Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

“What’s that?”

  She rose from the piano bench and walked back to the couch. She took his hand in hers and passed it across the warm moist place on the brocade.

  The Mountains

  15

  That evening Liberace was unfolded and set up prancing into the night. That big poster of him waved at a herd of goats on the hills below us. The herd was almost entirely black except for a few white ones wandering among the others like threads being pulled. The entire herd was in a jostling quest for the leaves on the few remaining trees that had not already been nibbled bare. A few camels showed up on another hill, peering at the goats with a ruminant’s disdain for all the hyperactivity below.

  Danny was using his rucksack as a pillow, doing the usual, staring up at the stars that were beginning to poke holes in the sky. He had set up the speakers about eighty yards away, facing the mountain. Just far enough away so that if anyone attacked, we’d be off to the side.

  “I’ll Be Seeing You” was wafting out into the void. With the bleating of the goats providing the vocals.

  “There’s three goat herders down there. They’re staring up toward our position. You think maybe they’re music critics?”

  “The purists always hated Liberace,” he said.

  “Yeah, but the Taliban are purists.”

  “Yeah. That’s the point.”

  Later, after the CD player had gone through all the music, I was deep into my watch-for-shooting-stars game that was better in Afghanistan than anywhere else because when those stars took off in that perfect blackness, they really ripped through the night. It looked like slashing a canvas with a blowtorch. Way better than my earlier, sinsemilla-fueled days on the beach in Santa Monica. Danny was completely still and silent. I thought he was sleeping until: “It was her father.” Silence.

  “And?”

  “Her father came back. It was all over then. But I didn’t know it. I didn’t want to know it.” More silence. “I still don’t.”

  • • •

  No one ever talks about Pashtunwali up here in the mountains. They don’t have to. You feel it. Crawling all around you like a thousand-year fog. No one escapes it. The old-time Special Forces guys, the ones who go native in grand style, put it in ways you can really understand: Who the fuck has ever heard of a code of honor that exalts treachery and throat slitting as the best way to achieve that honor? And all these dumb motherfuckers live by that code. There’s lots of little footnotes up here, all of them drenched in blood, and the feuds go on for so many generations no one can remember which of the addled ancestors started it all. But honor—or nang, as they call it here—is automatically the motive for most of the party-trick decapitations that go on in the night. Murder mysteries would definitely not sell well over here—there’s simply no mystery in it at all.

  And then there’s miratha, which, as an added bonus in the whole Pashtunwali thing, means that if your nang is seriously bent out of shape, then go for it, march right into your enemy’s village and annihilate every living male. A no-penis-left-alive policy. And just to put it all in perspective, this is the twenty-first century, not the twelfth.

  (Well maybe for Muslims it’s only the sixteenth because that’s how long it is since Muhammad first got his own revelations. But that’s another story; don’t even go there. You end up in no end of soggy comparisons to the Reformation and all that, not to mention accusations and footnotes from righteously tenured professors you’ve never heard of.)

  The real root of this Pashtunwali thing is zan, zar, and zamin, which, not so loosely translated, means women, gold, and land. In that order. If you mess with a Pashtun’s zan or his zar or his zamin then you’re into throat-slitting territory. His nang will get seriously bent out of shape. Which is pretty much why we’re here—me and Danny, at least—freezing our asses off in these Afghan mountains. Because Ariana is Pashtun and Pashtunwali is what this is all about. And Danny is going toe-to-toe with it all: nang, zan, zar, and zamin—something that legions of dead Victorian Brits and dead Soviets whose bones litter the countryside here would no doubt advise against.

  Danny is seriously messing with the zan end of things—women—endlessly telling himself that he’ll find Ariana and they’ll live in a cabin in the woods or whatever and raise a herd of kids. And you have to ask yourself: is he just totally oblivious or is this really some grand obsession, some love affair that makes the rest of us look like mud wrestlers at the ballet?

