A Particular Darkness

by Robert E. Dunn

  “A lot of rain, not a lot of storms. I’ve never seen a tornado.”

  “You’re not seeing one now either. This is a spring storm. We have bigger things to worry about.”

  Keene’s hands were locked on the wheel in a grip so tight the dark skin of his knuckles were noticeably paler, like each little joint was giving its all, even its color, to keeping him connected to the car. His back was hunched up, a mockery of his usual posture.

  I can’t say why I said it, but I told him, “There’s no shame in what you’re feeling.”

  Keene didn’t say anything. He did straighten his back and loosen his grip. Both hands stayed on the wheel though.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was reading something that probably wasn’t there.”

  “I could say the same to you, you know.”

  He looked like he was going to say more. I headed it off. “What do weapons, girls, and Peruvian revolutionaries have to do with an imaginary Kurdish state, missionaries, and mercenaries?” By the time he was ready to say anything I was pointing again. “Turn there,” I said. “We’re here.”

  The long, unpaved drive needed grading and a new covering of gravel. Rain, by that time, blowing in a sideways slurry, was already making muddy basins in the ruts. We followed the loop through the trailer park to the most distant arc, where the weeds grew and the road turned back as if in shame. There was one double-wide, white trimmed in faded black and rust stains. Leading up to the door was a staircase of stacked cinder blocks. They matched the dry stack supports showing under the unskirted trailer.

  “You know how a tornado is like a divorce in Taney County?” I asked Keene.

  “No.”

  “Either way, somebody’s losing a trailer.”

  He laughed, a nervous sounding grunt, probably pity.

  “Stop,” I told him. “We’re going in.”

  “We’re not waiting for backup?”

  “I’m not.”

  “What if we’re wrong about this place?”

  “Either way, somebody’s losing a trailer.”

  As soon as Keene had the car stopped in a track of crushed grass and weeds that served as a driveway, I was out in the rain with my weapon at ready.

  If my life was a book or a movie, what happened next would have been perfectly scripted. Squalling rain died, swept aside by the same wind it was carried on. Overhead, the black blanket was pulled gently aside and sunlight made bright pockets in the gaps. In one place, a beam, feeble illumination that looked, none the less, like a strong promise, stroked trash and weeds in the yard before moving on to paint the tops of trees.

  Keene was beside me, even though I’d never heard him get out of the car. “Does that happen a lot here?”

  I was angry with myself when I realized that the awe in his voice reflected my own feelings. Signs. I’d been seeing them lately. Both good and bad. Life had taught me only one thing about signs and omens. You only see them when you’re looking and you’re only looking when the real world is too ugly to offer the hope you crave.

  “Let’s get inside,” I said, suddenly absolutely sure that nothing short of nightmare waited inside.

  “Just wait.”

  “For what?”

  “Them.” Keene jerked a thumb over his shoulder at a snake of cop cars hurtling up the mud track. They were running lights, no sirens. Behind the front three Taney County Sheriff’s vehicles there were two other civilian vehicles.

  The feeling I had about impending nightmare got stronger.

  “Captain Keene,” I spoke louder than I needed to. “Can they stop us?”

  “Stop us?”

  “There is an order from DOJ keeping the department away from the tent show and the people there.”

  Keene’s glance felt like a long stare. When he nodded the movement was almost imperceptible. Its meaning was impossible to miss. He looked away and toward the double-wide. I suspected, like me, he was looking for signs.

  The snake of cars came sloshing to a stop in the road with everyone piling out like a single unit. Aside from the sheriff in the lead car and deputies, men I knew and mostly trusted, Massoud and armed contractors stood before me. The last civilian car was my father’s. Uncle Orson and Congresswoman Whilomina Tindal stood beside it. That’s how it was for a moment. All action poised but not yet triggered.

  Then the moment was over.

  Massoud shouted first. I followed, stepping on his words with accusations. The sheriff and Whilomina joined in next. We were all yelling with all the breath we could muster and none of us hearing.

