Taking Morgan

by David Rose

  They’ve finally left the paved road behind, heading southwest toward the sea, a milky blue she occasionally glimpses in the distance. The shadows are lengthening. Sunset can’t be far away. Ahead, there’s a cloud of dust; she guesses it’s the other vehicle, the SUV containing Abdel Nasser. They’re heading down a broad, stony wadi, the baked red-brown mountains behind them. The amazing thing is, Aqil is asleep, not just dozing but really asleep, his snores making the seat of the car vibrate. She closes her own eyes as, imperceptibly, she bends over a little and moves her hands, slowly freeing Abu Mustafa’s knife from her waistband. Once or twice the jolting of the car has made the point prick her, so she knows it’s quite sharp.

  Karim too appears to be unconscious; he’s tilted his seat back, so it presses against her knees. As for the driver, he’s concentrating hard, focused on the track’s stones and potholes. Some of the ruts are so big that it wouldn’t be hard to roll the vehicle over or wreck it, and they can’t be traveling faster than ten miles per hour. The heat is just a little less intense, the cooling effect of the sea. Gently she manages to twist the blade so that it strokes the surface of the plastic cuffs that bind her wrists. It’s awkward work, and she drops the knife several times, catching it again in her lap. But she manages eventually to lever the blade in behind the plastic, and so makes faster progress. All the time, her actions are concealed by her robe. Ten, fifteen minutes pass. At last her hands are free. There are no restraints on her lower limbs; Karim trusts Aqil and his gun. She closes her eyes again, pretending to doze.

  Aqil’s woken up. He’s speaking to Karim, a staccato conversation that sounds a little urgent. But surely, he can’t be alarmed. Nothing’s going wrong with their plan. They haven’t been followed, and they haven’t been stopped. If she really heard a drone all those hours ago, there’s been no sign of anything since. From the kidnappers’ perspective, everything is as it should be. She’s the package. This is the delivery.

  They’re coming much closer to the sea. It’s less than a mile away now, and she can see the lateen sails of a dark, narrow-hulled dhow, moored only a short distance from the shore. The SUV has stopped on the sandy beach in front of it. The cove is small, less than half a mile wide, framed by the brown rocky cliffs of the headlands on either side. The beach itself is almost featureless, except for a few large boulders, which have evidently tumbled from the cliffs. The sun is dipping close to the horizon. Once the dhow leaves, whether she is on board or not, it will very soon be night.

  They’re closer still, and she catches sight of the welcoming party. There’s a tall man with pale skin, well-built with a bushy red beard, dressed in a dazzling white robe and a dark turban. He stands on the beach, flanked by at least a dozen armed retainers. There are several men still on the dhow; the beach party has made landfall by means of a small rowing boat.

  The bearded man has the aura of leadership, and she recognizes him from Agency photographs: Abu Ibrahim al-Almani, also known as Siegfried Maier, the adopted son of a Mercedes auto worker and a kindergarten nurse from Dusseldorf. In earlier times, he might have channeled his many hatreds into a nihilist, left-wing cell like the Baader-Meinhof gang. Instead, as a student of political science in Hamburg, he converted to Islam, and, having attended the mosque that served as the incubator for the 9/11 conspiracy, he joined al-Qaeda. He has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is now believed to be running his own increasingly murderous operations from a base in Yemen, at the same time making assiduous use of the Internet to gather further European recruits. Now the DIA intelligence report she read in America makes sense. A weapons and IED supply line from Yemen to Egypt and Gaza, just the kind of thing Abu Ibrahim might have organized, and just the kind of terrorist organization that Karim would have tried to connect with once he had her confession video and was trying to burnish his career as an international jihadi.

  The car begins to slow. This journey is almost over, and Morgan knows one thing with overwhelming clarity, that if she surrenders herself to this man’s custody, she will die, and probably slowly, after much suffering. Far better that, if this is the way it has to be, she dies fighting now. They stop, about twenty yards behind the SUV. The driver is opening the front passenger door and Karim is getting out, wreathed in smiles. It’s his big moment, the moment he achieves recognition on the world jihadist stage, and he’s walking slowly toward Abu Ibrahim, readying himself for his embrace. Aqil’s still beside her but seems distracted, as if he’s noticed something; in any case, he’s not watching her. He’s peering across to the headland on the far side of the dhow, as if he’s noticed something. It can’t be anything. He’s imagining threats that cannot exist. Baseless or not, his unexpected anxiety provides her opportunity.

