Escape from Baghdad!

by Saad Hossain

  “He does what he must,” Dagr said softly. “Same as you or I.”

  “Not the same,” Amal said. “Not the same. In the alley last night, I believed. I saw his finger on the pin, and I believed, more than in any bastard god, that he would kill us all; that he would rather die than take one step back.”

  “Kinza is not suicidal,” Dagr said. “He just wants to see the world end.”

  “Then maybe he will be a hero before the end,” Amal said. “And rid us of our enemy.”

  “Who is this Lion of Akkad?”

  “No one knows. Six months ago he just appeared in the night,” Amal said. “There were random murders, thefts. Some say he works for the Jaish Al Mahdi, here to settle scores and collect debts.”

  “The Mahdi Army does not collect rent.”

  “We know,” Amal shrugged. “What can we do? Some say that he has a brother in the JAM. Whatever the truth, we asked them for help and received none.”

  “The police?” Dagr said. Even to him that sounded dubious. No one in Iraq went to the police. That was like asking to be extorted.

  Amal snorted. “This man is a killer. He strikes suddenly, in the darkness, knocking on your door, holding a knife to your throat, a gun to your head. No one knows where he eats or sleeps or anything. In the day, poof! He is gone, like a ghost.”

  “He comes only at night?” Kinza, woken up now, joined them with a faint stir of interest.

  “Mostly after the evening patrols,” Amal said.

  “How often?” Kinza asked. “Once a week?”

  “Sometimes more or less,” Amal shrugged. “There is no pattern. In the beginning, some of us tried to ambush him. He took a bullet in the chest and kept on walking. Two days later, he cut a little girl’s throat. Last week, he threw my neighbor down the stairs. Broke his legs for no reason. We don’t even know what he wants. I think he’s one of those American serial killers like they have on TV.”

  “Excellent tactics,” Dagr said. “Terror in the night. Random violence. Swift, excessive retribution. Sort of thing the Spartans used to do to the Helots to keep them in line.”

  “You said you shot him?” Kinza asked. “Did he bleed?”

  “It was dark,” Amal said. “We couldn’t see. He kind of stumbled but then kept on coming. We scattered.”

  “Kevlar,” Kinza said. “Our boy has body armor. Does he use a gun?”

  “He carries a revolver,” Amal said. “But he prefers to use his knife. It’s the size of my arm, almost like a sword. And his fists. He has the strength of ten men.”

  “Ten Shi’as or ten Americans?” Kinza asked, straight faced.

  “What?”

  “Just saying,” he said. “It might make a difference. Americans are very strong.”

  “Knives are psychologically more frightening than bullets,” Dagr said.

  “He wants to stay silent,” Kinza said. “He’s using the darkness and the fear of these people, the sudden violence, to keep them off balance.”

  “No one knows what he looks like?” Dagr asked.

  “He wears a hood,” Amal said. “And he’s fast, silent. One minute you’re sleeping peacefully in your bed and the next you’re on the floor with a knife in your eye.”

  “Ok, we’re getting a picture here,” Dagr said. “This Akkadian works alone. He’s well armed and wears Kevlar. Probably some kind of military training, too.”

  “You left out super strength and super speed.”

  “You mock us,” Amal said. “But you have not faced him yet.”

  “He slinks around at night picking on infants and the elderly,” Dagr continued. “He wears a hood. He wants to protect his identity. This suggests that his position with the JAM is not official, at least.”

  “So, professor, how do we find him?”

  “We could always wait,” Dagr said. “Camp out here. He’s bound to come sooner or later.”

  “Yeah, maybe in a month,” Kinza said. “Not a good option. Plus he will find out about us soon enough. I’m guessing he lives somewhere in this neighborhood.”

  “Then?” Amal asked.

  “He hunts at night,” Kinza said. “So must we. We’ll take to the streets. Give us a map of the area he covers and all your volunteers. There is an old way to hunt wild game. Let’s see if we cross paths with any lions.”

