Burn Down the Sky: Part Twenty-three

 

21

 

Ahmad was still terribly weak and in awful pain from being beating. His kidneys had been damaged and he feared that several ribs had been broken as any sudden move and even breathing was excruciating. The beating had brought on a terrible fever, and with that came a malaise the likes of which he had never known, worse even than when he was wounded fighting the Soviets. Ahmad should have seen a doctor, but there was no time and there would have been far too many questions. It hurt even to wear clothes, as they rubbed against the flesh of a body that had become one giant bruise. Memories of the beating were still vivid and the impotent rage they evoked served to focus his mind away from the pain and to the task at hand.

As a Kurdish farmer named Umit, he was driving an old white Diana with Karkuk plates. In the back seat were toys and gifts for a fictional family in the town of Trabzon on the Black Sea coast. Byars had provided him with several identities and a host of perfectly forged documents to get him to Sarajevo. The rest of the mission depended upon Ahmad.

Ahmad studied his face in the Diana’s oblong rearview mirror and scratched the stubble where his beard had been. He could play the part of Umit the Kurd well enough, but it would take some time to get use to seeing himself this way. It was embarrassing to be seen without the beard, for no longer was he a man who had acquired a knowledge in Islam but instead he was an ignorant child again. By God, he’d had a beard since he was a boy! Ahmad looked at his reflection in the mirror once more and thought that he looked much less wise and further from God.

The American checkpoints before the Turkish border were easy enough to get through. Byars forgeries were excellent and the Americans were less concerned with who was leaving Iraq than who was coming into the country. The Turkish soldiers at the border crossing were much tougher. They had waged a war with Kurdish rebels for two decades and were eternally suspicious of everyone coming out of Iraq. They pestered him with superfluous questions meant to frustrate and confuse the unprepared. They asked questions like how old were the children that he was visiting, what were their birthdays and what were their names? But Ahmad was no amateur, and was well prepared for their questions. He had spent years of evading the modern idea of national boundaries, smuggling arms or fighters between wars. Ahmad did not act like Umit, instead he became Umit.

  He tried not to think of the job, but only the next step in the journey that would lead him there. It was easier to think of it in pieces rather than as a whole, and made his cover much easier to manage. He wondered about the two comrades he had let off when the Americans happened upon him. He wondered about their secret mission and marveled at the complexity of the movement, of which he was only a miniscule part. Like Ahmad, the purpose of their mission was rarely apparent. Instead it changed and evolved as needs arose. That he found himself working for the enemy bespoke the fluid nature of the movement, but at his level the line between enemy and strategic opportunity was a blur. Byars had helped him to escape, which allowed Ahmad’s mission to continue. There might come a time when Ahmad would have to kill him, but for now he would pay this debt.

He arrived in the colorless port city of Trabzon after dark. The drive through town came as a confirmation of the purpose of his mission and of the movement. The decline of Islamic ideals started under Kemal Ataturk almost a century earlier seemed to have become manifest in the Russian whores lining filthy streets and crime-ridden apartment blocks. A century of secularism had brought ruin to the renaissance and splendor built upon the ruins of Byzantium. He was happy to leave the city behind, and soon emerged to a more peaceful land where a breeze off the sea awakened the peppery scent of tea farms along the coast.

It was no accident for him to take this route. Turkey’s Black sea coast was a remote, sometimes primitive frontier. It was also among the more lucrative for smuggling, as it had been for thousands of years. Here the authorities would be on the look out for real smugglers and not for someone such as Ahmad.

In the town of Ordu, with it’s ancient basilica, Ahmad stopped to change cars and identities at the house of a tea farmer. There he managed a few hours sleep in a shed with several Bangladeshi men smuggling their way to Europe in search of work. Over a small hearth he burned the papers for Umit the Kurd. With Umit dead and burned Ahmad would assume the identity of a Bosnian Muslim named Kurtovich traveling through Turkey on holiday. He traded the Diana for a little blue Volkswagen Golf with serial numbers taken from a factory just outside of Sarajevo. His Bosnian passport was already stamped and dated with entry and exit visas all the way from Bosnia to Turkey. Byars had even gone so far as to provide hotel bills and gift shop receipts as well. In Istanbul he purchased souvenirs, some post cards and a bottle of Turkish Rakiya. The Rakiya was, of course, a ruse, a small detail to throw off suspicious authorities. Devout Muslims did not drink alcohol, but many of Bosnia’s secular Muslims did.

He crossed into Bulgaria just after midnight, taking advantage of the late hour and laconic border guards just as Alan Kirby was leaving Baghdad some eight hundred miles to the southeast. Just inside Bulgaria Ahmad stopped at a small roadside inn to rest before pushing on to Sarajevo in the morning. The long, rough trip across Turkey had left his battered body taxed to the limit. As he lay back to sleep he prayed that this would all be over in a few days.

 

 

 

Alan tucked in with a convoy headed to Karkuk. There was still time, he told himself, and if there was still time then there was still hope. There was a freedom that came with his decision to forgive Adnan, and if he could save him there was also the promise of redemption. It was more than human, and if there was a God, Alan thought, this was as close as he had ever been to that unending love.