  Morgan takes the stubby knife in her right hand, pulls up her robe with the other, and with the reflexive speed that once took her to the top of her Farm martial arts class, she plunges the blade into Aqil’s right eye. When she feels it penetrate the surprisingly resilient membrane at the back of his eye socket and enter the reservoir of softer material behind, she moves the knife from side to side, slashing and gouging at Aqil’s brains, then takes it out and thrusts it in again, first upward, and afterward once again slashing, rendering as liquid the fleshy pad beneath his chin, at the angle between his throat and the back of his jaw.

  At first he tries to resist, putting up his arms as if to ward off the acidic pain eating at his consciousness, but in what feels like a very few seconds she feels him start to go limp. The end of the knife is inside his mouth, slicing pieces from his tongue, and the blood bubbles and gushes, a little red spring that drenches her hand. But he cannot scream, partly because she has rendered his frontal cortex as useless as mashed potato, and partly because he is starting to choke, drowning in his own blood.

  Only a little while ago Morgan was considering the subject of revenge, and now she is exacting it. She says nothing, but inside she is exultant. This is for what he did to Zainab, and for the fear and privation she has endured these past three months, and it means that she can die happy. In the space of an instant she sees the light begin to fade from his remaining good eye. It’s turning milky, opaque, like the eye of a roasted sea bass when the cooking time is done. There is a detached part of her mind that senses she should feel horror at what she is doing; that considers that if she were still a proper and responsive human being, she should be retching or be trying to vomit the meager substance in her stomach. But there is no time for anything like that. She has chosen life, chosen action over passivity, and such choices have their consequences.

  These swaggering, lazy, arrogant motherfuckers are so stupid; they have not fixed the child safety lock to prevent her from leaving the car. She grabs the handle and flings open the backseat door, diving from the vehicle while ripping the niqab from her head. She almost trips in the sand but recovers, running away from the water, and as she hurtles away from the vehicles it becomes apparent that the guards around the two terrorist emirs haven’t seen what she’s done to Aqil. For some inexplicable reason, they’re not reacting to her running away. But they’re bound to soon, though the further she runs, the longer she will have so long as they don’t shoot straight. As she runs, she braces herself, waiting for the bullets and final oblivion.

  The bullets don’t come. Is she dreaming? She manages to rip off the encumbering robe mid-stride, and thus increases her pace. She’s sprinting now, toward the rocks, her mind filled with a sudden flash of that day in the summer of 1988 when she won the two hundred meters at the Texas state high school outdoor championships with a winning time of less than twenty-five seconds. Amazing that after so long confined she can still run, still leap across the ground, so fast, so lithe. Her feet are bare and the stones on the beach are sharp, but she feels no trace of pain. She’s so light, it’s almost as if she’s floating. In making what must be the very last glorious movements of her life, she feels liberated, loose-limbed, unleashed. Just as when she raced, time means nothing, every stride brings
new thoughts, new perceptions. Maybe she’s already dead, and her personal paradise is simply to keep on running.

  But through her athletic trance she hears a voice from the real world, the voice of an African American male. It’s yelling at her, as loud as it can, in English.

  “Ms. Cooper! Morgan Cooper! Get the fuck down, get the fuck down!”

  Almost simultaneously she catches sight of what must have distracted Aqil: a glint of reflected light among the boulders, now less than two hundred yards ahead. Then the first of three astonishing and wonderful things starts to happen. The glint becomes what can only be the barrel of a sniper rifle. It starts to fire. She can’t look around to see if anyone has been hit, because she’s taking the voice’s advice and flinging herself headlong into the sand. But she can see straight in front of her, and there she sees the second wonderful thing: two US Marine Corps AH-1 Sea Cobra helicopters. They round the headland that has been hiding them, their noses into the wind. It must be the breeze that, until now, has stopped anyone from hearing them.

  They’re flying in close formation. She does look back now, as one of the helicopters swoops low over the beach, while the other attacks the dhow. The Cobra fires its gun, and the place where the rudder must have been at the back of the boat explodes in a pool of flame, followed almost immediately by the wheelhouse over the engine. The gunship rakes the hull. This dhow isn’t going anywhere.

