Wrath & Righteousnes Episodes 01 to 05

by Chris Stewart

  TEN

  Eridu, Southeastern Iraq

  Lieutenant Bono turned in a slow circle, scanning the desert around him. The sand was brown and as fine as talcum powder. Slow to move, it seemed to paste itself to the bedrock, the oldest sand on earth. Here and there small bluffs of black, craggy rock penetrated the rolling desert, the flinty hunks of lava glinting in the angled sun. From a distance, the bluffs appeared to be covered with dark bushes and low vegetation, but Bono knew that wasn’t true. He knew that as they got closer the dark patches would emerge as small hunks of stone that jutted from the ground, not vegetation. Above his head and to his back, opposite the setting sun, the sky changed color as it rose above the far horizon. Near the ground it was solid white from reflecting off the sand, but it deepened to greenish-silver and then dark blue directly over his head. The sand and rolling mounds (they weren’t high enough for Bono to quite call them hills) seemed to go on forever, and the air was so clear that the details of the dismal landscape didn’t seem to fade, no matter how far off he looked.

  Sam stood somewhere behind him, quiet, unseen, and unmoving, but Bono knew he was near. A soldier, especially a soldier who spent much of his time in the desert, developed his senses, and Bono could smell the other man’s leather boots, the detergent on his uniform, the spearmint gum in his pocket, the aftershave he had put on a few days ago.

  Bono turned in two full circles, his feet treading lightly across the brown sand, years of moving without leaving a trace instinctive to him now. Then he held still and listened as Sam moved quietly to his side.

  “So this is it?” Samuel Brighton shook his head as he looked around in disbelief.

  Bono nodded toward the barren desert. “That’s what they say.”

  Sam squinted through the setting sun at the utterly barren landscape around him. “What did Adam grow here? Snakes and sand fleas? Help me understand this, Lieutenant, because I’m not so sure you’ve got your geography right.”

  Bono hunched his shoulders. “It might have changed a little bit over the years.”

  “Changed a bit. Yeah, I guess so.” Sam’s voice was sarcastically light-hearted. “If this was the Garden of Eden, and if this is what it looked like, I’d say Adam got the better end of the deal. Getting tossed out of this hunk of burning sand couldn’t have been the worst thing that happened to him that day.”

  Bono smiled but didn’t answer as he continued looking down from the bluff.

  It was so quiet he could feel the atmospheric pressure in his ears, the air perfectly calm as evening came on. His neck tingled from a light sweat that evaporated in the rapidly cooling air. The sun was low now, a huge, blood-red ball sinking toward the western horizon. As he watched, it began to fall so quickly its movement was perceptible.

  The thought that this land of rock, sand and black scorpions searching desperately for some warm-blooded prey had once been the Garden of Eden was almost laughable. But it really didn’t matter. Bono knew it wasn’t true. “This isn’t it,” he said to Sam after a long pause. “Not literally, I mean, not the Garden of Eden. Yes, it’s true that most scholars and historians believe the Garden had to be somewhere near this place, but we know that’s not the case.”

  “Do we?” Sam sounded surprised.

  “True, my friend.”

  “This isn’t where Adam and Eve strolled among the animals and chomped down a couple apples?”

  Bono shook his head and smiled. Sam was on the right track, but his understanding of the gospel still had a long way to go. That was what made him so interesting. He had so little knowledge, but his emerging faith was so strong. It was as if the death of his father had turned on the switch of faith inside.

  “No, this isn’t the location of the Garden,” Bono finally repeated.

  Sam waited, then turned toward him. “And you know this because . . . ?”

  “It was revealed. So we know.”

  “Hmmm,” Sam thought. For the first twenty-some-odd years of his life, he would have thought that that was foolish. But it was enough now. “Where is the real Garden?” he asked.

  “America, my bushy-haired friend.”

  Sam shook his hair from his eyes. He had the longest hair in the unit now; it hung down past the bottom of his neck. The blond hair had to go—he had dyed it black so as not to stand out—but it still curled and was finer than a Middle-Eastern man’s, and he didn’t quite fit in with the locals around him. Still, it was better than the blond hair that immediately branded him as different.

