Spoils

by Brian Van Reet

  They make the far side and slightly higher ground. She wrings out the hem of the abaya while the others wait, and Hafs goes up ahead so that he can film them, an establishing shot as they walk toward him in single file, beating a path through a bright-green field of rye. Walid takes them into some scraggly cedar along the edge of the field. He studies the terrain to get his bearings, then heads deeper into the scrub. At the base of one of the trees he finds what he’s looking for: an ammo cache, a large metal chest half-buried, covered in camo netting and dropped cedar needles, which he sweeps away with his hands. He opens the chest, assesses its contents, then nods at the European guard, who in a feat of strength lifts out an 82-millimeter mortar tube, shouldering it across his back like a steel yoke.

  “Umm Ammara,” Walid says, hefting a rucksack from the chest and offering it to her. “You’ll carry this.”

  He renamed her in the statement to memorize that morning. Printed on card stock, like the others. When they took her out of the cell and she saw Hafs with the camera, it was like hearing the first words of a death sentence. The only thing missing was the knife, which she’s been waiting for ever since. But with this mortar cache, it seems like the statement—Today, I join the fight—was literally true. Walid wants to film her attacking her own people.

  She worries the shoulder straps on the rucksack as they march back into the rye field. Fifty meters from the tree line, Walid tells them to stop. On a patch of flat ground the European guard heaves the mortar tube off his shoulder and begins to emplace it, unfolding the bipod and staking out the baseplate for support. He fiddles with the locking sleeves, getting the alignment just right. Cassandra squats in the grass, up past her knees, watching him work, thinking for a moment about that night at the traffic circle, coming under fire, maybe from this exact same weapon. Two months ago, maybe not even that long. Back then, she would’ve fought to the death. Almost did. No matter what happens she’ll never be that person again. She remembers how strange it felt: someone she’d never even seen was actually trying to kill her. Nothing about that situation seems strange anymore. It was just one particular kind of murder, and she’s become conversant with many others.

  You better focus, she tells herself, use your head; what do you know about that thing? She guesses at the mortar’s maximum range. Can’t be more than four or five klicks. Which means a friendly position is close. She even knows the exact direction to run in order to find it. The same direction the weapon is pointed: there lies safety. They’d shoot you in the back if you tried. Maybe that’d be better.

  But you’re not there yet. Slow down, think this through. Something about it feels wrong. Why would they be out here, just the four of them, if they were about to attack an American position? Walid would expect a counterattack, and they’re not equipped to deal with one. Doesn’t make sense.

  Unless, she thinks, he’s not expecting a counterattack. Because the whole performance is a sham and they’re not about to launch mortars at anyone. She’d never be the wiser; shooting at nothing, sending a few rounds harmlessly into the swamp, would make a lot more sense than an actual engagement. Same reward for them—they get their video—at much less risk. That’s got to be it. This is all for show. Which means she can go through with it. There are limits, but this can be forgiven. It can’t be real.

  When beckoned, she brings forward the rucksack. It contains mortar rounds, dense and substantial, rolling against one another like canned goods.

  “You’ll be the gunner,” Walid says. “Do you know how to work it?”

  “No.”

  “See this switch?”

  “Yes.”

  “This means it’s set to Drop Fire. Here. Kneel on this side. I’ll be like this. I’ll say the takbir, then you. Then I pass you the rounds. Don’t let any part of your body hang over the tube, drop the round in, then get low. Watch yourself; it’ll be much more than a rifle. Abu Hafs, set up over there. We’ll rehearse it once before we fire.”

  Round in hand she kneels, hesitating a moment before proclaiming the takbir herself: God is greater. She feeds the mortar into the tube with a dead-limbed trembling clumsiness and lets go, dropping—it’s beyond her control now, a concussion like a gut punch juddering everything.

  “Another!” Walid says, passing her a round. “Allahu akbar!”

  “Wait, wait! I hit the button!” Hafs cries.

  They look to him, fiddling with the camera. A distant explosion. Thump. Goddamn, I hope no one’s downrange. She’s holding the round just handed to her by Walid, who curses and jogs over to confer with Hafs, the two of them huddling to watch what they’ve gotten on the LCD, and she can’t hear exactly what they’re saying, but Walid appears to calm down. Hafs gets set to film again. The driver lurks cagily a ways off, near the tree line, alert, scanning the sky, interested only in tactical soundness, not the theater of terror. Alone near the mortar she’s separated from the others by twenty yards or more when from the direction of the canal road there’s a faint rumbling like a distant freight train approaching. She knows that sound. Tanks on the move, and fast. The others have also heard it, eyes on the horizon—for a moment, nothing, then a dust cloud rising in the east.

  “Down!” Walid orders. He’s already on his belly in the tall grass. Hafs is, too. The other guard is nowhere to be seen, having disappeared into the scrub at the first sign of trouble.

  “Get down!” Walid barks at her again. “Push over the tube!”

