“Go,” the Big Man said. “Settle him down, we need him here.” I stood, and Snoop began to do the same. “We need the terp.” Anticipating a protest, the Big Man waved me outside. “Be creative, Lieutenant. Put that liberal arts degree to use.”
I scooped up my helmet, slung my rifle, and walked out into a chalky sun.
• • •
The mukhtar stood in his driveway rubbing the hood of a black Mercedes. He watched me approach through the reflection of the tinted windshield.
“No Snoop,” I said. “Bosses. Mudirs.”
After sneering at the house, he burped and pointed at the fleet of Land Rovers and Mercedeses in his flagstone driveway. Then he pointed back to himself with his thumb, the digit disappearing into a pit of white cloth.
“Bayti. Mine,” he said, the English word like a pepper shaker in his mouth.
He gestured to follow him down the driveway. We walked under a canopy of palm trees, most of them sagging from overwatering. Some of the rolls of carpet that covered his lawns had bunches in them, little green tufts that belonged on a miniature golf course. The estate overlooked the Villages from a ridge wedged between hills. Below us, irrigation ditches zigzagged through hamlets with gridded care, a network of blue forcing structure upon dusty bedlam. In the far north, the sluggish waters of the canal gleamed, partially cloaked by the fruit groves. To the south was nothing but desert and dried-out ravines, and to the west—to the west Rana lay in wait, an exile in her own land.
“Mine,” Fat Mukhtar said, spreading his arms wide to encompass everything from the canal to the villas behind us. “Mine.”
We approached a group of Sahwa and jundis gathered near a woodshed the mukhtar used as an arms room. Across the gravel road, four Strykers sat like sleepy ogres, the tops of headquarters soldiers poking out from the hatches. I considered forcing some of them to interact with their Iraqi counterparts, but decided not to. How had Shaba put it in his love letter to Rana? “They are here to survive and endure, not to change.”
I exchanged shaku makus and knuckles with the Iraqis on duty. One of the khaki browns shied away, turning his back. It didn’t take me long to figure out why: Azhar’s brother wanted nothing to do with an accord. He kept his thin shoulders straight and cocked and tossed the shiny rifle in his hands from palm to palm.
“Salaam,” I said to him. There was no reply. He remained facing away, northward. I looked at Fat Mukhtar and arched an eyebrow. He shrugged.
“Mine,” Fat Mukhtar said, referring to the Sahwa guards. Then he patted the laser sights attached to the jundis’ rifles. It’d taken some wrangling, but the supply guys at Camp Independence had come through. I’d honored the deal with Saif, though he would never know it.
“Mine,” he said again, pointing to my chest.
“Yours,” I corrected.
He shook his head and grabbed a laser sight with one meaty hand and my shoulder with the other. “Mine,” he said.
I closed my eyes and sighed.
As I opened my eyes, ready to convince Fat Mukhtar to go back to the meeting, I saw a familiar shape peek from behind the corner of the squatty woodshed. I pushed past the mukhtar’s arm and stepped over a strand of razor wire. Around the corner huddled a sullen teenager, more stick figure than man.
“The fuck?” The Barbie Kid lifted his good eye to me, his unibrow a dark question mark of its own. He still wore pink sweatpants, but his shirt was an oversized khaki top, like the Sahwa wore. New sneakers covered his feet, white socks rising up his calves like garden snakes. He remained huddled, even when Fat Mukhtar waddled up and clapped at him.
“Sahwa,” Fat Mukhtar said. “Jadid.”
Through broken Arabic and broken-er English, Fat Mukhtar conveyed that he’d hired the youth after the death of Haitham. They’d been family, he reminded me. It was the right thing to do.
I hadn’t seen the Barbie Kid since we’d hit the small roadside bomb west of Ashuriyah. I’d wondered many times if he’d been a lookout for that attack. Now I knew whom he’d have called—not that it could be proven. I asked where his weapon was.
“Hah!” A dam of laughter broke in Fat Mukhtar’s throat. He acted out shots hitting all around a target and then said, “No bueno!” since the last thing we needed was a third language. Under the dim of the shed, the Barbie Kid watched on in fury.
