by Clay Martin
“How does it look?” Tariq asked the jihadi behind the video camera.
“Excellent,” the jihadi said. “God is great.”
“That will show the American infidels that we are serious,” Tariq said. “God willing, they will all die if they try to defeat us.”
Another jihadi handed Tariq a bucket of water and a rag. “Tariq, you are destined to be the face and the voice of all jihad.”
“In’shallah,” Tariq said. He dipped the knife and his hands into the water and washed, turning the water a deep pink.
Chapter 2
At the fitness club south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kyle Dawson hovered, his hands poised just above the wide, chromed bar that held 265 pounds in iron weights. On the bench below him was Raoul Garcia, whose face was taut and red. Raoul lowered the bar to his chest, held it a moment, then groaned as he pushed it back up, fully extending his arms.
Doubting he could hold the bar if Raoul’s arms gave out, Kyle gripped it and guided it to the rack. The bar clunked into place.
Raoul exhaled noisily through puffed cheeks and stared up at Kyle.
“One more? Just one more?” Kyle coaxed, envious of Raoul’s build and bulk.
“Remember,” Raoul said, “you’re next.”
His face beaded with sweat, Raoul sucked in a couple of quick breaths as Kyle helped him ease the bar up and off the rack. Exhaling slowly, Raoul lowered the bar to within an inch of his chest, then struggled to push it back up. His elbows bent, his muscled arms quivering, the bar stopped moving upward.
Kyle grabbed it and strained, providing just enough lift for Raoul to get it back onto the rack. His armed splayed, Raoul panted and growled, “Holy mother of God.” He sat up and massaged his triceps.
“They’ve got a gym up there at Vista Verde, don’t they?” Kyle asked.
“They got every damned thing,” Raoul said. “That’s how we keep the trainees occupied. They’re working out every day, twice a day.”
“Must get boring.”
“It’s a lot of things, but it’s never boring,” Raoul said. “Most days, I feel like a drill sergeant. But it’s a damned paycheck, so I can’t complain.”
“A damned good paycheck, from what I understand,” Kyle said.
“They want me to work overseas again,” Raoul said, his words hanging in the air.
“Let me guess. You told them you’d had enough of Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“I’ve been lucky, Kyle.” Raoul tapped each arm and leg. “I’ve still got my limbs. I know too many guys who don’t. After a while, you wonder how many lives you have left.”
“So, what do they want you to do? Or can’t you talk about it?”
“Green zone security. Baghdad.”
“At least it’s not night raids hunting for hajjis.”
“Been there, done that,” Raoul said with a shake of his head. “I’ve got Miguel and Viviana to think about.” He gazed at Kyle. “But family never stopped you, did it?”
That stung. Kyle swallowed hard, but Raoul was right. He’d spend the past dozen years moving from one war zone to another as a correspondent for the Washington Herald. A year each in Afghanistan and Iraq, mixed with stops in the Congo, Kenya, and Somalia.
But now he was back in Santa Fe where he’d started. His son Brandon was in the Santa Fe Little League and his daughter Erica was a standout on her high school freshman soccer team. He was seeing his kids regularly, no longer the absentee father who occasionally talked to them on Skype from parts unknown.
“How’s Miguel doing, anyway?” Kyle asked.
“He’s finishing his freshman year at UNM,” Raoul said. “Came through with a 2.7 grade average first semester. Not bad, but I know he could do better.”
“The first year is always tough,” Kyle said.
Raoul shook his head. “He’s got a girlfriend, already. I think he spends too much time with her.”
“That can be a good thing,” Kyle said. “Keeps him out of the bars.”
Raoul stood and massaged his shoulders. “She’s Iranian. Drop dead beautiful.”
“What’s her name?”
“Aliyah Muhadi.”
“How did that happen?”
“Like it always does. Boy meets girl.”
Kyle nodded. “Hmmm.”
“Her father’s a scientist,” Raoul continued. “Fled the Ayatollah Khamenei. Now works at Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque.”
“Probably his reward for telling the CIA all he knows about the Iranian nukes.”
