War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

  “Yeah, it’s really close,” he said again.

  * * *

  Montauk sat across from Captain Byrd and handed him the photos of the building. He’d marked an X over the door that Ali Gorma had identified as the apartment of Abdul Aziz.

  “You trust Gorma?” Byrd asked.

  “He was lazy,” Montauk said. “But I doubt he’d lie to my face. And someone clearly did a number on him. Gorma says it’s the same guys who killed Aladdin. We have to do something, sir.”

  “I hear you. Can’t lose any more translators. We oughta hit back.”

  “I asked Olaf to search the Connex for a battering ram,” Montauk said.

  “What’s the scheme of maneuver?” Byrd asked.

  “Third squad goes in, Second on perimeter security, First in reserve in the alley.”

  “Work up a full brief,” Byrd said. “I’ll approve it—if the intel is any good. I ate a mouthful of shit last month when Third Platoon booted a family out of their house at gunpoint—including Grandma and baby—because intelligence said they were AIF. I don’t want to get burned again.”

  “Understood, sir,” Montauk said.

  “You find me some corroborating intel, and we’ll do this, Montauk. Until then, no dice.”

  42

  * * *

  The barber brushed lather across the stubble on Luc’s chin and upper lip.

  “Mustache, no?” the barber asked. It took a few back-and-forths of pointing and head shaking to convince him. He gave a slight shake of his own head at the end and dutifully took the straight razor to the long stubble on Luc’s upper lip, the barber’s own luxurious mustache twitching slightly as he did so.

  Tricia was transfixed by the music video playing on the barber’s screen—in it, an Arab pop star in a flashy suit sang to rows of hot video-girls wearing hijabs and dancing on a set of stairs in a mansion. It was a weird combination of Biggie and Bryan Adams, but with an Arab/Islamic sensibility, or at least with girls who covered their heads (but not their midriffs).

  “I heard back from my friend at the IPS,” Luc said. “They loved the mortar piece and want to see more work from us.”

  Us? You mean from me? It was like he was pretending he’d never chastised her for visiting the polls, or for wanting to hear the military viewpoint at the press conference, without which her article would have been little more than a snapshot of a mortar in someone’s backyard. “That’s great,” Tricia said. She had been keeping one eye down the hall, where Bravo Company soldiers could be seen trooping across G. H. W. Bush on the way to the dining facility.

  “And I found another lead this morning. A family that was booted out of their house by the Army. Bad intel, it seems. Thought they were insurgents. We’ll try to track them down this afternoon.”

  She’d had a few false alarms when stocky young white men with short brown hair and Army uniforms passed through her field of vision. This one looked like him, though. Yes, it was him. “I’m going to the dining hall,” she said. “Meet me in there.”

  She wandered past the vendors and fell into line a few people behind Mickey. He signed the roster in silence and continued toward the buffet. A moment later, she signed and was let through, wondering what kind of contract Halliburton had that they were feeding her for free. She caught up with him at the tray dispenser. “Hey, let’s talk. I only have a couple of minutes.”

  For once he dispensed with arrogant witticisms and followed her straight back to a side table before hitting the buffet line.

  “You get my e-mail?” Montauk asked.

  “Yeah, so you think it’s the same guys who killed your last translator?”

  “Maybe. That’s why I need your help.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “About Aladdin?”

  “You know that’s not his name.”

  “No, that’s his name. Was, anyway. And that guy over there is Muhammad Ali. So is that guy. Seriously. Anyway. He was a student at Baghdad University.”

  Montauk handed Tricia a picture of Gorma and his injuries, then an image of Aladdin he’d printed off the black-and-white LaserJet in the TOC. It had been taken on his first day of work for the company database of possibly useful Iraqi portraiture. He was standing up against the T-wall of the CP with a bit of the checkpoint map jutting into the frame behind him. The grin he wore was not quite familiar to Montauk; it looked like his usual grin, but there was something more hesitant or tremulous about it around the eyes. Probably because it had been his first day.

