by John Sweeney
‘So what now?’ asked Agim.
‘I know a little about the facility,’ Zeke replied. ‘Not enough but, given time, I can work out the rest. I’m going home.’
‘It’s a long way to the United States from here by bus.’
‘Where is the nearest phone?’
‘You told me not to use one.’
‘It should be all right now.’
Zeke jotted down a name and a telephone number on a piece of paper.
‘You trust this man?’ asked Agim.
‘Yeah, he’s the head of tactical operations, CIA. I appointed him. He won’t let me down. My guess is in the other direction, that he might just go a little over the top.’
Zeke guessed right. Within two hours of Agim returning from the farmer’s hut, where he had called the number, the sky over the shepherd’s shack was full of heavy metal, the air trembling with chopper blades: two Apache gunships to keep the peace, two Chinooks packed with special forces muscle, and a fifth machine that was more flying clinic than helicopter. The last thing Agim and Sotir saw was Zeke being loaded on a stretcher up the medevac’s ramp, a medic fussing over him, and Zeke waving at them, grinning his simple smile.
Then the ramp was raised, and Zeke vanished in a storm of dust.
PALMYRA, SYRIA
They left him handcuffed in his room in the hotel, returning shortly after dawn. Under the canvas awnings to blind the spies in the sky, they led him towards a tractor pulling a trailer, its cargo masked by a grey sheet of plastic. Khalil lifted the plastic aside: underneath were three cages, one occupied by a man in an orange jumpsuit, another by a woman in a black abaya. Khalil opened the roof of the third cage and manhandled Timur in, none too gently, and then closed the cage, locking it in place with a thick padlock, and pulled the plastic sheet back in place. The tractor’s engine chugged into life and they rode off, at fifteen miles an hour, the true nature of the load hidden from the enemy.
Timur’s cage was at the back of the trailer and he had been placed in it facing the rear, so he couldn’t communicate with the others; nor would it have been wise. He did his best to make himself as comfortable as was humanly possible with his arms handcuffed behind his back, in a cage less than a metre cubed. The journey was horrible – every bump and hollow in the road was transmitted directly up through Timur’s spine – but it was not, mercifully, a long one.
The coolness of the tunnel gave away their destination – that and the echoing racket the tractor made as it chugged into the side of the mountain. After a short spell of time, they pulled up with a jerk. Each cage was lifted from the trailer and carried through the steel door into the facility, where they were dropped, gently, onto the concrete floor. As the cages were shifted, Timur was able to make out his fellow prisoners. One was Beth, the woman with the blue eyes who had condemned Abdul’s execution. The other occupant was no less exotic: Korean, and not from the south.
A Hisbah slouched towards them. Timur contracted in his cage, remembering Rashid flinching from Haroun’s use of that evil electric stick, but it was a false alarm: the Hisbah emptied a bottle of water over his head and some of it landed on his tongue. Then the Hisbah performed the same act of mercy two more times and they heard his steps retreat, the lights were killed, the steel door slammed shut. Beyond, they could make out the sound of the tractor starting up. Only when its last echo had receded and the silence was total did they dare speak.
The Asian man said something in a language Timur did not understand. His tone, though, was entirely readable: the wheedling of a doomed man.
‘Timur, it’s you, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, Beth, it is me.’
‘How did you end up in a cage?’
‘I made a miscalculation,’ he said drily. ‘How are you?’
She paused, and then came the reply: ‘It’s wonderful to know you’re here.’
‘Beth,’ he replied, ‘sometimes I wonder whether you are who you say you are. No native English-speaker could possibly call this situation wonderful.’
Her laughter, when it came, was delicious. Her voice lowered an octave as she continued: ‘Timur, I have a question for you. Just before the lights were switched off I saw a big stack of drums, stainless-steel drums. They had death’s heads on them.’
‘You did.’
‘What’s in them?’
‘Sarin,’ said Timur.
‘What is sarin?’