  I’d forgotten that I still had my pistol in my hand. When I raised it to point at Massoud the three men in tac gear lifted their weapons and joined in the shouting. I might actually have dropped my weapon if Orson had not been behind the men. He pulled the .45 that he’d brought back from Vietnam and oiled like a baby every Sunday night since.

  Orson didn’t yell or threaten. He didn’t do anything to turn the mercenaries to him. If things didn’t ease up, he would just pull the trigger. Two of the men would drop before they could even turn and I was pretty secure in my feeling that he would trust me to get the third.

  Sheriff Benson raised both hands and strode into the center of the shouting match. It actually worked. I lowered my weapon and stopped shouting. The mercenaries raised theirs to the sky and quieted.

  The only one who kept making noise was Massoud. He shouted, “No!”

  But he was directing it beyond me. I turned just in time to see Captain Alastair Keene kick aside the trailer door and step inside.

  Chapter 19

  Even with the clearing of the clouds, there was enough of a pallor to the day that the two gunshots from within the trailer flared like flashbulbs.

  No one was yelling anymore. In fact it had gotten so quiet I realized that the rain had not stopped completely. Thick drops were falling with sporadic spits of sound as they impacted leaves or mud.

  Keene stepped back into the open doorway and waved. “You need to see this, Sheriff.” He shouted.

  I holstered my pistol and waited for the sheriff to come along side before I started walking. He held up a hand to tell me to stop. As he kept walking he continued holding the gesture until he got to the steps. By that time Massoud had tromped past me without looking. His mercenaries looked. In fact they gave me serious stink-eye as they followed the money.

  Probably, I would have said to hell with it and gone on in if Whilomina had not put a hand on my shoulder. Uncle Orson gave me a quick nod then tilted his chin toward the car. Neither said anything, but Orson still had his .45 in a two-handed ready grip. He followed Whilomina and me to the car, backing all the way.

  “I suspect that Army officer took a big hit for you back there,” Whilomina said as soon as Uncle Orson had the car rolling. She was seated with me in the rear.

  “How do you mean?” I asked, looking back through the rear window. I could see nothing but weeds and battered trailers.

  “You’re not a cop anymore,” Orson made it an angry pronouncement.

  “How?” I wasn’t really surprised and not as disappointed as I might have expected.

  “DOJ has been putting pressure on the sheriff. Pressure they’ve been getting from other departments,” Whilomina explained.

  “What departments?”

  “Defense. Homeland. State. Departments doesn’t really sum it up very well. We’ll simply say, the executive branch.”

  “The president?” That time I was surprised. Impressed actually. I was about to say so when Uncle Orson took a hard turn from the county blacktop onto a private farm road. “Where are you going,” I asked gripping the back of his seat for stability. He had not slowed at all. In fact I think he sped up.

  Without answering he twisted the wheel and shot through an open gate into wet pasture. The sedan was not built for off-road, but it dampened the irregularities of the rough field admirably.

  “Who are we hiding from?” I asked.

  “We’re not entirely
sure,” Whilomina answered. “I only hope it is not from our own forces. I couldn’t stand that.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “A few days ago I would have said never. Now . . .”

  Orson pushed the car from one field to another. We crossed over and along farm roads and bits of asphalt, twisting over crooked country. More than once he stopped to open gates. At one in particular, a soft gate of post and wire, I suddenly realized where I was.

  “I’ll get it,” I told him as he stopped in front of the same gate Billy had brought me to just days before.

  I unhooked the post and dragged the wire fencing aside. When the car was clear, I brought the gate back around and latched it carefully. Back in the car, I didn’t say anything about why that gate or why I lingered. They didn’t ask.

  We didn’t talk anymore until we were back at the dock.

  * * *

  Clare was there waiting for us in an idling truck. As we passed through the short downhill drive into the parking lot, he pulled across, blocking the road, and parked. I noticed when he got out of the truck that the old moonshiner carried an ancient M1. He walked slowly, keeping a careful eye out as we went up the long dock ramp.

