Escape from Baghdad!

by Saad Hossain

  “Up?” Dagr asked.

  “No, through,” Kinza said. “Act like a tenant.”

  They moved by ways into a narrow unlit passage, which disgorged them to a rear entrance. There was a lock on the door, a small combination number Kinza shattered with the butt of his K-Bar. The noise chimed like a bell but no one came to investigate. There were faint shouts coming from outside and sporadic gunfire. Dagr looked back, his heart pounding. There was no one. No one was coming after them.

  “Hamid and the Druze must have engaged,” Kinza said. “The Mukhabarat don’t know we’re here.”

  36: BIRDS OF PEACE

  “THERE THEY FUCKING ARE!” AVICENNA SNARLED. THE CAMERA screens painted his face green. “It’s the damned Druze. Get him!”

  In the bustle of guns, sandaled feet, and a barking hodge-podge of orders, Yakin was able to slink into a corner by the CCTVs, fiddle around with wires until everyone cleared out. It was not his intention to get shot up by some Druze.

  His eyes lingered over the bank of TV screens, marveling at the thoroughness of the Old Man. The explosion had knocked out some of the cameras. He rewound the tape. The RPG explosion looked unreal on black and white film. He rewound some of the other cameras, trying to look busy in case anyone came to collect him. He could hear Salemi nearby, marshalling his troops.

  The cart caught his eye. He had eaten kebab rolls from there just last night. Men were eating there, strangers. Two of them looked familiar. They were bulky, their clothes puffed up. Yakin froze the image in his mind. There was a partial profile of one. Something clenched in his bowels, he pissed himself in a shock of hot urine. He kept staring, his mouth open, frozen in terror. It was Kinza. No doubt about it. He was inside the cordon.

  Dagr blundered around the corner of an ancient sagging gray tenement, the walls stained with flaking paint and water damage, reeking of old urine. It gave him a strong sense of déjà vu, this nightmare haze of violence that seemed to persist around him. It painted everything in garish smells, of cordite and barely suppressed vomit, of the iron mist of sprayed blood, the bare lucidity of moving forward through smoke and chaos. Men came the other way, ill-fitted suits of Mukhabarat sweating in the heat, dark patches around their armpits, guns, and moustaches, inspiring an ingrained fear in him.

  It was, he reflected, why he was so useful—that instinctive flinching that marked him out as sheep, the perfect civilian cowering that could never be feigned, his pant-wetting terror made the Mukhabarat smile inside. They shoved him aside, they glowered and cursed at the cloud of maladroit bumbling that permeated him, but they let him pass. And in his wake came the dark wolf, almost invisible in his gliding edge, the other half of the coin skating along the most unlikely shadows.

  Three times, they ran into soldiers after that, distracted men with hard faces. They noticed Dagr, tried to stop, went down in fans of dark blood. Kinza with a knife was deadly. It was quiet work, and if they left bodies in their wake, it was too chaotic to tell.

  “Close,” Kinza said, when they were within sight of the house where the Old Man lived. His smile was genuine, the simple pleasure of a man contemplating his heart’s desire.

  “They’re too close,” the Lion said. Never in the unending years of his existence had he been this desperate. “We’re pinned down.”

  They were on a rooftop behind a water tank, a solid iron one with a full skin of rust, an old school tank of the kind unavailable now, so heavy that it must have been carried up piecemeal at the time of construction and assembled on site. Mukhabarat came from two sides, pinning them with rifle fire. There was a way to the next building, a sprint across open space and a two foot jump, a corridor now covered by gunfire.

  “I will make it,” Hamid said.

  “It’s stupid,” the Lion felt a sudden loss of courage. “It’s mad.”

  “We will be dead in minutes,” Hamid said. “If I must die, I should take some of them with me.”

  “You speak with bravado for a torturer.”

  “Before that, I was a soldier in the Republican Guard,” Hamid said. “It is true, I am assassin and torturer both, I killed in the night, and I cared nothing for innocence or guilt. I make no excuses, violence has been my life. Let it be said, however, that I died under the open sky, fighting with my comrades.”

