Warlord: Dervish (12 page)

Jason considered turning around and walking out of the room with Ahmed but changed his mind, deciding to get this over with while the other two were absent.

“I’m Jason.” He walked up to them, not offering his hand. “And this is Ahmed.”

The older of the two placed his controller down in his lap and directed his attention to Jason and Ahmed. The other man continued playing.

“You can call me Fleegle.” The man wore a bushy, horseshoe mustache. “And this out-sized thirteen year old is Bingo.” Bingo was black and sported a chin curtain beard.

“We just passed your friends in the hall. The one with the mouth.”

Fleegle smirked while Bingo snickered. “They call him Snork,” said the older man. “We just call him asshole,” clarified Bingo, working his thumbs and index fingers, blowing away aliens in a first person shooter. “Son of a bitch!” he cursed the screen.

“Either of you,” Jason didn’t expect much, “have any idea where we are or why we’re here?”

“All I know…” Bingo didn’t look up from the game, “…this is a better place than where we were. I’m not asking any questions.”

“You heard ‘the Major,’” Fleegle had produced a pack of cigarettes and lit up. He didn’t offer one to anyone else. “Do what he says, in a few days, we’re on our way stateside.”

“You buy that?” Jason didn’t believe the older man did.

“If your accommodations—before this—were anything like ours…” Fleegle exhaled, studying the smoke as it dissipated in the atmosphere “…then you know they could have killed us any moment they wanted to.”

“Where were we?”

“I don’t know.”

“They tortured you too then?”

“Whatever you want to call it.” Fleegle tapped the ash from his cigarette into a tray on the folding chair next to his own. “I don’t think the UN would approve. But you heard the Major. Between now and then—I’m just aiming to survive.”

Jason recalled having a similar mindset. He didn’t know what he’d expected to find out talking to these men. But he felt his earlier trepidation regarding them justified. He looked at Ahmed, signaling their exit.

“Jason, right?” Fleegle called after him. “A word of advice?”

Ahmed continued towards the doors as Jason turned, raising his eyebrows. Fleegle made a show of fixing his gaze on Ahmed’s back before speaking to Jason.

“Choose your friends carefully.”

Yeah
, Jason thought,
these guys were going to be trouble
.

“I could say the same thing to you.”

“Yeah,” Fleegle smiled back. “You could.”

Out in the hall, Ahmed said, “I don’t think they are good men, Jason.”

“I think you’re right about that, Ahmed.”

“But I think he is correct about one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“We must survive. I want to see my family again, Jason.”

“I hear you Ahmed. I hear you.”

Jason poked his head into rooms Ahmed told him were empty and found they were. As the two neared the end of the hallway, what sounded like muffled gunfire met Jason’s ears.

“That sounds like…”

“It is.” Ahmed led the way through the doors.

They stepped into a glassed-in ante-chamber looking out onto a series of self contained booths. The booths, in turn, let onto a gun range. One of the booths was occupied. The unfriendly woman from the cafeteria was firing a pistol downrange at a target. If she was aware she had company she ignored them.

There was a list of rules on the wall, but before Jason could read them, Ahmed ushered him forward. “Come, come.”

Jason followed him to the entrance of a booth. When Ahmed pressed a button, the glass door slid up, granting them access. They stepped inside and Jason was surprised at the booth’s size. It accommodated the two of them. A variety of guns were racked on either side of the wall.

The woman’s pistol shots reverberated along the range and through their booth. “Here.” Ahmed proffered a pair of cellophane-sealed ear plugs as he tore open his own and began inserting them in his ear canals. Jason did the same.

“This place is something,” Jason spoke loudly because of their ear plugs.

“Yes.” Ahmed fixed a paper torso target to a bracket overhead and depressed a button. The target receded down the range roughly seventy five yards before Ahmed took his finger off the button.

Jason considered the selection of handguns, revolvers and automatic rifles bracketed on the wall as Ahmed took down a submachine gun. A slot beneath the weapon’s place on the wall contained magazines of ammunition. Ahmed took two, inserting one vertically in the pistol grip magazine well and the other horizontally where the stock would have been.

“That’s cool,” Jason remarked of the way the horizontal magazine replaced the shoulder stock.

“I go first, okay?”

“Okay.” Jason took a step back.

Ahmed leaned his elbows on the counter and aimed. He squeezed off a series of tight, controlled bursts. Jason watched the target flutter. He was admiring the fact that Ahmed practiced fire discipline and hadn’t opened up on full auto when the interpreter inserted the second magazine and spent it in one sustained burst.

Shell casings scattered on the floor around their feet. Ahmed depressed the button and the perforated target returned to them.

“Nice,” Jason complimented. Ahmed’s bursts were tightly placed in the upper torso of the target.

“Thank you.”

“Where’d you learn to shoot, Ahmed?”

“It’s something I—how do you say, picked up?”

“Well, for an interpreter, you sure know how to shoot.”

“I wasn’t always an interpreter.” Ahmed smiled coyly. “Your turn.”

Jason scanned the firearms on the walls. There were so many he’d like to try his hand with. He selected a matte black pistol and took it off the wall. He noticed when he did so a miniscule red light lit up where the pistol had been.

“What’s that?” he pointed it out to Ahmed.

“Try to open the door.”

“Huh?” Jason didn’t understand.

“Open the door.”

Jason pressed the button that would raise the glass partition between their booth and the ante-chamber. Nothing happened.

“Put the gun back.”

When Jason returned the pistol, the red light disappeared. He stepped back to the button and this time as he pressed it the glass partition slid open.

“This way no weapons leave the booths,” explained Ahmed.

“Ain’t that something…”

After Jason pressed the button he retrieved a .357 Desert Eagle from the wall. “I always wanted to fire one of these. Look out.”

