Jihadi (42 page)

Mike Mazzoni was never prosecuted. The events at Wafa’s house accrued instantly to unidentified wayward insurgents, their motives obscure and suicidal.

Having spun around in the flatlands, having run out of gas, having radioed in for help, the man who sped away from the burning house that held the bodies of women found himself retrieved, sobered up and returned to active duty. He stank. Even after a shower, there was a strange smell on him. His colleagues picked it up. Metal and gasoline and something else maybe, something you didn’t want to know.

A big part of the reason Mike Mazzoni was rushed back into duty as quickly as he was – despite still being technically eligible for bereavement time – was the trouble bubbling up in the village of D—, near the base where he was stationed. The ragheads were getting antsy out near the supply road, according to Captain X. Boots on the ground were in order.

The New Imam’s Community Leadership Council, mindful of the village of D—’s recent history as the site of the disgraceful flechette assault masterminded by the kafireen, requested all available brothers to assemble at that village. Their presence was necessary to prevent the imminent bulldozing of the structure where the rape of the nation itself had taken place. A grand and obedient march from the sick heart of the city followed, on the urging of a heavyset woman who led it largely by scowling.

She rode in a dark vehicle, an American convertible, driven by a
Bearded Glarer. She faced backward in it and grimaced at the crowd as it edged forward. From time to time she shouted at them.

Evidence had already been removed from the site of the atrocity. Word of that much had reached her. What remained was subject to the judicial proceedings of the Islamic Caliphate, and not to be tampered with or destroyed, not by the Americans or anyone else. Kafirs, she had heard, had sworn to build a Christian church on the spot.

The brothers from Islamic City arrived and reinforced the local brothers who had been staring down the bulldozer.

Well ahead of the Americans in number, the White Beast’s thousand hands set to work and joined in the assemblage of a great and ever-expanding wall of debris around Wafa’s house.

This was a wall of fortuitous bits of garbage and basement-clearings, all fitted together like masonry. Surrounding the charred scene of the crime, rising beyond every new high point it established, the wall protected the sacred soil it enclosed from the corrupting hands and feet of Americans. It consisted of stray planks and bicycles, of appliances and milk crates, of rubber trash bins and once-discreet briefcases now open to the world, of discarded tyres and cracked computer monitors, and of the heavyset woman’s black convertible, upended and set on its side near the base at her instruction. If you happened to be a bird flying above that wall, you saw that it formed a great inverted U around a half-burned-out shrine where the improvisers who built it now worshipped, bowing in synchronized awe and reverence, a few dozen at a time, toward the cracked, kicked-out kitchen window, where a flattering photograph of Abu Islam had been nailed.

The top of this U was guarded now by a line of hundreds of severe men in white, their arms linked, all bearded, all glaring.

They chanted, ‘No church, no church, no Christian church here.’

The night after his desert rescue, bleary-eyed Mike Mazzoni put his very own boots back on the ground and rejoined the ranks of the American soldiers, committing himself to the cause of pulling down a building that presented a significant hazard to public safety.

But the wall around the burned-out house was still growing. It was nineteen feet high at its topmost point, which rose above the base of the U.

Mike Mazzoni didn’t understand what the hell the men were chanting, but he was impressed at how fast they were chanting it. Half of them were out front, staring his unit down, and the other half were busy throwing stuff to each other. They kept working as they chanted, fitting their space heaters and their dead radios and their baby carriages into the wall.

The walk to the city was over. She thanked God for that. Her dead legs ached beneath the table in the rear of the dark, noisy internet café she had found on the borders of the city. She looked down at her own feet, imagined them without their shoes. What a journey they had pursued, those feet. So long, the path. So long.

Open all night. A booth all to herself. She thanked God for that too. Time to work. She began with a question: Was it possible he had a Skype account? It was.

Working on the paired theories that Thelonius would use his beloved comic book as the starting point for his screen name (plausible, but not certain) and that he was unlikely to broadcast his whereabouts (almost certain), it had taken her less than half an hour to identify all the candidates. Skype featured less than four dozen accounts bearing some variation on the name Sergeant USA. Of these, careful examination had confirmed that only six were located in undisclosed locations. She sent each of the six a contact request.

One came back immediately.

She clicked the icon and initiated a video call. They would need to see each other’s faces, tired and bloodstained as hers was – that blow across the bridge of her nose that simply refused to heal. As the call connected she felt a shiver of embarrassment, then fought it down. This was not a courtship. They had business to conduct. Not a good world to bring children into anyway.

His face appeared.

His eyes, as tired as hers, said through the looking-glass of the computer screen,
Here we are
. She felt her own eyes say,
Here we are
in return.

Then he said:

‘Assalamu alaykum.’

Odd that the phrase translating
peace be with you
, easily memorized by anyone, should have so completely dispelled any doubts about him. She believed he meant it.

Indelible made a request. Would he be permitted to meet face-to-face with an American contact? Within the American embassy? In order to discuss his deep desire to attain American citizenship and set up a plan for doing so?

Back in his cubicle in Langley, Sullivan Hand stared at his glowing screen and smiled.

He had never held a conversation like this before. If he had, or if he’d had the sense to work with someone who had, he would have known that confidential informants working within war zones are unlikely to ask for face-to-face meetings in environments densely populated by surveillance cameras. Cameras tend to make them skittish. Unless of course they are planning, in short order, to detonate themselves.