  “I have struggled so long against the Old Man,” the Lion said. “To die thus…”

  “Down there is a man who will finish what you should have done years ago,” Hamid said. “Stay here if you like. You have lived long, but you’ve not understood that sometimes, it is important to show good form.”

  He spun around the tank, hands unfurling like petals, two grenades arcing up, catching the light, like two black rooks falling from the sky. Bullets riddled into him and then he was clear, skipping ahead as explosions rocked all around him and his enemies took cover. The Lion looked, astonished, as Hamid barely slowed, leaking blood across the roof, making the jump easily, scattering scarlet droplets behind. He followed.

  The Apache gunship hovered, its Gatling cannon pounding the earth, making a two-story building fold in on itself, its ancient timber and brick frame just disintegrating. The witch Mother Davala smiled around her Cuban and let cigar smoke fill the cockpit. Hoffman tried to see whom he was shooting, but it was too difficult to make out the figures through the smoke. He aimed mostly for people in suits.

  The gunner Ancelloti tried to signal the helicopter and took a bullet in the leg for his trouble. The man he recognized as Hassan Salemi shot him. He crawled away in the dirt into an alley way by the side of an old building. There was a way up and he took it. He wanted to be up on the roof, where the fighting seemed hottest. Plus, the ground was never safe with an Apache gunship in the air, no matter whose side it was on. In reality, the cannons were so addictive that most of the time the gunship ended up killing everyone. He tried to staunch the bleeding with a tourniquet. He was woozy by the time he got to the top of the stairs. He poked his head around the corner and saw Behruse on an opposite roof. The fat man was gesticulating wildly, an AK47 in his hands. They seemed to be at an impasse. Larger weapons were being called for. Eventually, he supposed they would simply blow up the building. Ancelloti decided to take a break and lit up a cigarette.

  Yakin wanted to run away. He also wanted to warn somebody. These conflicting emotions created a deep existential crisis within him, causing him to remain rooted to one spot. Naturally, during a crisis, he watched TV. The cameras showed him insane footage. Hamid on a roof, causing havoc. Some large man beside him, both of them bleeding, armed to the teeth. There was a convergence of Mukhabarat around them.

  Sabeen was leading commandos on another roof, trying to bring down a chopper. The wind was molding her clothes against her body. Her scarf had flown off, her hair was streaming back; she looked ferocious. He felt something like an erection. It stiffened his resolve.

  Halfway out of the door, he thought of the prisoners held captive in the back of the house. The two silent witches, in particular, excited him. He tried to recall whether they were guarded and remembered Avicenna waving all the men out. He did not think the retard from the library would put up much resistance.

  “In a time of madness, God forgives small crimes,” he said to himself.

  He decided to go back up for some sport.

  “We have to go down!” Hoffman screamed. He had stopped firing.

  “Are you stupid?” The pilot shouted back. “Sir?”

  “What?”

  “It is against protocol to land in a combat zone during a fire fight,” the pilot said.

  “See that woman?” Hoffman pointed at Sabeen, who was all too visibly trying to shoot them down. “She carries vital information. Nuclear information, if you get my drift.”

  “What?” The pilot was decidedly unconvinced. “That’s sounds like a load of crap, sir!”

  Hoffman pointed a gun at the pilot’s head. “Take the ship down now, or I’m shooting you under the Official Secrets Act.”r />
  “Dude, are you crazy?”

  “Don’t argue with me, I’m Batman!”

  Dagr cowered against the side of a building, surrounded by debris. He was stunned, bleeding from nose and mouth, choking on masonry dust. He was in this state because the 30mm bullets from the M230 Boeing chaingun affixed to the bottom of the Apache gunship fuselage had ripped indiscriminately through the buildings and populace of the alley. Dagr was unsure if he was hit; the sheer earth shaking power of the bullets and the terrible damage to the street had paralyzed his body to such an extent that he could barely take cover.