Several hours later, their next meal was served in the cafeteria. Jason found Bronson and sat with him, Ahmed joining them. Everyone else ate as they had earlier in the day, individually except for the four.

“Either of you see any clocks in here?” asked Bronson.

“No,” answered Ahmed.

Jason thought about it. He hadn’t seen a clock once in the complex. “I usually have a pretty good idea of what time of day it is,” he remarked. “Like my body would wake up at exactly—I don’t know—five every morning, right? Or I could just tell it was around ten o’clock and when I checked on the clock, sure enough it was around ten o’clock.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But in here, I don’t know, I’m off.”

“You’re feeling it too, B.”

“Yeah.”

“Neither of you are alone,” concurred Ahmed. “Is it my imagination, or has it only been a few hours since we ate breakfast?”

“Youse right,” Bronson agreed, “but thing is—I don’t think that was breakfast.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jason.

“I mean, they fed us breakfast food and whatnot, right? But I got a feeling that was more like lunchtime. But what I know? Could be middle of the night outside now.”

“I was the last one to wake up and come in here. Were there many people when you guys came out?”

“I came in before those assholes—” Bronson gestured towards the little group “—and you came in after them. Homeboy here—” he meant Ahmed “—youse was here before me.”

“I was the second man to arrive in this room. He—” Ahmed indicated the only man who sat alone “—was here before me.”

“You check his eyes out yet, B?”

“No, I didn’t. And stop calling me that. It’s annoying.
Buford
.”

Bronson shook his head like Jason failed to grasp some elemental truth. “What’d you say your name was again?”

“Ahmed.”

“Oh. Youse another one of them real name motherfuckas, huh?” Ahmed looked confused. “We gotta kill that noise, ya’hear?”

“What is this you mean?”

“Don’t you worry. I’m on it.”

“You’re right, Bronson.” Jason had an eye on the man sitting alone. “Somethings up with that guy.”

“Somethings up with every motherfucka in here.”

“I talked to them today, earlier.”

“Who dat?”

“Those four.” Jason cocked his head at the table. “Two of them at least. You’d like them.”

“Nah, I don’t think so.”

“No, really. They already got fancy little nicknames. The one with the 1970s mustache calls himself Fleegle and the black guy’s Bingo. The fat one’s Snorky or something.”

“No shit, B?”

“No shit.”

“And let me guess. You don’t get that either, huh?”

“Should I?”

“How old are you, B?”

“Thirty-eight. And stop with the B-shit.”

“So you was an 80s baby, like my boy Joel Ortiz, huh?”

“I don’t know. More like late 70s.
Who
?”

“You have a television when you were growing up?”

“Of course. Why?”

“Because I call you Buford Pusser and you never heard of
Walking Tall
. Those guys calling themselves Fleegle and Snork and you don’t know those are the names of the Banana Splits.”

“The Banana-who?”

“Damn. What’d you watch Saturday mornings when you was a kid?”

“The Smurfs?”

“Smurfs.” Bronson stuck a forkful of steaming meat into his mouth. “Shit.”

After dinner they returned to the barracks. No one had to tell them to do so. Jason found his bunk and decided he’d sleep on the top-most mattress.

“Yo, Jay,” Bronson came over and settled into the bunk beneath him. “I’m a sleep down here.”

“Would either of you mind if I spent the night in this bunk?”

“Be my guest, A-Rod,” said Bronson. He’d come up with his nickname for Ahmed. Jason was just glad the man had stopped calling him
Buford
.

“Help yourself,” Jason affirmed. Ahmed sat down on a mattress across from them and began untying his sneakers.

One by one the others entered: the woman with the Israeli military tattoo; the quiet, pretty woman who’d been the object of Snork’s harassment earlier in the day; the man with what Bronson called crazy eyes; the unapproachable, stone-faced woman. Much as they had in the cavernous mess hall, they spread out in the same general area. The Israeli soldier settled closest to Jason and his two new friends, in a bunk directly across the aisle.

Bronson and Ahmed spoke quietly to one another while Jason lay on his mattress. He was waiting to hear the four men but they did not come in while he was awake.

Jason wondered about them. He’d known some special operators in Iraq, spooks. They never dressed like other soldiers. They were never armed like other soldiers. And they never acted like other soldiers. They seemed to follow their own rules and a lot of mystery and resentment surrounded them for it. Envy too, Jason had to admit. Those guys were considered the black-ops motherfuckers who got shit done.

Jason wondered if the four were spook types. He couldn’t imagine. The one called Snork seemed more a common thug than a highly trained special operative. They apparently all knew each other from outside this place. Jason figured it was best to have as little to do with them as possible.

After awhile, the lights in the ceiling dimmed and Jason lay listening to the gentle hum of the ventilation system. He turned over on his mattress and looked out across the barracks. The Israeli woman was under her blanket with her pillow over her head. The guy with the eyes was sitting up on his mattress several bunks away, his back to the support. Jason wondered if the man was going to sleep, if he was even tired. Maybe Bronson was right. Maybe the guy was crazy.

Bronson and Ahmed had both stopped talking beneath him. Jason didn’t need to look to know both were asleep.

Ahmed was probably correct about them being underground. Jason wondered if they were in the United States. Wherever
here
was, he was just glad to be here, away from that other place, away from…Best not to think about him, Jason told himself. He wanted to avoid nightmares.

He thought about his students. He’d taught for fifteen years. High School. High school was a cool age. They had one foot in adolescence and the other in adulthood. By the time they graduated they had hair on their faces, they had boobs, but they were still kids. He always thought about them that way too,
kids
. Fifteen years was long enough for a kid he’d taught when the kid was a senior to be in her thirties now. Jeez. Sometimes they stopped by to visit the school and see him. He was always surprised. He remembered them the way they looked in ninth or twelfth grade.