Fat Mukhtar clapped again, barking instructions. This time the Barbie Kid stood, walked into the shed, and picked up a broom and dustpan from the ground. The mukhtar nodded toward his house and I followed, certain I’d just found another piece to the puzzle that was Iraq, but bemused as to where to place it.
The mukhtar moved quickly for a man his size, his steps sturdy and pronounced. I matched his strides, figuring him ready to return to the meeting. But we walked past the rusty door to the front room, instead heading into a courtyard that bisected his four eggshell villas. More artificial grass greened the lawn, a small red gazebo marking the center. Three women sat in the gazebo, their colorful abayas a rainbow against the dull sky. They were laughing and folding laundry, watching a group of children jump on a trampoline in the yard. The toucan Sinbad croaked nearby, its heavy keel bill scrounging the bottom of its cage for seeds. I found no sign of the mukhtar’s imaginary Syrian bear. The thin wife, dressed in purple, noticed us first, hushing her companions and pointing to their husband and me. They all donned face veils and bowed their heads. Meanwhile, the children had lost all interest in their jumping and ran to us.
There were six of them, the eldest a girl of about ten, the youngest a little mukhtar clone I guessed to be Karim’s age, my mind drifting westward once more.
“Mine,” I said, slapping Fat Mukhtar on the shoulder, ruffling the closest boy’s hair. I put my hands out and let them play with the hard plastic that lined the knuckles of my gloves, though the eldest rolled her eyes at this.
Fat Mukhtar beamed proud and stroked his goatee. “Mine,” he said. He started quizzing his children on their studies; I picked out words like “math” and “spelling” from the conversation, but the rest blurred by. Then he clapped his hands, the children scattered, and he waved me on. I pointed back to the front house, but he shook his head. The wives remained motionless and silent in the gazebo, one of them still midfold with her husband’s tracksuit. As we passed, Sinbad hopped across the birdcage and stuck out its bill. The mukhtar stroked it, but when I tried to do the same, it snapped at my finger and flapped its wings. I cursed and said I was glad its wings were clipped. Fat Mukhtar just laughed.
We continued to one of the rear villas. He opened a large metal door and held it open, gesturing for me to walk in first. The inside of the room was drab and dank. I felt Fat Mukhtar’s grin more than I saw it, the left side of his mouth curving higher than his left. Images of beheaded soldiers and journalists came over me like a hood, bodies without heads, heads without bodies.
I couldn’t even remember the list of things that American soldiers were supposed to recite under torture. Name. Rank. Social Security number? Why the hell would al-Qaeda care about my Social Security number? I walked into the room.
I held my breath and remained in the near corner while Fat Mukhtar followed, my ears hunting the shadows. He closed the door, a slice of gray light under the frame the only illumination in the room. He shuffled along a wall searching for something, bent over at the waist. I heard the pop of a prong entering a socket. Arcade neon blinked to life, revealing a blocky game meant for a mall.
“Big Buck Hunter?” I tried to embrace the moment as I took in the toy shotguns and virtual deer running across the arcade screen, but couldn’t. “Why do you have this?”
Fat Mukhtar answered with another “Mine.” I was familiar with the game from drunken bar nights in college, but how a machine had ended up in rural Iraq seemed too absurd even to try to comprehend. Fat Mukhtar grabbed the green shotgun and tapped its barrel against the screen.
“Ali babas,” he said, calling attention to the antlered bucks.
Then he tapped at a group of does. “No ali babas.”
I flashed a thumbs-up to signal my understanding. The room smelled of sour mildew; the worn couch in the back and mini fridge filled with wine coolers suggested the mukhtar spent a lot of time here. I turned back to the machine, where Fat Mukhtar was setting up a match for two players. The level read ALASKA. He nodded to the orange shotgun, and I replaced my real gun with a fake one. High-definition cartoon Kodiak wilderness washed over our faces.
The sight was off, shooting half an inch high, but I adjusted during the first round, killing two bucks. Fat Mukhtar doed-out right away, which eliminated him from the round. He leaned into the screen with his gun, holding it under an armpit rather than squaring it into his shoulder. He watched me finish the round. I was up two hundred points.
“Surf’s up,” I said with a wink. Fat Mukhtar grunted, but I saw the mischievous curve of his mouth return.
