“The men of sand?”
“The sandmen.”
“The sandmen…” Bronson sounded less than thrilled as he fiddled with his watch “…fuckin’ sand fuckin’ with my watch.”
“We haven’t seen anybody…” Letitia pointed out.
“We’re taking that house—” Jason pointed to a large, two story home recessed behind a towering mud wall. “Bronson, Letitia, you two stack on me.”
“Fuck that,” Letitia told him. “I’m staying here.”
“I’ll go,” volunteered Ahmed.
“Nah, Ahmed,” Bronson told him, “you stay with the boy.”
“No, I go.”
“Ahmed,” Jason asked the translator coolly, “you up to this?”
“…you should stick here, Ahmed, main. When the shooting starts, this gonna be the safest place.”
“He’s good,” Jason assured Bronson, thinking of the way Ahmed handled himself on the gun range. “He can take care of himself.”
“Aight.” Bronson looked away from his watch. “We gonna lay some 203 down on that house?”
“No.”
“No. We just walk in, let them spring it? That it, Jay?”
“Let ‘em spring it, let ‘em bring it. That rhymes. Don’t steal it.”
“Steal nothin’ from you.” Bronson scoffed. “We go in, we find them motherfuckas waitin’,” he didn’t sound amused, “tell me then what?”
“Then,” Jason repeated Bronson’s words from earlier, “we get strong with them niggas.” The corners of Bronson’s mouth turned up.
The targeted house was set well back from the street, behind twenty foot high mud walls. An ornate, brass gate in the wall hung open, granting access to an inner courtyard replete with fruit trees. The three men leap-frogged through the gate, each rushing forward a few yards, taking a knee behind the flimsy cover of a date tree, covering the next man into the courtyard.
They repeated this bounding tactic to the front door of the house. Jason scanned the windows, each secured. Ahmed was behind him, Bronson across from them on the opposite side of the doorway. The door, like the gates into the compound, was ajar.
Jason knew how to clear a house. They’d practiced breaching techniques in urban warfare training and he’d done enough of the real thing in the field. He knew his instincts would hold him back if he let them. Caution wasn’t the way here. They had to be in and out of the rooms fast, pure confidence and speed, or they’d be giving the enemy the time he needed to vanquish them. He flicked the Surefire flashlight mounted on the side of his M4’s barrel to life.
He held up three fingers of a gloved hand. On me, he mouthed, one, two—
Through the doorway, across the tiled floor of a vestibule, rooms branching off either side and a stairway turning a corner above. The white light beams of their flashlights jerked over the walls and floors and up the stairs. Jason ignored the steps, bee-lining it to the room on his left, going low through the open doorway, scanning the room—an overstuffed couch, scattered cushions, woven rugs, a television with some video equipment hooked up to it, light filtering in from the slats blocking the windows. He cleared the room, spying no other entryways than the one he’d taken.
Bronson had secured the room on the right of the vestibule while Ahmed guarded the stairwell and the hall that stretched further into the house. Jason signaled the interpreter to stay put. Bronson followed him down the hallway, deeper into the home, entering first one room and then another, each furnished, all empty of life.
After they had checked the first floor they did the same for the second and returned downstairs. Ahmed was kneeling in front of a video camera, its wires snaking across the floor into the side of the television.
“Ahmed,” cautioned Jason, “careful.”
“It’s not a bomb.”
“How you know?” asked Bronson.
“I know.”
“How you know?”
“I have had experience with these types of things.”
“Bet you have.” Bronson wasn’t sure if Ahmed meant he’d had experience with video cameras or bombs. He looked at his wrist. “Damn.”
“What is it?” Jason asked him.
“Nothin’. My watch actin’ funny, that’s all.”
“Mine too…” Ahmed looked up from the video camera.
“This thing’s seen better days…” Jason looked down on the smashed video camera. He’d be surprised if Ahmed could get it to play.
“Onzor!” Ahmed voiced triumphantly as the television screen came to life. Static was followed by a grainy image, the camera jerking around, abruptly focusing and pulling back.
