Spoils

by Brian Van Reet

  “How would you send word?” the sheikh asked. “All the telephone lines are scrambled.”

  “Abu Hafs, bring me one of the satellite phones.”

  “Is there no end to your generosity?” the sheikh said, but with some reservation.

  “It’s nothing.” The doctor flicked his wrist dismissively. “But we’re afraid we do need some help, if we’re going to make the journey.”

  The sheikh indicated with a nod that he was listening.

  “Your truck. The radiator hose. One of ours has broken down.”

  “I see now,” the sheikh said, narrowing his cloudy eyes. “I see you would barter with my granddaughter’s life.”

  “I’m only seeking a solution that benefits everyone,” replied Walid smoothly. “Let’s call the one-eyed man one-eyed. I need that hose, and you need the road to Baghdad. Do me this favor, and I’ll pay it back in gold. You have my word.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t. My family needs that truck. I have a duty to them.” The sheikh sipped his tea and placed the cup carefully on its saucer, which he rotated a quarter turn. He rose from the chair and smoothed his dishdasha where it had bunched around his waist. I could tell he was the kind of man who moves and speaks slowly, who does not mind if others mistake this slowness for insipidity, and who may even accentuate certain deliberate aspects of his personality, inviting this misjudgment, realizing its advantages. He motioned for his crippled grandson to collect everyone’s cups. “That’s all I can say on it. Thank you for looking at Fatima, but the time has come for you to go.”

  For the second time that day, I spoke out of turn. “You talk about duty. Do you think I wanted to give my own boy to this struggle, to have the flesh of my flesh shrouded in a funeral robe? And yet he was, and I went so far as to celebrate his martyrdom, because that was my duty as a Muslim, which is greater than anything I owe to family. So what are you doing? Why aren’t you fighting the Americans, who even now are plundering your country? Or, if you are too old and weak for that, why aren’t your landsmen under arms? You know, it would be lawful for us simply to take that truck of yours. We’ll take what God demands and no more. And if you stand in the way, I’ll have your head for a traitor’s.”

  Dr. Walid looked at me crossly but not without some pride at being able to lay claim to a subordinate with such a brutally stern streak, one that had lain dormant a long time. “You see what my men think,” he said to the sheikh. “But we won’t let Abu have your soul. Despite your weak faith, you are no traitor. It would be a sin to take your head, but my brother might be right: It is lawful for us to take your truck. With due compensation, of course. Abu al-Deehar, give it a look over. If it runs all right, we’ll trade it for ours. Surely you’ll be able to find a radiator hose among your neighbors soon enough.”

  “Now there’s—”

  “No, no, sit back down. We’ll just be another minute.”

  Walid had drawn a pistol from beneath his shalwar and pointed it lackadaisically at the sheikh’s gut.

  So it was we solved the problem of our transportation. We left the village in search of our first engagement with the kuffar—the roundabout, not our intended target, but one of opportunity. I was purified with water and blade, having shorn every hair on my body the previous morning. We moved to seek the enemy: at our backs was a ruddy sun that cleaved the gulf of earth and sky, illuminating bilious red clouds like wet clay smudged over the horizon. A wall of dust and sand crawled behind and carried with it uncountable specks of grit swept up by the wind to roil a while before falling and dislodging more of the earth with the force of their saltating impact. The atmosphere was electric, a combination of the weather and the battle to come. I was out of my body. I was willpower hurtling through space. The past receded to mean nothing; the future was all. There was the sense of the existing order overturned, a feeling of wild possibility.

  8

  SLEED: VICTORY OVER AMERICA

  Day Of

  IRAQ (PALACE ROW; TRIANGLETOWN)

  Jonesing in the dead of night I flicked my Zippo and lit a Miami, this off-brand cigarette made in China. Galvan had bought a couple cartons from a local national after our supply of Marlboros had run out. I dangled my legs off the back deck of the tank. We’d run the engine earlier to do some maintenance and underneath me it still gave off heat like the coals of a buried campfire. Crickets chattered in the palm groves, the sound throbbing like the slow scattered heartbeat of one big creature. I smoked and petted my dog in the light of the moon that’d risen high over the lake at the Row and put a glazed look on the water. Victory over America Palace was a black shape out there not too far.

