The Sleeper (11 page)

“What?”

“He said your friend was named—what was it?—‘Zoo Bear.' Betsy said, ‘What zoo bear? Kurt's a teddy bear, but we don't know any zoo bears.' Weird, huh? We laughed about that. Do you know anybody named Zoo Bear, Kurt?”

“Nobody,” I said. “Did he say what the message was?”

“That's what I asked Betsy, but she said he didn't tell her. He just said, ‘It's personal.' ”

 

Nureddin opened his eyes when he heard the double click of the FAL's bolt. Apart from that, he didn't move. I kept my eyes on his eyes.

The FAL was a gun I knew real well, and every piece of it felt familiar. I'd already taken the magazine off, and now I worked the cocking handle back and forth. I hit the release catch near the pistol grip. The barrel broke forward. I pulled out the bolt. Nureddin never looked at what I was doing. He just looked at me.

The metal under my fingers was clean and well oiled. I twisted the gas plug and lifted it out, then removed the piston and the hand guards. All the pieces were on the workbench now, but I didn't look down. I just raised my hands beside my face to show they were empty, and then without looking at the rifle put it back together piece by piece. When I finished, I snapped on the magazine and chambered a round, then flicked up the safety.

Nureddin never took his eyes off mine, but now he stood up and took one step toward me, face-to-face across the bench. His hands were at his side. He didn't make another move.

I put the rifle down on the bench and took one step back. He picked it up. Still looking at my face, he clicked off the magazine and pulled back the cocking handle. A bullet flew out the side and landed on the ground. Now Nureddin stripped the gun just the way I did it, never looking down, always looking at me. When he was finished putting it back together, he chambered a round, flicked up the safety, put the rifle on the bench again, and stepped back.

I nodded toward the wall of ammo boxes. He nodded. He knew I'd found everything in there: another FAL, three Kalashnikovs, an M16, three M67 fragmentation grenades, and one M18 smoke grenade. From the look of them the grenades dated back to the US mission in Somalia in the early 1990s. There were also a couple of long knives, almost like machetes, a little quiver full of arrows with handmade points, and an African bow. The M16 was useless. No ammo. There were just a few rounds in the clips of the Kalashnikovs. But the second FAL's magazine was full, and there were about a hundred loose rounds besides. It was quite a good little arsenal, I figured. Anyway, it was enough to change the limit of my possibilities.

I picked the FAL off the bench and held it up between us. “Wolla Jora,” I said, and for the first time since I met him, I saw Nureddin smile.

I follow the rhythms of the solitary shifta running through the lightless desert, my feet striking the ground but the rest of my body and my head somewhere else, without sight, without any sense of what is around us, lost in space in the middle of the moonless night. The pain in my muscles doesn't reach me after a while, but in that empty-headed, hard-breathing trance the fear keeps catching up. If Abu Zubayr's people have Betsy and Miriam, then Abu Zubayr is the only chance I'll have to save them. He is going to have to tell me where they are. He is going to have to tell his people to release them. And he is going to have to do all of that in the next few hours. I know after September 11—we all know after September 11—these guys don't take prisoners, and hostages don't survive. A running cadence from my Ranger days keeps slipping into my open-eyed dream. “C-130 rolling down the strip, Airborne daddy gonna take a little trip. Mission unspoken, destination unknown, don't even know if we're ever going home.” Destination unknown. Going home. Destination unknown.

But now there's a light. The destination is known. It's there up ahead. The first light is in one of the farm buildings about six hundred yards away from us. Nureddin, in one smooth movement, takes up a prone position. So do I. Another light goes on and casts a dim glow over the ground outside, just enough so we can pick up the movement of a man walking from one building to another. The sound of a generator rolls across the empty terrain between us.

Nureddin takes a sharp breath, inhaling the scent of decay on the air, and he points to a space about halfway between us and the first building, but I'm not sure what I see. Something big is silhouetted dead-still against the glow coming from the compound. An animal corpse, maybe a camel. And it's not the only one. There are at least three other bare-boned skeletons of some sort out there. Nureddin makes a gesture with his hands, opening them like an explosion. He points to each of the big stinking carcasses, and each time makes the same explosive gesture. There are mines. Goddamn mines. I can clear our way through the field, probing inch by inch with the knife on my belt, if I haven't lost my touch. But by the time I finish, the sun will be rising.