  The first thing I noticed inside the shop was that all the liquor was still absent. They didn’t trust me not to get drunk. I wasn’t sure if I was resentful or grateful. Too much of one and not enough of the other probably.

  Once Clare joined us inside, Whilomina told me, “You need to know what this is all about.”

  “Rojava?” My question was also an answer.

  She looked stunned for a second then nodded. “How did you know?”

  “I don’t. Not really.” I sat at the table. Uncle Orson was there already with an opened bottle of Clare’s homemade root beer. He and the bottle got the kind of look I usually reserve for ketchup on a hot-dog. He ignored the rebuke in my face and pushed the bottle closer to me. “I want something stronger.”

  “I know,” he answered. “Me too.”

  “You’re going to keep me dry?”

  “You can thank me for the root beer later.”

  “Katrina,” Whilomina spoke my name gently. “What do you know?”

  “Not as much as you, I’m sure.” I took a mouthful from the bottle. You know that feeling of surprised disappointment you feel when you pick up the wrong drink? Somehow, despite my knowledge of the contents, there was another part of me, the drunk, expecting the amber satisfaction of an American lager.

  My tongue and throat wanted to reject the liquid. The drunk screamed inside my head and the noise set spiders to dancing under my skin. I choked, but I got the root beer down. Where has your world gone when even a drink of soda pop feels like both a small penance and a bullet to the head?

  To my credit, I only cried for a minute or two. To everyone else’s—my uncle, Whilomina, Clare—they all came close and embraced me or touched my hands with no pressure for me to stop. Clare handed me a napkin to wipe my eyes and running nose.

  Finally I said, “Tell me about Rojava. What was so important that my father had to die?”

  Saying that was not an accusation in any way. But un-careful words are like bullets. Once loosed, there is no control. Whilomina looked for an instant like she’d been slapped. She recovered before I even recognized the look. I had to remind myself, she was hurting as badly as I was about him. And she carried the burden of one thought I didn’t, Why did the bullet miss me and take him?

  I opened my mouth to apologize.

  Before any sound could come out Whilomina said, “Rojava is a piece of a puzzle. The other piece is the Kurdistan Autonomous Region of northern Iraq. Put the pieces together and you have an idea whose time, many powerful people and forces think, has come.”

  “A Kurdish state,” I said.

  “A nation,” she corrected.

  “How?”

  “How—is startlingly easy. Between the Syrian civil war, our invasion of Iraq, and the rise of the Islamic State, there is an entire swath of ground with no working civil authority. All the Kurds need to do is declare it theirs and a nation is born.”

  “It can’t be that easy.”

  She shook her head sadly. “You’re right. Nothing is easy. Least of all this. They declare and face instant opposition from Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Daesh.”

  “How could it possibly work?”

  “The Kurds, particularly those of northern Syria, are politically committed to acceptance of ethnicity, religion, and gender equality.” It was a statement that seemed, at first, to have nothing to do with the question I’d asked.

  Then—“That’s . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence or the thought. None of that represented any kind of world I was exposed to in the Middle East.

  “Indeed.” Whilomina seemed to be agreeing with thoughts that I could not even complete.

  “What had been unthinkable a year ago, a separate, Kurdish nation, could be birthed and supported by a coalition of forces including us, Israel, most of the NATO nations, the Vatican, and even Russia. It’s a shot at stability and a political reasonableness that the region hasn’t seen since the map got jiggering after the First World War.”

  “As amazing as that is, how did it end up here in Missouri with mercenaries and murder?”

  “I can answer part of that.” Clare Bolin was sitting across from me. The hands that he’d held mine with earlier were under the edge of the table, hidden but nervous. Their fidgeting was given away by the motion of his arms. His eyes were turned down. Also hiding from me.

  “Roscoe told me some of it.” His confession was quiet. “I never put it together with what was happening here. It all seemed so removed.” Clare looked up and at me then huffed out a snort that communicated disgust. “Who am I kidding? It sounded like bullshit, apple-pie-in-the-big-blue-sky dreaming.”