  The darkness in the streets was a smear of tar, a discombobulating colorant turning harmless daylight noises into the snickering of hyenas. Lights were absent, windows bricked or boarded mostly or shuttered at least against this most deadly hour. The Joint Forces stayed far away in their reinforced boxes; this was not their half of the day, not the time for pretend patrols and breaking down empty fortresses. Nor the time for Mahdi Army men to parade in their black scarves and AK47s, holding aloft their pages of calligraphy. This was the business end of the hour, where the real predators of each side mingled, open season for the ones in the know, springtime for men with guns, when the harmless cowered in their beds and hoped to hear nothing.

  It had seemed a fine plan to Dagr, sitting cramped and safe in Amal’s fantasy office two days ago. Now the darkness sucked everything out of him, and he was a walking husk, hands jammed into his jacket pocket to stop the shaking. Kinza was ahead, sure-footed, wolfish, snapping into place like the last piece missing from the jigsaw street. Dagr worried at the ancient gun in his pocket, the snub muzzle poking through the silk lining of his coat, fretting that it would go off and cripple him, that he would shoot the wrong person.

  They did not belong here, and their convoy of three was disturbing the routine of the regulars. Dagr felt men shuffle close in the darkness, veering off in tangents after a sniff, split second decisions demarking victims and victimizers. Dagr too fell infected with their mindless aggression, heard whimpers and ragged wet tears from far corners, felt with shame some of the exhilaration of walking the night with a gun.

  They were following tiny pinpricks of light, a system Dagr himself had designed. Men and women tired of the depredations had risen up in this meager rebellion. Small lamps hung in high, street-facing windows, staggered in a mathematical pattern that Dagr had memorized. The idea was simple. Watchers lined each of these windows. Whoever recognized the Lion of Akkad would put out their light. If he moved away, they would turn their light back on. The blink in the pattern would follow the Akkadian throughout the night, hopefully leading them straight to him.

  The first few nights had been unsuccessful. The tracking system had been refined, the watchers reinforced, his probable routes calculated. It worked well on paper, but humans were fallible. Watchers fell asleep or were too scared to act fast. The advantage of the terrain was also with the Lion, as myriad routes became available at night, sudden shortcuts that allowed him to cut the pattern in half.

  In the hour just before dawn, luck finally favored them. Weary with nerves, they were resting against a shattered streetlamp when a sliver of light abruptly disappeared from the horizon. Five minutes and another light blinked off, this time closer, barely half a kilometer away. It was unmistakable. Kinza was on his feet, moving swiftly, a quick word behind him, telling his companions to fan out across the street. Dagr felt every neuron firing simultaneously with something akin to terror. The colossal stupidity of this plan smashed the breath out of his ribs. He fought the urge to slink back, making his legs move forward until he was parallel with his friend. Behind him, to the left, he could hear Hamid make similar, reluctant steps, well back. The torturer had little intention of taking part.

  The blinking came closer, closer, until he could imagine the entire street lined up and watching, judging. A few hundred meters more and he could almost see the Lion of Akkad, a tall man in a dark coat, an indistinct blur, ensconced no doubt in his Kevlar, a one man tank. In spite of himself, Dagr felt his steps faltering, his stride shortening until he was barely mincing along. Kinza broke ahead, slinking along the walls, two, four, then ten meters away. In some glint of moonlight he actually saw the face, hawk like nos
e jutting out, a black scarf wound around the rest of his features.

  Kinza crouched into the hollow of a doorway winking abruptly out of sight, even as Dagr continued edging forward, his mind frozen into a kind of panicky inertia. A flicker of darkness, a slight bend in the street, and suddenly the Akkadian was gone, disappeared in a breath, leaving Dagr standing paralyzed. He began to edge his gun out, and it caught in the lining; a second later he was face to face with the Lion of Akkad, yellow eyes glinting with feral madness.

  A blur of motion and the man was spinning into him, the blade of his knife caught in Dagr’s sleeve, buttons popping, slicing a shallow groove along his forearm. Dagr bulled forward, desperately trying to grapple, his knee giving away even as he heard Hamid’s pus-ridden voice shouting, “Down, down you fool.” Guns barked in close range, blinding and deafening him. A heavy blow knocked him sideways as his hands clawed across the Lion’s greatcoat, and Dagr fell away useless. He saw Kinza leaping out of the darkness, a split second of struggle before he was thrown back, skittering through the street.

