Warlord: Dervish (19 page)

“What are they saying, Ahmed?” Jason never took his eyes from the screen.

“That they are ‘traitors’ and ‘infidels’…” Ahmed sounded like he knew what was coming next and it wasn’t going to be any good.

“Main—they gonna cut their heads off, aren’t they? I don’t want to watch this shit. Fast forward, Ahmed.”

The video sped up and ran by, the events unintelligible. When Ahmed took his finger off the button the white man was pleading with his captors in Chinese and the black kid was shrieking, his head pulled back, shoulders held down, a long bladed knife sawing through his neck.

“
Awh
!” Bronson turned away from the screen. “Fast forward, Ahmed! Fast forward dammit!” Ahmed rushed to comply. “Yeah, I
do not
need to see
this
shit. Fuckin’ animals.”

“Wait!” Jason stared at the television screen, the scene scrolling past, indecipherable. “
Wait
!”

“Nah, Jay, I don’t wanna see this.”

“Play it, Ahmed. Play the fucking thing!”

A third man was kneeling beside the second. The black kid’s legs were in the picture, lying to the side. The third man tried to get up and was hammered over his head with a rifle butt.

“He’s one of us…” Jason whispered. The man wore camouflaged fatigues. The insurgents were barking and the camera jerked away from the kneeling men—panning quickly over an insurgent whose mouth and nose were hidden under a garish purple scarf—to Kalashnikov toting men pushing back against buckling window shutters, dust puffing between the slats.

The camera focused abruptly on the white man speaking Chinese. There were tears in his eyes and he was begging. Hands clasped either side of his head, holding it steady, pulling it back, exposing his neck. The bloody knife entered the frame.

An explosion off camera and the image jumped, the camera yanked back. AK fire, screams and muzzle flashes, a flurry of sand rushed in, swirling, obscuring the scene, then static, the end of the video.

“The fuck did we just see?”

“I don’t know.” Jason looked at Ahmed, who appeared as puzzled and distressed as they. “Let’s get out of here.”

They left the house and the video behind, fanning out across the fruit orchard, back through the ornate gate, gathering at the Stryker. There was still no sign of the sandstorm that had chased them into the city.

“Tell him to shut his goddamned mouth,” Letitia was saying of Areya, who appeared panicked. Ahmed knelt down in front of the boy and took him by the shoulders, listening to him.

“He says we have to get inside quickly…” Ahmed translated. “The sand will be coming soon.”

“Tell him to relax,” instructed Jason. “Bronson?”

“That house there. Good view from the roof.”

“Okay.” The two men trotted away from the Stryker, towards a house opposite the compound they’d just checked. What they found inside further disquieted them. The entrance—a thick, heavy wooden door—was unlocked, but several of the doorways inside were bricked up, barring access. Every window they found was similarly blockaded. On a lark, Bronson tried a wall switch and they found the house had electricity, naked bulbs hanging from the ceilings. They switched their Surefires off.

The doors and windows were sealed in such a way that a single path was left open to whoever entered. Funneling them through a corridor, it passed a stairwell leading to the second floor, opening into a small room with a folding table. This small room, in turn, gave to another short hallway which ended in a final room, where an overturned table rested beneath a torn out staircase. Wires were stapled to the walls of the passageways, terminating behind the table under the stairs.

Jason went and looked behind the table. He let out a low whistle when he saw what the wires were connected to. They’d been lucky the house hadn’t blown sky-high when Bronson turned on the lights.

“Haji central,” Bronson apprised.

“Yeah, so where is he?”

Returning to the small room with the folding table, they stared down on the rubber banded wads of cash and foreign passports, on the suicide vests in various states of repair. A perfunctory search of the second floor yielded little. Every door off the one functional stairwell was cemented and bricked off. The stairs continued up to the roof.

“This place ain’t cool, Jay.” Both men were thinking of the wires and their terminus behind the table.

“Yeah. Let’s get everybody and head across to that compound.”

Voices sounded from the front room.

“Why aren’t you guys out in the Stryker?” Bronson asked Letitia as he and Jason stepped into the room where the others gathered.

“Why don’t you go and sit in that thing in the middle of the fucking street?”

“Woman, you got a mouth on you…”

Areya was sitting in a corner with his legs drawn up to his chin, whispering to himself. “What’s he saying?” Jason asked Ahmed.

“He wants us to close the door.”