“Probably.”
“Physicist?”
Raoul shrugged.
“Does Miguel have a roommate?” Kyle asked.
Raoul nodded, drying his hands with a small towel. “A kid from the north.”
“The north? As in northern New Mexico?”
“Yeah. Smart kid. Carlito.”
Kyle nodded. “That’s good.”
“Yes and no,” Raoul said.
“What does that mean?”
“The kid’s a Muslim.”
“What? Carlito? A Muslim? Everyone in northern New Mexico is Roman Catholic. Santuario de Chimayo and all that. Easter pilgrimage. People walking all the way up there from Albuquerque.”
“I know,” Raoul said. “The way Miguel explains it, Carlito hooked up with some people at a mosque over there in Abiquiu.”
“There’s a Benedictine monastery in the north. Christ in the Desert, it called. So, what’s with the mosque?”
“That’s all I know Kyle.”
Kyle stared across the weight and workout room and out through the windows, remembering his first big story in northern New Mexico. He’d worked for the Santa Fe daily newspaper back then. It seemed like ages ago. “I knew a kid named Carlito from the north,” Kyle said slowly. “I wonder if it’s the same one. His father was shot and killed by the state police. I was there. The kid saw the whole thing.”
“Shot and killed?” Raoul asked. “What the hell was going on?”
His mind swimming in a sea of memories, Kyle shook his head and focused on Raoul. “It was a land grant protest. It got real ugly.”
“I guess so.” Raoul pointed to the bench. “Your turn, buddy.”
Kyle drew a deep breath, then glanced at one of several flat-screen televisions hanging on the wall. He lifted a hand. “Hold on.”
The face of CNN’s Anderson Cooper, cropped white hair and black rimmed glasses, filled the screen. “CNN has just learned that the Islamic state has released a video depicting the beheading of what appears to be American photo journalist Nathan Kennard,” Cooper said. A grab shot of a man wearing an orange prison jump suit filled the screen. The man was on his knees, his arms tied behind his back, in front of a figure clad in black.
“The executioner in the video,” Cooper continued, “who intelligence officials are calling Jihadi John, says that the killing of the journalist is in retaliation for US air strikes against Muslim extremists of the Islamic state, a territory carved out of portions of Syria and Iraq.”
Cooper’s face was replaced by another slightly blurred shot of the black-clad executioner pointing his knife at the camera, his voice barely audible in the blowing wind. “Intelligence officials in the UK and the US are analyzing the voice on the video in hopes of positively identifying the killer.”
Kyle stared, his mouth agape, his stomach knotted. “That’s Nate,” he groaned, clenching his jaw as he stared at Raoul. “We worked together in Afghanistan.”
His arms folded across his chest, Raoul shook his head in disgust. “Fuckin’ animals.”
“Nate went to Syria because no one was buying photos about the war in Afghanistan anymore,” Kyle said.
“He jumped from the frying pan into the fire,” Raoul said.
“They killed him, Raoul!” Kyle said, his throat t
ight, his voice rising. “They cut his head off!” He looked at Raoul with wide, angry eyes. His mind roiling, Kyle shook his head slowly, and still clenching his jaw, settled onto the bench. “Take a couple fifties off the bar,” Kyle said. “I can’t lift like you.” As Raoul removed some of the plates, Kyle stared at the overhead lighting, his head filled with images of Nate’s moments before his death. Kyle shook his arms to warm them.
“One seventy five,” Raoul said. “You can handle that.”
Kyle gripped the bar, and with a grunt, lifted it off the rack, his arms straining against the weight, his mind swirling with thoughts of Nate Kennard. He slowly lowered the bar to his chest, drew a deep breath, and groaning loudly, pushed the bar upwards, once, twice, then a third and fourth time before his arms began to burn.
“C’mon,” Raoul said, staring down at Kyle’s face. “One more.”
Kyle lowered the bar to his chest, then sucked in a breath and emitted a loud “ahhhhgggh,” as he pushed the bar upwards, his arms fully extended. He let the bar drop into the rack and stared at the overhead lights, his chest tight with anger.