The second round regressed to the mean. I hit a doe early when it dashed in front of a buck drinking from a snowy stream. Fat Mukhtar proceeded to hit all six bucks in the round, culminating with a head shot in the far distance. He seized the lead, laughing deeply, jowl wobbling.
The fucker had rope-a-doped me, I thought, something the third round confirmed when he killed five bucks to my one. He knew the board like it was kin, displaying foreknowledge of open shots and an accuracy he’d concealed at first. He’d wanted to watch me shoot to learn my strengths and weaknesses. Whereas I was reacting to the game, he anticipated it. There was a counterinsurgency lesson in this somewhere, but I had neither the time nor the patience to figure it out. The war didn’t matter anymore. Wiping the grin off the mukhtar’s fat face did.
Down a breezy 1,100 points, I had two rounds to redeem myself. I knew I couldn’t win fairly, he was too good, too aware of what was to come. While the game loaded the next board, I asked myself what would vex him the most.
I smirked at my own genius.
The screen instructed us to GET READY. I turned to Fat Mukhtar and smacked him on the ass, shouting incoherently and cupping a saggy cheek a beat longer than necessary.
He cursed and dropped his gun. I had free rein of the board, a frost-ridden forest where I had to contend with trees and does alike. By the time the mukhtar had regained his weapon, I was pumping the kill shot into my sixth hide. I was now 120 points away from the lead.
Fat Mukhtar’s face quivered with anger, and he started to walk into me, belly first, until I raised a peace sign and pointed to the screen. He rearranged the green shotgun under his armpit in a salvo of Arabic vulgarities. As we waited for the sixth round, blocky letters of GET READY formed on the screen. We crouched in the wait, his feet parallel like he was at the O.K. Corral, mine staggered and clenched as I’d been taught in training.
The board began. A doe stood alone in a field, eating grass.
“Sheika,” Fat Mukhtar said. Then he chanted. “Ra-na. Sheik-a. Ra-na.”
He knew. Somehow, some way, he knew. It didn’t bother me, though, or rattle me. It infuriated me, and as soon as the first antler pierced the edge of the screen, I started pumping out shots with abandon. “Mukhtar, ali baba!” I yelled as the first buck went down in a glow of orange, awarding me the kill. “Mukhtar!” In the back, under a large pine: a twinkle of dark brown. I deemed it worth the risk, and got bonus points for the distance. “Azhar!” A buck bounded down a hillside in the center of the screen, and we saw it in chorus. He shot it in the neck, and it didn’t go down. I shot it in the chest, and it did. “Motherfucking Cleric!”
A quick glance to the top of the screen showed that I’d pulled ahead by 350 points. One last buck zigzagged across the screen, a muscular devil that dodged bullets and does with aplomb. He needed to kill it to regain the lead. I needed to kill it to keep that from happening. Our toy shotguns crossed as the buck reached the center of the screen. It wouldn’t go down, as if our bullets were passing through a phantom. Fat Mukhtar howled murder, so I did, too. The screen turned red.
The ghost buck had slipped away, or so it appeared. We’d never know, because we’d each shot a doe, ending the round and ending the game. No one received points for the last buck.
I’d won.
He threw down his gun and then pointed to the screen, asking for a rematch. I shook my head. It was time for a victorious retreat.
I picked up my real rifle. “You say Rana,” I said, jolted blood still pumping. “I say Haitham. I say Fat Mukhtar is ali baba. I say Fat Mukhtar kill—Fat Mukhtar keel Haitham.”
He inhaled sharply, then bent over to pick up the toy gun he’d tossed. Standing back up, he ran a hand through his black thatch of curls and narrowed his eyes. “No,” he said, pointing at me. “Haitham mine.”
We’d been through a lot together, the mukhtar and me. And kept even more from each other. I was thinking about how easy it would be to shoot him in his own den when someone banged on the door twice. There was a blast of raw light.
“There you are.” It was Captain Vrettos. “Meeting’s over. Time to roll.”
I followed my commander outside without a word.
After the war found him and turned him into a martyr, I often wondered what thoughts flitted through Fat Mukhtar’s mind as we walked out of his courtyard that day. There must’ve been many.
