Team Red

by David DeBatto

  The window swung out on hinges. He worked the left side first, moving it slowly, lest the hinges complain. When he had both sides opened, he climbed in, taking care that nothing of his clothing caught on the sill. Inside, he crouched behind the bed, his automatic aimed at the door.

  He moved to the body on the floor. It was Khalil. Adnan was nowhere to be found. Khalil’s legs were bound at the ankles, tied tightly by wire, which took him longer than it should have to undo. He loosened the flex cuffs binding Khalil’s wrists behind him, then rolled him over on his back. He loosened the hood and removed it. He felt the neck for a pulse.

  When Khalil opened his eyes and saw who was crouched over him, he smiled. DeLuca put his hand over Khalil’s mouth before Khalil could make a sound, DeLuca putting a finger to his own lips to signal the need for silence. He pointed to Khalil, then to the window. Khalil looked at the window, then at DeLuca and nodded, then raised a finger and pointed to his leg. DeLuca lifted the man’s pant leg, high enough to see what Khalil was indicating, a fragment of bone sticking out from the flesh, just above the ankle.

  He gave DeLuca a smile and a thumbs-up, nevertheless.

  DeLuca helped him to the window, holding the smaller man beneath the armpits. He helped him raise his injured leg, lifted him, and slid him across the sill until he was able to sit upright. The young Kurd grimaced from the pain as he moved, clenching his teeth, but didn’t make a sound.

  The drop to the ground outside was going to hurt. DeLuca would be able to lower him most of the way, but there was no way he’d be able to cushion the blow entirely. Khalil collected himself, then gave DeLuca a thumbs-up for the second time. DeLuca helped Khalil out the window, grabbed him by the wrists, then lowered him the remaining few feet. Khalil went down and didn’t move, but again, he didn’t make a sound.

  Once he was outside, DeLuca maneuvered Khalil into a fireman’s carry and moved him to the SUV, setting him down on the ground on the far side of the vehicle. Warner joined them.

  “I’ll take care of the leg when we get out of here,” DeLuca said. “Where’s Adnan?”

  “I don’t know,” Khalil said. “I saw him running through the bazaar. I think he may have gotten away.”

  “He’s not in the house?”

  “I don’t think so,” Khalil said, in obvious pain. “I did not see him.”

  “Then we go,” DeLuca said. He gestured for Evelyn to cover the house for one more minute, then opened his sat phone. The power indicator registered that his battery was next to dead. He dialed his son’s number.

  “DeLuca,” his son said.

  “Same here,” DeLuca said. “Need your help, Scooter. You got a picture?”

  “Negative,” his son replied. “Got your location, though. What do you need? You need an air strike? I could get something on you in three minutes.”

  “Negative,” DeLuca said. He’d already decided he might want to keep Hmood and the others alive for questioning. “We can deal with this later. Can you jam calls coming out of here? I need a few hours.”

  “I can’t personally,” his son said. “I can get it done in five but I have to make a call.”

  “Make it two,” DeLuca said. “I don’t want anybody phoning the highway patrol. One last thing—where the fuck am I?”

  He heard a beeping sound, and then his battery cut out before he could get an answer.

  He helped Khalil into the backseat of the SUV, then told Evelyn to get in on the passenger side.

  “If the car doesn’t start, we’re on foot. Khalil . . .”

  “Give me the Uzi,” Khalil said. “I will try to hold them back as long as I can . . .”

  “And don’t touch anything metal,” DeLuca said. “If we’re lucky, we won’t electrocute ourselves.”

  He gave his son one more minute, keeping his eye on the house’s front door, then realized he could wait no longer when he saw a figure appearing on the front steps.

  “Stay down” he said, turning the key.

  The SUV, a Ford Bronco, roared to life.

  He threw it into drive and floored it.

  The wheels spun in the dirt. He looked back as the towing cable pulled the wires down behind him. He saw sparks in the night, a bright flash, then another, and then the lights in the house went dark, his wheels throwing up a rooster tail of gravel as they spun against the road.