Chapter 3
That evening, his face lighted by the glow of laptop screen, Kyle sat at the heavy wooden dining table that doubled as his writing desk. He scoured the internet for stories of how and why his friend and photo journalist Nate Kennard had been captured, despite the gnawing suspicion he already knew the answers. Information was coming to light from other journalists who were in and around the area at the time.
Kennard had been with a British freelance reporter named Eric McCovey, on assignment for the London Telegraph. McCovey had been writing about the weapons flowing to the Kurds and other Syrian rebels fighting the forces of Syrian President Bashir al-Assad.
Kennard and McCovey had stopped to file stories and photos at an internet café at a small town inside northern Syria and near the border with Turkey. They apparently figured it was safe since they were in rebel-held territory— certainly safer than the areas held by the Assad regime, whose police and army arrested and imprisoned journalists.
Kyle knew the Syrian rebels were a mixed bag. He’d been in Syria briefly and now tracked the war there from afar. The civil war had begun as a popular uprising in the spring of 2011 with short-lived, pro-democracy demonstrations. Assad responded brutally, as he had in the past, using his secret police and their ruthless military tactics. Civilian militias had formed for self-protection and within months morphed into the Free Syrian Army. Most western powers, especially the US, weary of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had hoped Assad would fall quickly and cleanly. But Russia stepped in to prop up Assad, one dictatorship helping another, and as Syria’s civil war dragged on, the popular uprising degenerated into chaos.
Kyle knew most news organizations kept their staff out of the mayhem and relied on Syrian reporters. Only a handful of foreign freelancers ventured into the fray, praying they’d make it out alive, but knowing their exclusive stories and photos commanded top dollar.
What made Syria more deadly than most war zones were the fundamentalist jihadis who had coalesced around a man named Abu al-Bakar. The man was an Iraqi religious scholar, a part-time Islamic fighter, and had served time in a US prison in Iraq. When the US pulled out of Iraq, al-Bakar and his followers became the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
Al-Bakar took advantage of the chaos and sent his fanatics into rebel-held towns and provinces, hanging people, mutilating women and children, and cutting off heads. ISIS grew exponentially, seizing Syrian oil fields and selling oil on the black market, much of it to Turkey. Flush with cash and weapons, ISIS demanded absolute obedience to its brand of oppressive Islam. They weren’t alone. Other competing Islamic fundamentalist groups like the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate, joined the fray, turning the territory in hell on earth.
Kyle’s felt sick as the accounts of Kennard’s and McCovey’s capture raised more questions than they answered. One said after Kennard and McCovey had filed their stories and photos and had left the internet café near the Syrian border that day, their translator flagged down a taxi driver to take them to the small guest room where they’d stayed the night before to retrieve their bags.
Kyle wondered why then, with their gear and gags in hand, the two journalists had not crossed the border into Turkey, but had driven deeper into Syria, southwest toward Aleppo and into the heart of rebel territory. He guessed they’d gotten a tip. But about what?
Along the way, McCovey and Kennard were forced off the road by a small white van, according to one account. The people in the van must have known who was in the taxi. But how? The taxi driver was a possible source, but more likely it was their translator, their “fixer.”
Fixers were vital to foreign journalists working in war zones and were often local journalists who spoke passable English. In Muslim countries, fixers walked a fine line. Neighbors often viewed them as collaborators with western infidels—traitors to Islam, and as such deserved to die. Most fixers took the risk, however, hoping their work would get them a visa to the US. The lives of foreign journalists were in the hands of their fixers, so good ones were like gold. Bad ones were deadly.
Kyle drew a deep breath as his stomach soured. He remembered talking with Kennard about a story that had puzzled him ever since he’d been in Libya and written about the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi. Kyle’s story had been about weapons, tons of them, that had disappeared from Libya after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi.
