The Weapon (23 page)

By now Abu and Ibrahim, Ibrahim especially, had brought some order to the uproar. At least no one was being flailed with lit torches. But Dan didn't like the way the team was surrounded. There were at least forty Abu Sayyaf bunched close around them, each with some type of rifle and almost all with machetes in their belts as well. The women stayed to the fringes, faces veiled, keeping well back from the firelight. Their eyes shimmered in the torch glare, but they said absolutely nothing. There were kids, too, big-eyed,
hanging on their skirts, and a dozen mangy dogs plunged about, tripling the din with frenzied barking. Abu was still speaking at length, questioning the original four who'd brought in the couple. Then he turned to Izmin, who'd gone berserker. He kept trying to burst out of the armlocks two of his buddies held him in. He howled at his wife, spittle-spray gleaming in the firelight.

“This might be our only chance to break out,” Oberg murmured.

“Break out?” Dan glanced around. “Where to?”

“Hit 'em hard and bust through. Lay down covering fire and head for the road.”

Dan doubted a fighting retreat through rough terrain, in the dark, outnumbered six to one by men who knew every tree, would have much chance. His anger boiled up again. “We might have been able to do that before you fucking armed them all, Obie. Couldn't you have waited to weapon them up, till after we left?”

“No way to keep 'em locked up, Commander.” The SEAL shook himself. “Sumo! Monty! Breakout to the north. Stand by—”

“No. Belay that,” Dan snapped. “We're not going there, Oberg! Ground your weapon!” The SEAL had it aimed at a villager who'd shoved him. “
Ground that weapon!
And stand fast. I'm going to talk to Abu.”

“Standing down, boss,” Oberg said unwillingly.

Dan pushed his way through the throng, getting furious glances and punches to his back. He ignored them and got to the little chieftain. Abu looked different without his beret. Less artistic, more like a thug. “Captain. What's going on? I am this man's leader. I must be involved in the discussion.”

To his surprise, this seemed to go down perfectly. “Yes. You his leader. So. You speak for him?”

“I'm not certain—you mean, like a lawyer?”

“No. Like the head of his family.”

“Uh, yeah. Sure. The head of his family.” He hissed to Carpenter, “You stupid son of a bitch, don't you ever learn? You did this in Korea, too!”

“Sorry, Commander. She hit on me first—”

“Goddamn it, who gives a shit about who hit on who first! I've seen you operate! This time I hope they cut it off!”

He was sorry the moment he'd said it. Especially since it looked like that was exactly what the men milling around them had in mind. Carpenter looked shocked, as if he'd never expected to hear an officer use that kind of language. Dan rubbed his face, feeling the beard prickle. How instantly a mission could go to shit.

“Excuse me,” said a quiet, nasal, but beautifully modulated voice next to him. It even had a Scottish burr.

Dan glanced up in surprise. He'd never heard Ibrahim speak before. “I didn't know you spoke English.”

“Oh, yes. I studied at a madrasa in Scotland.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, that is so. In Dundee. Now, Mr. Carpenter,” the imam said pleasantly. “Did you lie with this woman? These witnesses say you were found together.”

Carpenter mumbled something.

“Excuse me?” Ibrahim enquired gently.

“I said, yes.”

“Did you rape her?”

“More like the other way around.”

“Really,” said the imam, deadpan. “That is a joke, I take it.”

“Yeah. Sorry. A joke.”

He turned to Dan. “Your soldier here. He is married?”

“Uh, no. Divorced.”

“Did you knowingly have intercourse with her?” Ibrahim asked Carpenter, courteously. “With Amin's wife?”

“I
said
I did. But I didn't know whose wife she was.”

“I see. Did you know it was unlawful?”

“Unlawful? Fuck. I suppose so,” said Carpenter. He seemed to be trying to buck himself up, which was probably, Dan thought, not easy, surrounded as he was by heavily armed outlaws howling for his blood.