  I’d woken up craving a smoke and found I was alone on the tank. It was Galvan’s turn to pull duty as sergeant of the guard, we had posts set up on the roof of headquarters and in five sandbagged hooches on the perimeter, but that didn’t explain why Fitzpatrick was missing, too. If I hadn’t known better I might’ve thought something bad had happened. Instead, my mind went straight to them foraging. That’s what Fitzpatrick called it. Some nights he and Galvan liked to go out and explore the palaces and sometimes I went along to see what they might find. Once it was a suit of chain-mail armor, another time, a brand-new big-screen plasma TV that we lugged over to headquarters and presented to the sergeant major who was happy as a pig in shit to get it.

  I wondered what it’d be tonight. Nothing to do but find out. I grabbed my weapon and battle rattle and a pair of night-vision goggles that I hung around my neck on some parachute cord. Frago tagged along as I hopped off the tank and we walked the lakeshore to Bunker Six on the perimeter of the secure area. I ducked under a sagging plywood roof covered with sandbags. The bunker was empty, a couple cigarette butts floating in some stagnant ooze that’d filled the grenade sump. Frago hopped on the firing platform by the machine gun and raised his hackles, growling softly. He stared into the night and kept up that throaty purring. I shushed him and strained to hear what was out there in the dark. The wind gusted like a storm was on the way and made it hard to pick out any sound. I stood listening for a minute like an idiot before remembering the NVGs. Powering up, they made a faint electronic whine, then I saw a cluster of bushes along the water. Next to them, two dudes about the right shape to be Fitzpatrick and Galvan, heads on a slow swivel.

  What happened next was strange. They sat on the shore and took off their boots and pants. I didn’t know what to think about that. I thought maybe I’d seriously mistaken the nature of their friendship.

  They got up and stood half-naked. Each one tied his bootlaces together and slung his boots along with trousers over his neck, and Galvan also carried something that looked like a long walking staff that he held for balance as he waded through the muck. Fitzpatrick went behind him and I watched as they slunk into the water. The way they did it made me think of Vietnam, at least what I’d seen in movies, rice paddies and muddy GIs with peace signs and kill counts painted on their helmets. Some things change. Most don’t. I tracked them through the goggles as they kept moving offshore to Victory over America Palace.

  Frago hated getting wet and had sense enough not to go venturing into a strange body of water at night. I could just barely hear him worrying about me as I sloshed around the palace’s pilings, no clue how Fitzpatrick and Galvan had climbed up and gotten in. I’d seen them do it from a distance through the blurry NVGs. Stumbling through the water I banged my kneecap on a concrete block hidden below the surface. Pain shot through my leg, I bit my lip, and craned my neck. Then I saw it. On the underside of the pier beneath the palace, a maintenance porthole was busted out. Next to it was a piling with a service ladder attached.

  I waded over to the ladder and climbed the narrow rungs, sharp on my bare feet. I had slung my boots around my neck like I’d seen them do. At the top of the ladder I dragged myself over the lip of the porthole, into a dark room like some sort of pump house, pipes and metal tanks stained with rust trails.

  “Sergeant Galvan. Rooster. Y’all i
n here?”

  My voice sounded too deep in the hollow concrete room, like talking at the bottom of a well. No one answered. As I put on my boots I decided it’d be dumb to panic them with whispers in the dark, take a bullet in my lungs for the trouble. I clicked off the goggles and lowered them to my chest. I had a red-light headlamp on my helmet and used that instead.

  Footprints in dust led away from the porthole. I tracked them through the pump room and a T-shaped hallway to an industrial-sized kitchen with stainless steel countertops and pots and pans hanging in racks from the ceiling. Everything coated with plaster dust and grime. Big cracks had opened in the floor and I made out a rat skittering through one, catching its red eyes in my light. The air was stagnant, humid, with the whiff of spoiled meat, and I hoped the smell was coming from a refrigerator somewhere and not bodies.