There has to be another way. What can we see here? One four-door Toyota pickup “technical” with a mount for a .50-caliber in the back—but no gun there. There's supposed to be three other technicals. Where the hell are they? And where are the sentries? Where is everybody? And why is this man who is stumbling half asleep from one building to the other so relaxed? He's acting the way any soldier does when the thing he's supposed to guard is gone. Abu Zubayr must have left with the other technicals and probably half his crew or more. Shit. What's it going to take to squeeze something useful out of these characters? What are they going to know? They ain't gonna know shit.

“Abu Zubayr?” I ask. Nureddin nods. “Here? Now?” I point down. He nods again, then holds up his hand to silence me, and stands. He puts his bow over one shoulder and the FAL over the other, then motions me to follow as he starts loping like a marathoner on a victory lap, running straight for the rotting carcasses. If he knows what he's doing and I follow close enough and carefully enough, maybe we'll get through. If he doesn't know what he's doing, we're both going to get killed—or maybe maimed and then killed. But if I hang back, I'm going to be left crawling inch by inch until the sun lights me up. I follow his pace and his footsteps as fast and as best as I can and I think I hear something coming out of his throat. Low. Rhythmic. Not a running cadence or a song. A prayer. Ah, shit, Nureddin, don't you go trusting God to get us through this.

Nureddin takes a zigzag course, running from the corpse of the camel to the skeleton of a goat next to a couple of blown-apart buzzards, then on toward the skeleton of another goat, and straight toward the small building that I figure is the mosque. Nureddin seems to know his way around this place pretty damn well, which gives me some confidence. And also gives me the creeps.

We circle behind the mosque at a distance of about twenty yards and crouch behind a long row of ammo boxes. Each one is mounted on stone supports, and even in the dark I recognize our hives. Most of the bees are still asleep, but a faint buzzing mixes with the distant sound of the generator. We wait.

 

“Allahu Akbar—”
A tape-recorded call to prayer explodes through a loudspeaker on top of the building in front of us. The hives vibrate with the sound and buzz with life. A couple of bees, then a couple more, light on my face. Neither Nureddin nor I move as we watch the men of the compound slowly making their way to their prayers. I count twenty-four of them wandering drowsily into the little building. I can't tell which is Abu Zubayr, or if any of them are, but one is limping like Bassam al-Shami, the torture doctor, the secret source. It would be good to see him here.

Nureddin points to the day pack, where I carry the grenades, then at the mosque. I nod. He's thinking what I am thinking.

The imam begins the recitation. A single Kalashnikovtoting sentry stands, sleepy and bored, outside the door of the mosque. He picks his nose and tries to get a good look at what he dug out. Nothing else in the compound moves. Nureddin pulls two arrows from his quiver and strings one in his bow. It catches the sentry in the shoulder—not a killing shot. Nureddin has the other arrow drawn and aimed, but holds back. The sentry collapses on the ground, twitching like a man with a seizure, but makes no sound.

The two of us creep forward to the open doorway. Bees rise off our bodies and faces and fly back to the hives. The sentry is lying almost still, but not quite. His eyes are wide open, and up close you can see he's shivering with some kind of uncontrollable spasm. Nureddin puts his hand on the man's heart and nods. The sentry is still alive. Still conscious. Completely paralyzed.

There is a hierarchy of prayer. We know the most important men in the mosque will be in the front row of the faithful, so as all kneel together and touch their heads to the ground with their backsides to us, I pull the pins from two of the grenades, then release the handle on one. Counting “four,” “three,” “two,” I toss it into one of the back corners of the building near the door, then I toss the second, and step back. The first explosion sends a cloud of dust out the door. There is a hush, a taking of breath by the injured and the stunned inside, then the second grenade goes off.

I look over my shoulder. Nobody is coming from anywhere else in the compound. Everybody is here. Nureddin lets off a three-shot burst, then another, then another. There is no place for anyone to hide. Five or six men at the back of the building have taken the brunt of the shrapnel. But everyone inside is stunned, and just about everybody who wasn't in the front row is injured. I throw another grenade into the back. A dud. And another that explodes in the air. It tears off half of one man's face and knocks a second man against the wall, his chest gushing blood like a sieve. Now I have my gun to my shoulder, watching for any survivor who is somehow together enough to grab his rifle. One in a turban manages to throw the bolt on his Kalashnikov before I catch him in the gut with a quick burst from the FAL. Now nobody moves. There are about a dozen still standing. Slowly they put their hands up in the air and back toward the wall, their faces a mix of confusion and fury. Half of them have their eyes closed, praying.

I was afraid that Nureddin would kill them all. But he is cool—so super cool it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

I look at the man who limped. I don't recognize his face. But, then, I never really did see Al-Shami.
“Hola,”
I say. No reaction.
“Qué tal?”
No reaction. “You don't remember Granada?” Nothing. Maybe he is Al-Shami, maybe not. He looks too young, and he doesn't look smart enough. “I'll get back to you.”