  “He looks nice. Why did they kill him?” Tricia asked.

  “Because he was nice. Because he worked for me.”

  “That’s it?”

  “What? Yeah, that’s it. I actually can’t tell if you’re fucking with me. You are aware of the insurgency, right? Car bombs? Dead bodies everywhere?”

  “Excuse me for being curious,” Tricia said. “And stop being a jerk. I can take these to Yasmin and see if she can ask around. You have a suspect?”

  “We do.”

  “It would help if you gave me a name and address.”

  “Can’t. I need an independent confirmation. If you give Iraqis some guy’s name and ask them if he’s a terrorist, they’ll be like, ‘Yeah, sure, whatever.’ ”

  “That’s what you think Iraqis are like?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Aladdin, too?”

  “Well, no. Look, if I give you a name and the confirmation comes back yes, I can’t evaluate that. But if you can somehow get a name that independently matches the name I got, that suggests it’s real.”

  “Okay.”

  “Independent confirmation.”

  “I got it.”

  “Obviously, I’m not counting on this. I just feel like you probably have more access to the locals than I do.”

  “Ya think?”

  “Stop breaking my balls, all right? I’m fighting for justice here. That’s not even a joke, I’m being serious. I’m fighting for fucking justice.” As soon as he said it, he felt proud and moral in a way he hadn’t until that moment. Maybe it was Tricia’s presence. But he still wanted to drive a spike through the killer’s eye socket. That was okay. Vengeance and justice weren’t mutually exclusive.

  Tricia was struck by his seriousness. When she’d met him in Boston, he’d seemed to be some sarcastic wit, bopping through life.

  They noticed Luc’s appearance at the table. Tricia slid the photos into her pocket. Luc said, “Tricia. And is it . . .”

  “Mickey.”

  “That’s right. And how do you know each other again?”

  Tricia looked at Montauk. “He went to college with my roommate in Boston.”

  “So you went to university. And then you chose to come here.”

  “I was ordered to come here.”

  “I thought you were all volunteers.”

  “We volunteer for the military, in my case the reserves, but deployment orders are based on what unit you’re in.”

  Tricia had also assumed that Mickey had volunteered for Iraq. She noticed his face beginning to darken and wondered if he disliked Luc because of a rivalry over her or because he was annoyed at the line of questioning. She felt fatigued and wanted nothing more than a long, cool shower followed by a long sleep in a cool, soft bed with the crisp New England night outside her walls. She’d lived like a princess back in Boston, in comparative terms. Her insulation and airflow and midshelf sheets and coffee press were items of luxury never seen or perhaps imagined by the vast majority of humans in history, and probably, no, definitely not by the majority of people in the world today. And yet that was her default, what she’d grown up in. Tricia forced herself to focus.

  “. . . I don’t fight for Bush. We follow Bush’s orders because he’s the president. If Kerry won, we’d be under Kerry.”

  “An
d if he was elected unconstitutionally?”

  “So we should all break out the UN Charter or whatever and give it a good read, and if we decide in our wisdom that the war is unlawful, then we should just turn in our stuff and go home?”

  “Why not?”

  “Gee, I never thought of that. I’ll go ahead and spread the word, maybe we’ll have a mass desertion. Then we can storm the White House, oust that charlatan cartoon villain, and install a military junta.”

  “This is a serious question. If the war isn’t lawful—”

  “Well, on that note, I’m gonna grab me some chicken parm or whatever they’ve got. When we get to D.C., I call the Lincoln Bedroom. Trish, a pleasure, as always.”

  Tricia gave him a quiet wave as he stalked off. Luc turned to her with a smile that was halfway sad. “I don’t quite get it. Does he not understand these issues or does he just not care about them? I usually assume it’s a little of both, but he’s been to university.”

  “Maybe he thinks it’s complicated.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it’s so complicated. I think people pretend that it’s complicated so they don’t have to make the hard choices.”

  It sounded like something she had said a dozen times. She still believed it, mostly.