Daylight shown outside the entrance.

Jason followed Bronson out into the road. There was no one in either direction.

“You know this house ain’t safe, Jay.”

“I know that.”

“I know you know. So, what you wanna do?”

“I don’t know.”

When Jason stepped back into the house, Letitia was complaining. “Okay, is my watch the only one that’s acting like this?”

“Like what?” She immediately thrust her wrist under his nose. He wrapped his hand around her lower arm and forced it down to a suitable viewing distance, eyeing her distastefully as he did so. The minute and hour digits of Letitia’s watch were cycling from 0 to 9 wildly.

“Mine started slowing down out on the road.” Bronson had entered the house. “Its froze now.”

When Ahmed and Deirdre both agreed that their watches were off, Deirdre asked, “What about you, Jay?”

Jason pulled his camo sleeve back, showing them his wrist. He didn’t have a watch to consult.

“Shit don’t
feel
right…” Bronson stood in the doorway with a clear view of the Stryker, the compound walls, and the street. “…the eternal now…” his voice trailed off, but not before Jason startled from the recognition.

“He said something to you, too, didn’t he?
Kaku
said something to you about time?”

“I don’t want to talk about that man.”

Areya was trembling in the corner.

“What’d he say to you?”

The light bulb in the ceiling flickered.

“Jay—I said I don’t want to talk about him. You heard?”

Outside, the daylight was fading.

“Nine million vibrations…” Jason remembered. “Nine million vibrations of the—”

“Jay!”

He joined Bronson at the door. The sky had blackened as a wave of sand rolled in, a thunderous booming echoing from somewhere within its mass.

“We got to get this door closed,” Jason told Bronson before shouting to the others: “Check all the windows again!”

“What is it?” screamed Letitia.

“Sand storm!” Bronson yelled back, he and Jason pushing the door shut. Metal bars set beside the door fit into brackets mounted on either side of the frame. The light in the room flashed on and off.

“Jay—what they trying to keep out?”

“Letitia, help me recheck this floor!” Jason disappeared into the interior of the house.

“Fuck you!”

“Bitch!” Bronson cursed her, his back to the barred entrance. The door started to shake as wind on the other side pummeled it. “What’s the matter with him?” Bronson referred to Areya sobbing in the corner. Ahmed went to the boy.

They waited anxiously as the winds and sand whipped the door from the outside. Jason returned. “There’s a door to the roof. Like this one.” He indicated the braces.

As the winds howled outside, the door tremored, the light bulb flaring and dimming. Ahmed sat next to Areya, speaking to the child, gesturing with his hands. The boy looked up at the light, which blinked before burning steadily. His breathing slowed and he swallowed, composing himself. There was no mistaking the look on his face: relief. The door had stopped moving.

47th Iteration

“What just happened?” asked Bronson.

“Sand storm,” Letitia answered scornfully. “
Duh
.”

Jason pressed his ear to the door. “Let’s open it.”

He and Bronson lifted the steel bars and laid them aside. The door opened, revealing the street, a street neither man recognized. The Stryker had vanished. The compound across from them was gone, replaced by tightly packed two story cement houses. Electrical wires hung over the street between wooden pylons.

“What is it?” Deirdre joined them in the doorway. “Oh…”

“
People
!” Bronson closed the door, barring it again.

“I didn’t see anybody.”

“I did, Jay.”

“Something isn’t right.” Deirdre frowned down at her watch.

“What is it?” asked Letitia. “What did you see out there?”

“The Stryker gone. Where the fuck’d it go, Jay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Them houses, Jay. Those weren’t the same houses as before.”

“Bronson: we gotta stay calm here, right?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Come with me.”

“Where are you going?” Letitia narrowed her eyes.

“Keep cool down here, Letitia.”

She scowled back at him.

Jason and Bronson took the stairs to the roof. At the door, Jason dislodged the metal bars he’d set in place. The stairwell ended in a pillbox-like structure atop the roof. Stepping from the stairwell, both men removed their sunglasses. A concrete parapet lined the edge of the building.

“This is…Jay this is…”

“Yeah.” There was no need to say anything else. They looked out across the roof of the house they sheltered in. Before, the house had been a few blocks from the edge of the city. Now they stared out across a vast sea of roofs and power lines, ensconced in the middle of the city. It was dawn outside.

“Something happen’ here, Jay.”