  Shots rang out.

  He ducked reflexively.

  The rear window shattered. He heard more gunshots.

  The car fishtailed in the gravel as they picked up speed.

  They were fifty yards away, then a hundred. He saw no lights in the rearview mirror. No one was following.

  Another shot broke one of the back side windows.

  Then they were safe.

  Ten minutes later, he realized that he was rapidly running out of gas. A bullet had evidently struck the tank.

  He looked for a place to ditch the vehicle, without a light in sight and no idea where he was.

  Chapter Eleven

  PROFESSOR JABURI DID NOT LIKE TO WAIT, ANY more than he tolerated lateness. Two more minutes, he decided, and he would use his rental car and drive himself. He’d been in the lobby of the Palo Verde Inn for nearly five minutes beyond the appointed time before the car from the university pulled up. The professor of Islamic studies who’d been designated to serve as his host apologized, explaining that there’d been an accident in front of them that had forced them to take a detour, but Jaburi was not interested in excuses. In the car with them were two graduate students, a boy named Jonathan and a girl named Latifah, with whom he exchanged glances. They’d arranged in advance for a private meeting after his lecture, but he’d yet to meet her.

  They drove down Speedway Avenue, the road as ugly as any he’d ever seen in America, lined with fast food restaurants, strip malls and strip joints, muffler shops and big box warehouses, porn shops, lawn ornament dealers and secondhand clothing stores. The American professor of Islamic studies droned on and on about how the University of Arizona had one of the highest populations of Arab students in the country due to the warm climate, blah blah blah, things any idiot tourism office guide might have been able to tell him. It took him a few minutes, once they’d arrived at the lecture hall, before he could regain his composure.

  “Tonight, I will place in context for you the last thirty thousand years of human history,” he began his lecture, “and I will show you exactly how it was that the Neolithic hunter-gatherers chose the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East as the place to create modern civilization as we know it, how the seeds of social evolution first took root between the Dijla and the Furat, and how civilization continues to flow from this source; in this light, the struggle today in Iraq may be seen as merely the latest expression of a process that has ebbed and flowed literally since the beginning of recorded time, in a most fortunate and unfortunate of lands, where the forces of geology, of biology, and of history have made it an arena, much like the Coliseum in ancient Rome, within which all true and false predictors of culture must eventually do battle.”

  He went on to limn the procession of powers and governments that invaded, occupied, and eventually left Iraq in defeat, starting with the Garden of Eden and moving quickly through the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians, Alexander the Great, the Parthians, the Buwayhids, the Seljuk Turks, Genghis Khan, the Black Sheep Dynasty, the White Sheep Dynasty, the Ottomans, the British, and then the Americans. He listed the conquerors and the proxy rulers they left behind to rule in their stead, all of them eventually overthrown, assassinated, cast out, each leaving something of value behind, the Code of Hammurabi, algebra, an alphabet, and so on, and in that sense, he explained, the dialectic was a healthy one, though fraught with pain and suffering, without which there can be no growth. He spoke for two hours, citing names and dates and facts, all without notes. He closed with a note of warning, explaining that for the first time, civilization had the means with which to destroy itself many times
over, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, biological, chemical, things that were themselves an unstoppable expression of culture and, as controversial as it might sound, something to be welcomed and embraced, a culmination of thirty thousand years of human progress and something that could be predicted, prepared for, and put to use.

  “The fires in the forge of change have never burned as hot,” he said. “From this current conflict, a new world will emerge. A better world, in the end, a world that George Bush and the Americans will not recognize, and a world that the Iraqis will not recognize either, because this has always been the case. This has always been the historical dynamic. In great times, great changes occur, and these are indeed great times.”

  He took questions afterward. He’d delivered the lecture before, and inevitably, someone asked him if he were advocating the use of weapons of mass destruction. He explained, again, that he was neither advocating nor not advocating, but that their very existence signified the powerful forces of change that were afoot, and that those forces would express themselves, whether the weapons themselves were used or not.