  Extremely accurate fire is coming now from the sniper team hidden among the boulders. She hears a loud popping noise, and, looking behind her again, she sees they’ve hit the engine block of the SUV. Another sniper round, and Abu Ibrahim, still standing stupidly in his billowing, pompous robe, goes down, the place where his chest used to be a cloud of red vapor. She hears the crackle of AK47s; finally, the kidnappers have started to react, and they’re firing their Kalashnikovs. She doesn’t know who or what they’re aiming at, only that she doesn’t want to be hit.

  There’s still one more wonderful thing to come. Streaking into the bay at more than forty knots, two rigid hull inflatable boats, each one bearing a Marine Corps special operations fire team. One of the Cobras is covering their approach, and as she lies in the sand, Morgan watches Karim visibly panicking. He’s yelling at the Yemenis, whose fire seems wild and undirected, and at his own driver. The Corolla is still undamaged, and he pushes himself past the driver, barging into what was his seat—he’s trying to get away. He starts the motor and the engine screams as he puts the stick shift into reverse and turns the car around. He sets off up the track that leads away from the beach. He’s going much faster than the driver dared when they came here, twenty, thirty, soon even forty miles an hour, making the vehicle heave as it hits the ruts and stones, like a white-knuckle theme park ride or a rodeo bucking bronco.

  There’s something languid about the Cobra’s response. It hovers for a moment, sways a little, and its gun fires just once. The car is utterly destroyed. Karim has been reduced to red, fatty particles.

  Now the seaborne fire teams are beaching their boats and disembarking, one near the rocks, less than fifty yards from Morgan, the other in the middle of the cove, by the remains of the dhow and the vehicles. Some of the Yemenis look as if they’re trying to surrender, putting up their hands and discarding their weapons, but a couple are still shooting. This one-sided firefight doesn’t look as if it’s going to last very long.

  Then the awful realization hits her. Abdel Nasser, weak and wounded, is still inside the SUV, and none of the men whose efforts make up these wonderful things has the least idea who he is. They are bound to assume that he is one of the kidnappers and, like Karim, will try to get away. There’s still firing going on from both sides when she gets to her feet and starts to run back the way she came, waving her arms, trying ineffectually to gesture to the Marines that they shouldn’t attack the second vehicle.

  “That’s Abdel Nasser! Don’t shoot him! Please stop, stop, he’s one of the good guys, let me explain—”

  A bullet strikes the ground in front of her, and another just to her side. One of the Yemenis has decided she’s a target after all, so she ducks and starts to weave, still shouting, “Stop! For God’s sake stop!”

  But suddenly she’s caught and can go no further; the huge, uniformed arm of one of the waterborne fire team members is around her waist, dragging her back to the ground.

  “Lady, for fuck’s sake, you trying to get yourself killed? Stay down, stay down!”

  “You don’t understand.” She’s yelling, but she’s trying to sound authoritative. “The guy in that vehicle, he’s not one of them, he’s a—”

  It’s too late. The Cobra fires. When the dust clears, there’s very little left, either of Abdel Nasser or the SUV. And the battle seems to be over. In place of the firing, there’s near-silence; the Cobras have moved offshore. Morgan can hear the breeze, and it’s starting to get dark. The Marine helps her to her feet, then offers her his arm. But she can no longer walk unaided. Her legs have crumpled and the Marine has to call over one of his comrades. They give her a lift under each of her armpits. As they half-carry her toward the boat, she can’t stop the sobs escaping through her cracked and arid lips.

  “You’re safe. You understand? You’re safe,” the first Marine says. “It’s over. We’re taking you off by boat. It’s going to be okay. Ms. Cooper. Please, Ms. Cooper, don’t worry. There’s no need to worry about a thing anymore. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Adam’s in Tel Aviv. It’s early evening. He’s chosen to wait at a different hotel, the Park Plaza, right on the seafront, sitting on a sofa on its beach-side terrace, gazing with empty eyes toward the sunset. He’s doing something he hasn’t done for well over a decade: smoking his way through a pack of Marlboros, mixing them with bitter black coffee, glancing obsessively down at his cell phone on the glass table in front of him, willing it to ring. It’s been hours without a word from Lieutenant Shawcross, and there’s been nothing from anyone else. He could call Rob, but what can he say? They may have started by following the wrong truck, but at least he took his chance to put them right. Have they found the correct target now? Where is it heading? What will they do? He has no idea, and it doesn’t really seem that Rob’s intervention now will be helpful. But why won’t they call and give him an update, or, if it has to be done, tell him the terrible truth? He takes another cigarette and lights it, convinced to his marrow that no news can’t be good news.