  Dagr wrenched himself up on one knee. The street was empty, silent once more. Hamid lay curled nearby, cradling a mangled hand, his fingers blown off by a soft revolver shell. The Lion of Akkad was gone.

  A pall hung over their makeshift command center, crowded now with the scents of the triage and the gloom of their co-conspirators.

  “Do you believe me now?” Amal was aggrieved.

  “You’ve failed,” a nondescript shopkeeper cried. “And now the Lion of Akkad will start killing children again.”

  “We have to run!” A truck driver said. “To Shulla! I’m getting my truck.”

  “It did not go as planned,” Dagr said. His body was a mass of cuts and bruises.

  “You did nothing, you fool,” Hamid snapped. “He shot my fingers off.”

  “The man is strong,” Kinza said.

  “And fast,” Dagr said. “He kind of just appeared in front of me before I could clear my weapon.”

  “You’ve made everything worse,” Amal said. A dozen men rumbled in agreement. “He will become more brutal now. Our lives are worth shit.”

  “He’s human,” Kinza said. “He bleeds. I shot him in the leg. The blood on the street is not ours only.”

  “So we have some time,” Dagr said, thinking again, furiously. “He won’t come out wounded. Not when he knows he’s being hunted.”

  “You boys should just leave,” Amal said. “I curse the day I stopped you.”

  “Yes,” Hamid hissed into Dagr’s face, so close that he could smell the sweet rot of his wounds. “Why the fuck are we wasting time with these yokels? You’re supposed to take me to Mo…”

  “We’re going nowhere,” Kinza said. “I said I’d kill this man, and so I will.”

  “He will become cautious now,” Dagr said. He glanced at the watchers. “And I doubt the grid will catch him out again. Even if he doesn’t figure out how we tracked him, he’ll take steps to counter us. We must devise a new method.”

  “Oh, what’s the use if you do catch him?” Amal asked. “He nearly killed the three of you.”

  Kinza stared him down. “Do you think I can’t take a hit? I never walk away from a fight.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Look,” Dagr said. “We won’t catch him on the streets again. We have to find out where he hides. We have to attack him in his lair, while he’s still wounded.”

  “There’s a reason he works these particular streets,” Kinza said. “He moves on foot. He must live within this zone.”

  “We could send the watchers to canvass the neighborhood,” Dagr said. “Look for something suspicious, blood stains perhaps?”

  “Get real. You are in Ghazaliya,” Amal said. “Which door doesn’t have blood on it?” He seemed almost proud of it.

  “We need to narrow the area down,” Kinza said.

  “Two things struck me,” Dagr said slowly. “When he was beating the crap out of me, I felt a backpack under his coat. He was carrying something heavy. And he smelled funny. I can’t describe it.”

  “That would be Hoj’s candlesticks,” Amal said. “Pure silver. He was saving them for his grandsons.”

  “You said he’s a serial killer.”

  “He does whatever he damn well pleases,” Amal said.

  “What difference does it make? Often he takes random things,” the shopkeeper shrugged. “He has to eat, I guess.”

  “It might make a big difference, Amal,” Dagr sat up straight, weariness disappearing. “A huge difference! Quick, what else has he taken?”

  “He took a gilded statue from Ibrahim,” the truck driver said. “And he took my iPod.”

  “Look at the map,” Dagr said. “I need exact times and locations for each of his strikes for as far back as possible. And most importantly, I need to know what he took each time.”

  Amal looked bewildered.

  “It’s simple mathematics,” Dagr began scribbling formulas on the map, cursing how rusty he was. “We know he’s on foot, he only hunts in this area, and he works only at night. We calculate his route each night for as far back as we can, data given by his victims. Now we have his average speed. Even if he constantly varies his schedule, we’ll find him hitting an average number of victims per night. Given his starting and ending hits, we might be able correlate where he lives. But every time he takes something extra, there will be a deviation. There are a finite amount of candlesticks he can carry, after all. I predict every time he takes something heavy, there will be an unexplained lag. In effect, he will go home to put away his loot before moving onto the next house.”

