Warlord: Dervish (2 page)

“Sometimes,” the kid had said to him, “you just gotta let go…”

Specialist Jason Aaron wasn’t feeling right and hadn’t been feeling right for some time. He’d sweated through his drab green t-shirt under his ACUs, the sweat plastering the shirt to his torso before drying on him, and here he was sweating through it again. The odor trapped in the t-shirt was rank. Jason wasn’t feeling so well.

A hundred and twenty degree days
, he thought,
had a way of doing that to you
. But it wasn’t even ten in the morning and nowhere near a hundred and twenty yet. The heat and the stink of his t-shirt. Just two of the million little things that made Jason hate this country, hate this place.

“Hey, America!” the children were waving, hoping for chocolate.

On the other side of the barricade, across from Jason, Staff Sergeant Marc Patterson took one hand off the fore grip of his M-4 and waved back at the kids with his gloved hand. No one in their gun team called the sergeant by his given name. They called him
Mook
.

“Hey yo’self, future terrorists.” Tucker called back, smiling, his voice high and nasally, loud enough for the other Americans and their interpreter to hear.

“You ain’t right, Tucker.”

“What chew mean, Mook?”

“Shouldn’t talk to them like that.”

“Puh-lease, Sarge.” To anyone other than the Sergeant, Tucker would have said
nigger please
. Tucker was black and Mook was black, but Tucker knew better than to talk to Mook like that. “Little sandgook probably got a poster of al-Sadr at home on his bedroom wall. Ain’t that right, Meech?”

Their interpreter shrugged. “This is possible.”

He wasn’t sure, but Jason thought it had been Tucker who’d bestowed the nickname
Big Meech
on their terp.

Jason looked out on a foreign world through his black sunglasses. The kids, smiling and waving. The women in their black robes, staring at the ground. The old men, their faces lined and eyes empty. The young men would stare back, their eyes hard and cold. The red-and-white and the black-and-white headdresses, each signifying allegiance to some sect. Jason was glad for his sunglasses, relieved he didn’t need to make eye contact with any of them.

Espada took his eyes off the people for a moment and glanced up into the sky. “Wonder if the Hindenburg’s seeing anything interesting today,” he commented.

The aerostat hung over the city far above them. Its mooring lines—a perversely long umbilical cord—stretched from the nose cone down through the air, disappearing somewhere in the dust and buildings of the city. An American flag fluttered above the lower rudder. The corporate brand, Diogenes Inc., was emblazoned in red, white and blue lettering across the envelope. Though he couldn’t see it this morning, Jason knew the corporate logo—a blazing lantern—was printed on the starboard side.

As he stood with the stock of his M-4 tucked into his side, his back to the Hesco barriers that comprised their traffic control point, Jason knew that electro-optical sensors aboard the aerostat were scanning the city. The images were transmitted to someone, somewhere. He’d read that the drones were operated state-side, out of Virginia and Jason wondered if the blimp worked the same way.

What were the spooks and pencil pushers back at Langley looking at on their monitors? Entire blocks of homes reduced to enormous piles of rubble in the war. Streets strewn with concrete and masonry. Pockmarked ruins amid pools of fetid water and raw sewage. Paths blocked with coils of razor wire. Densely packed, square grids of cement houses linked by cement walls. A labyrinth of courtyards and walls, homes built in such proximity you could leap from one roof to another. The more affluent homes in town, compounds with date trees in courtyards lined by ten foot walls.

The people. Faces chiseled granite, lined from a lifetime of fear and uncertainty, privation and want, dictatorship and invasion. Old men squatting on their haunches, sipping
chai
. Dishdashas and kaffiyeh-wrapped faces. Robed sheiks stepping in and out of their luxury sedans, ringed by their personal security details. Western volunteers in the employ of humanitarian organizations, trying to minister to local nationals without armed escorts, fodder for future kidnappings and beheadings. Ill-disciplined Haji patrols overseen by American advisors. Down-armored Humvees moving through the streets that could fit them at ten miles an hour; dour-faced men and women in the turrets manning fifty caliber machine guns and automatic grenade launchers. Somewhere—anywhere—
everywhere
, black-hooded insurgents, the Iraqis and Syrians and Saudis, the Italians, Chechens and Filipinos, ready to pop up with their RPGs and AKs and chest rigs, waiting to obliterate the infidels and themselves. Seventy two virgins and jihad, freedom and democracy, a clash of civilizations.

The Americans and coalition forces behind their five-ton, reinforced concrete Texas barriers. Their wire basket Hescos lined with moleskin, filled with twenty-five tons of rock and sand. Berms of earth, defensive positions thrown up by bulldozers. This city, their area of operations, their COP far from the nearest Forward Operating Base. The CHUs—air-conditioned aluminum housing units the size of shipping containers—where grunts like Jason, Mook and Tucker laid their heads down when time and circumstance permitted. Where the kid, Rudy, had laid his head down when the kid’d had a head to lay down, before he was just another slab of charred meat waiting to be shipped back home.

A once proud country, a once mighty empire, a cradle of civilization, hobbled, looted, occupied. Was this what they watched in Langley, in the artificial chill of their air conditioned cubicles?

The same sights, day in and day out. Jason knew them well. They’d been out here for a week, guarding this barricade, denying access to the street behind. The street led to the
souk
, the market. The barricade itself made little sense to Jason. The people came and went, generally steering clear of him and the other Americans. They could get to the market through the side streets. Any Muj or his brother could psych themselves up watching a martyr video, shrug on a vest of C4 and rusty nails, bypass their TCP and detonate themselves in the middle of the bazaar.