  The hot tube standing upright in the grass, muzzle poking a foot or two over the tops of the seed heads, is a glaring target that she’s still kneeling by. The dust cloud in the east has become two tanks emerging on the high ground on the other side of the swamp. A momentary rush of hope—the impossible, a rescue; the tanks roll to a stop, maybe a klick away, their turrets moving robotically, scanning for the enemy. Their gun tubes are pointing in the wrong direction, as if they’ve been clued in to the mortar shot, the general area, a grid square, but don’t know exactly where it came from.

  Then it hits her. Why tanks, why here, now. No matter how much she wants it to be otherwise, she knows she’s right. The setup is totally wrong for a rescue. It would be SEALs fast-roping from Black Hawks in the middle of the night, not tanks in this field, and especially not moments after they’ve fired a mortar. These tanks aren’t hunting for her. They’re out hunting, period. Her bad luck to be in the way.

  “Push it over right now or I’ll kill you!”

  The tanks still haven’t seen them. You are still alive. She looks at the mortar round in her hand and knows what she has to do next, suddenly remembering a piece of knowledge from basic: run unpredictable zigzags if you have to cross open ground with someone shooting at you—One, two, three, ready, rush. She drops the round down the tube and without even waiting for the concussion takes off at a sprint through the field, the brush catching in her robes as she ducks low to avoid the hell she is deliberately calling down on them. A burst of machine gun fire snaps overhead like five whips cracking in rapid consecution, missing by what sounds like inches. With no idea who just took a shot at her—Walid, the tanks, both—she bears down through the scrub and can hear the armor maneuvering again in the distance and now something new from the air, approaching rotor noise, birds flying low, fast, just above the power lines, but she knows better than to believe they’re coming to save her.

  They crest the horizon, two Apache attack helicopters. She unhoods the abaya and stands and waves her arms in big arcs so they’ll be sure to see her. It’s the best she can do. You can’t surrender to a helicopter. These flyboys won’t notice her dirty, blond hair, won’t register the lightness of her skin. To them she’s just another green humanoid blob in their infrared vision, a hajji running panicked from a hot mortar tube, a black widow out with the boys, dead meat in their reticle. A kilometer. Half a kilometer. Approaching that fast. The lead helicopter opens up with its chain gun, a hammering roar like it’s tearing the fabric of the sky itself, high-explosive rounds strafing the
field, the area around the mortar, continuing into the scrub, missing her but not by enough, and she’s down from the blast, the now-familiar burn of shrapnel.

  She rolls onto her elbows, knees, frantically stripping off the vest and then the abaya like they’re soaked in boiling oil. Still with the simple long dress on underneath, her sandals lost after the chain gun salvo, feet and legs filthy, cut up from the brush. Sweating, heart racing like she’s just run miles. Tunnel vision. The world through a keyhole slot. She searches for the Apaches and finds them circling the horizon, rotors a blur nearly perpendicular, banking hard, coming around for another pass, their sleek wasplike underbellies and electronic noses aslant, racks of Hellfire missiles hanging on their wings, and she lurches to her feet and sets off at a fast limp deeper into the scrub toward another stand of cypress, the best cover around. Her only hope is to make those trees, find someplace to hide until she can get close enough to a friendly for them to recognize her.

  “Cassandra! Cassandra!”

  It’s Hafs. He’s calling to her loudly but not aggressively. She turns and sees him closing on her through the brush. But she’s not going anywhere with him or any of the others, not anymore. The rotor noise changes in tone.

  Death is always right around the corner.

  Not many people get to choose how.

  She braces to take him down. He’s surprised by the reaction; they clinch, pummeling, fighting over his rifle. He’s strong but an inch shorter, a few pounds lighter, and, along with the element of surprise, all the pacing and push-ups alone in the dark are rewarded; she frees an arm and throws an elbow into his face; he staggers, bleeding; she takes hold of his rifle and jerks it free from his grip, screaming a great war cry, pointing it center mass as he turns to her, reeling, just now realizing she’s about to shoot him, the helicopters racing over the trees, and there appears before them a bright-orange light like a second sun.

  She’s down, this time for good. Superpressurized air, rounds whipping overhead, the iron tang of gore in her sinuses, some invisible force tearing through her hand like a claw-foot hammer; this new and sharp, spreading, thwacking pain setting her into reflexive motion, she drags herself by the elbows, pushing with toes and knees toward Hafs until she makes it alongside him.

  He’s losing his breath, arching his back in the grass. She reaches out to touch him, and he becomes aware of her presence. She says she’s sorry. Can’t catch her breath, and it comes out a whisper, her last words. Sorry for what, no telling. The fact they both have to die like this.

  He looks at her with no recognition at all before turning his gaze away. Hands wet with her own blood; getting harder to see; not that the light has changed but she’s sinking farther behind her eyes, the ringing in her ears—wah, wah, wah—like the feeling after a euphoric dose of nitrous.

