War of the Encyclopaedists

by Christopher Robinson

“C’mon in.” Captain Byrd was sitting on his cot in the small office. He looked sleep-deprived but alert. “Shut the door. Have a seat.” Byrd popped out a can of Copenhagen, stuffed a plug in, and held it out to Montauk.

  “I’m good, thanks, sir.”

  Byrd was already leafing through his green Army-issue notepad. “All right, so. I stopped by Intel today at Warhorse. They’ve been putting the question to your guy from the raid.”

  Montauk blinked. “What’d he say?”

  “Says he’s never heard of Aladdin. But he does know Ali Gorma. He says—this is coming from the interrogators at Brigade, by the way—he’s known Ali Gorma for a long time, and they’ve had differences. For a long time. That’s what he says, that he was basically framed.”

  “Aziz could be lying, sir.”

  “Could be. But it’s out of our hands now. Brigade’s going to keep him detained for the time being to see if anything else pops up. They don’t have their own detention facility, so your guy will be going to Abu Ghraib. They say they’ll let me know if they learn anything, but I’m not holding my breath.”

  Montauk imagined himself bursting into tears.

  Captain Byrd looked back down at his notebook for a moment. “Did your other source confirm the link to Aladdin?”

  “No, sir. Just the name and address of the guy who assaulted Gorma.”

  “So all we know about Aladdin is that Gorma said it was the same dude. You know you need to take that shit with a grain of salt, right, Montauk? I mean, you’ve been here for a few months.”

  “Roger, sir. It’s a pretty thin lead.”

  “Yeah, it is. Which leads me to another thing. Are you putting prices on people’s heads?”

  “Sir?”

  “I heard you had a reward posted for the guys who smoked Aladdin. That true?”

  “Yes, sir, it is. Probably a mistake, I realize now.”

  “How much?”

  “Five hundred.”

  “Dollars US?”

  “Roger.”

  Byrd spat thoughtfully into his plastic bottle. “That’s an interesting choice,” he said. “Do you think that’s part of your mission?”

  “Well, sir, force protection is part of our mission, as is nailing terrorists, so anything that would help accomplish those missions seems like an implied task. So finding Aladdin’s killers is kind of part of the mission, yes.”

  “Montauk, let me tell you what your mission is. Your mission is to secure the southern entrance into the Green Zone. It’s to ensure that the Green Zone doesn’t get blown up by anything coming through your checkpoint. It’s also to accomplish that while taking care of the troops in your platoon and following my orders. Which, by the way, means informing me when you intend to do something novel like post personal rewards for information leading to the death or capture of a terrorist.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I don’t want to stifle your initiative. You’re all about finding ways to accomplish the mission, and that’s good. You’ll be a good company commander someday. But this reward shit is dumb. It’s just going to lead to a bunch of Iraqis coming up to try to get your cash.” He spat in the bottle again. “But maybe the real issue is that it makes you look like a weirdo in front of your platoon. You know what most guys read around here? Maxim.”

  “Uh, hooah?”

  “You’ve got a bunch of highbrow shit coming in, like your book review newspapers. And a big old copy of The Canterbury Tales. It’s good that your troops think you’re a smart guy. That’s going to give them confidence. But you need to understand how you come off to your platoon. They need to know that you’re not making decisions affecting their personal health and safety based on criteria from some cuckoo-cloud Montauk-land. And what I think is that your reward scheme comes across to your guys as a weirdo obsession. That you’re thinking about revenge rather than your mission, or that you’re somehow more attached to your translator than your men. Understand what I’m saying?”

  “Roger, sir.”

  “So, with that in mind, shit-can the reward. Any questions?”

  “No, sir.”

  “All right. Dismissed.”

  Montauk slung Molly over his shoulder and headed out the door.

  “And go read a copy of Men’s Health or Low Rider or something,” Byrd said.

