Spoils

by Brian Van Reet

  Easton sighed. “Okay. I was expecting this, but hell. First, make sure you let him know that I’m the one who gave the order to fire. My men were just doing their job. Second, pass on my deepest regrets over his loss. There’s nothing I can do to make this right, I know that. It’ll be a burden on me for as long as I live, and obviously it’s much worse for him. I’m not sure what happened last night, but we’re looking into it. His people were driving a vehicle that matched the exact description of one that ambushed my men. They were driving off road, no lights, evading a search. That’s why I made the call. It was a terrible mistake.”

  Moe relayed the colonel’s message, and for the first time the sheikh brought his hands from behind his back. One was wrapped with a strand of prayer beads like a rosary, except a knotted green cloth hung in place of a crucifix. He concentrated on his hands, fingering the beads as he spoke, and Moe translated.

  “He says they were driving the girl to a hospital. She was sick and got much worse during the night. Since your men have blocked all the roads, they were going a back way. He says he understands that this was not done on purpose and begs you again for their bodies.”

  “Tell him I’m sorry, but I can’t get them,” the colonel said more bluntly. “They were taken to our hospital across the river. He’ll have to go there to claim them. I can give him my personal sat-phone number and a letter of passage to show Third Corps.”

  After Moe translated, the corners of the sheikh’s mouth tightened like he’d been insulted.

  “He says he’d prefer you claim the bodies yourself. He wants you to bring them here for his people to receive. They’re gathered and ready to perform the burial. This must be done by nightfall to keep with Islam, as you’re probably aware. He says you owe him at least that much. He also hinted at diyya, an Arabic custom. The payment of blood money in cases like this.”

  “Cases like what?” Easton said.

  “Wrongful death, usually. Diyya is a way to make things right with the family without resorting to, well, more forceful forms of justice. But he only mentioned that in passing. He’s much too correct, you might say, to get into money right now. Mostly he talked about what has to be done with the bodies to satisfy his—”

  “Like I said. Tell this distinguished gentleman I’ll be glad to give him all the credentials he needs to claim them, but he has to do it. They’ve been signed over to Thirds Corps, Division Mortuary Services, and that’s where they’ll stay until they’re claimed by next of kin. Just tell him I don’t like it, my hands are tied, but it’s protocol. And we can definitely talk more about that diyya. I think we can get at least five thousand per casualty from Brigade for a war damage reparation payment. That’s twenty thousand dollars. Tell him.”

  11

  ABU AL-HOOL: THE EMPTY TIME

  7 Days After

  IRAQ (WATER TREATMENT PLANT)

  Continuing a spate of uncanny good fortune, Dr. Walid has found a water treatment plant ideal for his current purposes. The facility, long disused, has space enough to hold the prisoners and also to quarter the brothers while still affording us a certain inconspicuous privacy. Roughly a dozen kilometers northwest of Fallujah, it’s built on rotten ground near the edge of a marshy, derelict network of canals that feeds off the Euphrates like a metastasized tumor; this patch of blocky concrete overgrown with elephant grass and cypress would appear from the air as only another moldering infrastructural ruin, vestige of the sixties, a substantially more prosperous and optimistic time for this country.

  The Americans keep up the search for their own. I find it remarkable, their dogged determination to repatriate three measly soldiers, their willingness to devote tens of thousands of man-hours and untold millions of dollars and matériel to the cause: they barge into homes, stores, and mosques, harassing travelers on the roads, disrupting traffic into kilometers of angry gridlock. One unintended effect of this operation has been to prove what we’ve argued all along—their shambolic rhetoric of liberation aside: they hold their own lives dear and an Arab’s cheap.

  I am, however, far from exilient: so much good fortune makes me skittish. The noise from any overflight, even an oblique one, is enough to send me to ground. Though the countryside has its benefits, in the end it’s almost always safer for the guerilla to operate where the crowded hubbub of urban life offers a better guarantee of anonymity. We find ourselves in a predicament. Returning to the mosque where we’d been holed up in Fallujah is out of the question, the roads too well watched for us to risk moving our prisoners again. Nor can we sneak into Baghdad and join the fight there. If we had planned on taking captives, we might have been able to arrange a better stash house beforehand. As it is, in a real sense, they are the ones who have shackled us.