  • • •

  Two days later our radio came alive. Reaper One? . . . Come in, Reaper One. Which was us. (Whoever gave us that designation did not include irony as a factor—Reaper as in Grim with a One tacked on.) The radio was our master with us, its servants, bowing to the voice from the Gods of Tampa, the CENTCOM brass sitting back there on an air base in Florida watching the whole thing play out on video screens with images from their cameras in the drone way above our heads. They, and the Lesser Gods of Bagram outside Kabul, collectively hurled thunderbolts commanding Danny and me, mere grunt-type mortals, to slog up to a mountain LZ on a tiny windswept plateau barely big enough for a sparrow to land on, and then get choppered into another mountain area somewhere between Khost and Gardez.

  We flew over sheer mountain walls, as straight as the side of a New York skyscraper, only taller. The mountains flashing past the open back of the helicopter with the machine gunner balancing on the ramp made your mind play games right up until it roared out into clear skies and landed somewhere east of the phony border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Our orders were to support a Special Forces team that had a little problem. No one spelled out exactly what this little problem was. Right off the top, something didn’t compute.

  Why were the Gods of Tampa sending us, a puny, two-man sniper team, all this way? “We’re way off the reservation,” said Danny, moving faster down into the treeline once we left the chopper, stopping only to punch eight-digit grid coordinates into the store-bought GPS.

  “Zadran’s territory,” he said, and then kept going, strangely excited. For a moment I thought that maybe Zadran was the reason we were here, the image of him with his Frito Bandito moustache and black turban appearing out of the mist a couple of months ago at the roadblock outside of Gardez. Everywhere you looked, his men were appearing out of that same mist, all around us.

  “Zadran!” Danny yelled into the mountain air, as if someone would be out there listening.

  It was when the shadows were shortest that we first saw the horses, the ones that Special Forces Team 590 was riding in on. There was something about seeing them that fried the wiring between eye and brain. These guys, about a dozen of them, farm boys and surfers, riding these small, fierce Afghan horses, were a collision of centuries, like seeing Henry the Eighth stepping out of a Ferrari, these guys with satellite radios riding in on saddles that looked like they were designed by Genghis Khan. You told yourself it was real, you were seeing it, but some rebellious neurocircuitry behind your eyes just didn’t want to close the deal.

  Danny unfolded Liberace again and set him up on the side of the mountain while the Special Forces Team 590 watched as if someone was burning the flag. Liberace’s prancing in fringe and those tight little white shorts was just not what they were all about. They didn’t say anything. They didn’t have to. Those guys could use silence better than a fist. For a bunch of Kansas farm boys or Laguna surfers or wherever they were from, these guys were world-class fighters who had gone seriously native, making a fashion statement all their own. They were dressed in varying combinations of American military and Pashtun warrior, complete with checkered neck shawls and the occasional Afghan kameez. All of them had mastered the art of the dead-eyed stare, which was what we were getting.

  Actually, it was Liberace getting those stares as he waved and pranced into the wind. Liberace gave these Team 590 Green Beret guys a slow-motion fit. But it was nothing compared to the reaction of the Afghan soldiers they were with—about a hundred of them. The Afghans had their own circuitry blowout,
bunched up behind a hill on the other side of a little gully, a milling collage of turbans, pakols, and AK-47s, all of which seemed to be pointing at Liberace. Or was I only imagining it?

  One of the Special Forces guys rode up to meet us, like he was stepping out of a spaghetti Western, only wearing a baseball cap. He had what Annie Boo would call a high-cool-factor, complete with the Oakley wraparounds, a headset connecting him to the Lesser Gods of Bagram, an M4 dangling at his side at the end of a bronzed and muscular arm, a ton of pouches and bullet belts looking like a carapace that a turtle would be proud of, and all of it deliciously accessorized by that over-the-shoulder Afghan throat slitter’s checkered-pattern shawl that Liberace would simply die for.

  “Call me Tom,” was the first thing he said. Which probably meant his name was anything but Tom. Most of these Special Forces guys, once they got up in the mountains, had names like Wolfman or Dice or Spinner. Tom, or whoever he was, had not stopped staring. “What the fuck is that?”