  The kitchen was next to the palace dining hall. The footprints disappeared on the moldy carpet there but I headed for the only other way out, a set of double doors blown off their hinges that opened to a domed lobby with a black-marble goldfish pond, the stone shattered, water leaked out, and fish rotted on the bottom. A cruise missile had crashed through the ceiling, left a gash in the dome, brought down half of it, and the falling ceiling had sheared off the bottom of a staircase on the other side of the lobby. The upper stairs were still attached to the next-higher floor. Broken glass and tile crunched underfoot as I headed that way, adjusting the beam on my lamp to focus on the staircase where there were more marks disturbing the dust.

  I slung my weapon and went for it, jumped up and grabbed one of the wrought-iron spindles, hung there in midair rocking side to side enough to throw a leg on the bottommost step. I got a knee up, an arm, and the rest of me. At the head of the stairs was a long hall. Falling sheets of wallpaper drooped down and made it look like a path cut through jungle.

  “Hey, fucknuts. You guys up here?”

  Nothing. I started checking rooms. I hadn’t gotten far when a clanging came from the other end of the hall, a steady muffled clanging like someone was trapped in the walls, banging on pipes. I followed the sound till I found the door where it was coming from and pounded on it with my fist.

  The clanging stopped.

  “Sergeant Galvan! Rooster!”

  Footsteps, and Galvan spoke from inside. “What the hell, Sleed. You scared the piss out of us.”

  “I wouldn’t have had to if you’d told me you were going out tonight.”

  “I can’t have a snitch,” Galvan said.

  “I keep saying, I’m not gonna snitch. Just let me in. I’m not chickenshit like you think. You scored something good, I want in.”

  He opened the door a little and showed his narrow face, looked at me and thought about it.

  “Fine. You want in, you’re in. About fucking time.”

  He opened the door, and I saw a desk and a dresser with drawers and cabinets dumped out, but I zeroed in on the king-sized four-poster bed. With my red headlamp the gold rifle lying there looked the same color as a sunset.

  “Pretty badass, right?” Galvan said.

  It was an AK-47. I picked it up and pulled back the charging handle, turning the weapon in my hands and admiring it.

  “This thing legit?”

  “Gold plate,” Galvan said, like it was no big thing. “Check this, though.”

  He pointed me to a walk-in closet. No clothes inside, like no one had ever really lived in the room, just another empty one in a big-ass palace. Propped in the corner was a tanker’s bar, an oversized crowbar four feet long. It was the thing I’d seen Galvan carrying like a staff, and now I could tell why he’d brought it. The closet had three safes in it. The smallest one was a fireproof model with a carrying handle and its lock mangled, the lid jimmied open, the inside empty. The other two were identical floor safes with thick steel doors and combination locks. They were shut tight.

  “I busted this one earlier,” Galvan said, and toed the fireproof safe. “You won’t believe this shit.”

  He grabbed a stack of papers from a dusty bare shelf in the closet and handed them to me. I scanned the first page and looked at him. The writing was in Arabic. None of us spoke a lick, let alone could read it.

  “Keep going.”

  I flipped through. Most of the paperwork was in Arabic but I found some in English, account statements and real estate deeds, the kind of stuff people usually keep in fireproof safes. What blew me away was the name printed on them. Uday Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti.

  “How’d you find this?” I said.

  “Same way we found everything else. Climbed up in here and started messing around. I went back and got the tanker bar and Rooster tonight, to get at them safes.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah. Crazy, right?”

  “Seriously,” I said, excited but also beginning to experience major doubts. “Maybe we should forget about this and head back to the tank line.”

  “Damn, Sleed. Cold feet already? Thought you were in, tough guy. Do what you want, but I’m not going anywhere till I crack these.”

  “He could be right,” Fitzpatrick said. “Let’s call it quits for now and come back tomorrow night with an acetylene torch.”

  “Who says we’ll even be here tomorrow?” Galvan said. “We might get orders to roll anytime. This QRF gravy train’s not gonna last forever. We’ll be back in the shit before long. We gotta seize the moment here.”