“So you laid with her, knowing it was unlawful, and that she was married?”

“Uh—affirmative.”

“And you had sexual intercourse with her? Was this the first time?”

“No.”

“How many times previous?”

Carpenter hesitated. Then squared his shoulders and said, louder than his previous answers, “Fifteen or twenty. Maybe more.”

“Oh, you fucking bullshitter,” Oberg muttered.

“We need to defuse this,” Dan told Abu and Ibrahim. “All three of us, or we're going to have a bloodbath.”

“There is not other possible,” Abu said.

“Meaning what?”

Ibrahim said oh-so-sadly, “He means that unfortunately, this is what we call a
hadd
offense. The punishment is defined; we cannot alter it. He was caught with the woman by four men. Four witnesses—as the law prescribes. And unfortunately, he has just admitted his deed four times. Also as the law prescribes.”

So that was why the imam had kept asking the same question over and over. It sounded like entrapment, but Dan had the feeling “entrapment” wasn't going to be a defense. “Okay, assuming he did it. What's the punishment?”

“This that they do, is hated by God. It gives bad example to other women. If she has child, it will be hated by all. Therefore what
shariya
prescribes is what is best for the community.” Ibrahim smiled fondly. “If she is found guilty, she must die.”

Dan looked at the woman. Her gaze was still on the ground. He honestly didn't see anything he could do for her. “Uh . . . and for him?”

“For a non-Moslem? It, too, is death.”

“
Death?
”

“Correct.”

“Uh, right . . . but . . . there's no trial?” He was groping now.

“Of course, there will be a trial,” Ibrahim said, sounding shocked. “Who do you think we are? We shall have it right now.”

Back in the hamlet, with fresh torches planted in a ring around the dusty chicken-scratched patch at its heart, and fresh wood stacked on the previous evening's embers to stoke up the fire. Dan had asked for a few minutes to talk things over. He motioned Henrickson and Oberg in, too. “Guys, we've got a problem.”

“That's an understatement.” Henrickson looked as worried as Dan had ever seen him.

“Teddy, we're going to need a plan in case they actually condemn Carpenter.”

“Well, I say, fuck his ass,” Oberg said. “Screwing around with the host group's women? A
Moslem
host group? Leave him, he's that fucking stupid.”

“We're not leaving anybody. You think we'd leave you?”

“If I ballocksed up like that, sure,” Obie told him. “If it means we lose the rest of the team, can't accomplish the mission—fuck, yeah. Leave the silly fucker. Maybe if they cut his empty fucking head off, he won't do it again.”

“Well, we're not. So I need you to help me figure how we're getting him out of here. Is the boat ready to go?”

Teddy squatted, flipping up a bit of soil with the tip of his Glock, over and over. He was wondering if he should tell Lenson about the Americans in the hut. The man and the woman. He still hadn't seen them, but when he'd crept in to check it out, after Wenck had told him about his discovery, he'd heard the distant murmur of their talk. Midwest, by the flat vowels.

“Well?”

“It's running, sir. Had to get the heads off and clean some crap out of the cooling system, looks like they ran it through a bed of kelp. But she's ready to go now.” Fuck it, if Lenson knew, he'd figure he had to do something about it. Then they'd really be up shit creek.

“Fuel?”

“Half a tank, and the jerry cans that came in on the truck. I did a fuel-consumption run, put the clock on her. We're good for about four hundred miles.”

Dan went over what they had and where it was. The extra fuel was hidden among the rocks, down by where the boat lay. The food still hadn't arrived, though, and the water tank was only half full.

“Okay, listen up. I want Donnie down there, getting all those gas cans aboard.
Quietly.
I want anything we can find filled with water. And food, anything we can lay our hands on without attracting attention.”

“We're not gonna be able to snatch him, if that's what you're thinking,” Oberg said. “We might have been able to when they brought him out of the woods. Now they're loaded for bear. We try to shoot our way out, we're gonna get hit, bad.”