“There’s your people.” Jason and Bronson stood at the waist-high barrier, looking down into the street. A half dozen men and women walked the street. They wore an assortment of dark robes, cotton shalwar kameez, and dishdashas. They went about their business, a burka-clad woman with her arms around a covered basket, a turbaned man with a briefcase passing the area where the Stryker should have been.

“Listen.”

“Yeah, Bronson. I hear it.”

Gunfire sounded in the distance.

“What’s that sound like to you?”

“AKs.”

“Think its Fleegle and them?”

“Who’s to say.”

“I think it’s them.”

“They don’t seem too bothered.” Jason referred to the men and women below.

“What you want to do, Jay?”

“I’m gonna head down there, see if I can talk to someone.”

“You serious?”

“Yeah. You stay here. Keep your eyes open.”

“You sure you know what you doin’?”

“No. So you better keep those eyes open.”

Downstairs, Jason ignored Letitia’s questions and exited the house. The few passersby did double takes, startled by his appearance. They turned and hurried off in the opposite direction. One old man spotted Jason, calling out to him. Jason waved. The old man hobbled down the street towards him, shaking the raw piece of wood he used as a cane, hailing Jason as he came.

“
Marhaba
,” Jason greeted, touching his right hand to his chest, lips and forehead, stepping away from the house as he did so, into the street. He had a big smile on his face, which he wasn’t feeling, but he tried to look friendly and hoped he’d made the right gesture. A machine gun echoed in the distance.

Winded, the old man paused momentarily when he reached Jason, huffing, staring down at the ground.

“You okay, grandfather?” Jason reached out to take him by the arm but the old man swatted his hand away and started hurling invective at him in Arabic.

“What—what—
whoa
—
whoa
—
whoa
, old man, chill!” Jason shouted over the man’s protestations, thinking his decision to come out here onto the street might not have been a shrewd one. The old man continued to scream at him, poking him in his armored chest with an arthritic finger. “Come on, old man—stop this shit!” Jason stepped away, putting a few feet between himself and the old man. “Stop it!”

“Jay!” Bronson yelled from the roof a split second before AKs started to chatter. A rash of bullets kicked dirt and sand from the ground around Jason and the old man. While Jason ducked and weaved, the old man cried out in agony, his body popping and locking, gouts of blood erupting from his chest and stomach. Jason raced back to the house, M4 spitting three-round bursts back at the men shooting at him. The old man slumped lifeless in the street.

One of the gunmen wilted, caught in the fusillade from Bronson on the roof and Letitia in the doorway. Jason made it to the house, rounds chasing him, walking across the wall—a mist of concrete filling the air—forcing Letitia to duck inside behind him.

“Shit!” She slammed the door. “The fuck, Jason?”

“Don’t know. Thanks.”

“Fuck you. I just like shooting sand niggers.”

“Marvelous.”

“Jason,” said Deirdre. “Bronson is calling you.”

On top of the house, Jason found Bronson squatting against the wall overlooking the street. Keeping low, Bronson refused to present himself as a target to anyone below. Jason duck walked to his position.

“How many we got?”

“I seen five down that way—” Bronson indicated the direction the initial gunfire had come from “—at least another five that way.”

“Shit. Okay.”

Men’s voices called to one another in the street.

“What we do, Jay?”

By way of an answer, Jason stood, the M4 at his shoulder. In the split second before he opened fire his mind registered a handful of men—a few houses down, dressed in an assortment of t-shirts and dishdashas, trousers and camouflage cargo pants, sneakers and flip-flops. His first burst missed, raising dust in the street and scattering them, the men yelling and returning fire wildly. He fired a second and third burst before dropping down, the air around him snapping as return fire broke the sound barrier.

“I got one.”

“This ain’t cool, Jay.”

“No, it ain’t cool. But we got the high ground.”

“Yeah, right, the high—”

“Let’s frag them. You ready?”

Bronson wrapped his hand around the pistol grip of the M-203 mounted under his rifle. “Bet.”

They stood together, facing in opposite directions, triggering their 40mm rounds and dipping beneath the parapet. After the grenades burst, an M4 barked from below—Letitia or Ahmed firing from the door.

Jason trotted forward to the corner of the roof and stood. Three insurgents lay unmoving in the street: the first one Bronson and Letitia had dropped; the second he’d brought down with his M4; the third had been caught in the blast of his fragmentation grenade. Whatever men were on their side of the street were hidden from him, but the two men on the opposite side were exposed, and—worse for them—they were waiting for Jason to appear in the middle of the roof where they’d last seen him. He took them out with well placed bursts from the M4, dropping low as incoming rounds sought him out.