‘Sarin is an organophosphorus neurotoxin,’ said Timur dispassionately, reciting from his prodigious memory. ‘Twenty times as lethal as cyanide. It tastes of nothing and is a clear liquid with no colour. It works by blocking the enzyme that causes nerve cells to stop firing. The effect is that sarin jams every nerve switch “on” so that the heart and lung muscles go into spasm. The actual cause of death is asphyxiation.’
‘How did it end up here?’
‘Our friend in orange is a gentleman from the north of Korea, I believe. His government has twice been caught shipping chemical suits to the government of Syria. It makes no sense for Zarif to buy chemical suits but not the gas. This is it. When ISIS overran Palmyra, they discovered this place. All the other North Korean technicians managed to run away. This one got left behind.’
‘So why have they left us here?’
Timur said nothing.
‘It’s not good news, is it, Timur?’ Somehow Beth forced laughter into her voice, the laughter of the brave. ‘They’re going to gas us with this sarin, aren’t they?’
Timur held his tongue.
‘How many people could ISIS kill with this amount of sarin?’
‘Hundreds, thousands. Too many.’
‘Promise me, Timur, that if you ever get out of here, you will find someone, someone good, and you will tell them about this place so that it can be destroyed.’
Timur remained silent.
‘Timur,’ Beth said quietly, ‘I came to Syria to help, to save lives, to prevent children from being paralysed, from being crippled for life by an entirely preventable disease. Because of bad luck and maybe naivety on my part, and pure evil on theirs, I am to end my life being gassed in a cage. I have been traded at a slave market, raped, again and again, and have been used horribly by this pig you call the Caliph. So my entire life has ended up some ghastly, cosmic joke, and every single thing I believe in and cherish – the power of human goodness, the necessity to behave honourably, to honour other people’s faiths and customs while doing one’s best to help people, to help children – that has ended in this – this darkness.’
No sound at all in the cavern, apart from the light murmur of their breathing.
‘But my life will not be a joke,’ she continued. ‘It will not be in vain if somehow we can prevent this horrible gas from being used against ordinary people. So this is the last request of a woman who is to die: will you, Timur, promise me that, if you survive, you will tell someone good, someone with the power to prevent this gas from being used? Will you, Timur?’
In the distance, the clatter of motorbikes became louder and louder in the tunnel.
‘Will you, Timur?’ she repeated.
Over the sound of the fast-approaching motorbikes, now deafening, came Timur’s voice, loud and strong: ‘I will, Beth, I promise.’
The bike engines stopped and the door to the cavern swung open. One headlight’s full beam remained switched on. Timur watched as the shadow of a thickset figure limped across the light. The Caliph himself had come to see the devil’s work with his own eyes. The Caliph’s shadow was holding hands with a much smaller shadow: Haroun.
The lights came on with a clang, and Timur noted the arrival of Khalil and – last to enter – Hadeed. With a dryness in his throat, Timur noted that Haroun had brought his electric gun with him.
The boy rushed over to the three cages, smiled his iciest smile and plunged the Taser into the back of the neck of the Korean, the electric-blue sparks creating a spider’s web against the iron bars of the cage. The prisoner convulsed in agony and gi
bbered something pitiable in his own language.
‘Where is this kaffir from?’ asked the Caliph.
‘He was left behind,’ said Hadeed, ‘the only one we caught when the other North Koreans ran away. He speaks no English; he is useless to us.’
Again, Haroun prodded the Korean with his Taser. He screamed and this time broke into Russian, a long, soulful sentence expressing his regrets for any wrongs he had committed. The prisoner’s skull, arms and legs stopped their banging and crashing against the cage, and into the sudden quiet Timur found himself replying in Russian: ‘Hush, soon you will be with God.’
‘Timur, what did you say?’ hissed the Caliph.
Timur twisted inside his cage, as much as he was able, to turn to face the Caliph. ‘I told this man that soon he will be with God.’
‘What tongue?’ asked the Caliph.
‘I spoke in Russian, sir.’
‘So you can communicate with him? I was told this man was useless to us.’
‘Russian is my second language, sir, after Chechen.’