  * * *

  Three days passed. The usual potshots. The usual VBIED scares. Another anonymous body in the river. Then, finally, Montauk received an e-mail from Tricia saying she had something for him. He hopped out of the Millennium Falcon after his shift and went straight to the Al Rasheed. He strode over Bush’s face. The sheen of sweat exposed to the air was chilled far below his body temperature, though he was cooking sous vide inside his armor and fatigues. Molly Millions bounced gently against his chest as he walked past the elevators and barbershop and into the Al Rasheed’s café.

  He found Tricia sitting at a table sipping a Turkish coffee and smoking a Gauloise. “Pretty liberating, right? Smoking right here in the hotel?”

  She exhaled. “You can do it in France.”

  “It’s banned on dirigibles these days.” He rested Molly against the booth and began taking off his armor. The Velcro made a loud tearing sound as he opened it up, and he actually felt a gust of hot air escaping as he slid out of it and exposed his soaked uniform blouse to the air-conditioning. She was wearing a tight tank top under a khaki safari-type jacket.

  “How’s everything going?” she asked.

  “It’s kind of dragging right now, to be honest. Pretty boring.”

  “That’s good. Isn’t it?”

  “Found another body under the bridge, so that was something. It’s getting harder and harder to get the cops to deal with the corpses. Maybe you and Luc could set up a side business in riverine corpse disposal.”

  She glared at him.

  “Sorry.”

  “Is this a good place to do this?” she asked.

  “No. There’s a place upstairs. C’mon.”

  Tricia left five bucks on the table and followed him back down the hall to the elevator bank. Montauk looked around warily but didn’t see anyone he knew. The door opened to an empty elevator, and he followed her inside, his nerves picking up at her proximity. He dropped his armor and hit the button for the seventh floor. He was acutely aware of how desperate he was for her and how easily that desperation could cause this whole operation to fall apart. Operation Horizontal Blonde. Operation Urgent Sex. Just the scent of her in the enclosed elevator was making his heart pump faster. The old tragicomic paradox about girls and action was that the more you needed it, the less likely you were to get it. A little tension was a good thing, though. The seventh floor was empty when the doors opened. Down the hall and to the left, to the infamous Room 710. It was unlocked and relatively clean. He ushered her in and locked the door behind them. Fly casual.

  “Did this place get bombed or something?”

  “It got hit with a rocket last year when the place was full of CPA types. It was kind of the opening salvo of the insurgency. There was an Air Force colonel in here at the time.”

  “Did he die?”

  “Something like that.” From what Montauk had heard, the Air Force colonel had been distributed across the walls and ceiling.

  A tarp was duct-taped over the window where the rocket had come in and detonated at the foot of the bed. The wallpaper was torn up, but they’d replaced the bed for some reason. Montauk piled his gear against the wall and took out a green Army-issue notebook. Inside was a folded paper where he’d copied down several of the incident reports in the neighborhood. The sound of large truck engines wafted through the rippling window covering. Tricia sat down on the edge of the bed beside him and took the paper.

  “I translated some of the Army-ese for you. It’s probably a patois you should learn a little of, anyway. Do you get what the grid squares mean?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Because the thing is, if you take a bunch of military grid squares and just give them to Luc, he’ll probably assume I gave them to you. Or at least that you got them from some US Army source.”

  “Right.”

  “So I think our options are: one, you get ahold of your GPS, plot the points, and turn them into street intersections; or two, I could plot the points myself, but that will take me a while, and you might start getting day-old intel.”

  “And we have to stop meeting like this,” she said.

  “Of course.” He looked at her lips, then back at her eyes. “It ain’t free, though.”

  She shimmied out of the safari jacket and retrieved a scrap of paper from a front pocket. Montauk noted that it was not necessary to take off the jacket in order to reach that pocket. Her breasts were cupped snugly in the green tank top. He peeled his eyes away reluctantly to check the proffered paper.

  Abdul Aziz, Babil Apartments, #8, Karada Kharidge. That was the place. He stared at it for a few seconds. Holy shit. The analytic side of his brain was in a brownout due to the power demands of the animal side. “So I just gave you the pictures and names of the translators, right?” Montauk asked.