  “America? That makes sense,” he answered after thinking awhile. “Not geographically, I guess, but something in my gut says that is just right. America is the chosen land. Why wouldn’t the Garden be there?”

  Bono lifted a hand toward the horizon, pointing south across the short bluff where they stood. “At one time, the sea must have reached up to where we are standing now,” he explained. “The Euphrates and Tigris merged just to the north, then dumped into the Persian Gulf somewhere near here, I would guess. Even if this wasn’t the literal Garden of Eden, it certainly was the cradle of civilization. The fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates—” he shot a look at Sam. “I’m sure you can tell me their Arabic names, can’t you, stud?”

  “Dejla and Furat.”

  Bono shook his head in disgust. “How do you do that? Come on, man, I can’t remember my wife’s maiden name or how to count to ten in Spanish despite sitting through at least three thousand episodes of Sesame Street as a kid, yet you hear an Arabic word a single time and you can remember it forever!”

  Sam smiled, satisfied. It was true. He really could.

  “I just don’t get Arabic,” Bono muttered. “It’s like running water through a sieve. The words go in. They flow out. I can’t remember anything.”

  “Hey, you got a beautiful wife and great aim. It wouldn’t be fair if you got everything.”

  “Still, I don’t know how you do it.”

  Sam shrugged. “It just comes. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  Bono cocked an eyebrow. “But you can’t remember any history?”

  “Dead people and lost cities. Not my thing, I guess.”

  Bono swatted at a circle of biting sand flies that hovered above his head, then continued his instruction, even though he knew that Sam wouldn’t remember and really didn’t care. “This place gave birth, if not to Adam, certainly to the first cities and civilizations of man. Nimrod, the great hunter mentioned in Genesis, was the founder of Nineveh, the capital of ancient Assyria, which was up on the Tigris north of here. And Nineveh wasn’t some insignificant desert village. It was a massive city, taking three days to walk around. An entire library of clay books was found there, probably the oldest on earth. Jonah, of course, preached in Nineveh. He was a funny guy, ol’ Jonah. Got all ticked off when the entire city repented and was saved. Wanted to see some falling meteors and blazing fireworks, I guess.” Bono pointed slightly west. “Babylon, the most famous ancient city in the world, was the capital of ten Mesopotamian dynasties starting almost four thousand years ago. Of course, Nebuchadnezzar built his amazing cities on the backs of his slaves, many of them Jews. Muslims believe Noah—they call him the second father of people—lived in Fara, which is just north of here. Azra lived in Auzayr, Hizkael in El-Kifl.”

  Sam listened, watching Bono as he moved his finger across the horizon, pointing at different spots in the desert that looked identical to Sam. Sand. Low bluffs. Lifeless dunes. Nothing else.

  Bono turned east. “Ur of the Chaldees is out there, birthplace of Abraham. It was a spectacular city until the Euphrates changed its course, leaving it to shrivel in the desert, suffering a slow but certain death.”

  Bono quit talking and wiped a dark sleeve across his brow. “I know it looks barren—”

  “Barren?!” Sam interrupted. “That’s a pretty generous description, I’d say. Barren indicates a happenstance lack of life. This desert is one step beyond that. It seems to be sterile, as if a great cosmic hand had int
entionally wiped away every form of life.”

  “Maybe,” Bono answered slowly, “but there is still beauty here. The openness. The endless sky. The heat turning the sand into shimmering waves. The horizon that glitters in the distance. The colors of silver and dark blue overhead. The deep quiet. The clean air. It’s really beautiful.”

  Sam looked around and nodded slowly. The wind shifted and, behind them now, they could hear human voices as the man-made sounds of clicking metal and gas-powered generators signaled their base camp’s coming to life.

