Tess Awakening (23 page)

***

In the morning, Amir received four of his
friends from Iraq, now ministers in the government, and a General.
They brought news of the chaos in the country and talked about what
they perceived the incompetence of the new government. After
filling all the bureaucratic posts with Shiites, they started to
fill the ranks of the reconstituted military, not with the most
experienced and deserving officers, but with candidates whose chief
qualification was political. The men saw only continued strife and
war far into the future, and a threat to the existence of the
country itself.

They discussed with Amir a report from a
watchdog group in Europe, which stated that the government of Iraq
is the most corrupt institution in the Middle East. It is between a
“flawed democracy” and an “authoritarian regime.” The U.S. military
in Iraq has not been able to prevent this corruption. There are
manifest signs that post-Saddam Iraq was clearly not going to be
the linchpin for a new democratic Middle East.

“The country is in dire need of competent
leadership General, and we are asking you to return and run for one
of the important government posts. Shortly after that, our faction
would maneuver to offer you the top leadership position.”

Amir was not thinking of going back to Iraq
anytime soon. Had Tess been with him, he would not have considered
returning. But now he no longer had a reason to remain on the
sidelines. Perhaps it was time to get back in the fray. Getting
busy would take his mind off things.

The group planned for four days, at the end
of which Amir agreed to return to Iraq on condition that he would
be appointed General, the rank with most of the authority and
responsibility. He made preparations to leave at once.

Before departing, there was one more thing he
needed to do. He retrieved the videos from the vault, went outside
in the garden, and burned them in a barrel. Fadime would be
furious, but he had come to abhor the tapes. They were no longer a
record of his triumph over Tess, but a defilement of the bliss that
he had shared with her during a sublime night of passion.

Chapter 34

Jake was drunk in his bunk. He couldn’t
believe that he had been so reckless to ask Tess a question that
should have best been left unanswered, lest it disclosed what he
was most afraid to hear. He recalled his mother telling him that
everyone is entitled to their own secrets. Total honesty is not
always good for relationships.

He could still feel the thrill of having her
in his arms, of playfully romping in bed, the joy of sharing each
other. His mood changed to anger. She did the same things with Amir
and more. The thought of Tess passionately making love to Amir kept
driving him crazy. The mental image of her willingly allowing the
man to invade her body made him scream with primal despair.

His sense of loss broke his heart. He cried
like a baby and punched the walls repeatedly with his fists until
the knuckles bled.

The next day, feeling like crap, he rode in a
Humvee to a field station. His assignment was to investigate a
potential case of corruption. CIA analysts had detected messages
from Al Qaeda indicating that they had received some sort of large
payoff in American dollars from sources in the Iraqi government.
The analysts had monitored coded messages between various terrorist
groups, disclosing that factions were arguing on who would receive
a piece of the pie.

Jake and his team planned the operation and
proceeded to implement it. The key was finding a few individuals
who either were involved in the transaction or who knew who did it.
The team started contacting some of their sources. They dressed in
local clothes and furtively met with reliable informers in and out
of the Iraqi government.

Jake’s knowledge of Arabic enabled him to
understand the nuances of what was being said. He had built up
credibility with locals in his network, particularly government
employees that disliked the rampant corruption among the ruling
class. They had been in power less than a year and had already
reverted to a culture of graft and corruption, feasting at the
trough provided by American money.

The first clue surfaced when Jake found out
that an Iraqi minister had been released after four months of
terrorist captivity. Jake knew that Al Qaeda would release people
only with the payment of a substantial ransom. This case appeared
to fit the bill. He made further inquiries, coming to the
conclusion that there seemed to be some connection back to the
CIA.

He went back to Baghdad to talk with his
boss, Paul Saunders. He presented what he knew and told him that he
had trouble finding where the money had come from. Paul, who had
his tentacles everywhere, disclosed that the cash came from the
CIA. To Jake’s astonishment, he revealed that the CIA had regularly
delivered suitcases of cash to keep the Iraqi government afloat.
The convoluted trail of money evaded detection, and it was obvious
that much of it went to line the pockets of people in the power
structure to do with it what they willed.