  There was the usual reception afterward, with the usual dreary assortment of fawners and sycophants, telling him things he already knew and battering him with flattery. As soon as he could excuse himself, he found his professor host and told him he wasn’t feeling well, and that the girl Latifah had offered to drive him back to his hotel.

  He regarded her in the car. She wore a veil and headscarf, but the veil was pulled up only to the bottom of her chin, as was the fashion with some girls these days. She reminded him of his wife when his wife was younger, stupid and gullible and a bit frightened of him.

  “I would like to see your preparations,” he told her. “Primary, secondary, and tertiary targets.”

  She drove him first to the Tucson Convention Center, where she showed him a short alley, at the end of which were located the intake vents for the convention center’s air-conditioning system. She told him the air circulated within the building every four minutes, and that she had yet to see anyone guarding the alley or the apparatus. The convention center could hold up to twenty thousand people. Next, she drove to a large hotel downtown, where she pointed out the intake vents, wide horizontal slats a mere twelve feet above the ground at the rear of the building. The hotel air-conditioning system kept the building at negative pressure, she explained, such that fresh air came in through the intake vents, moved through the hotel halls, got sucked into the rooms beneath the doors, drawn into the bathrooms, and was vented out through the bathroom exhaust fans. This was how the hotel managed to keep any smells from the rooms from entering the corridors. The air in the hotel was replaced with fresh air every five minutes. The occupancy of the hotel on an average day was about a thousand people. Her third target was the main terminal at the airport, where all the security was concentrated near the airplanes, luggage terminals, and boarding gates. The airport’s air-conditioning system, she showed him, was virtually unguarded, though security officers did occasionally drive past, usually looking the other way.

  “And the rest of it?” he asked her.

  “I have it here,” she said, gesturing toward a large straw bag in the back.

  “What?” he said.

  “I brought it,” she said. “I thought you might want to see it.”

  He was furious.

  He slapped her across the face with the back of his hand.

  “You idiot!” he said. “You stupid stupid girl! Do you have any idea what would happen if some policeman pulled us over right now? Do you have any idea how much would be compromised? How many people are depending on us?”

  He wanted to hit her again, but he was afraid the way she swerved as she drove would attract attention.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, crying.

  He took the bag from the backseat. Inside it, he found a uniform, gray and green, and stitched above the breast pocket, the words “Carrier Air-Conditioning.” He examined the uniform for a few minutes, then put it back in the bag.

  “These are identical?”

  “Identical,” she said.

  “And the IDs?”

  “They are perfect.”

  “And your people?”

  “I told them only that they have been chosen,” the girl said. “And that I will contact them. They are ready.”

  “Have they met each other?”

  “No, no,” she said. “They each think they are the only one. They know nothing of each other.”

  “Good,” he said. “At least you’ve gotten that right.” They were at his hotel. She put the car in park and set the parking brake, turning to him, her head lowered in fear or shame. “Look at me,” he commanded. “Look.”

  She looked up.

  “Do you have a piece of paper and something to write with?” She nodded. “Get it.”

  She reached into the glove compartment and found a pen and a small notebook.

  “Take a page out and write against the palm of your hand so you do not leave an impression on the page below.” She complied. “Now write this down: 8-4-3-j-4-3-j-d-0-k-f-t-r-i-r-9-3-e-u-3-h-e-d-9-r-5-t-t-0-t-6-0-6. Show me.”

  She had written: 843j43jd0kftrir93eu3hed9r5tt0t606.

  “Good. Three days before ‘Id al-Fitr, the last day of Ramadan, you will open an AOL e-mail account using that number as the username. This number is not written down anywhere but here. I also have it in my head. When you get home, take this piece of paper and tear it into three parts, and hide each part in a separate place. Do not put them together again until you open the account. Do not use the account. On the day of ‘Id al-Fitr, you will receive instructions as to where you can retrieve the agent. Later that same day, you will receive the signal either to go ahead and use it or to wait. Under no circumstances are you to open the bottles or break the seals on them until you receive the signal to do so. Do you have any questions?”

  “No,” she said.