‘Ask him a technical question,’ said the Caliph. ‘Ask him how many people one canister of this gas can kill.’
Timur translated the question into Russian. The Korean’s answer was complicated and long.
‘Well, what does he say?’ demanded the Caliph.
‘He says that is a difficult question to answer, because it depends on a number of factors, including the delivery system and the nature of the target, in particular the density of the population. So, if one were able to release the gas at a controlled rate in a closed room, like a concert hall, with no easy access to fresh air, then you could kill hundreds in one go. Technically, if you administer the smallest dose of gas to the maximum number of people – and this is an impossibility – then each canister could kill one hundred thousand people.’
The Caliph clapped his hands with joy.
‘What is his name?’
Timur discovered that his name was Mr Zhang.
‘Release him.’
The guards cut the plastic handcuffs and unlocked the padlock holding the cage door in place. Zhang was so stiff they had to lift him out. He tried to stand up and fell over and stayed down, gripping his thighs, trying to squeeze some life into muscles that had gone dead through lack of use. Meanwhile, the Caliph inspected the stack of sarin drums, the chemical suits and the gas masks with a look of satisfaction. He barked a series of commands in Arabic, and the guards picked up the cages holding Beth and Timur and began carrying them into the gassing hut.
‘Sir,’ said Hadeed, ‘if we spare the Korean but execute Timur, we won’t be able to communicate with him. Timur is the only one of us who speaks Russian and Arabic fluently, and he is a capable engineer.’
‘But Timur is a traitor, sir,’ Haroun piped up. ‘He freed the three moderns.’
When the Caliph spoke, his voice was so soft it could have been a girl’s: ‘Haroun, my boy, we have a traitor on our hands whose voice could be useful to us. What would you do?’
‘The traitor must be punished for his crimes against us,’ said Haroun, his face suffused with piety. ‘Timur’s voice is useful to us, yes, but not his eyes. Let him be blinded.’
‘Khalil,’ barked the Caliph. ‘Deliver our mercy to the prisoner and let all our judgements be as wise as this one.’
Child’s play for a man of Khalil’s strength to blind a prisoner trussed up in a cage. Timur did his best to make no sound, but the moment his second eyeball was mashed to a useless pulp he let out a shudder of pain. Haroun clapped, excited.
The Caliph barked an order, and Khalil went over to Beth’s cage to carry it into the gassing hut. As it was lifted, Beth started to sing:
‘Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me . . .’
Khalil placed the cage in the hut facing the observation window, but there was a problem sealing the door. Timur would have solved the problem in an instant, but he was sightless. So Hadeed and Khalil had to fuss over the locking bolts while still she sang, her voice not wavering once, a thing of beauty, echoing in the cavern.
‘I once was lost but now am found
Was blind but now I see . . .’
Timur sat in his cage, his hands still cuffed behind his back, his muscles locked in the agony of enforced stasis, his eyeballs gone, blood and jelly dribbling down his chest, but his heart beat with pride that he had known this Beth, who could go to her death with such raw courage. The door was closed, shutting off her song.
Beth would have died like the others: her muscles jerking in violent, incoherent spasms, pink foam bubbling out of her eyes, nose, mouth and ears, then her face falling deathly white.
The Caliph watched in silence, then his face lit up with a wintry smile. ‘This is a most excellent weapon.’
Unbidden, inside Timur’s head, came the lines:
I am in blood
Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
‘Timur,’ asked the Caliph, ‘what was she singing?’
‘A song of forgiveness, sir. A Christian song.’
The Caliph walked through the steel door out to the tunnel proper in absolute silence. The Caliph’s motorbike was a Harley, taken from the home of an Iraqi general in Mosul. The Hisbah who drove it opened the box above the rear wheel and took out a black abaya, black gloves and a black facemask. The Caliph donned them and sat on the back of the Harley, with Haroun sitting in the middle. The guard switched on the engine and the Harley roared along through the tunnel and out into the light of day.
To anyone watching from a mountaintop or a video feed seven thousand miles away in Colorado, they would only make out a motorbike, a rider, a child and a woman. They could only be an innocent family on the road.