“What…?” Bronson looked up from his watch.
The frame tightened on two kneeling figures, a boy and a man. The child was black and shirtless and stared off camera at someone defiantly.
“Ma hatha?” Ahmed’s question trailed off.
Assault rifle barrels and the lower torsos of pajama-clad men crowded around the two. Whoever was filming the video had no idea what they were doing—the picture lurched and lost focus as Jason, Ahmed and Bronson watched—but the audio worked well enough. The men around the two jabbered on in Arabic.
“What are they saying, Ahmed?” Jason never took his eyes from the screen.
“That they are ‘traitors’ and ‘infidels’…” Ahmed sounded like he knew what was coming next and it wasn’t going to be any good.
“Main—they gonna cut their heads off, aren’t they? I don’t want to watch this shit. Fast forward, Ahmed.”
The video sped up and ran by, the events unintelligible. When Ahmed took his finger off the button the white man was pleading with his captors in Chinese and the black kid was shrieking, his head pulled back, shoulders held down, a long bladed knife sawing through his neck.
“Awh!” Bronson turned away from the screen. “Fast forward, Ahmed! Fast forward dammit!” Ahmed rushed to comply. “Yeah, I do not need to see this shit. Fuckin’ animals.”
“Wait!” Jason stared at the television screen, the scene scrolling past, indecipherable. “Wait!”
“Nah, Jay, I don’t wanna see this.”
“Play it, Ahmed. Play the fucking thing!”
A third man was kneeling beside the second. The black kid’s legs were in the picture, lying to the side. The third man tried to get up and was hammered over his head with a rifle butt.
“He’s one of us…” Jason whispered. The man wore camouflaged fatigues. The insurgents were barking and the camera jerked away from the kneeling men—panning quickly over an insurgent whose mouth and nose were hidden under a garish purple scarf—to Kalashnikov toting men pushing back against buckling window shutters, dust puffing between the slats.
The camera focused abruptly on the white man speaking Chinese. There were tears in his eyes and he was begging. Hands clasped either side of his head, holding it steady, pulling it back, exposing his neck. The bloody knife entered the frame.
An explosion off camera and the image jumped, the camera yanked back. AK fire, screams and muzzle flashes, a flurry of sand rushed in, swirling, obscuring the scene, then static, the end of the video.
“The fuck did we just see?”
“I don’t know.” Jason looked at Ahmed, who appeared as puzzled and distressed as they. “Let’s get out of here.”
They left the house and the video behind, fanning out across the fruit orchard, back through the ornate gate, gathering at the Stryker. There was still no sign of the sandstorm that had chased them into the city.
“Tell him to shut his goddamned mouth,” Letitia was saying of Areya, who appeared panicked. Ahmed knelt down in front of the boy and took him by the shoulders, listening to him.
“He says we have to get inside quickly…” Ahmed translated. “The sand will be coming soon.”
“Tell him to relax,” instructed Jason. “Bronson?”
“That house there. Good view from the roof.”
“Okay.” The two men trotted away from the Stryke
r, towards a house opposite the compound they’d just checked. What they found inside further disquieted them. The entrance—a thick, heavy wooden door—was unlocked, but several of the doorways inside were bricked up, barring access. Every window they found was similarly blockaded. On a lark, Bronson tried a wall switch and they found the house had electricity, naked bulbs hanging from the ceilings. They switched their Surefires off.
The doors and windows were sealed in such a way that a single path was left open to whoever entered. Funneling them through a corridor, it passed a stairwell leading to the second floor, opening into a small room with a folding table. This small room, in turn, gave to another short hallway which ended in a final room, where an overturned table rested beneath a torn out staircase. Wires were stapled to the walls of the passageways, terminating behind the table under the stairs.
Jason went and looked behind the table. He let out a low whistle when he saw what the wires were connected to. They’d been lucky the house hadn’t blown sky-high when Bronson turned on the lights.