  Yesterday Dr. Walid and I took one of the HiLuxes and drove into the marsh, scouting out a place that we might use to cache our explosives, the mortars and a small case of plastique, so as not to be sleeping right next to them. The excursion, I found, had an ulterior purpose as well: when the doctor had me alone, he laid out his plan for the Americans.

  “I need you with me on this,” he said after I’d expressed uneasiness with what he had in mind. “A thing like this could divide the brotherhood. You’re one-half of their heart, you know. I’m the other. They can’t see us at odds.”

  “It’d be one thing if they had any valuable information to give. But they don’t. They’re just peons. What you’re talking about is a perversion of jihad.”

  “Do you understand what we’ve got on our hands here?” he said. “Do you realize what Zarqawi would do if he learned we had them?”

  “I agree. They’re a huge liability. They should’ve been executed immediately on the battlefield, in the lawful way. But, since they weren’t, we need to arrange a trial, contact a few of the emirs we trust, and then—”

  He beat his hands on the steering wheel. “No. No, no, no. What you see as a liability is actually a blessing. This is our moment, brother. It’s what we’ve been working for all these years. We must do this.”

  “It would be false. A victory, maybe, but empty. You can’t start rewriting the rules, Walid. It undercuts everything we stand for.”

  “In your opinion. I could offer counterexamples from the Sunna. At the Battle of Uhud, who served the Messenger of God as a living shield to catch the arrows of the kuffar? It wasn’t a man but Nusaybah, Mother of Ammara, who won that glory. But you know this. And also that in some ways this isn’t about religion—we must speak to God but also into the megaphone. Argue all you want. You can’t deny how powerful it would be.”

  An exhausting night, troubled by dreams of the dead. I was back in Chechnya, in the field where they laid my son to rest. Except in the dream, I was the grave digger, and it wasn’t Hassan but a small boy that I was to bury. I worked quickly and without breaks, slamming my pickax into the hard frozen ground, gripped with a criminal’s sense of panic; the more I thought about what I was doing, the faster I swung the ax, yanking out clods of dirt, worrying someone would pass in the forest and find me with the boy’s corpse: I had no good explanation for it, no memory of what’d happened. My rifle was with me, but his body showed no sign of violence, his face familiar—but I couldn’t place it—serene.

  As happens in dreams, my fear realized itself at the worst possible moment. A Chechen woman appeared across the meadow just when I’d finished excavating the plot. She was dressed in an old coat and a loosely woven shawl, moving toward me with a hobbling but purposeful gait, calling, “You! What is it you have there, what wickedness are you about?”

  “Don’t come any closer,” I said, not wanting to do it; but, according to the logic of the dream, allowing her to see the dead boy would be a kind of death for me as well. It was the thing I was most afraid of. I simply could not let it happen. When she refused to heed my warning, I picked up my rifle and fired a single shot.

  Now I had two graves to dig.

  In the interrogation room the doctor plays angel to my devil
tonight. Abu Annas lurks in the background, flexing his thick forearms, a menacing addition to the mise en scène. The focal point of our efforts is the American prisoner Michael Crump, a boy not much older than Abu Hafs, who is operating the camera.

  Shielding the prisoner’s orbital socket, livid with bruising from the surgery, is a crude patch fashioned out of tape and rigid plastic; Dr. Walid did his best to save the eye but, after putting the boy under ether, determined it was irretrievably lost, then scooped out what remained, cauterizing the optic nerve, I must say ingeniously, with gunpowder. Despite the memory of this wound, the fallibility of his flesh, the prisoner has proven himself intractable, the least pliable of the three. We’ve succeeded in coaxing the girl to make statements against her government, and just last night their sergeant went even further and professed the Shahada on record. With these words he became a believer, supposedly—though the forced nature of this conversion invalidates it. There can be no compulsion in religion, but Dr. Walid has little time for such scruples. For him, last night’s session with Zachary McGinnis was nothing less than a triumph; our emir’s fight is not for souls but for footage he can accumulate, arrange, and later release to embarrass the enemy and embolden our allies.