Sumo said, “You give the order, we'll do it. But Obie's right, we'll just all go down.”

Monty had been listening, wondering if they were missing a simple answer. “Look, these guys are supposed to be bandits, right?”

“Someplace between bandits and rebels,” Dan said. “Why?”

“Well, what are bandits in business for? The
money
. Can't we buy Rit off? At this trial. Can't you pay like, blood money?”

“Good thought,” Dan said. He sucked air through his teeth. “I'll try Abu. This Ibrahim guy, he doesn't sound buyable.”

“Yeah, he comes across as a true believer,” Oberg said.

Dan started to get up, but they were still waiting. He lowered himself again. “What?”

“In case none of that works out, we need an execute signal,” Kaulukukui muttered.

“Teddy? Help me out here.”

Oberg scraped the blade off on his boot. “Not much to say, sir. Group on you, blast our way to him, take out as many of them as we can. Grenade the huts. Then head for the boat and rear-guard the hell out of it on our way down the trail. If we're still walking.”

Abu was calling him. Dan dusted off his trou and got up.
He scratched in his beard. “Okay,” he muttered. “Okay. Tell Wenck to get the engines turning over as soon as he hears firing. If we can make it down there, we want to be out past the reef before they can get their machine guns down to the beach.”

“The execute order, sir?” the Hawaiian said again.

“Ambush,” Dan said.

“ ‘Ambush,' sir?”

“Yeah. If they understand English, it might confuse them for a second.”

“Not bad.” Oberg got up, too. He squinted.

“Let's go to trial,” Dan said.

They headed back toward the fire.

 

Two hours later they were still sitting around it. Dan was in the guayabera, the most dignified shirt he'd brought, though it was filthy. Under it he was coated with sweat, and his legs were cramping.

They sat in a square. On one side sat Carpenter and the woman. She still hadn't said a word, and Dan hadn't caught her name clearly enough to be sure he knew it. Someone had thrown the blanket over her shoulders, and she sat without moving or looking up, hands in her lap. Carpenter fidgeted, pale under his stubble, sucking on a beer bottle of water the imam had ordered brought to him. Behind the defendants stood armed men. Dan, Sosukan, and Oberg sat on the second side. Across from him Ibrahim sat cross-legged, cool in a white robe that looked like something you'd get baptized in at a Pentecostal church. The imam had a book open in front of him. He kept quoting from it to the five men who finished the square, stone-faced rebels, apparently the oldest in the camp, most, though not all, with gray in their beards. These were the judges, the imam had explained in the incongruous Caledonian burr that made him sound like Scotty in
Star Trek
. The Abu Sayyaf could not comply with all the requirements of
shariya
law. After all, they were warriors in the field. But they'd do the best they could to render Islamic justice.

For two hours straight Dan had labored to penetrate what was going on. The language arrangements didn't help. Ibrahim would read something in Arabic. Then he'd translate it into Tausug for the “judges.” Beside Oberg, Sosukan would translate it and the ensuing discussion into Tagalog, which Oberg turned into English. Dan suspected serious losses in meaning at each interface, but it was the best he could do; Ibrahim refused to translate what he was reading directly into an “infidel” language. Such as English, apparently.

So far, they'd established that four “upstanding” men had witnessed the act, that Carpenter was not a Moslem, that he'd known his deed was unlawful, and that he'd admitted his crime aloud four times before being confronted with the witnesses.

Dan rotated his head, stretching the kinks out of his neck. He was getting the drift of the process. It wasn't like a common-law trial. Actually, it was more like a court-martial, with its panel of judges instead of a jury, its limited representation, and the way evidence and admissions, matched scrupulously against a code that set down in black and white exactly what had to be proven to constitute an offense, were weighed against testimony about the character of the accused. He figured this was nothing like a real
shariya
court would be, say in Saudi, where it was the law of the land, but he could see where, if you kept to the letter of Islamic law, an accused might get something resembling a fair hearing.