At long last, Magic Stick moves forth. Also, I am SO getting a Wife of the Year trophy.
Dumphy looked at his clearly labeled MRE crackers and sighed. He'd given away the peanut butter in the pack at lunchtime, to Lt. Benally nonetheless and even though there were plenty of unopened MREs with everything from jelly to cheese spread; something about ransacking their food supply for a couple ounces of Skippy Creamy seemed inappropriate while millions of people went hungry in Darfur.
He put aside the mid-afternoon snack and followed an ant trail into the guardhouse where the Lieutenant was making use of the least rickety chair and pretending to listen to music with her boots up on the leftover sandbags they'd used to dust the place and get it back to smelling semi-habitable. He went along with the i-Pod charade, wise to Silas' similar trick with the printed word and cleared his throat loudly.
"Ma'am?"
"Don't call me that, I'm not your mother," she said dislodging the dead earphones.
"Yes ma… Lieu…"
"How may I or my infinite wisdom help you soldier?" She interrupted softening the unintended bark in her voice to something more ladylike.
"I was wondering what you are looking for?"
"Why would you wonder that?"
"Well, because we've searched every car and double checked every ID coming through here but no one's had so much as a hair out of place." He hesitated before continuing and pointed from the cased binoculars on her lap to the tripod by the window.
"And you've been in here checking them out every couple hours but I thought we only have orders to hold down the fort for Lt. Colonel Lyle, ma'am."
Benally didn't react to the last, stray ma'am and instead stood up. She grabbed the binocular case and motioned for Dumphy to follow her to the window. They stood before the glassless frame, secure in the distance that put them out of range of the most ubiquitous weaponry in the hands of their iffy allies. Dumphy whistled when she screwed the pricey binoculars onto the tripod.
"Doting husband," Kai said adjusting scope and tripod height for Pvt. Dumphy who had to bend only slightly to look through them. "You are looking for the last window on the right," she added.
"That's Colonel Ghazi."
"What else?"
"He's reading the newspaper, shit; I can see the date on it ma'am!"
"Anything else?"
"He's sitting outside his office and not in it?" Frank looked up.
"Right. What's more, he's been knocking on his office door before going in. Do you think Sergeant Silas would ask you to get off his cot if you were taking nap on it?"
Dumphy laughed nervously picturing the scenario. Even at his mellowest a couple weeks prior, even at the tail end of a year's deployment, the tension between Cerebral Frank and Practical Christopher was thick enough to cut with a knife. They had yet to bridge a gap that was nonexistent with King and Tariq and a hell of a lot shorter where Pvt. Maurice Williams was concerned.
"So you don't think he wants to hold on to the Minister of Interior because they really want to try him?"
"If you believe that, I can give you a great deal on a bridge in Brooklyn."
"How come?" He asked. She put away the binoculars.
"Bina doesn't exist in any map printed before 2003 Private. It was a glorified rest-stop along the highway until the Iraqi Police moved in. Everyone living here right now is either part of the force or lends service to it; the wives, the barber, the grocer, the mullah. His eloquent, yet hole-ridden jurisdiction argument is hairy sack of nuts."
"Who came up with the name?"
"Coffee mug at battalion. Burmese Independent News Agency."
"So we really turned the town over to the Iraqi for brownie points ma'am?"
"Dim," she said trying the man's nickname on for size "whether you like it or not, this is a very political war and all the rightful indignation in the world isn't going to change it. Had you, however, chosen to look at the part you can affect, i.e. fucking them before they get a chance to fuck you, you might have noticed the lookout on the roof isn't in issued livery, the shoulder-boards of the two uniforms posted outside match the Colonel's thus severely reducing the likelihood that they might be legit patrolmen and just for kicks, they've chosen to stage their dog and pony show when 90 of the force is on a training exercise on the Iranian border."
When it came to the line between southern bitch and southern belle, Kai Benally often found herself standing squarely on the wrong side.
-X-
Back in its nameless lean-to days when Bina first caught the eye of whoever was looking to centralize the Iraqi Police training efforts in northern Iraq, whatever structure wasn't easily accessible through the long main street had been razed and removed and the most appealing piece of real estate set aside to build a model police station complete with its very own dungeon –which is what it was even if in the official blueprints, the architect had decided to go with the less macabre 'holding cells' tag.
The Villain and The Failure were at it again in the aforementioned city jail where they had just finished checking in on Husam Thamir Ibrahim 'Too Many Names' al-Sadun and his personal journalistic attaché. They walked up the narrow stairwell to the first floor of the squat police station where the radio operator in the outfit, a male specimen stuck somewhere between puberty and any age that didn't get a 'teen' tacked to its end, was keeping an ear on the scanner the U.S. Army had released from its surplus inventory into the property of the Iraqi Police. As before, Salik had nothing new to report.
Rashid shook his pretty head in an over the top, melodramatic gesture that made the Colonel want to choke his shady, interim boss. Instead, he looked out the window to the building across the street that served as barracks for the single officers in the force. The married men in Bina were only the permanent cadre and their families had lucked out with new apartments eight blocks away on the two buildings on the outer edge of town.
"Do you really think they were going to provide us with a radio scanner that can intercept their secure transmissions?" Ghazi asked. The scorn that tinted his opinion of the man before him bled too far into his voice. Rashid considered the question.