  Human touch persists longer than any other sense, but consciousness exceeds even that. Something smells fresh and good, like a lemon just after you cut it. Hafs has changed under her touch, diaphragm no longer rising. Peace is the wrong word. Stillness is best. You are still alive.

  She slips deeper into a barely describable state. Time slows as her facility to perceive it diminishes, like this will last forever, the nature of those last few moments stretching slower and slower, approaching eternity but never quite reaching it because eternity exists only in relation to its inconceivability, covering half the distance to it, then half that distance, halve a half, quarter a millisecond, shaving time infinitesimally thin, like slivers off a yardstick that is your remaining life. You never really reach the moment. That’s the truth. You just get closer until.

  18

  SLEED: SPOIL

  55 Days After

  IRAQ (UNDISCLOSED)

  The mission was on a tip from a farmer. Bunch of us, on the ground and in the air, heading to this old water treatment plant when a drone that was spotting for us caught the heat signature from a mortar. We took a detour and let them have it. When there was no more movement in the thermals, we fanned out to search for bodies, leaving a guard on the tanks because it was too wet to drive them any closer to the river without getting mired. We crossed a ditch where black mud pulled at our boots, into a field of tall green grass, where we found a blood trail that led the rest of the way. It was a woman. That was the first thing wrong. They had to use DNA to make the ID for sure, but Blornsbaum was the one to notice the hair. Hard to see with all the dust and blood, but there it was, strands of blond in the field. That was when we knew. She was lying right next to this teenager, like side to side, one facing the other. We found a Yemeni passport on him and a camera back in the grass. I picked it up. It was still recording.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To family, above all. To the teachers who encouraged efforts toward this book: Speer Morgan, Michael Adams, Steven Harrigan, Anthony Giardina, Trudy Lewis, Peter LaSalle, Jim Magnuson, Nathan Oates, and Marly Swick. To Marcy Nicklas, for believing I was a writer, early on. To Philipp Meyer, big-hearted champion. To the Michener Center, one of the best things I ever stumbled into. To Ben Falby, Kevin Powers, Claudia Ballard, Phil Klay, Aaron Gwyn, Julia Delacroix, Alexandra Becker, Ben Roberts, Matthew and Melissa Stuart, Lucas Kline, and Brian Hockin, for taking the time over the years to read and comment on my attempts at novels.

  To Peter Straus, Laurence Laluyaux, Stephen Edwards, Matthew Turner, Tristan Kendrick, Zoë Nelson, and Katharina Volckmer at Rogers, Coleridge & White; to Lee Boudreaux and Carina Guiterman at Lee Boudreaux Books, and their colleagues Terry Adams, Reagan Arthur, Sabrina Callahan, Nicole Dewey, Michael Noon, and Craig Young at Little, Brown; to Michal Shavit, Ana Fletcher, Clare Bullock, and Aidan O’Neill at Jonathan Cape; to Olivier Cohen at L’Olivier; to Marcus Gärtner at Rowohlt; to Luigi Brioschi at Guanda; to Jessica Nash at Atlas Contact; and to everyone else who believed in this book and worked on its behalf, I owe a debt of gratitude.

  Additionally, I would like to thank the following authors and filmmakers, and to recommend their works that I drew on while composing this story:

  Ingrid Betancourt, Even Silence Has an End; Lisa Bowden & Shannon Cain, editors of Powder; Rick Bragg, I Am a Soldier, Too; Aukai Collins, My Jihad; Kirby Dick, The Invisible War; Dexter Filkins, The Forever War; Jim Frederick, Black Hearts; Mike German, Thinking Like a Terrorist; Roy Hallums, Buried Alive; Sebastian Junger, War; Brian Keenan, An Evil Cradling; Sara Corbett and Amanda Lindhout, A House in the Sky; Hussein Maxos, The Arabic Idioms; Loretta Napoleoni, Insurgent Iraq; Omar Nasiri, Inside the Jihad; Riverbend, Baghdad Burning; Meg McLagan and Daria Sommers, Lioness; Helen Thorpe, Soldier Girls; Brian Turner, Patrick Hicks, “A Conversation with Brian Turner,” The Missouri Review; Jere Van Dyk, Captive; Terry Waite, Taken on Trust; and Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower.

  To the dead, and to those people of all nations whose lives have been diminished by war. You are not forgotten.

  BVR

  BRIAN VAN REET was born in Houston. Following the September 11 attacks, he left the University of Virginia, where he was an Echols Scholar, and enlisted in the U.S. Army as a tank crewman. He served in Iraq under stop-loss orders, achieved the rank of sergeant, and was awarded a Bronze Star for valor. After an honorable discharge he studied at the University of Missouri and later the University of Texas. His fiction has been recognized with awards and fellowships from the Michener Center for Writers, Gulf Coast, and the Iowa Review, with stories and essays also appearing in the New York Times, the Daily Beast, the Washington Post, and in literary magazines and anthologies, including Fire and Forget. He has twice won the Texas Institute of Letters short story award. Spoils is his first novel.

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