  “You and your brother are not the only ones guilty of dreaming,” Whilomina said.

  Just as she had a few moments before, I experienced a slap from words that turned out not to be aimed at me. It was her own dreaming that she spoke of not mine. The emotion covering the words was grief not the rancor I imagined.

  I wondered if she was as angry as I was. Is anyone?

  “Go on,” I said to Clare.

  “It started when Roscoe was an Army chaplain. He told me about cooperation between Sunni and Shia Muslims, Christian missionaries, and local Assyrian priests. Did you know there were so many religious sects living in the same area? Even Yezidi and Zoroaster communities. The thing was, all these religious people were talking. The only thing they really had in common was the desire to live and worship how they wanted. Maybe that’s enough?”

  “No,” Whilomina answered him with absolute certainty. “Not in a war zone. They need weapons.”

  “The United States is giving them weapons?” I asked.

  “Oh no.” She shook her head in a tight, disappointed looking negative. “Turkey would never allow that. They’re a NATO ally with military bases and airspace we need. The Assad government in Syria would fight it too. And they’re allied with Russia. What government there is in Iraq, won’t willingly give up territory or control either. They expect us to push out the Islamic State and leave the country just as it was under Saddam Hussein.”

  “Iran-Contra,” I interjected.

  “In this case, it’s Peru-KDR.”

  “KDR?”

  “Kurdish Democratic Republic. That’s the dream.”

  “And we can’t be seen supporting that dream because it might offend other friends,” I filled in.

  “That’s the crux of it. The real pity is that it’s as worthwhile a dream as that part of the world has had in a long time. A homeland for a people who have been stateless for a century. An island of tolerance in a sea of religious and ethnic differences. And a possible stabilizing buffer against Bashar al-Assad and ISIL.”

  “That’s over there,” I said. “Here, once again, the United States has gotten itself involved in morally dubious
transactions, absolutely against our own laws, to sell weapons to one group and shunt the profits to another.”

  “That’s right. It’s the profits that got your father and I involved. They’re sitting in a Pentagon slush fund. And I’ve got the money tied up with a congressional subpoena of records. We’re going to get answers.”

  “But it’s different this time, right?” Clare asked. “I mean the Kurds aren’t Contras. And the end goal is something that could serve the whole world.”

  “What profit to a man, that he should gain the whole world and lose his soul?”

  It was the first time Uncle Orson had spoken since he’d pushed root beer on me. It was a stunning contribution not only because it seemed so on target, but because I could never recall him making a religious reference in my life. He rose from the table and went to peer carefully out the front door. Orson startled us again by saying, “They’re here.”

  At the mouth of the parking lot, three black SUV’s were stacked up the ramp blocked by Clare’s old truck. The improvised barrier didn’t stop them more than a moment. A man jumped out of the passenger side of the lead vehicle and checked for keys in the truck. Finding nothing he waved the driver forward then stood aside. He kept a weapon ready and his gaze moving.

  Easing the wheel over and the SUV forward, the driver brought the nose of his vehicle to touch the bed of Clare’s truck at the back bumper. Once contact was made, he dropped the transmission into low and gunned it, nosing the old truck aside almost gently.

  As soon as the road was clear the caravan darted into the lot then spread out. They stopped well apart from each other forming a rough semi-circle around the dock’s gangway. All the doors on the front and rear vehicles opened to disgorge dangerous-looking men. They all wore black tactical gear and carried automatic weapons. The middle SUV sat idling, motionless for a long moment before the front doors opened. First out was the passenger, General Massoud Masum. He stared up at the dock but didn’t move from behind his open door. The driver got out and without hesitation or any looking around, strode toward the gangway. Timothy Givens.

  Both Orson and Clare were ready to shoot him down before he had a chance to set a foot on the ramp. Whilomina warned against it although without much force. I asked them to wait on the shooting. I had the feeling he wanted to talk to me. I knew I wanted to talk to him.