Armed with this information, Jake made
further inquiries and deduced that CIA cash, five million, had
found its way to Al Qaeda. Essentially, the CIA ended up financing
terrorist operations.

The obscenity of the situation sickened him.
Rather than helping create a stable, democratic government, the U.
S. was actually paying off a few individuals to have them go
through the motions of good governance, thus creating an illusion
of progress.

The inquiries of Jake’s team did not go
unnoticed, and he soon detected that people were following him and
his operations partner, Harvey Morris. Using the skills learned at
the Farm in Langley, they evaded surveillance and turned the tables
on their pursuers. Now they became shadows, trailing the three men
to the gates of an elegant house outside of Baghdad. Jake called
Central and found out that the house belonged to a current big shot
government minister. It appeared that the ransom transaction
originated here. He called the office with the information. They
will take it from here.

They got ready to return to base. They had to
traverse an open field, and they decided to do it one at a time.
Harvey went first. Jake looked for activity from the house and
started moving, crouching as low as possible as darkness
approached. Then he heard shots. They had been discovered, and half
a dozen men with AK-47s began to run toward them. Jake joined
Harvey behind a boulder and they returned fire with their pistols.
One of the attackers fell, but the rest kept coming and firing.

Jake and Harvey hit two more men and
momentarily stopped their advance. Harvey got on the cell phone and
asked for extraction. The request was relayed to the chopper units.
The crews started the engines of a couple of aircraft and the
pilots rushed to man the machines. Shortly after that, two gunships
were on the way.

Tess and Carmen had been diverted to run one
of the Black Hawks because they happened to be on the tarmac. They
received instructions on flight and headed to the given
coordinates. Arriving on site, they hovered and assessed the
situation. The two CIA men were having a hard time holding back the
onslaught of what now appeared to be a dozen men. Tess made a
strafing run, but the looming darkness made it difficult to discern
any effect of their fire. Making another run, Tess ordered Carmen
to deploy a flare. The resulting flash illuminated the scene and
they were able to fire at the attackers in preparation for
landing.

Jake saw what the pilots were trying to do,
and made for the aircraft with his partner behind him. The second
chopper tried to keep the bad guys at bay by spraying bullets at
them. Rushing toward the rescue helicopter, Jake suddenly felt like
something had stabbed him, and he fell. Harvey saw him fall and
tried to drag him into the aircraft. The crew rushed out of the
chopper, helped Harvey inside, and heaved Jake in before a few more
shots hit the fuselage.

The second helicopter released a hellish
burst of machine gun fire, neutralizing the attackers.

The medics on board started to apply
compresses on Jake’s wounds. He was in shock and didn’t feel any
pain. Tess asked Carmen to take over and crouched in the rear of
the craft. Her heart stopped. To her horror, she saw Jake bleeding,
staring into space.

“Jake, Jake! Are you all right?” He opened
his eyes, recognized Tess and passed out. The craft rushed back to
base where an ambulance was waiting. They rushed Jake to
surgery.

When he woke up in the military hospital, he
didn’t know how long he had been under. His right leg was in a
cast, and his torso was bandaged. An assortment of IVs protruded
from his arms, and he had trouble swallowing. Not surprising,
because he had a tube down his nose. A nurse came in, checked his
vitals and the various screens in the room, and left. Jake tried to
catch her attention, but couldn’t move.

He started to panic. He could not move.
Nothing seemed to work. “If I am paralyzed, I don’t want to live,”
he thought. He lost consciousness.

When he returned to consciousness, he could
not focus his eyes until he recognized Tess’s face. ‘I am surely
dead and in Heaven,’ he thought.