  It was, he reflected, no real surprise that he could see Hoffman’s awkward-shaped head through the rapidly dropping helicopter and the crazed grin of Mother Davala, although why she was billowing smoke was a mystery. Perhaps he was delirious from loss of blood.

  It occurred to him to look for Kinza, but he couldn’t spot him anywhere in the wreckage. Eventually the dust from the rotor was sufficiently irritating to make him crawl further into a recess in the side of a building. He found himself in someone’s living room, half the wall and window ripped away by gunfire. There was a television that flickered with static. He sat down in an old chintz armchair and tried to catch his breath.

  Several minutes later, Kinza staggered in through the same hole, face slick with blood.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

  “Resting,” Dagr said. “You?”

  “Cleaning up a bit,” Kinza said. He gestured slightly with his knife. “Mukhabarat guys. Never liked them. Couple of beards too.”

  “Salemi’s or random people?”

  “Does it really matter at this point?”

  “Guess not.”

  “Is that fucking Hoffman?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Dagr said. “I thought I was hallucinating.”

  “Should have fucking known he’d come and fuck things up,” Kinza said. He looked profoundly disgusted. “What’s he doing?”

  “He appears to be trying to give that woman some flowers.”

  “She’s hot.”

  “She’s shooting at him,” Dagr said.

  “Fucking Hoffman,” Kinza said.

  “It must be the wrong kind of flowers.”

  “Are you just about rested up?”

  “I guess,” Dagr looked around the living room. “You want some tea or something?”

  “I had a Coke earlier.”

  “That Apache is blocking the way,”

  “We’ll just have to go around,” Kinza said. “Fucking Hoffman.”

  Avicenna, ensconced in the safe room of his command center, was not having a particularly happy time. First of all, the fuckwit Yakin had deserted his post, which meant the cameras were unmanned. Second, he had pissed on the floor. The room was not very large and poorly ventilated; Avicenna now had to spend the duration of the fight breathing in the shithead’s urine.

  His main concern, however, was the absence of Red Hawk 1 and 2 on radio. The likelihood of both teams manning the eastern quadrant going incommunicado appeared slim. The actual fighting should have been confined to the southern quadrant, where Hassan Salemi had already reported that the enemy was pinned down behind cover and soon to be annihilated.

  He spent fifteen minutes repeatedly flashing them; it was possible that the equipment was faulty, particularly in a crisis. And then he called Red Hawk 3, which was a two-man sniper team on the roof. They were stationary, as much eyes and ears in the sky as anything offensive. Red Hawk 3 also did not answer. He began to feel the first moments of disquiet. It was the Lion, after all, the old enemy who just wouldn’t go away. It was a bit of a relief when Red Hawk 4 answered. He sent them to go investigate.

  Red Hawk 4 consisted of two retired desk workers who had spent most of their careers pushing papers and interrogating mild criminals of dubious intelligence. They wore ill-fitting suits and cheap rubber-soled shoes. The only gunplay they had experienced had been in the firing range during the mandatory practices. They looked more like pigeons than hawks.

  It was not surprising, therefore, that when they saw Dagr sauntering around the vicinity of the eastern quadrant, they did not, at first, find it suspicious. He did, in fact, appear to be the quintessential civilian: clumsy, furtive, ridiculous. Then Kinza slipped in behind them from a patch of shadow, knives in each hand, stabbing up beneath the ribs, lifting the first man damn near two feet off the ground.

  He let the knives go and caromed into secret agent number two, tripping him and ending up mounted on his chest, raining down hammer fists. The nose pulped, the teeth caved in, and then the flailing stopped as the man went limp. Behind him, Dagr was turning over the knife victim, planting his feet against the gurgling chest to try and retrieve the K-Bar. The suction of the chest cavity held the blade firm. In the end, it took both men to pull it out.

  “The worst thing about knife fighting is when it gets stuck,” Kinza said.

  “No,” Dagr said. “The worst thing is being the guy who gets stabbed.”