Working all on his own, Sullivan Hand assumed Indelible’s enthusiasm on this point was a positive sign. He thought giving the people in the embassy a close-up look at Indelible was a damn good idea. He also wanted to position himself with Indelible as a nurturing parent, as his mentor had instructed. Last but not least, he wanted greater visibility among the half-dozen or so important Directorate people he knew to be based in the embassy. He intended to surprise them all. He wanted to be there. In the embassy. To welcome his asset.

So he said yes. And said he would be there in person to shake Indelible’s hand. Becky set up the flight and arranged the clearances.

‘We have business to conduct, you and I,’ Fatima said. She looked down, gave herself half a smile, looked into the camera again. ‘That is. I need help from
you
now. I have information to offer in return for your help. I mean to say: This is to be a transaction.’

‘How did you get this Skype address?’

She waved a hand in dismissal. As though she meant, but didn’t care to say,
please
.

‘We are here to discuss justice. Then other matters, if you wish.’

He nodded.

‘I live,’ she said, ‘in a republic ruled by madmen. Do you understand?’

Thelonius did. He said: ‘It’s not much better over here.’

Through the screen, she laughed. He laughed, too. Even though it was only a tiny laugh, it felt good to laugh with someone again.

The laugh subsided.

‘My family is gone,’ she said. ‘I have been expelled from my home and banned from my mosque. The only publicly permitted form of worship involves praying toward a picture of this demagogue, Abu Islam. They actually place his picture on the street corners. Thugs roam the public places and take down the names of people who object to worshipping his photograph. Under such circumstances, one is forced to constitute one’s own authority. A frightening time in one’s life, to be the only member of one’s own private nation.’

‘Yes,’ Thelonius agreed. ‘It is frightening.’

‘My mother and sister were murdered. The man who did this was an American. A marine.’

Although he could not see her hands, she might have placed them on the edges of the table from which she spoke, the better to steady herself.

She continued: ‘I intend to execute this man without making him a public spectacle.’

Her eyes closed, firm against the world, she said:

‘I am my own republic now.’

He felt his heart rising. As though to protect her. To bring justice. Another impossibility.

‘I do recognize this man,’ she continued, eyes open again, rimmed with tears. ‘The man who destroyed my family was the same man you observed desecrating the Koran. Legally, I need confirming testimony from another person before I can execute him as an enemy of the state. I want you to confirm my certainty in his identity. I want his name, and I beg you, Thelonius, to tell me the truth.’

Whatever he said now, it sounded like he was ready to shoot somebody.

Some idiot was blasting ‘Purple Haze’ from a boom box. Mike Mazzoni demanded that it be shut off, and silence followed.

One might have imagined, from the tone of his voice, that he was taking a principled stand for greater discipline on the night watch. Or that he was fixed with some particular grim purpose on the five hundred or so bearded, poorly lit men who stood before him, the human barrier protecting the narrow, and only, gap in the wall. Or that their eleven elders, spotted by airborne surveillance, had become visible to him, that he had seen something untoward, some kind of movement or decision from those eleven shadows moving behind the barrier, casting some spark that might define the obscurity before him.

None of that was happening. His head hurt more when the music played. The more his head hurt, the more he remembered that he hadn’t slept enough. That was all.

They all had to stand watch, all had to surround the damn thing and the greybeards inside it. Waste of boots, guarding this tower of crap, if you asked him. It was twenty-four feet high now, the wall, with a goddamn Lincoln convertible set into its base. It had been growing from the inside for hours, the wall, but he was pretty sure now that they had finally used up everything that could be flung or hoisted.

Plastic chairs, white, about a dozen of them, some with messed-up legs. A big metal fan-blade that looked like it once belonged to a factory or a warehouse ventilation system. A manhole cover. Some
kind of entertainment centre, but without any of the equipment, just the wooden frame and the glass, which somehow hadn’t broken. A bookshelf. A rake with plastic teeth. A piano. Upright, not grand, but still, how the hell they got a piano up there, which neighbour’s house it had come from, how they had managed to levitate it to the peak of that wall of crap, he couldn’t guess. Wasn’t music supposed to be illegal to these people?

Aerial images showed that, once the marine guard had settled into formation, eleven ragheads had opted to stay seated in a circle on the ground, well behind the wall, in tight, near the remains of the house, near what would eventually be the strike point. Like they knew that was the best place to be if you wanted to die.

No one had thrown anything up over the top of the wall for more than an hour now. The betting was it wasn’t going to get any higher unless they started throwing bodies up there.

There were voices from inside, old men within the U who could be heard but not seen, arguing or something. Sounded important.

The birds made a weird chirring sound as they flew over. These were photo birds. Not bomb birds. The bomb birds made a different sound. Higher.

Time to flatten this fucking place.

Every fifteen minutes, Mike Mazzoni, his hand home to thirty-nine black pentagrams, his face set taut against any truce or parley with ragheads, recited a lengthy foreign phrase out loud, into a bullhorn, its syllables set down on an index card. If he recited them correctly, the syllables were supposed to mean: THIS PROPERTY IS NOW UNDER THE CONTROL OF THE UNITED STATES MILITARY. EXIT IMMEDIATELY IN AN ORDERLY FASHION OR ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR ILLEGAL TRESPASS.

He recited the words so poorly they didn’t actually mean anything.