Betsy.

Miriam.

One of these bastards knows where they are. One of these motherfuckers is going to make sure Miriam gets home to play with her Barbies tonight.

If I ask for Abu Zubayr, simple as that, nobody is going to know him, and the more I ask, the more they're going to harden their lies. I rip a piece of cloth off of one of the dead men's thobes and use it to wipe the black grease off my face. I want to make sure I am recognized, even if I fail to recognize him. As I work my way down our row of prisoners, a couple of them look away. Some stare right back. But others, in what looks like the trance of prayer, will not open their eyes at all. This isn't working. I step back.

“Abu Zubayr? Who knows Abu Zubayr?” None of the holy warriors answers. I let off a round into the groin of a dark-skinned Arab I know can't be Salah and he crumbles screaming onto the blood-damp floor. All but one of those saying their prayers opens his eyes. A couple try to make a move. Nureddin drops one of them with a clean shot to the head. We step back a couple of paces.

“Abu Zubayr?” I am looking at the man with his eyes still closed. His features are coming into focus in my memory. One of the younger Somalis looks at him, too.

“That'll do fine. Open your eyes, Salah.” His skin is pitted and scarred from acne, so the long, rough beard seems to grow from craters in his face. His lips are thin, his nose broad and broken. Only one of his eyes, the left one, has any life in it. The other is as gray and dead as a spent bullet.

From behind me Nureddin speaks the name “Abu Zubayr.” I wouldn't want to hear him say my name like that. Nureddin puts a fresh clip into his FAL.

The screaming man I'd shot in the groin goes quiet. There is a thin metal click: the handle of a grenade springing off. It spins toward me on the floor like a child's top.

Nureddin and I bolt back through the door and step to each side. Nothing. No explosion. But the survivors inside grab up their guns and started blasting. “Shit.”

Just that fast the situation is out of control. More bursts of gunfire. And a kind of panic hits me, not that we will be killed ourselves, but that, now we've found him, we'll have to kill the man we came for. “Abu Zubayr,” I shout at Nureddin and wag my finger. He cuts loose another burst through the doorway of the mosque, then backs off.

No one moves. Nureddin and I are outnumbered eight to two. At some point the muj will try to break out. But we can't know when. They have the initiative. We can't leave. I can't question them. We are prisoners of our prisoners.

The only grenade I have left is the smoke grenade. I hold it in my hand, trying to think the best use to make of it. Then Nureddin reaches for it. He studies it, handling it like he knows exactly how it works. Then he fires off a couple of blind bursts toward the building and runs around the back. I keep popping off rounds, trying to keep them down inside without using up too much ammunition, backing away at an angle and lying prone about thirty yards away to get a clear field of fire with a little bit of cover.

The thick plume of yellow smoke rises from behind the mosque. “What the fuck are you doing, Nureddin?” A couple of minutes later, he reappears carrying an ammo-box beehive. The smoke-drunk insects are crawling over his face and arms. He throws the hive underhanded into the mosque, like he was heaving a boulder. I lay down some covering fire. Nureddin disappears again around the back and returns with another hive. He throws that in, too. You can hear it smash and splinter on the dirt floor. There is a scuffling sound. Then nothing. Then someone screams. The bees are waking up.

Now Nureddin takes up a prone position angled opposite mine. We have the door in a crossfire. We wait. The first man through is the one with the limp, his face and arms covered with stinging bees. Nureddin drops him. Now the rest follow, screaming and firing blind as Nureddin and I squeeze off one short burst after another. When Abu Zubayr appears, Nureddin sees him first and lowers his aim to the legs. The bullet shatters one of Abu Zubayr's knees and he starts to crawl. The man behind him takes a round through the lungs and falls on him. The bees, now in the open air, swarm upward and away. Abu Zubayr is trapped by his wound and the weight of the man on top of him, and now Nureddin has the barrel of the FAL pointed straight into his good eye.

“Ibn sharmuta,”
says Abu Zubayr. Son of a whore.

“My name is Kurt Kurtovic.”

“I remember,” he says.

“You're going to remember more.”

Nureddin looks at the wounded and dying men around us. He takes the long knife out of his belt and, one by one, slits their throats. Abu Zubayr watches with the face of a man who's seen it all before. Then Nureddin kneels down beside the paralyzed sentry he's shot with his poisoned arrow. He feels the man's beating heart and nods, like a doctor checking a patient.