Bronson huddled in the corner directly across from him, switching out magazines. There was the sound of vehicles in the street.

“Sounds like the reinforcements are here.”

Jason risked a glance over the wall. A compact car at the end of the block disgorged AK-wielding men. They were yelling back and forth to one another, excitedly.
Stupidly
. Jason bobbed back down as ragged bursts of gunfire smacked into the opposite side of the wall, concrete dust boiling up.

“Fuck…” Bronson breathed, the gunfire momentarily abating.

“Fuck
them
.”

“Frag ‘em.” Bronson stood long enough to loose another 40mm round from his 203. He was already under cover when the grenade detonated, raising a SUV off the ground, spilling men out of its doors mid-air.

“These fuckers is stupid.” Bronson remarked of the way the insurgents had driven directly down the street to their deaths. “These fucks don’t give a fuck.” He loaded another grenade into the launcher. “Fuckers die good.” He rose, fired the grenade, and dropped back into place. “Stupid fucks.”

Jason reached up over his head and fired half a magazine out into the street and whoever was on it. The return barrage was deafening, the air above their heads rent by seemingly hundreds of rounds.

Bronson removed two hand grenades from his webbing, peeling off the tape that secured their pins.

“Give me one of those.”

“You got your own.” Bronson pulled the pin from one grenade. “Don’t be lazy.” He tossed it over his shoulder and the roof wall. Someone on the ground cried out before it detonated. Bronson sent the second down behind it.

Jason hopped up and fired the remaining half magazine at a car that had pulled up down the block. Men were piling out of it, pointing at him and the house. He triggered his M-203 and dropped behind the wall, cursing himself, knowing he’d been off with the grenade, hearing it explode in the street. The car’s engine revved and faded as it sped off. He slapped a new magazine home.

“Jay,” Bronson was looking past him. “They gonna figure out to come up on these roofs sooner or later.” As if on cue, a gunman appeared on the rooftop three houses down, screaming how great god was.

Jason promptly dropped him.

“How you doin’ on ammo?” Jason focused on the roof and the stairwell the insurgent had come from.

“I’m good.”

“Are you chaps all right?” Deirdre called from the stairwell.

“Yeah,” Jason responded. “It’s a party up here.” The high pitched whine of a bullet passed by overhead. “Tell Letitia to keep that door closed. She wants to shoot at
haji
, tell her to get her ass up here with us.”

“It was Ahmed. And he closed it.”

“Okay, good.” Jason thought he saw something, some movement from the stairwell. He sent a burst at it and waited. “You guys sit tight down there.”

A few seconds passed before Bronson spoke,. “You think they can get in?”

“Front door or this way,” Jason nodded to their own stairwell, summing up the entry points, never taking his eyes off the other roof. “They set this place up to fuck us up. Might actually work to our favor.”

Bronson tossed a grenade over his shoulder as he had with the first two. As it exploded he pitched another past Jason in the other direction. A burst of gunfire followed the explosions and then the street was still. Off in the distance the muted reverberations of assault rifles and machine guns continued.

“Who are these guys, Jay? Some kind of A-rabs?”

“I don’t know. I seen a lot of different clothes.”

“Think I seen some Chechens.”

“Chechens?”

“Yeah. They like them fuckin’ skull caps. Shits is woolen. In this weather?”

“No shit.”

Shards of concrete from the wall showered down on them, the booming discharge of a heavy machine gun moving closer on the street. Bronson stood and fired on a pick up truck, a fifty caliber mounted in the bed. The gunner’s red and white kaffiyeh trailed him, the truck speeding by the house. Blood misted as the man pitched from the truck bed and Bronson dipped back to cover Jason studied the stairwell the gunman had emerged from, waiting patiently.

“Bronson, listen. Not to bust your balls…”

“Which means you gonna bust my balls, right Jay?”

“Yeah. Why Bronson?”

“Why Bronson? You gotta ask?”

“I’m asking. That your rap name?”

“That shit? Nah. Another nigga calls himself that.”

“You got a rap name?”

“Yeah, J-Todd.”

“J-Todd?”

“Werd.”

“So then what’s with
Bronson
?”

“Maybe I tell you that some other time, aight?”