  “Yeah, that’s what we went off of.”

  “So who came up with the info?”

  “I went through Yasmin. She asked around. I didn’t pry too much.”

  “Okay, wow.”

  “Is it right?” Tricia asked.

  Independent confirmation. The raid was on. They were going to get that scumbag. He looked back at her. She was the picture of soft youth, a cool mind and driven spirit, padded out with just the right dimensions . . .

  “Yeah,” he said, and folded it back up, smoothed it out, and buttoned it into his own chest pocket.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked, putting a hand on his chest.

  He pushed some hair back from her forehead and slipped his hand behind her neck and kissed her. She gave a soft moan and kissed him back, draping her arms around his shoulders. “My God, you’re soaking wet!” she said.

  He laughed, unbuttoned his sodden uniform top, and threw it over his gear. He started unlacing his boots. “You know what? I’m going to give my dogs a rinse.”

  “What?”

  “Sweat is one thing, boot sweat is another. Just give me a sec.” Montauk’s feet were absolutely swollen and soaked. He stumbled over to the bathroom, peeled off his socks, threw them in the corner, and quickly rinsed off his feet in the sink, balancing awkwardly on one foot and then another. He had some kind of tropical foot rot going on for sure. He turned around, and to his huge relief, there she was, on the edge of the bed, smiling at him.

  Tricia wondered if this whole thing wasn’t some elaborate plan to get her alone. She almost hoped it was. She peeled off his soaked undershirt and kissed him again. “Oh, you have these,” she said, fingering his dog tags. “That’s classic.”

  “Yeah, you’re in a movie right now. It’s black-and-white.”

&n
bsp; “It’s more complex than that,” she said as he pulled the tank top off her and kissed her along the lacy tops of her bra cups.

  A knife edge of Arabian sunlight slid across the pillows from a gap in the tarp. They had followed each other to this place, and their previous drunken hookup was picked up and burnished to a shine and repackaged in a filigreed box of fate or kismet. Tricia looked up at the gouges in the ceiling where the insurgency began; below that, Montauk’s face and muscled chest floated over her own, the warm steel of his dog tags sliding across the space between her breasts. They were making stories about themselves. Tricia knew this was happening even as it was happening, and realized that she didn’t care.

  43

  * * *

  After Montauk had provided independent confirmation of the address and name, Captain Byrd had given the go-ahead. From the halogen bath of the checkpoint’s generators, the raid party walked into darkness. Baghdad was in a continuous brownout, and central Karada’s streetlights had been mostly offline since the invasion. They spread out into the usual urban march formation—two columns, one on either side of the street, with about ten yards between each soldier. The apartments still had some juice, and a soft glow came from a few of the windows, although most of the city was long asleep. Each soldier did a quick swivel to either side every so often, scanning. Jackson pointed his muzzle at an upper story, and Montauk followed the line of sight to a silhouette in a dimly lit window: a middle-aged man, mostly bald on top, illuminated by a floor lamp with a red fringed shade. Montauk nodded to Jackson in acknowledgment. No one said a word. The man did not wave. When they had gone four blocks south, Jackson looked back and Montauk waved him left. Their column crossed the street to join the other column, and the raid party slipped into Mansour’s alley network.

  The temperature was in the high eighties Fahrenheit, and the air smelled of sweat and gun oil and smoke from homemade stoves and trash fires and something else, spicy and faintly putrid, that Montauk imagined as some kind of complex Iraqi stew. They fell silent as they approached the Babil Apartments. Montauk motioned for 3rd Squad to stack up along the front porch of number 8. Ant was at the front. Montauk took his position at the rear. He fingered the safety on Molly and ran a glove over her heat guard. If Abdul Aziz were waiting for them inside, there was a good chance Ant would catch some bullets. Montauk had told himself back in training that he’d never order troops into a building like this—he’d just call in an air strike and sift through the rubble. So much for that plan.