In the Stryker, Captain Vrettos said that we’d relented and agreed to pay fasil for all the mosque dead but Azhar. Lose a battle to win the war, he said.
“That Yousef guy is something else,” he continued. “Wish he was more active in the community. It would have been good to work with a man like that.”
41
* * *
The outpost was a zoo the next morning. Another platoon was driving out the front gate to deliver the fasil payments as the logisticians arrived with a delivery—the last shipment of foam mattresses from a contractor leaving Kuwait. First Sergeant said we didn’t need them, but could hand them out to locals. They also had the infamous satellite dish. Meanwhile, a group of Rangers arrived unannounced, a captain built like a viking needing to talk to someone about “high-value targets.” The rest of the Rangers remained in their Humvees, eyeballing our soldiers with carefully cultivated disdain.
On the outpost stairs, Captain Vrettos admired the pistol holstered on my chest plate—Saif’s olive Glock—and asked what I had planned for the day.
“I could meet with the Rangers if you want,” I said. “But I have a meeting slated with that source from out west. Going to take us to a graveyard in town. Something about the real Cleric.”
“No, I’ll handle the Rangers.” The commander’s mind seemed elsewhere, perhaps at Camp Independence, where the Big Man had said he had no second chances left—it was peace or bust. “Stick with your patrol. Just get some good intel, please. We’ve got to figure this out.”
If I felt any guilt about misleading my commander, the thought of spending time with Rana quickly displaced it. I’d called the previous night to thank her for saving lives—our lives. She again refused the offer of cash, but said there was another way I could repay her.
“Anything,” I said.
“My family is buried together, in south Ashuriyah,” she said. “I haven’t visited them in years. Perhaps you could take us.”
“Of course,” I said. “But this is a small thing. We’re still not even.”
I didn’t let her hang up until she agreed with that.
A daisy chain of sweaty, grunting soldiers led down to the foyer, with a variety of items being passed up the stairs from large cargo trucks outside, crates of Rip It and jugs of bleach and Memory Foam pillows that’d come with the mattresses. In a corner of the first floor stood Alia, mopping the red-and-white tiles with indifference. She wore a gray abaya and leopard-pattern head scarf, and her attention was focused across the octagonal foyer. She was watching Chambers, still in his body armor, yelling at soldiers to daisy-chain faster. I watched her watch him while the same section of tiles got mopped again and again. Then, as if her Sp
idey sense had tingled, she turned with her mop into the corner.
I walked over to Chambers and placed a hand on his shoulder. We hadn’t spoken since the roof.
He looked up with a jerk. “Lieutenant,” he said. “What’s the patrol today?”
I tried to visualize him the way Rana remembered him from 2006: eager, brash, more peacock-like than Machiavellian. It didn’t quite fit what I saw in front of me.
“Source meeting out west, again. About the real Cleric. Think we’re getting closer.”
“Really.” He crossed his arms and looked at me out of the corner of his eye, as if he were testing a new angle to see me for what I really was. “Think I’ll come along. Be good to get out in the day again.”
No way, I thought. You’ll ruin everything.
“Be great to have you,” I said. “For any patrol. But honestly, man, this is the source that saved us the other day. You’re the hammer. These people remember you.”
“ ‘The hammer’?” I thought he’d be pleased at being described this way, but it seemed to bother him. “Hajjis call me that?”
“Yeah. You do your thing, we do ours. Seems to be working.” I swallowed. “Seems like it’ll get the guys home. Nothing else matters.”
“Nothing else.”
His eyes crinkled with doubt, but when he unbuckled his helmet strap, I knew I was safe—that we were safe. I turned to walk outside to the Strykers, but Chambers called me back.
“Lieutenant,” he said. “You still a believer?”
I’d tried to read the opening of The Confessions of Saint Augustine but found it tedious. “I don’t always get God, but, yeah, I guess I am.”
Cloudy green met pale slate again. I stood up a bit straighter and stood out a bit wider, mentally counting to ten in Arabic.
“Not that,” he said, pushing past and smelling of ugly sweat. He walked upstairs, not bothering to glance at the mural above. Pedo bin Laden and the smiling children looked surprised at this for some reason. The Mother Hajj didn’t.
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