The city was just awakening as the sun rose in the east, climbing towards the day above the Zagros Mountains. He left the convoy on the outskirts of Karkuk, following the twisting banks of the Rukhana as it neatly cleaved the city into two parts. Alan knew the city better now but in the half-light the dusty streets could still be confusing.  He pulled to a stop beside the old bakery and looked over the street for any sigh of danger. Foreigners had become targets for kidnapping by Al Qa’eda groups, local insurgents and criminals looking to make a fast buck. Already several of the captives had been beheaded in gruesome videotaped executions. More than that Alan had to be sure that no one was watching Byars’ door. Beside the alley that led to Byars’ flat sat the old Kurd. Alan could hear a woman shouting at her husband and noticed how it agitated the goats in her balcony. Alan waited for the old man to get up for a piss then scooted quickly down the alley.

Alan heard noises from inside, the sound of voices, and for a moment he had half a mind to leave rather than get into worse trouble than he already faced. It wouldn’t help Adnan if he were to be captured or worse. When the door opened Byars had a look of surprise, as if he had been caught doing something wrong.

“Al,” he exclaimed, “I wish that I could say that it’s good to see you.”

“We’ve come a long way, John,” he replied. The room was thick with cigarette smoke. It was obvious that Byars was not alone. Alan stepped inside. Byars lit a cigarette. Byars paced up and back, keeping his body between Alan and the other room.

“Long way from that ditch in ‘Nam, buddy,” there was a noticeable lack of sincerity in Byars tone. “What is it about us that we keep cropping up in each other’s lives in these God-awful shit holes?”

“I keep digging for the filth in the world, and every time I turn over a shovel full there you are. Beginning to think that it’s not a mistake.”

“Mistakes are for fools. The world is a very different place from when you and I first landed in Vietnam damn near thirty-five years ago. Shit, that’s a lifetime. The risks got bigger, the enemies more exotic, the game more confusing until it all got muddled.”

“But you still play the game?”

“Still got my eye on the ball.”

“Do you?”

“Do you, Al?”

“Call it off, John. Call off the hit. It’s a mistake and an innocent man will die.” Alan hated that he sounded as though he was pleading. Byars’ brow furled deeply as he crushed the cigarette into an ashtray. He motioned to the pile of cushions and looked up at Alan.

“Sit, and let me see if I can explain any of this to you.”

Byars was clearly torn, more than Alan had ever seen him before. It was more than he had even noticed that awful day when they took Maria from the stadium in Buenos Aires. Byars stroked his beard. His eyes were dark, empty pools.

“My father said when I was a boy, if there’s a good fight then join in. Al, this is a good fight, and I’m in it to the end. There’s a bigger picture here than any of us.” Byars tone was quickly condescending. “You want to chase your little stories around to world to help make sense of the past. But the past is dead. There is no sense and no purpose to redefining it. All that matters now is what will be. History is yet to be created, and in this world the guy who controls the crayons gets to decide what color that future will be.”

“It’s a nice abstract, John, but there are real lives at stake here.”

“That’s how the game is freakin’ played! People live and people die. Most of them lead meaningless lives. They’re born to fill graves and nothing more. You think that this is about your friend, or some bobble headed president of the United States, or some camel hopping terrorist? It’s not about winning a war in five or ten or even twenty years. It’s about where the world will be in a hundred or a thousand years. It’s about who will survive, us or them? Simple biology; the strong survive.”

“To the detriment of the rest of the world?”

“That’s up to them, if they want to play with us or against us.”

“Do we never escape our tribal ways?”

“In favor of what?”

“Sanity? Humanity?”

“We are tribal. We’re selfish creatures aligning and realigning our alliances in order to survive. Sanity and humanity must concede to order, or only chaos will reign.”

“Tell me why? What does this man’s death mean to you here?”

“When you asked for my help he meant nothing, but all that has changed, Al. Just can’t go back now. It’s too late.”

“Tell me, John,” he accused. “Make me believe that Adnan’s murder is necessary!”

“You want to know?” Byars temper roared, getting the best of him. “Here it is. I broke an Al Qa’eda operative from jail and agreed to look the other way if he does the hit. He also agreed to funnel money to an Arab opposition group to balance Kurdish power in the region. That way my hands stay clean.”

“What does that have to do with Adnan?”

“It’s a big world, Al. It’s all interconnected. One of our people encouraged the plot to off Serbia’s Foreign Minister to undermine Albanian Muslim standing in the World Press. Your friend gets implicated in the plot and we throw a shot to Muslim hardliners in Bosnia. We know that the Serbs will overreact to the plot and whip it into further evidence that they are under attack by Muslims, just like the Jews and Palestinians. So they do something stupid and Washington threatens their financial aid. Everybody comes off a little dirty and we get to tighten our control, and thus the status quo is maintained. Sometimes the best way to remain in control is not to be the center of calm, but the center of confusion.”

“John, have you gone completely insane,” he groaned. “Why?”

“Oil, leverage, the future of history, Al. The game. You’re wasting your time. This time tomorrow your friend will already be dead.” Byars came close. “You’ve seen a world that most people never know about. You looked into the engine room that makes it all run, you can never go back after you’ve seen that.”

“I feel like I’ve looked under the floorboards of the world to find all the cockroaches and snakes.”

“That too.”

“Somebody will turn a light on you one of these days.”

Byars’ eyes narrowed on Alan and he leaned closer. The look in his eyes sent a wave of terror through Alan “Don’t let it be you, or you’ll suffer the wrath of God.”