Then he felt a light kiss on his cheek and
thought he heard “Hello Jake.” Tess was talking to him and took his
hand into hers. Feasting his eyes on the one person in the word he
wanted to be with, he passed out.

The next time he woke up, the tube down his
nose was gone, and a doctor was checking his vitals. “You got shot
up pretty bad, Colonel Vickers. You are lucky to be alive.

Jake croaked, “Will I be able to walk?”

“Yes, you will after your leg heals. But we
have to pay attention to your left lung. You took a bullet there,
and two of your ribs are broken. You must take it easy for a
while.”

“The pilot that rescued me, Major Turner, is
she coming back?”

“I will call her and tell her that you will
be fine.”

That’s not what Jake wanted to hear. What he
really needed to know is if Tess would come and see him again. The
morphine took hold, and he went to sleep.

Chapter 35

Amir’s plane landed in Baghdad. A small
convoy transported him to a house in the Green Zone that would be
his residence. Shortly afterward, he went to the Iraqi Army
Headquarters to receive his new commission as a General. He then
attended various briefings to bring him up to date on recent
events.

The situation had not changed much since he
last read updates in London. The Government was dysfunctional,
beset by severe problems that originated with the dismissal of
Sunni government workers at the end of the war. The Shiites that
replaced them, for the most part, did not have the experience to
perform much of the work. It would take quite some time for things
to normalize.

The insurrection was raging, and the newly
reconstituted Army had neither the experience nor skill to be
effective at present. A lot of the fighting fell on the Americans,
who were now anxious to quiet things down so that could go home.
The proud, capable Iraqi Army that he knew no longer existed. Many
of the officers were political appointees and had little or no
experience in leadership.

Amir’s initial job was to prepare competent
senior officers to serve in the General Staff. This required the
definition and implementation of a lot of training.

Amir brought energetic leadership and
expertise to the task, at the same time laying the seeds to serve
his personal agenda. His real objective was to maneuver himself
into the top leadership in government. To achieve that, he needed
to assemble a group of loyal followers beholden to him that would
eventually participate in the takeover.

He wanted to select candidates that he had
previously worked with, but he had many constraints. He was not
allowed to use any of the previous Sunni officers that had been
demobilized after the war. This in effect eliminated a large pool
of tested and reliable leaders. The pool of candidates available to
him not only needed to be trained, but also evaluated as potential
loyal supporters.

He arranged for the best available pilots in
the country’s air force to receive training in the United States
and worked with American Army trainers to help increase the
effectiveness of the troops. Apparently, money was no object. There
seemed to be an unending supply of weapons and equipment that the
Americans were willing to provide: tanks, helicopters, rockets,
tons of ammunition, Humvees and even fighter jets. It seemed that
all they wanted is to stabilize things and get out of the mess they
created.

***

He was able to take some time to go to visit
his ancestral home out in the country. When he arrived, it was easy
to see that it had been looted. Some of the outbuildings were
burned or destroyed. Trash and debris all over the yard were
evidence that the site had been the center of significant fighting.
He went to the front door and was welcomed by his caretaker. The
man apologized for the condition of the premises, him being the
only one available to take care of things.

Walking into the interior, much of the
furniture had been stolen or damaged. Only his desk and a few
chairs remained. The plush bedrooms had been ransacked; only the
bed frame remained and all of the beautiful women’s clothes,
perfumes and mirrors were long gone.

Amir did not really care about what happened
to the house, but he remembered it as the place when he first met
Tess: the beautiful warrior that defied and hurt him, then escaped.
She also had changed him.

His thoughts turned to Kejal, the Kurdish
captive who overtly hated him and had chosen to resist him with
every fiber of her being. He had found her shell-shocked in the
middle of a battle with the Iranians. Her large house was in ruins;
her husband and two children were dead, victims of a gas attack on
the town. He saw that she possessed great beauty. He could not
abandon her in a town that was contaminated, with the dead strewn
everywhere. She would have wanted to go to her family, and would
have died as well.