"They believe the Sunnis and the Shiites will get along one day. I expect anything."
Ghazi squared his shoulder and crossed his arms over his chest.
"About that Mr. Sabawi," he said "I have been thinking. I shall leave tonight. You can kill the Lieutenant Colonel tomorrow as he gets out of his car. There is no need for this elaborate meeting you have orchestrated. I will join my men in the border for the end of their exercise."
Body language alone wasn't enough to sell the idea that he wasn't asking for permission. Ghazi stared up at Rashid, impotent in the heat of his powerful gaze.
"You will do no such thing Hassan. The interview and the Lieutenant Colonel's death will be broadcast on Al-Jazeera in that order. Do not mistake my disinterest in your lack of significance for anything more than it is."
-X-
"All right, I'll bite. Who pissed in your Wheaties Sergeant?" Kai wiped sweat from her forehead and looked at Silas in the passenger seat beside her.
"I don't know what you mean ma'am."
"And then the Holy Spirit whispered in Mary's ear and Jesus was born." They were three minutes out with the last roadblock behind them and the second car in the Humvee Indian file headed to a rendezvous with Captain Baron to be briefed before bed. It wasn't even time for the sun set but they were sleeping in shifts and not even heat, discomfort and tasteless, plasticky food could explain Silas' wrinkled brow.
"Okay." He nodded like one of those supermarket coin rides getting shiny new quarter, all full of energy and resolve. "For starters, you told Tariq you don't speak Arabic and Captain says different." He looked at the side of her face, intent on the road ahead.
"Dim is chatty as hell," he added "but he's got good instincts; you know something we don't and probably that Captain doesn't know either. Whether you think you are gonna be here for a day or a year, there are twenty-three men in this platoon ma'am and they are all your responsibility. I have a feeling we are going to get some action before this shit's over and the way this works is if you know anything that'll make it even a little bit less dangerous for your men, you need to come clean."
She didn't say anything for a full minute. Silas bit down on the bite-valve of his Camelbak ™ issued hydration system –worn at individual discretion or as directed by the company commander, like he might treat the tapered end of a fifty dollar cigar.
"You are right," Kai said breaking the silent lull that had elapsed. Silas' ears perked up. A woman and an officer all of whom happened to be the same person had just admitted he was right. She was bursting with nervous energy, tapping a random rhythm on the steering wheel.
"I'm an intelligence officer Sergeant and I'm good at my job which means I have a lot bad habits like this principle that information is wealth and it has to be spent wisely but after you allow for all that, I still only have hunches and theories."
"And I prefer considering an educated guess at my discretion than walking in blind so shoot."
"This thing about keeping Thamir to put him on trial in Bina; it sounds good when Joe Blow tunes in Podunk but I think it's a load of crap. You agree?"
"Could be; Ghazi's not local. The Batman act stinks."
"I have a lot of time to look at all the angles when no one's shooting at me so what if, shit. I hope this doesn't sound stupid…"
"If it's stupid and it works it's not stupid ma'am," Silas interrupted hoping the gist of it was more inspirational than the sentence itself.
"Have you noticed how in the last couple of weeks no one's hurrying to claim car bombs in time for the evening news? Usually Mufasa's Second Army or Ali Baba's Cave Raiders are claiming the damn thing before the main charge goes off but for the past month… nada."
"Wasn't Mufasa the Lion King ma'am?" He asked. Kai laughed.
"Seriously though, what if this isn't about Allah at all? What if it's just about creating a distraction big enough that no one will notice Jihad Joe is trying to get the hell out of Dodge?
"Why go through all that trouble? All the borders are like Swiss cheese."
"Every self-respecting warlord from here to Timbuktu is the biggest advocate for peace in Iraq you'll ever meet and helping Thamir evade capture is not going to help them so they figure why the hell bother?
"Nobody likes to dwell on all the high quality heroin coming through Iraq since we moved in but it doesn't change the fact that it's a problem. A kilo worth a $1,000 in Afghanistan brings in over $800K retail. Under Saddam people like Thamir had to be paid off. It added a lot of administrative costs to the tab so if you are on the supply end of the chain, you had to find an alternate route; Iran, Syria, Turkey, Jordan who cares as long as you kept it moving.
"Then suddenly, Papa Saddam's not in power anymore. It's Christmas in March! You can smuggle billions of dollars worth of heroin for next to nothing and there are no government officials to bribe and no warlords to finance.
"You think the hundred kilos in Qadiya and the other big bust in Arbil, you think it's all related ma'am?"
"At least loosely. The drugs destroyed in Qadiya were probably meant to be found Sergeant. They can move ten times that much product in one single NGO truck while all the attention is on a big load like that…"
Lt. Benally's voice trailed off when Sgt. Murphy hit the brakes ahead of them making the red taillights light up cheerily. She stepped on the brakes herself and began slowing down. Baron's Humvee was blocking the road up ahead and the Captain was already pacing the length of the vehicle and angrily if the way his boots hit the asphalt was any indication. The convoy crawled to a stop.
In case you don't want to scroll all the way up to the subject line, you just finished Chapter. 9.
Thy Author and Ze Editor.