DAMASCUS, SYRIA
It stopped, as suddenly as it had begun.
Once you’ve heard the distorted sobs and squawk-box yelps and popped howls of a man being tortured through a malfunctioning public address system until they stop or he’s dead or his vocal cords give way, your life changes. The sounds of agony are imprinted on your mind, forever.
Joe sat with his back against the wall, the cell so deep below ground he could feel the air pressure suck and pop in his inner ear. It was as if he were in a tomb. The only light was a dagger’s slash under the door from the corridor beyond. To smother the sound of a fellow human being subjected to monstrous agony, Joe had his hands over his ears, but the noise – piercing, intense, ethereal – got through. That was, of course, their purpose. Joe didn’t know how long the victim lasted before he stopped making any sound. It was probably ten minutes. It felt like ten centuries.
Time slipped in the tomb. Joe had no idea how long he had spent in the darkness. He feared that if he spent much longer without seeing daylight, he would go mad.
The white noise of the loudspeakers was killed with a loud click, and the tomb fell into silence. This, something Joe had begged for, when it came, bore down on him more horribly than the screaming. Physical pain is one thing, but the agony one’s own mind invents, the agony of what might be to come, is fiendishly worse. And the heft of the silence intensified his fear.
The cell was very deep underground. No natural light, no rays of the sun penetrated it; no sounds from the outside world, no car engines, no car horns, no dogs barking, no children playing. What sounds you could just make out were muffled, gagged, suppressed: a soft thunk might be a cell door slamming in the distance; a tick-tack, tack-tick, footsteps coming towards his cell, then receding into stillness. Only the screams could be heard at full volume.
His mind’s ear still echoed to the sound of the man in endless agony. The fear that they might do to Joe what they had done to the screaming man was so strong he felt he could eat it.
Coming down the corridor, the click-clack step of a guard, but alongside that the soft shuffle of a prisoner, barefoot. Joe craved company, the solace of another human
soul. Would they walk past his cell, as they had done so many times before? His dislocation from humanity was nigh on complete. No one had spoken to him. Every now and then, the guard – Joe had baptised him Mr Click-Clack – and a second person, a man, some kind of doctor or medic, would arrive at the cell door. Mr Click-Clack would throw a blindfold at him, which he would put on. Then, in Arabic, the guard would command Joe to lie on his belly with his hands behind his back. Only then would they enter. The medic would cut his bandages, dab his wounds with sour-smelling and extremely painful antiseptic wipes and then re-bandage him. Then they would leave. At the start, Joe had asked questions: Where am I? What is the charge against me? When can I see a lawyer? Neither man had said a word. If Joe became too insistent, Mr Click-Clack would bring down a cosh on his arms or legs. Once, with Joe not getting the message, the guard smashed the cosh against the base of Joe’s spine with such force he feared he would never walk again. From then on, he asked no questions.
The silence was eating up his sanity. They were passing Joe’s door . . . Oh God, how wonderful. The door was unlocked and in they came. Joe heard the prisoner being pushed forward, the door slamming then locked, then Mr Click-Clack clack-clicking away until his steps dissolved into quiet. In the distance, Joe made out, or thought he made out, the suggestion of a door slamming shut, of someone weeping, in another direction, of a sneeze.
The newcomer began to shiver uncontrollably, and then he started to moan to himself. In near total darkness, one’s other senses – touch, hearing, smell – explode into a capacity you would never have thought possible. The new man stank, of shit and piss and blood and cooked meat, like kebab, so much so Joe could feel himself gagging. The smell was too disgusting, and Joe found himself vomiting, his stomach muscles in spasm. Eventually, the retching stopped and Joe cleaned himself up with a damp, smelly rag.
‘Good morning,’ Joe whispered.
Nothing.
‘Or should I have said good evening?’
Still nothing.
Then a light, soft murmuring in Arabic, verses of the Quran. Joe cursed silently to himself. He had had enough of religion to last him a dozen Paradises and then some.