“Haji central,” Bronson apprised.
“Yeah, so where is he?”
Returning to the small room with the folding table, they stared down on the rubber banded wads of cash and foreign passports, on the suicide vests in various states of repair. A perfunctory search of the second floor yielded little. Every door off the one functional stairwell was cemented and bricked off. The stairs continued up to the roof.
“This place ain’t cool, Jay.” Both men were thinking of the wires and their terminus behind the table.
“Yeah. Let’s get everybody and head across to that compound.”
Voices sounded from the front room.
“Why aren’t you guys out in the Stryker?” Bronson asked Letitia as he and Jason stepped into the room where the others gathered.
“Why don’t you go and sit in that thing in the middle of the fucking street?”
“Woman, you got a mouth on you…”
Areya was sitting in a corner with his legs drawn up to his chin, whispering to himself. “What’s he saying?” Jason asked Ahmed.
“He wants us to close the door.”
Daylight shown outside the entrance.
Jason followed Bronson out into the road. There was no one in either direction.
“You know this house ain’t safe, Jay.”
“I know that.”
“I know you know. So, what you wanna do?”
“I don’t know.”
When Jason stepped back into the house, Letitia was complaining. “Okay, is my watch the only one that’s acting like this?”
“Like what?” She immediately thrust her wrist under his nose. He wrapped his hand around her lower arm and forced it down to a suitable viewing distance, eyeing her distastefully as he did so. The minute and hour digits of Letitia’s watch were cycling from 0 to 9 wildly.
“Mine started slowing down out on the road.” Bronson had entered the house. “Its froze now.”
When Ahmed and Deirdre both agreed that their watches were off, Deirdre asked, “What about you, Jay?”
Jason pulled his camo sleeve back, showing them his wrist. He didn’t have a watch to consult.
“Shit don’t feel right…” Bronson stood in the doorway with a clear view of the Stryker, the compound walls, and the street. “…the eternal now…” his voice trailed off, but not before Jason startled from the recognition.
“He said something to you, too, didn’t he? Kaku said something to you about time?”
“I don’t want to talk about that man.”
Areya was trembling in the corner.
“What’d he say to you?”
The light bulb in the ceiling flickered.
“Jay—I said I don’t want to talk about him. You heard?”
Outside, the daylight was fading.
“Nine million vibrations…” Jason remembered. “Nine million vibrations of the—”
“Jay!”
He joined Bronson at the door. The sky had blackened as a wave of sand rolled in, a thunderous booming echoing from somewhere within its mass.
“We got to get this door closed,” Jason told Bronson before shouting to the others: “Check all the windows again!”
“What is it?” screamed Letitia.
“Sand storm!” Bronson yelled back, he and Jason pushing the door shut. Metal bars set beside the door fit into brackets mounted on either side of the frame. The light in the room flashed on and off.
“Jay—what they trying to keep out?”
“Letitia, help me recheck this floor!” Jason disappeared into the interior of the house.
“Fuck you!”
“Bitch!” Bronson cursed her, his back to the barred entrance. The door started to shake as wind on the other side pummeled it. “What’s the matter with him?” Bronson referred to Areya sobbing in the corner. Ahmed went to the boy.
They waited anxiously as the winds and sand whipped the door from the outside. Jason returned. “There’s a door to the roof. Like this one.” He indicated the braces.
As the winds howled outside, the door tremored, the light bulb flaring and dimming. Ahmed sat next to Areya, speaking to the child, gesturing with his hands. The boy looked up at the light, which blinked before burning steadily. His breathing slowed and he swallowed, composing himself. There was no mistaking the look on his face: relief. The door had stopped moving.
47th Iteration
“What just happened?” asked Bronson.
“Sand storm,” Letitia answered scornfully. “Duh.”
Jason pressed his ear to the door. “Let’s open it.”
He and Bronson lifted the steel bars and laid them aside. The door opened, revealing the street, a street neither man recognized. The Stryker had vanished. The compound across from them was gone, replaced by tightly packed two story cement houses. Electrical wires hung over the street between wooden pylons.