  This is a message to the people of Iraq. I know my country has caused you great suffering. I know we have profited from your suffering. I am a simple soldier. I have found nothing good here. I am sorry for what I have done.

  But tonight’s prisoner refuses to speak these words, printed on a piece of card stock. Dazzled in the bright light of the Fresnel lamp, he resembles a confused, dyspeptic Cyclops. We pick him out of the chair, his hands and feet already bound, and place him in bastinado. Abu Annas sits on his legs while Abu Muqhatil uses a length of steel cable wrapped in rubber on the soles of his bare feet.

  They take turns with the cable, but the doctor does not participate in the beating. He’s cast himself as the boy’s savior: the “good cop” (as the Americans would say) in this farce we are playing. We hold ourselves out to be their moral betters, but what we’re doing here leaves the same taste in my mouth as the atrocious reports from Guantánamo. Tit for tat, a childish and impure way of making war; with each lash they dole out, I gain further resolve to do what I should’ve done months ago. My time in this brotherhood, I am increasingly sure, is drawing to an end.

  The boy’s body shivers with pain, his feet seared by the cable. He cannot help but cry out. He’s strong, but no one is strong enough to resist this. His shalwar is damp with sweat; dirty tears run down his face, poor boy; he shouldn’t have come here. I run a finger along the edge of his foot to check if there is feeling. When he no longer cringes, I nod at Dr. Walid.

  “That’s enough,” he says in English. “I want this to be easier for you. I could stop it if you helped us. But you’re like an unruly child”—here he glances knowingly at me, speaking more lies. “He wants to bring a car battery and a capacitor for you. I tell him no, not yet. But maybe he’s right. This is nothing compared with electricity.”

  “Fuck pain,” the boy growls, his first words of the interrogation. “I’m not afraid of pain.”

  Anything other than his silence is an incremental victory for the doctor, who latches on to the antagonistic angle, provoking him again. “You know that’s not true. Everyone fears pain. But in a way, you’re right. There are worse things.”

  “You’ll kill me anyway. You just want me on tape, saying that bullshit. The minute I do, it’s over.”

  “No. False.”

  “What? You’re going to let me go?” The boy’s contempt is palpable, grainy and black as bile. What glowering defiance he shows, for someone who’s just taken a beating like that. I admire him for it. I admire the one we have tortured.

  “No, we’re not letting you free.” Dr. Walid smiles wanly, hinting at the secret he’s been building up to. “Though you might live. Save yourself. Your sergeant, he’s found this way.” He snaps his fingers at Abu Hafs, demanding the camera be brought forward. “Show him, Cub. Show him how alone he is in this.”

  Abu Hafs flips the camera display shut after the tape ends in a blue screen.

  “You’re lying,” Michael Crump says. “It’s just trick photography or some shit.”

  The doctor allows the bald absurdity of that accusation to go unanswered. As if we had the resources for cinematic special effects; it’s all we can do to keep the generator gassed up and running long enough to charge the radio batteries.

  “Even if it’s real, he would’ve never said that if you hadn’t made him. I ain’t no Muslim and neither is Sergeant Mac. You’ll never make me say I am. You all can go to hell. Get it over with.”

  “No. Not today. If and when that time comes, we’ll not be the ones to take your head. Your ‘Sergeant Mac’ will have that honor. Then you’ll know, once and for all, that we’ve told you only the truth.”