  He took the tanker’s bar and jammed the chisel end between the safe door and the frame and threw all his weight behind it like he was hitting the tackling dummies at football practice. It barely budged.

  “You two gonna help or just stand there and jaw jack?”

  Cash, jewels, guns, drugs, Uday’s collection of self-produced snuff films, or maybe empty space, nothing at all, we couldn’t say. We beat on the safes and jimmied the doors and dragged one down the hall and heaved it off the balcony, and it crashed into the empty marble goldfish pond, but nothing worked.

  “We’d better leave soon,” Fitzpatrick said, checking his watch. “We’re officially on QRF as of twenty minutes ago.”

  “Chill,” Galvan said. “When’s the last time they activated QRF? Let’s just try one more thing.”

  He ripped open a Velcro pouch on his tactical vest, took out a grenade, and grinned.

  “You’ve lost your damn mind,” I said.

  That was when Blornsbaum ruined the party, barking our crew’s call sign over the walkabout radio clipped to Galvan’s belt.

  “Two, this is Four. Where you at, Two?”

  I could tell by the background noise on Blornsbaum’s end that he was in his tank with the engine fired up, which could only mean one thing. QRF was rolling out. Soldiers outside the wire were in trouble and needed our help, but the three of us, messing around in the palace, had missed the call. Missing your unit’s movement was no joke. You could get court-martialed for this shit.

  “Fuck. What’re we gonna do?”

  “Don’t answer him yet,” Galvan said. “We need to get back to the tank.”

  We hauled ass out the palace, down the ladder, into the lake, and splashed back as fast as we could toward shore. As we hurried back, Blornsbaum tried to raise us on the handheld every thirty seconds or so, getting more and more pissed. Finally, he said the platoon was pulling out without us.

  We were screwed. Knew the situation was real bad when we saw a snaking black curl of smoke, the heat signature from the checkpoint at the traffic circle ten klicks west of the Row. It was impossible to miss, bigger and brighter in infrared as we pushed the tank to its limit, hitting sixty miles an hour before the governor on the transmission kicked in. We weren’t supposed to leave the Row with any less than a two vehicle convoy but there was no choice. It should’ve taken us only a few minutes to make the traffic circle once we got the call. It took almost twenty, and fifteen of those were us getting back to the tank from the palace.

  We got on scene and dismounted. Two Humvees were burning, the smoke smelling toxic
, making my eyes water. Soldiers from the MP platoon, guys whose names I didn’t know but whose faces I recognized, just stood around in shock, watching everything burn. One kid missing his helmet looked like he’d just crawled out of the shit canal and I saw a couple bodies down that way. They were so still. Like mannequins.

  “What happened?” Galvan said.

  “What’s it look like?” Blornsbaum said. “The MPs got hit hard, mortars and small arms. One truck and six joes are still unaccounted for. Now that you all finally decided to show up, we can go look for them. Where in Christ were you anyway? Why’re you all wet?”

  “Long story,” Galvan said.

  “Save it, then. I don’t even want to hear it right now. You even know what could happen if Higher finds out about this? You’re lucky I told them we were having engine trouble.”

  To be sure, it wasn’t like he’d covered for us out of the kindness of his heart. He’d lied to Higher to cover his own ass, too. A leader who couldn’t account for his soldiers was in almost as deep as the soldiers themselves.

  Two of our four tanks stayed at the circle to treat the wounded and secure the area while more platoons at the Row were spinning up to come help. The other two tanks, including ours, went to look for the MIA. We followed Blornsbaum as he tore down the road. Before long it dumped us in a little village of mud-daubed huts that everyone called Triangletown. The streets were narrow, unpaved, empty, and it wasn’t long before we found the missing truck. We spotted a heat signature and deep tire tracks in the mud by the side of the road. The Humvee had crashed through a low brick wall and rolled in a ditch, engine still running, bullet holes all through the cab. We looked around and called out for survivors, but there were none. Three killed, two in the cab, and this dude I knew named Worthy. I’d been in a long-running spades game with him and some other guys.