out of me too. Do you think calling me and yelling about it is going to get this done faster? My people are working on it. I’m working on it. I will call you when I know more. Hell—Hello?” Dan stared at the phone. “Prick.”

  “Hang up on you?”

  Dan twisted, his jaw hanging open. Shock lined his wide eyes. His gaze darted over Kris, from his change of clothes to his bag of takeout.

  “He used to do that to me too. When I was—” Kris flicked his wrist, as if that conveyed all that was the past and Afghanistan and his bitter shame. He shrugged and headed for Dan’s desk. Set the food down with a plop. “Hungry?”

  “I… didn’t expect to see you again.” Dan hung up, still staring. “Maybe ever.”

  “I swung by the Golden Sun.” Kris shrugged, taking out cartons of rice and egg rolls, lemon chicken and crispy beef. “Thought you might be hungry.” He kept his voice light, as much sass as he could inject. As if he just happened to be out, happened to drive by Dan’s favorite Chinese restaurant. Happened to have showered and changed into one of his best outfits, his slim black pants and a crisp turquoise button-down, showing off his collarbones. He slipped out of his Gucci trench, draped it over a chair.