  “Liberace,” said Danny. Acting just as cool as Tom, who dismounted.

  “Get rid of it.”

  “Uh-uh.” Danny looked surprised that Tom wasn’t kidding. And when Tom made a move, Danny did too, standing in front of Liberace. “He stays.”

  “Not even close, pal,” said Tom in a real quiet voice, his eyes narrowing. On the plateau behind us, the other Special Forces guys had dismounted, looking pretty much as slit-eyed as Tom. Several of them had lit up those little truck-stop cigars, Swishers, which definitely added to the spaghetti-Western feel of it all.

  “You fight the war your way, I’ll fight it my way.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Tom, looking around and making a whistling sound through his teeth. “Hey, pal, we’ll talk about court-martials later but—”

  “I’m not in your army,” said Danny, pointing to the maple leaf flag insignia on his shoulder.

  “—in case you hadn’t figured it out, we’re both fighting the same war.”

  “Not quite.”

  Right then, at the very moment they were teetering on one of those Oh yeah? Says who? numbers, one of the Afghans defused it with a different threat. He was climbing toward us, jabbering and pointing at Liberace. Tom called out something to him in Pashtun, which was obviously a kind of “Cool it,” because the guy muttered something and then settled into his own version of the thousand-yard stare. Which he did really well.

  “Atif there is freaked out.”

  “I can see that,” said Danny.

  “Is this really necessary?” Tom was looking at Liberace.

  “I’ll explain later.”

  “Yeah?” said Tom. “Well, Atif is their head guy and he wants to know why a woman is dressed like that and why a big picture of her is here in the mountains.”

  “Tell Atif that Liberace is a man.”

  “I already did. He said no man dresses like that.”

  “Damn,” said Danny. “What we got going on here is a cultural divide.”

  “Like hell we do,” said Tom, taking off the big Afghan shawl on his shoulders and draping it around the lower half of the cardboard cut-out. Liberace looked like he was wearing a skirt, and Atif seemed to think that was just fine. He and the other Afghans stopped jabbering among themselves and went back to pointing their rifles somewhere else.

  Which was when that noise sounded, that terrifying snap! you hear differently in the thin air of mountains than anywhere else—the sound of a bullet breaking the sound barrier.

  The bullet that ripped through Liberace.

  We all hit the ground and when we looked up, Liberace had been spun completely around but amazingly, he was still standing, a small-caliber bullet wound right through his reinforced cardboard heart. But still he was prancing into the wind.

  “Damn!” said Danny, looking over at me. Omar was the other word hanging out there just waiting to be said. But it wasn’t. And I was too busy finding cover to pay much attention to him anyway.

  Tom lifted his face from the dirt and looked up at Liberace, still beaming and prancing with that ragged hole in his chest. “Helluva fighter,” Tom said.

  • • •

  The simple question was why the Gods of Tampa went to all the trouble of ferrying us—me and Danny of all people—up to that particular mountain. The simple answer was pretty much what it is for most things that get overcomplicated:

  In other words, the lawyers got involved.

  It started off pretty simple three days earlier when the drones had relayed images of Tampa’s least favorite warlord, Zadran. With a column of his men, he was moving from a compound near Gardez up into the mountain we were now on. A mountain that was pretty much infested with Taliban. Zadran and his men had obviously arranged a friendly meeting with these Taliban. Which, on the surface, was strange because after all the bales of cash the CIA had dumped on Zadran, he and his tribe were officially supposed to be our allies.

  Which logically meant Zadran should be waging war on the Taliban instead of drinking tea with them. But the problem was that Zadran had the loyalties of a bond trader on a bad day. He spewed love onto whoever happened to be the highest bidder. And right now no one was sure whose side he was on.

  He remained the same smiling bundle of treachery and violence he had ever been, jovially untroubled by loyalty as it was understood by the Gods of Tampa. Not to mention his troubling tendency to rain mortar fire down on our guys from Sarabagh to Orgun whenever those bales of CIA cash didn’t show up on time.