  Dagr beamed at them. They stared back slack jawed.

  “I didn’t understand a word of that,” Amal said.

  4: BLACKBOARD RAGE

  DAGR HAD APPROPRIATED THE OFFICE ENTIRELY NOW, RUNNING data, fine tuning his equation. The computer was old, the software almost obsolete. It had taken Dagr half the day to jerry-rig it into doing what he wanted. Amal had fixed a blackboard on the wall, unearthed pieces of orange chalk. It helped him think, the board covered in symbols, calmed him into something like functionality. Men and women were dropping by all day, feeding him bits of data, suspicious until they saw him, his head and arms bandaged, chalk dust on his clothes, something fey in his eyes. They treated him like an idiot savant, talking to him slowly, old women pressing bits of fruit into his hands, taking on faith entirely that he was doing something useful.

  The chalk brought him intensely happy memories. The lull of an empty classroom, Dagr perched on his desk, making furious equations all over the board; a grad student walking by, stopping to watch him with gold flecked eyes, a smile crooking her mouth, lighting up a face so achingly earnest. The thin perfume alerted him, and he swiveled, almost falling, falling. She took the chalk and corrected his mistakes, still smiling, at some point getting on the desk, edging him aside, until she arrived at a point she could not reach on tiptoes, and Dagr grabbed her shirt, and they nearly fell over laughing.

  That much and no more and he stood bereft, staring, sliding slowly into dismay, awaiting the inevitable reconstruction of reality with its soul-killing loneliness. Blackboard, chair, table, computer, doorframe. Autistic fumbling, as his brain tried to fit them into something palatable and failed repeatedly, and the grayness seeped in. They slipped into his day, these moments, in the most unreasonable of times, pieces from some elusive mirror world, a past that he was unsure had ever existed at all. Surely that classroom stood somewhere, still, chalk dust and laughter.

  He saw Kinza approaching, eyes averted, reality tethering him back in.

  “Coffee,” he said, offering a cup. Neutral.

  “I’m alright,” Dagr said, “just light-headed.”

  “Any luck?”

  “It’s working,” Dagr said. “Slowly. I have some patterns. Too many assumptions to be sure.” He knew there was an impatient crowd outside, held in check by Kinza’s face alone.

  “I got word
from Shulla,” Kinza said. “They are looking for Hamid. We cannot stay here long.”

  “We can be ready tonight, perhaps,” Dagr hesitated. “I have an area narrowed down. An abandoned building, I guess.” He pointed to the board, “This equation approximates his speed on foot. The map is plotted with all his stops on any given night. The program catches any big gaps in his schedule and posits where he could have gone during that time. Data from a large period of time narrow these options. Taking into account first and last stops in each night, along with times, and we get a picture.”

  “Your arm is bleeding,” Kinza said. “You don’t need to come tonight. Hamid and I will be sufficient.”

  “No,” Dagr said, fighting back a temptation to agree. “No, you can’t trust Hamid. We should stick together.”

  “I am not afraid of Hamid,” Kinza said.

  “He could shoot you in the back,” Dagr said. “There’s a look in his eyes, something like religious fervor, except he is certainly not a man of God. Sometimes I think he’s completely insane.”

  “Even madmen know fear.”

  “Kinza, do you think there really is any gold in Mosul?”

  “Probably not.”

  “What will we do there, then? Provided we get there at all, of course.”

  “If there’s no gold, at least we can sell Hamid,” Kinza said.

  “I’m sure our good captain has something in mind for us.”

  “Hamid will betray us somehow,” Kinza said, amused. “Then I will dismember him, and you’ll probably try to find some reason to keep him alive.”

  “No happy endings for us I suppose.”

  “Look around. No happy endings for anyone. Not for a long time. Not ever again, perhaps.”

  “What makes us go on like this, I wonder?” Dagr said. “Day after day, this whole damned mess.”

  “Rage. Vengeance.”

  “God should permit us mass suicide,” Dagr said. “Then we could end it once and for all. Leave a clean slate for whoever comes after. No more fathers and brothers to avenge. No more mosques to burn. No more checkpoints. No more rifle butts and blindfolds in the night.”