  Terrorism is a word that’s hard to define and one that’s also always used contemptuously. These qualities, taken together, make it a powerful rallying cry but completely useless in describing real events with any degree of precision. During the Afghan jihad, their President Reagan called us “freedom fighters,” and as far as I’m concerned, the only thing that has changed between then and now is which ponderous empire has begged a reminder of its founding revolutionary principles. Yesterday’s freedom fighter is today’s Islamofascist; the Americans approved enough of killing Communists to let our techniques in doing so pass without criticism. At the Second Battle of Zhawar we harvested scores of Soviet heads. The Recitation is quite clear that this is an appropriate means of striking fear into the heart of the enemy. Nor is it unique to us; beheading appeals to the most primal fears and frailties, is the purest iteration of I am right and you are wrong, applied over the ages as an empire killer and as a tool for empires to use to stoke among the polis a hatred of the savage: from the Romans, horrified by the Celts, those dirty, long-haired tribesmen who were said not to fear death and who routinely beheaded their captives; to the French revolutionaries and a commoner’s handkerchief dipped in king’s blood; to the U.S. Marine Corps. I remember reading somewhere that 60 percent of Japanese skeletons recovered in the South Pacific were found missing their heads, with most thought to have been taken as trophies.

  Be all that as it may, I’ve never enjoyed executions. There aren’t many people who truly exult in that kind of work. Even the most ruthless man likes to think he kills only as a last resort; I am only of middling ruthlessness, and after my first trip to Afghanistan, it took no more than two and a half years for me to have had enough.

  Shortly after I returned to Egypt, my mother—never one to mince words—told me that I had the look in my eyes of a wild animal. It was a dark time for me, darker in some ways than the war had been. I had no patience, no money, and was forced by circumstances to live with my parents, which I hated, taking a job as a taxi driver, which I hated even more. I believed the work beneath me; there’s no creature more abhorrent than an underachieving rich boy. Looking back, however, I was well suited to the job. Driving other people around the city was one of the few things I could do all day without being overcome by a dangerous feeling of restlessness, which was alleviated temporarily by hurrying nonstop from one place to the next.

  I was twenty-three and felt like eighty: my soul seized like a set of rusty gears under enormous torque: stuck between worlds: as often happens, it was a woman who tipped the balance and set me in motion again. One afternoon, driving my cab, I picked up a second-year university student on her way home from a rally in support of Palestine. She gave me the address where I should drop her. I was interested to discover that, like mine, her family lived in Maadi. She had intense brown eyes flecked with gold and wore a modest abaya at a time when doing so had become a kind of political statement among the upper classes. Sadat had been assassinated by the brothers the previous October, with his lapdog, Mubarak, assuming the presidency. Mubarak had made good on his promise to crack down on fundamental
ists and leftist agitators, so naturally it was all the more fashionable to be one.

  Her name was Mariam. We struck up a conversation, starting with idle patter about our neighborhood: we’d attended different schools growing up, but, as it turned out, we’d both taken classes from the same swimming instructor at the sporting club.

  “How funny,” she said, recalling how all the children made light of the way this man slurped pool water from his bushy mustache when he thought no one was looking. “I can’t believe you remember that. It just goes to show how worthless it is to judge someone by his looks.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but when I first got in your cab, I was sure you were a refugee.”

  Even after returning home, I’d continued to wear the pakol, a rounded wool hat common in Afghanistan but not at all in Egypt. The affected manner of my dress distanced me from my countrymen, signaling I was either a foreigner or a veteran of the jihad. It was reckless of me to wear it, given the current political climate, but the garment was a totem, a fetish, an invitation to sympathy or hate. I wasn’t sure myself which I wanted.

  “A refugee isn’t far from the truth,” I said, and went on to tell her how I’d left university to join the mujahideen. She was enthralled, confiding in me a short while later that she was a member of the Muslim Sisterhood, opponent of the regime, supporter of our cause. I was afraid to tell her that I’d stopped caring much about our causes. I had gone to war as a desperate adventurer, not for a coherent set of beliefs. Which fact I kept to myself. It would be some years before Mariam came to discern just how troubled I was by doubt. In the meantime, I found a renewed purpose with her, the way it can be in young love, our desire fierce, bright, all-consuming as a collapsing star; each giving the other more than we were capable of, we eloped after knowing each other only the winter. My parents approved of the match—they were glad to see me take an interest in anything besides myself—but her family didn’t share their enthusiasm.