  The surveillance images on those wide screens back at Bagram and Tampa were now showing some kind of overly long meeting going on between Zadran and the Taliban. And whatever they were meeting about, the Gods of Tampa were displeased and wanted to send a message. Somebody’s first suggestion for a means of communication had been to drop a two-thousand-pound JDAM—which would pretty much have ended the meeting. Vaporized it, actually.

  Which was when the military lawyers got involved at the Judge Advocate General’s office, seven thousand miles west of here. Those military lawyers back in the States only had to dangle the thought—War Crime—and the entire JDAM bombing plan crumbled while all that due diligence stuff ensued. Conventions of international law were weighed and mulled while forlorn grunts like us froze on mountaintops, waiting to find out if we could just get on with fighting the war.

  We were guessing that the problem here was probably that it could turn into one of those General Accounting Office scandals in Washington. Because, after all, handing all those bales of CIA cash to Zadran and then incinerating him with a JDAM could lead to a lot of messy Senate subcommittee questions about all that taxpayers’ money going up in smoke. Literally.

  But right now all we really knew was that it was getting damn cold on this Afghan mountain and some guys in warm offices in Washington were probably looking up Allies—vaporizing of: while making dinner plans at some French restaurant.

  If Zadran had not been an ally, this whole legal mess would not have happened. Which is where we came in.

  Or at least where Danny came in.

  One of the Lesser Gods had apparently decided that what our lawyers said didn’t apply to someone from another army. Someone like Danny. So being a Canadian was one thing, but being a sniper was another. Especially a Canadian sniper with a McMillan Brothers .50-cal bolt-action long-range sniper rifle fitted with a Lilja barrel and modified with shortened bipods, Leupold optical . . . and all those other specs that don’t register with people outside the circle but translate into one simple fact that everyone understands: it was way better than anything we had in the American army. Which was the other reason Danny and I were here: that overgrown gun of his could hit targets our own snipers couldn’t even get close to.

  It was the stiletto instead of the hammer. The Gods of Tampa wanted us to send a precise and specific message to Zadran. Instead of vaporizing the whole tribe, they were letting him know that he was lucky. This time. Only a few of his people were being annihilated. Next time . . .


  “Three kills needed down there.” Tom was pointing to figures way off in the distance. “Like having a field-goal kicker who can get the job done from sixty yards out.” Tom had already forgotten about Liberace. “Except we’re seventy yards out.”

  I was probably the only one there who noticed the little shock wave go through Danny. The same one that went through him when anyone casually mentioned that he was needed to end a life.

  Like swatting a fly.

  • • •

  We glassed the mountainside in the direction Tom was pointing; a group of six men could be seen moving slowly up a steep trail. Three of them were prisoners and looked like they were having trouble walking, stumbling, their hands tied in front of them. One of them was being jabbed by a rifle butt to the back of the head. “Two ‘terps’—Mo and Ali is what we call them,” said Tom. The guy behind them is a teacher. The previous teacher at the school near Sarabagh was beheaded by the Taliban last August, his head stuck on a pole driven into the ground in front of the entrance with the Arabic sign warning that teaching females violates Allah’s will.

  “Mo and Ali are names we gave the interpreters. They’re our guys. They worked for us and somehow Zadran’s people caught them at the bottom of the mountain. About two hours later our intercept guys started picking up radio traffic between the kidnappers and Zadran, who’s up here somewhere on the plateau. Right after that, the captives were being marched up the mountain as Zadran’s offering to the Taliban, a sign that he can deliver whatever he wants to deliver. Mo, Ali, and the teacher are lambs being led to slaughter. Right before our eyes.”

  Zadran’s three prisoners were now about an hour’s trek from the plateau. We found the ragged little column by scanning until we first located a man cradling an RPG-7 rocket launcher, and then farther east and slightly below him were two lighter Russian machine guns. Glassing straight down about fifty meters below the machine guns, we saw the ledge that led around the mountain to where the meeting was supposed to be happening. “Black Hats,” Danny said, looking through the binoculars at the three men behind the machine gun.