  • • •

  Thomas handed Montauk a letter as he reentered the FOB. Mani. He tossed it on his desk and collapsed in his cot. He couldn’t imagine reading anything right now. Or ever. So Abdul Aziz had said he was framed—either he was lying or Gorma was. But Tricia’s translator had confirmed Gorma’s statement . . . He thought about sending Tricia a quick e-mail asking for more details. He should have asked back at the hotel. There were a thousand things he should have done, should be doing. His parents were getting divorced? It was all so exhausting. If he concentrated hard enough, maybe he could will his brain to liquefy itself and drain out his ear canals.

  * * *

  The Rabbit passed the flatbread shop and the miniature Eiffel Tower to the right. The ride was silent, save for Luc giving their driver, Adan, directions a few times. The machine-gun barrels in Mickey’s towers gazed impassively out to the city, tracking neither the Rabbit nor anything else. Yasmin was meeting them at the house. Babil Apartments, number 8. If Tricia had given Mickey solid intel, then they were about to knock on the door of an insurgent stronghold, which was insane. That, or Luc’s suspicions were right. Tricia desperately wanted to talk to Yasmin in private. But she wouldn’t get the chance.

  “Pull over here,” Luc said. “This is it.”

  Yasmin was waiting for them out front. She had on her business face.

  • • •

  Tricia stood behind Luc as he knocked on the door. Yasmin introduced them when the door opened, and a woman nervously invited them inside. A soapy bucket was on the floor, which was still half covered in boot prints. Tricia had her pad open and was taking notes, but she was only half able to focus on what Yasmin was translating.

  “She say they all come inside, all of them.”

  “How many?”

  “Maybe ten.” The mother was somewhat agitated, talking loudly. The husband stood in the corner of the kitchen, looking tense and vaguely embarrassed.

  “She say they were yelling at her and spilling things in the house onto the floor. These were the black soldiers. They were saying that she and her family were terrorists, and the white soldier pointed his small gun into her face. Then they found her son. Her son is Abdul. Abdul was hiding and the soldiers found him and tied him up and took him away.”

  Luc took a photo of the younger son’s ransacked bedroom. Tricia dutifully jotted the details in her notepad. She was skeptical about the whole gun-in-the-face thing. And the fact that it was only the black soldiers who were trashing the place.

  “She say her son knows Ali Gorma.”

  “Who?” Luc said.

  Tricia’s mind swam to the surface as something sounded the alarm. She looked up to see Yasmin confusedly looking at her before looking back to Luc.

  “Ali Gorma,” Yasmin said, “the translator for the American checkpoint that was attacked. Ali Gorma say Abdul attack him up because Abdul is a terrorist. But she say Ali Gorma knew Abdul and that they not like each other, and this is why Ali Gorma say Abdul is a terrorist. She say Abdul is not a terrorist.”

  Luc’s eyebrows were knitted together. “You’re saying the reason that the Americans came in here and took her son is because their translator told them he was a terrorist?”

  “They were trying to be careful, Luc. He asked me to help confirm the suspect before they went in,” Tricia said. “Yasmin, tell him. She confirmed the name.”

  “Yes. I know Ali Gorma from Baghdad University. English department.”

  “Wait, you know Ali Gorma?” Tricia said. “Personally?�
��

  “Go on.” Luc’s voice was flat.

  “I ask Ali Gorma myself who attack him. He says Abdul Aziz.”

  Tricia dropped her pen. Oh God. Mickey had asked her to confirm the suspect Gorma had fingered, and Yasmin had just asked Gorma. They’d taken away this woman’s son. Based on what? Someone who didn’t like him had said he was a terrorist.

  “Unbelievable,” Luc said. He shook his head at the wreckage of the apartment.

  Yasmin was speaking in soothing tones to the mother. Tricia covered her gaping mouth with her hand.

  45

  * * *

  Montauk swung open the door to the commander’s seat, heavy with makeshift steel plating, and squeezed into the Millennium Falcon. His mind was far away in time and space, at his old family home, a decade ago. His parents’ home. Playing with his dog, Hadrian. Wrestling in the living room before dinner, dinner when Hadrian would lie at his feet, passively begging for a chunk of meat loaf. These memories were a tourniquet on his arterial rage—rage born of accumulated stress, the smell of death in his clothes. There were no answers here. Was Gorma lying or was Aziz? Had they sent an innocent kid to Abu Ghraib? How was he supposed to act around his parents now? Separate holiday visits? And that letter from Mani. Her and Corderoy. Seriously? Fuck, fuck, fuck. Hadrian did this funny thing where he’d lift one eyelid to see if you were watching him sleep or pretend to sleep. He’d died the summer Montauk was in Rome, the summer he met Corderoy.

