Escape from Baghdad! (40 page)

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.”

“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.