The barricade was meant for the cars. If you wanted to drive down to the market, you had to stop and talk to the Americans first. Further up the street were the staggered Jersey barriers, the signs in English and Arabic warning drivers to STOP. Their barrier was undermanned, in Jason’s estimate, in Mook’s estimate. They had five men on it and Meech, but Meech wasn’t there to fight and didn’t have a weapon. It’d come down as a frago the week before and developed into something all its own, and Jason felt vulnerable, as he knew the other men did.

As far as the locals were concerned, Jason and his guys were alien invaders. Jason got that. He understood that. The men of his fire team were similarly attired. Digitalized camo fatigues; Kevlar helmets and black, wrap-around shades; body armor with ceramic plates; elbow and knee pads strapped on and throat protectors in place; bullet- and heat-resistant gloves; compression bandages, tourniquets, boots; two hundred and forty rounds of 5.56mm for their M-4s in eight, thirty-round magazines. Sixty pounds of armor and ammunition. Jason had sweated through his t-shirt, it had dried on him, and he was sweating through it again.

And it wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning.

He hadn’t been feeling well for some while, and he suspected it had little to do with the heat. He took a pull from his Camel Back, the water warm.

“Hey, America!” one boy had broken from another pack and approached the Hescos and sandbags, waving something in his hand. The kid was dirty and disheveled, maybe eleven years old. M-4 barrels rose to meet the kid, but Mook was already moving forward with Big Meech, intercepting the boy, keeping him back from the TCP. Jason looked around, unsure what to do, then followed, positioning himself between the barrier and their sergeant.

“What you got there, Abdul?” Mook asked the boy. Big Meech started to speak to the child in Arabic but the boy ignored him and spoke directly to Mook with whatever English he possessed.

“You like DVD America?” The child smiled and Jason was struck by the white of his teeth under all that dirt and grime.

“Let me see what you got, Abdul.”

Jason looked the boy over, knowing Mook already had. None of them put it past the insurgents to rig a kid in a suicide vest and send him up to the barrier. It’d been done before. They did it with women. Pregnant ones too.

Mook was bantering back and forth with the dirty boy, his M-4 hanging at his side, looking through the bootleg DVDs the kid proffered. Big Meech stood around looking bored, his lip curled up against the sun.

Months in the heat had leaned Jason out. Between the incessant, sauna-like temperatures, their MREs, energy drinks and the stress, he had abs again. When he looked close enough, there was grey in his short-cropped, brown hair. And there was grey in his eyebrows and beard whiskers when he had beard whiskers.

If she could see him, Aspen wouldn’t recognize him.

Jason had noticed the grey in his eyebrows when he’d shaved lines through them. It wasn’t his idea, but Rudy’s. The kid had been shaving lines in his own eyebrows. Jason asked him what he was doing and Rudy told him and then the kid asked, “What you think about that old man?” Jason had dismissed him with a wave, but the kid said, “Know what, old man? Sometimes, you just gotta let go.” Jason thought about it and then he’d let Rudy have at it. Afterwards, he remembered staring at himself in the mirror, Rudy nodding approvingly, smiling, “See what I mean old man?” The kid had offered to shave lines in Big Meech’s next, but the terp had muttered something in Arabic and wandered away from Rudy and his clippers.

Jason had thought of Rudy as
the kid
, but Rudy wasn’t a kid, not like this boy here, this kid talking with Mook. Rudy had been eighteen, maybe nineteen. He’d worn an Italian horn on a chain under his fatigues, said it was for luck. When his luck ran out they never found the charm.

Jason remembered when he was a child in New York. The winters. Old people used to complain about the cold. Uncle Ritchie would complain, but he wasn’t all that old, though he seemed old to Jason as a boy. Uncle Ritchie in his v-neck t-shirt with the gold chains on his hairy chest. He wasn’t really Jason’s uncle and Jason wasn’t sure how or when they’d started calling him
uncle
. He was a neighbor and a friend of the family; a friend of Jason’s mother.

This winter’s colder than
, Uncle Ritchie would be standing there in his t-shirt and grey sweat pants, hands on hips, plumes of breath jetting out of him in the wintry air. Jason and his friends would be playing in the snow, building their forts and readying their snowballs.
Let me tell ya, Jay
, Uncle Ritchie would say this to Jason, singling him out among all his little friends,
this winter’s colder than
, and then the man would catch himself because whatever was coming after
colder than
wasn’t going to be appropriate for nine-year-old ears.
This winter is friggin’ cold
.

Jason could never understand why Uncle Ritchie stood outside in the middle of the winter in a short-sleeved t-shirt.

Tell ya somethin’, Jay
, Uncle Ritchie would cross his hands in front of his body and rub his arms but make no move to go back in his house.
I don’t know how much more of this I can take
. The breath would be coming out of Uncle Ritchie in small clouds.
One day I’m going to sell this house and move
. Jason never needed to ask where Uncle Ritchie might move.

M
ove to Arizona
.

It was always Arizona.

Uncle Ritchie would say this to Jason when Jason was little. At nine, Jason had never been to Arizona. At that age, he’d never been outside of New York State and rarely beyond the borders of Rochester. But Jason knew Arizona was hot.

Tell ya what, Jay, it’s hot in Arizona
.

He knew Arizona was hot because Uncle Ritchie was always telling him how hot Arizona was.

Real hot

And he knew that Phoenix was the capital of Arizona. He’d learned that in school.

But it’s a dry heat
. Uncle Ritchie invariably added this, almost as an aside, like a secret he was sharing with little Jason in the snow, little Jason’s nose running in the cold.