  No one in the truck said anything on the way out to the checkpoint. They unloaded as usual. He and Olaf got with 3rd Platoon’s LT for the news of the day—there was supposedly a suicide VBIED threat against the checkpoint, the attack to take place in the next twelve hours. Montauk didn’t really listen; this was a warning they’d heard about fifteen times now, each time being the time it would happen for real, except that it never happened.

  He watched the traffic loop around the circle, sticking a plug of Kodiak in his mouth as his mind shot back to Tricia and her e-mail. She was freaked out about something. Said she needed to meet soon. If it had to do with their intel exchange, which was likely, then it was probably bad. Maybe her translator was receiving death threats, too. Montauk had led her right into the sights of some demented terrorist serial killer, the Translator Eviscerator. He imagined laughing at that, but his face wouldn’t comply. He reached under his eye pro and massaged his eyelids. Maybe it was nothing serious, nothing about Abdul Aziz. Maybe Tricia had just gotten some shit from her douchey photog for fucking Montauk instead of him. Maybe Luc had slapped her, really hit her, even. Given her a black eye. Montauk could make him answer for that. He imagined braining Luc with the grip of his pistol, making a nice red welt right where his widow’s peak topped out.

  The nine wouldn’t do the best job, though: you really needed a rifle. The first hit probably wouldn’t kill Luc; he’d collapse concussed on the ground, and Montauk would have to start bashing his skull in just like that, with the Karada blacktop as the anvil. He could almost see Luc’s limbs flopping and twitching in their Benetton business casual as he brought the rifle down again and again, caving in his eyeholes, hitting him so hard that his skull split open lengthwise from the shock.

  • • •

  “LT!” Monkey’s alto voice opened a door into Montauk’s daydream. He hesitated at the portal as if half awakened. He smelled the air outside again.

  “LT!” Monkey had skipped onto the lip of the T-wall and was approaching him with a paper bag.

  “What? What do you want?” Montauk spat.

  “I got it, man.”

  “You got what?”

  “I got the head, LT.”

  “You got the . . .”

  Monkey held up the shopping bag as if offering some kind of sacrifice or divine gift. Inside was a plastic paint bucket, and placed inside that, with some wadded tissue around it, was a human skull.

  “Jesus.” It was darker and yellower than Montauk would have thought. Green, almost. He supposed he was imagining skulls that had been bleached in some way. This one had not been bleached. He did not want to touch it, but he did anyway, lifting it a little out of the bag. Some of the surface of the interior, he could see, had dark gunk clinging in the crevices and rough parts, like old dried barbecue sauce in a pocked wooden bowl.

  “Where did you get this? Don’t answer that. Did they search you?”

  “What, man?”

  “Did the guys on Routine Lane see this?” He looked up and over toward the entrance of Routine Lane. They were busy mirroring a car.

  Montauk peeked into the bag again. There it was. A human skull. He’d heard about a guy from 1st Cavalry who’d gotten in deep shit for keeping a toe he’d found a block away from the wreckage of a blown-up Opel. Rumor had it, he’d tried to hide it from his CO, but he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. A skull would be a lot harder to conceal than a toe, and a lot harder to keep quiet about. But it was the ultimate souvenir.

  “Look, kid. I’m not taking this. I don’t need this. I’ve got enough fucking problems right now. Seriously.” He dropped the bag at Monkey’s feet.

  “One hundred bucks, man. You said, LT.”

  “I don’t have a hundred bucks on me.”

  Monkey’s face screwed up. “You don’t have it?”

  “I don’t have it on me. Look. I’ll bring it tomorrow. But I’m not taking the skull.”