  “If you have any, you must ask them now. You will not see me again so you will not get another opportunity.”

  “Well . . .” she said, hesitating.

  “What is it?”

  “This agent that we are to use for jihad,” she said. “May I know what it is? I will tell no one.”

  “You may tell your people when it is time,” he said. “It is a biological weapon. It will not hurt you. It will only hurt the infidels. It cannot hurt Alf Wajeh. You must have faith.”

  “I have faith,” she told him. He looked at her.

  “But you want a scientific explanation,” he said. “All right. I will tell you. It was developed by our scientists from camel pox. The blood of all Arab peoples carries a natural immunity to camel pox. This has been true for a thousand years. This is not true of the blood of infidels. So the weapon will kill only infidels. You see? Now do you have faith?”

  “I do,” she said.

  He held his arms out to hug her. She buried her face against his chest, crying. He patted her back to soothe her.

  “The world will be clean again,” he told her. “As in the story of Alf Wajeh. La ilaha ill Allah wa-Muhammad rasul Allah.”

  “La ilaha ill Allah,” she repeated back to him. “Wa-Muhammad rasul Allah.” She looked up at him, her eyes wet with tears, a beatific smile on her face, the ecstatic face of a true believer in the presence of God himself.

  “Shwaya, shwaya, ya bint Mohammed,” he told her, “rawgi.” Slowly, slowly, daughter of the Prophet, be calm.

  “Thank you,” she said, still weeping. “Thank you.”

  In his room, he washed the girl’s filth from his hands and turned on the television. The newsman on CNN spoke of another U.S. bombing raid in Iraq, a house in Ad-Dujayl where insurgents were believed to have been holed up, in response to a car bombing earlier in the day that had killed seven American soldiers near the front gate of the base at Balad. Such attacks were drawing away the Americans’ full attention. This was good.

  He turned the channel. He saw a baseball game, a so
ccer game, one of those “reality” shows that, when deconstructed, said more about reality as America defined it than anybody seemed to realize, a nation of whores and pimps, spreading AIDS to the rest of the world. He surfed through the pay-per-view options on the adult channels but turned the TV off. He looked at himself in the mirror, straightened his tie, and then went down to the hotel bar. He’d had trouble sleeping of late, the excitement of what he was engaged in impossible to push from his thoughts. He sat at the bar and ordered a cognac.

  He’d been there a minute before he noticed the girl at the table behind him. She was one of those pink American girls, wearing a miniskirt that sparkled and a top that revealed most of her breasts. She was blond with blue eyes, perhaps a natural blond, he thought, though such women were entirely rare. Her eyes were wet, as Latifah’s had been. He gathered that she had been crying. He watched as she frantically dialed number after number on her cell phone. She looked off, lost and forlorn.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked her.

  She looked up at him.

  “I can’t find my friends,” she said, drunk and otherwise stupefied. “I can’t find anybody. I don’t know how I’m going to get back to my dorm. I don’t have the money for a cab.” He saw a tear roll down her cheek.

  “Please,” he said. “Please do not cry. I will take you home. Please. It’s not a problem.”

  She looked up at him.

  “You don’t mind?” she said.

  “Not at all,” he said. “Not at all. If you could wait only a minute. I didn’t expect to be driving, so I left my keys in my room. Can you wait? And then I will drive you.”

  He smiled his most avuncular smile.

  “Okay,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

  He fingered the car keys in his pocket as he walked back to his room, where he reached into his toiletry kit and found what he was looking for, a pocket knife with a three-inch locking blade and a sturdy handle. He grabbed his hairbrush as well. In the closet, he found two plastic bags meant for guests to use to carry their dirty laundry. He stuffed them into his coat pocket. Before he left, he found the courtesy guide the hotel left for its guests and a map of Tucson. He noted where the road he was on, Palo Verde, led out of town and into the desert and a place called Mt. Lemon, where he felt certain he’d be able to find a place deserted enough to suit his purposes. His own corruption was complete, he knew, but he also knew that the purification to come would make him clean again.