Kyle shook his head to refocus on McCovey’s and Kennard’s demise. After the van forced their taxi to the side of the road, three armed had men leapt from it, and at gunpoint, took Kennard and McCovey, the driver, and their fixer. The armed men were not Syrians because they apparently spoke Arabic with foreign accents. This meant the men in the van were probably Arab members of ISIS or al-Qaeda.
When he read that the taxi driver was set free, Kyle figured the Syrian fixer had been bribed, possibly threatened, into giving up the two western journalists. Kennard and McCovey then disappeared. Now, six months later, Kennard had been executed on camera by Jihadi John. Kyle felt sick, knowing the hell Kennard and McCovey had endured.
As he stared at the laptop screen, Kyle’s mind drifted to a day a couple of years earlier when he and Kennard had worked together in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. It was spring and the poppies were in bloom and the Afghan opium harvest was peaking as the fat green bulbs laced with delicate pink petals bobbed atop tall stalks and oozed their precious milky sap, having been lacerated with razor blades.
Kyle and Kennard rode with the Afghan police to do a story about the country’s token poppy eradication program. They’d eaten a breakfast of eggs and nan, the chewy Afghan flat bread, and savored several cups of black tea inside the provincial governor’s heavily secured compound in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah. They’d climbed into the back seat of a dark green Ford Ranger pickup truck fitted with a double roll bar mounted with a .30 caliber machine gun. The back seat was cramped, but Kennard and Kyle sandwiched themselves inside, letting Daoud, their Afghan translator, a young man in his 20s, sit in the front seat beside the Afghan police driver. The truck was one of six in the convoy that included Afghan soldiers armed with AK-47s.
The convoy rolled through the capital on gritty roads of concrete and asphalt, slowing through the crowded commercial center, clogged with people milling about the streets, seemingly oblivious to the motor traffic, intent on what they were doing.
After horn honks and shouts from the soldiers, they were soon rolling along the wide graveled roads that networked the country, raising a thick plume of choking, chalky dust.
Kyle and Kennard kept the windows open, preferring the breeze despite the swirling dust and heat. About twenty miles outside the city, they encountered a convoy of behemoth MRAPs, the US army’s mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles draped with camo netting and trailed by a cloud of fine dust
that hung over the road like tunnel of fog.
They arrived at a sprawling mud brick farm house set amid a patchwork of fields of flowering poppies on the banks of the Helmand River, a shallow, meandering ribbon of brown water snaking southward from the distant Hindu Kush mountains, now just dark humps on the northern horizon.
Kyle recalled the historic irony of the region’s lush and irrigated fields flanking the river. In the 1950s, in an effort to curtail the spread of communism by the Soviet Union, the US began a decade-long project to establish viable farming along the Helmand River. The river was dammed and an extensive network of canals was dug to direct water to the fields. But the Afghan soil was bereft of nutrients and nothing grew. Except poppies.
After a decade of failure, the farming project ended. The American engineers and agricultural specialists packed up and went home. But the water and canals left behind quickly became valuable. In the years that followed, Afghanistan became the world’s largest supplier of opium, the raw ingredient to heroin, providing ninety percent of the world’s market.
Kyle and Kennard had climbed out of their truck and surveyed the scene. A half-dozen gray-uniformed Afghan police took positions at the corners of the sprawling poppy field, their AK-47s at their sides. Several more heavily armed policemen surrounded the Afghan farmer and his two sons, who were backed against the mud-plastered walls of their farmhouse. The women remained, for the moment, inside and out-of-sight.
The farmer and his sons watched helplessly as the diesel engine of a sturdy gray tractor roared to life, belching black smoke in the still morning air, and backed off a low, flatbed trailer. The farmer was in his fifties, Kyle guessed, with a deeply creased, brown leathery face and a smudged gray skull cap on the back of his balding head. His soiled white shalwar chamise hung loosely from thin shoulders, the shirt tails dangling to his knees and covering blousy pants. Badly scuffed leather shoes, the heels broken down and laces missing, covered his feet like makeshift slippers. His two boys, young teenagers, were similarly dressed, their eyes wet with tears dribbling down their brown cheeks.