  “I give you the head, you give me one hundred bucks, man!” The kid was almost whining. He looked like he was about to cry, which was a shock considering he mostly acted like an eleven-year-old warlord.

  “All right, Christ! I’ll take the damn skull. Just shut the fuck up!” Montauk snatched up the bag.

  Monkey recoiled as if he’d been smacked by an abusive father. “Hundred bucks, man,” he whimpered.

  “Tomorrow. I promise. I’m sorry, Monk. Didn’t mean to yell at you.”

  “Why you so mad, LT?”

  “A lot of reasons, buddy.”

  “ ’Cause Ali Gorma lie to you?”

  “What? When did Ali Gorma lie to me?”

  “He fall off his motorcycle, man. He break his arm, and, his arm. And his face.” Monkey dragged his hand across his face, where Gorma had the bruising and lacerations. Holy shit. Gorma’s injuries did look a lot like road rash.

  “Yeah, man,” Monkey went on. “He fall off his motorcycle in Dora. Now he want his job back. Everybody knows.”

  “He said he got beaten up by terrorists,” Montauk said lamely.

  Monkey shrugged. “He a liar, man. He Ali Baba.”

  Montauk could feel it coming. He was going to rage on someone, and he didn’t want it to be Monkey. “Leave,” he said. “Right now.”

  * * *

  As soon as he walked into the Al Rasheed, Tricia could tell he was furious, almost maniacally furious. He didn’t say a word. The elevator doors closed. He leaned back against the wall as they began ascending. He did not look at her except out of the corner of his eye. When the door opened, Montauk stepped out and began walking down the hall toward the death room. Tricia hesitated, then followed him, having to almost jog to keep up. “Mickey,” she said after him. He looked back and held up a wait finger, then opened the door, beckoning her inside.

  She had asked to meet, thinking she would apologize, hoping he would comfort her—as horrified as she’d been with herself, Luc had been even angrier. He’d said he was sending her home. A huge overreaction, all because she’d been tangentially involved in providing information that had led to a US military “atrocity.” More like a “fiasco,” and hopefully one they could remedy. But it was pointless to argue with Luc. He was probably e-mailing her degree advisers at Harvard right now to cancel her independent study. She had imagined meeting with Mickey and having a sensible discussion about how to fix this. But when she saw him standing there, breathing through flared nostrils, all
she could summon was anger. Anger toward him for being angry with her, for not admitting that he’d fucked up, too.

  “You have to let that kid go!” she said.

  “I would love nothing more than to let him go. But I can’t.”

  “He’s innocent.”

  “Yeah. I know!” Montauk spat on the floor. “Ali Gorma fell off his motorcycle. He was lying to me when he fingered Abdul Aziz. You confirmed that name.”

  “We’re not the secret police. What did you expect?”

  “Where did you get your information?”

  “I told you, I had Yasmin ask around.”

  “Tricia! Who told Yasmin that kid was a terrorist?”

  “How was I supposed to know that Yasmin would just ask Ali Gorma?”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? I told you why I needed confirmation. Because I didn’t trust my translator! Yasmin’s as stupid as you are.”

  “Don’t you dare blame her for this! You were the one crashing into that family’s apartment, sticking a gun in that woman’s face. You were the one who abducted their son.”

  “I didn’t stick my gun in anyone’s face.”

  “No? You didn’t pull your pistol out? Why would she say you did?”

  “I pulled it out, but—”

  “You pulled it out and waved it at her. Did she have a gun?”

  “No. If she did, we probably would have shot her.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Acting like you hate me!”

  “I don’t hate you.”

  “Because you failed in your little revenge mission?”

  “Yeah, I was trying to nail the guys who killed my fucking translator. Crucify me! I’ve got like three months to find them and shoot them in the head before I board a plane for Seattle.”

  “Jesus, what’s wrong with you? Just get the kid back to his family and stay safe until—”

  “The kid is in Abu Ghraib! I can’t just bring him back.”

  She had to grab on to the wall to steady herself. Her fingers poked into one of the shrapnel holes, and she pulled her hand away. “You took him to Abu Ghraib?”