  The American soldiers, a small group of elite Cherokees, were tearing down their camp, getting ready to bug out. Sam turned, knowing this would be the last time he would see the base camp in the light. By morning, they would be gone. He studied the camp. Three kilometers south of them, the ancient town of Eridu jutted up against the desert sky. Forty meters to his right was a double strand of razor-wire fence—behind that, a small minefield, then another double strand of wire. Unseen guards watched the perimeter of the base camp from various buried locations. Humvees and the other machines that the men used to kill the enemy were tucked away at the center of the camp. There were no tents, only bunkers, and the camp was set back twenty-four hundred meters from the main road, just beyond the range of the insurgents’ most powerful rocket-propelled grenades. An unpaved trail, heavily barricaded, made its way through the desert from the highway to the camp.

  The evening light began to fade, turning dull yellow and then hazy orange as the sun disappeared. The two men sat down, resting on the warm sand. “You heard about Rodriguez?” Bono asked.

  Sam closed his eyes and didn’t answer. Months before, a scout patrol from their old Ranger unit had been hit by a roadside incendiary bomb. Both Sam and Bono knew the men who had been injured; all of them were close friends. Mercilessly, all four men inside the Humvee had been severely burned. No more hair. No more skin. No more eyes. Over time, months of agony and anguish, each of the men had slowly died. The first to pass away, a young lieutenant, had been the lucky one—he had lived only a few weeks. One man lived for three months. Another for more than six. All four men were now gone, Rodriguez being the last man to give up the final fight, a little more than nine months after the explosion had burned him from head to toe.

  It sickened Sam to think about them. Nine months of battle. Nine months of anguish and pain. “Please, just kill me,” he mumbled as he considered the horrible fate of the men.

  Bono heard him and nodded. “Yeah. I’m with you.”

  Sam ground his teeth.

  “Rodriguez was what, twenty-one?” Bono asked.

  “Yeah.” Sam took a deep breath as he answered. Twenty-one was barely old enough to marry. It was too young to die. Then he thought of his father, General Brighton, who had also been too young to die.

  He thought of the pictures he had seen of Washington, D.C., after the nuclear detonation. Charred buildings. Hunks of burned concrete, the oil boiled from the blacktop on the streets. A few scattered trees, black and lifeless, nothing more than dead trunks and drooping branches that looked like witches’ hands reaching up from the ground. The spot where the White House had once stood had been identified, but there was nothing there. Four days had passed now and he knew that his adopted father, the only man who had ever cared anything for him, the person who had taught him what it meant to be a man, who had sacrificed everything for the only things he had loved, would not be found there. Like the others, he gone up in smoke and ash.

  The two soldiers were silent as the darkness came on.

  Sam turned to Bono. “Things haven’t gone too well, have they?” he asked.

  Bono shook his head, discouragement softening his icy-blue eyes. “It ain’t going swimmingly, I suppose.”

  “They’ve been saying it for years now. This place is not worth the price we’ve paid.”

  Bono thought of Rodriguez and didn’t say anything.

  Sam stared at Bono, then turned back to the growing darkness around them. “The air transports are lined up down in Basra. We’ll be out of here tomorrow. Think we’ll ever come back?”

  “I don’t know,” Bono said.

  Sam thought a long moment. “Would you die for this place?” he asked as the moon started to rise at their backs.

  Bono shrugged his shoulders. “For this place or this cause?”

  “I don’t know. Take your pick. Our cause. Our mission. The things they tell us to do.”

  A light breeze began to move the night air. “All we’re trying to do is help them,” Bono answered from the dark.

  Sam kept his eyes on the horizon, staring at the spot where the sun used to be.

  “Just trying to help them,” Bono repeated as if he were trying to convince himself.

  Sam grunted and asked, “Does that mean yes or no?”

  Bono slowly nodded. “Yes, I would die here. I would die for this cause. Good men die here every day. Some Americans. Some Iraqis. All are children of God.”

  Sam nodded, his face determined, then turned toward the lieutenant. “I want you to know something, Bono. I tell you now as my friend.

  “I would die for this mission. It’s a magnificent cause. My father died for this duty. So have others I have loved. I want to live—you know we all do—but I won’t turn away from this fight. Every generation has its battles, and this is the fight of our time.

  “You remember that, Bono.” He touched the lieutenant on the chest. “If you have to, you go and tell them, ‘I did what I had to do.’”