  Then his phone does ring. There’s an American voice that checks his identity, then says she’s going to patch him through to a name he can’t catch. A man speaks, says he has someone who wants to speak with him, and wherever he is, it sounds like an airport, or maybe a battlefield. He can hear a helicopter, loud and close, more male voices, and what sound like waves.

  And then, finally, unmistakably, her voice a little hoarse, Morgan. “Adam? Is that you? It’s me. I’m safe. They say I’m going to be safe. I’m okay.”

  He can’t speak at all for several seconds. “Morgan? You’re alive, you’re still in one piece?”

  “Just about.”

  “Oh Morgan.” He can’t say anything for several more seconds, because the tears are coursing down his cheeks and his sobs are almost choking him. “Thank God. Thank God.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Saturday, June 30, 2007

  Cerulean. She remembered the word from a translation of the Odyssey, and now, in the midst of her own voyage home, the color was everywhere. A cerulean sky and cerulean sea, two barely distinguishable infinities. When she closed her eyes during one of the four or five showers she took every day, the shade she saw behind her eyelids wasn’t the usual reddish-orange, but cerulean. She suspected that her tears and the water that came from the shower head were probably cerulean too. Caeruleus: the blue of heaven, caelum. Morgan knew perfectly well she hadn’t died, and yet her existence aboard the forty-one-thousand-ton United States amphibious assault ship Kearsage felt no more real than a children’s story of paradise. She wa
s also aware how narrowly she had avoided going to hell. A couple of days into the voyage, after the ship emerged from the Red Sea, she went up on deck to watch the sunset and saw the dark silhouette of some mountains. She was gazing into Yemen.

  Captain Melkessetian had given her his stateroom, a bland and far from enormous expanse of oatmeal carpet equipped with a desk, a steel-frame bunk bed, a plain round table, and two windows onto the cerulean world outside. There was a shelf of books, mainly military histories and great men’s biographies, but no computer. A Marine military policeman stood guard outside her door, and when she did venture beyond it, she encountered a pervasive smell, pine-scented cleaning fluid. The engines were almost inaudible, and the water invariably calm. But though the movement of the ship was almost imperceptible, she was permanently nauseous, a state she had long ago come to expect whenever she took to the sea.

  Inasmuch as she did feel able to eat, she took most of her meals alone in the stateroom. Ordinarily, liquor on US Navy vessels was prohibited, but the captain kindly sent her beverages from his own personal store—an ice cold beer with her lunch; a glass of Shiraz or Cabernet with dinner. Alcohol, she found, she could keep down more easily than food. On her third evening, the captain had invited her to dinner with a few of his senior officers. After congratulating her on her bravery, they tried to engage her interest on some of the world events and sporting triumphs that had transpired during her missing months, but she had forgotten how to converse. Nothing they said seemed important or interesting, and she resented their apparent delight in dwelling on triviality.

  They also gallantly informed her how well she was looking, but when she finally found the courage to appraise herself properly in her bathroom mirror, she was shocked, if not surprised. Her face was gaunt and bony, and the dark bags beneath her dull, tired eyes looked as if no amount of rest or expensive beauty products would ever remove them. Her hair, so glossy and sleek before her capture, was long and ragged, with new areas of white around her temples. But the biggest shock was her body. She must have lost thirty pounds, and the once-toned muscles of her upper and lower limbs had all but disappeared. Where her stomach had been firm, it was hollow. The skin around her breasts hung loose, and there seemed to be canyons between her ribs. No wonder she hadn’t had a period since the early days of her imprisonment. She looked anorexic. She had spent so long in hot, dirty conditions wearing the same, filthy clothes that in places her skin was raw and chafed by a red, fungal rash, and it felt as if she would never again be clean.