“What is it?” Deirdre joined them in the doorway. “Oh…”
“People!” Bronson closed the door, barring it again.
“I didn’t see anybody.”
“I did, Jay.”
“Something isn’t right.” Deirdre frowned down at her watch.
“What is it?” asked Letitia. “What did you see out there?”
“The Stryker gone. Where the fuck’d it go, Jay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Them houses, Jay. Those weren’t the same houses as before.”
“Bronson: we gotta stay calm here, right?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Come with me.”
“Where are you going?” Letitia narrowed her eyes.
“Keep cool down here, Letitia.”
She scowled back at him.
Jason and Bronson took the stairs to the roof. At the door, Jason dislodged the metal bars he’d set in place. The stairwell ended in a pillbox-like structure atop the roof. Stepping from the stairwell, both men removed their sunglasses. A concrete parapet lined the edge of the building.
“This is…Jay this is…”
“Yeah.” There was no need to say anything else. They looked out across the roof of the house they sheltered in. Before, the house had been a few blocks from the edge of the city. Now they stared out across a vast sea of roofs and power lines, ensconced in the middle of the city. It was dawn outside.
“Something happen’ here, Jay.”
“There’s your people.” Jason and Bronson stood at the waist-high barrier, looking down into the street. A half dozen men and women walked the street. They wore an assortment of dark robes, cotton shalwar kameez, and dishdashas. They went about their business, a burka-clad woman with her arms around a covered basket, a turbaned man with a briefcase passing the area where the Stryker should have been.
“Listen.”
“Yeah, Bronson. I hear it.”
Gunfire sounded in the distance.
“What’s that sound like to you?”
“AKs.”
“Think its Fleegle and them?”
“Who’s to say.”
“I think it’s them.”
“They don’t seem too bothered.” Jason referred to the men and women below.
“What you want to do, Jay?”
“I’m gonna head down there, see if I can talk to someone.”
“You serious?”
“Yeah. You stay here. Keep your eyes open.”
“You sure you know what you doin’?”
“No. So you better keep those eyes open.”
Downstairs, Jason ignored Letitia’s questions and exited the house. The few passersby did double takes, startled by his appearance. They turned and hurried off in the opposite direction. One old man spotted Jason, calling out to him. Jason waved. The old man hobbled down the street towards him, shaking the raw piece of wood he used as a cane, hailing Jason as he came.
“Marhaba,” Jason greeted, touching his right hand to his chest, lips and forehead, stepping away from the house as he did so, into the street. He had a big smile on his face, which he wasn’t feeling, but he tried to look friendly and hoped he’d made the right gesture. A machine gun echoed in the distance.
Winded, the old man paused momentarily when he reached Jason, huffing, staring down at the ground.
“You okay, grandfather?” Jason reached out to take him by the arm but the old man swatted his hand away and started hurling invective at him in Arabic.
“What—what—whoa—whoa—whoa, old man, chill!” Jason shouted over the man’s protestations, thinking his decision to come out here onto the street might not have been a shrewd one. The old man continued to scream at him, poking him in his armored chest with an arthritic finger. “Come on, old man—stop this shit!” Jason stepped away, putting a few feet between himself and the old man. “Stop it!”
“Jay!” Bronson yelled from the roof a split second before AKs started to chatter. A rash of bullets kicked dirt and sand from the ground around Jason and the old man. While Jason ducked and weaved, the old man cried out in agony, his body popping and locking, gouts of blood erupting from his chest and stomach. Jason raced back to the house, M4 spitting three-round bursts back at the men shooting at him. The old man slumped lifeless in the street.
One of the gunmen wilted, caught in the fusillade from Bronson on the roof and Letitia in the doorway. Jason made it to the house, rounds chasing him, walking across the wall—a mist of concrete filling the air—forcing Letitia to duck inside behind him.
Warlord: Dervish Page 14