  ELEVEN

  Royal Palace, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

  As the afternoon wore on, the children of the royal family spread across the great lawn and green gardens. A few were standing on the shore, dipping their feet into the man-made lake; a few were chasing the camel riders through the trees. Many of the younger children had gathered near the back wall of the palace where an ice cream fountain oozed ice cream and chocolate and sent it cascading down four tiers of silver plates.

  The king’s security agents, large men in black robes and gray turbans, moved through the crowd. They had divided up their assignments, and they moved among the offspring of the princes very quickly, taking up their charges one by one.

  The largest of the security men moved toward Prince Saud bin-Alquana, the Foreign Minister’s oldest son. Eighteen and proud, he stood above the other children, watching his younger cousins play. The king’s man moved toward the princeling and touched him on the elbow. “Sayid, I need you to come with me,” he said.

  The young prince turned. He was dark, determined, and stout like his father. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  The agent nodded, lifting his bearded chin toward the palace. “Your father sent me for you.”

  “My father?”

  “Sayid.” The agent bowed.

  The princeling hesitated. Something didn’t feel right. He didn’t know what it was, but his gut seemed to crunch. “Who are you? Where is my father?”

  “Young prince, I am to take you to him.”

  The prince wanted to pull back. He wanted to run away. The sudden fear made no sense, but he knew that something was horribly wrong. “What does my father want?” he demanded, trying to force a strong voice.

  “I do not ask, my Sayid.” The agent put a little pressure on the young man’s elbow, his grip firm.

  The young man didn’t move.

  “Come,” the agent said, his voice lower now. “I have my orders. You will come with me.”

  Tightening his grip, he pulled the young prince along.

  Around him, the king’s other men gathered up the oldest sons of the princes who were meeting in the Great Hall.

  TWELVE

  The Ab Tayyib (The Good Father), Eighty-Five Miles Southeast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina

  Small for an oceangoing craft, the 1,600-ton cargo ship Ab Tayyib (previously called the Cristi, previously called the Sunna, previously called the Ali Bin, which was what the ship was called when it first raised suspicion a
s being an al-Qaeda-operated vessel) had been re-flagged and re-registered at least a dozen times in its life, three times in the past month alone. Presently flagged in Cambodia as the Ab Tayyib (a good name and good omen, God willing, the captain thought), the ship was owned by a Greek shipowner, Dimitris Kokkos, and a Pakistani-American, Rifat Muhammed. More or less permanent residents of Croatia, both Kokkos and Muhammed were wanted by the Greek authorities for smuggling, an inconvenience that required several hundred thousand dollars in annual bribes to keep the government at bay.

  The Ab Tayyib was black with red striping, freshly painted but rusting underneath the thick paint that had been carelessly slapped on. Barnacled below the waterline and poorly maintained, the Ab Tayyib’s two huge diesel engines kept the dual propellers pounding at the sea, but it was becoming more common to have to shut down one of the engines for maintenance as the ship chugged along. The deck was worn, the grating torn in places, and the cavernous hold smelled of diesel, grease, mold, salt water, and filth. The ship had been at sea for several months now, having stopped in Malaysia before moving on to Cambodia, where it was re-flagged a final time before sailing back to Yemen, through the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal.

  Ten weeks after leaving the expanding ports at Jeddah, the ship had traveled the equivalent distance of a trip around the world. It would have been impossible to have tracked it even if it hadn’t been repainted, re-flagged, and renamed.

  There was simply no way to know or be suspicious when the ship showed up off the eastern coast of the United States.

  Had the Coast Guard had any reason to board the vessel, it would have taken only seconds for the mission of the Ab Tayyib to become painfully obvious. The ballistic missiles and elevator-controlled launcher built into the hold were pretty hard to disguise.

  At 4:43 a.m. local time, the improvised communications center inside the rusting Ab Tayyib got the highly encrypted strike instructions. The exact altitudes, flight azimuths, trajectories, and yield settings for the warheads had already been programmed into the flight computers, but still the captain reviewed the final flight instructions very carefully, comparing every line of code against the numbers burned into his memory.