  Behruse was rather annoyed. The enemy Taha was pinned behind a parapet on a roof but refusing to give. He had slightly higher ground and was thus able to prevent saturation fire from all sides. Salemi’s men were behind him but unable to make the jump due to there being two of the fuckers, both wielding automatic weapons. He had called for the grenade launcher, but the dumbfucks of Blue Raptor 1 were late. Very late.

  It was a bit of a standoff, and while it was only a matter of time before they got off a lucky shot and actually hit the fucker, the amount of noise they were making was a bit of a concern. Sooner or later, authorities would show up. It was with extreme reluctance that he called up Avicenna on his radio, screwing his index finger into his other ear to cut out the noise.

  “Hello. Hello?”

  “What?”

  “Hello! Avi!”

  “Behruse? Where’s your com?”

  “We’re trying to raise Blue Team 1 with it,” Behruse shouted.

  “What!? Where the hell are they?”

  “They were bringing the rocket launcher,” Behruse said. “Listen, Avi, we have the fuckers trapped, and they’re bleeding. I just need the rocket launcher.”

  “What the fuck happened to Blue Raptor 1?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Red Hawks 1,2,3, and 4 are not answering either.”

  “What?”

  “The entire fucking color red is not answering!”

  “That can’t be right, Avi. That’s the whole eastern quadrant.”

  “Five teams are out of communication, you stupid fuck,” Avicenna screamed through the phone. “Get Salemi out there. Someone is fucking killing our men there.”

  “I got the Lion pinned right here, boss,” Behruse said. “I can see him moving around.”

  “How many of them?”

  “The Lion and one other guy,” Behruse said. “It’s the old Republican Guard guy Salemi was looking for.”

  “Is he the man who got Salemi’s son?”

  “Er, no.”

  “Then where the fuck is that fucker?”

  “What?”

  “Where is the fucker who killed Salemi’s son?”

  “Er, not here?”

  “Could he by any chance be in the fucking eastern quadrant killing all our birds?”

  Blue Raptor 2 was a four-man team of Mukhabarat enforcers-turned-gangsters, well experienced in running down miscreants and dealing back alley justice. Each of them having been drummed out of the service for excessive brutality and corruption, they had found shelter under their old godfather, the Old Man known in dark corners as the founder of all things secret.

  Their loyalty was huge, the devotion of desperate men, and if their courage did not quite make up to the same figure, at least they had a numerical advantage. Their approach into the eastern quadrant was stealthy and cautious. Had they been paramilitary or Republican Guard, they would have fanned out and taken flanking positions and tried to reach the high ground. The Mukhabara
t training did not cover urban house-to-house combat, however, and their own training in petty enforcement made them believe that moving in a pack was the safest method of maintaining their advantage.

  The eastern quadrant was marked out as the corner of a dilapidated building that housed a sweatshop making textiles. Having been ordered to make a meticulous search for the intruders, Blue Raptor 2 started on the ground floor and worked their way up, slapping their way through dozens of cowering women and children. They gained entry to the roof by a rusty door and found it covered in wire lines of drying laundry.

  Making their way through these rows of abayas and billowing shirts, Blue Raptor 2 began to feel slightly foolish. There were no signs of the enemy. Rather, it was a peculiarly innocuous night with a three-quarter moon and a slight breeze. Up here the resonance of gunfire was faded and harmless, sounding like distant fireworks. They made their way through the laundry, poking left and right with the muzzles of their guns.

  They had their orders but were not in a hurry. It seemed to them that if the enemy were to be found elsewhere, it would be no bad thing. They had made it all the way across the roof when the leader, upon turning, found his company shortened by one. He opened his mouth to call out when the unfortunate individual staggered into view, pulling down an entire clothesline. His throat was lacerated, a gaping red necktie looking obscene against the whiteness of his shirt.

  Blue Raptor 2 opened fire in all directions, fingers convulsing against their automatic weapons. The laundry was duly slaughtered and the wounded man, who might have had several minutes longer to live, found his existence cruelly shortened by a rip of bullets. When they had exhausted themselves, the leader raised his hand and looked around. They had hit nothing. The enemy had disappeared, like a ghost.

  The Lion could take a hit. Hamid had to give him that.