Shari'a: is the Arabic word for Islamic law. It governs the public and private lives of those living within an Islamic state.
On a related sidenote, while I am aware that there are currently no direct flight linking Baghdad International Airport in Iraq and London's Heathrow via Iraqi Airways, I have chosen to ignore this and say there are because, well… I can.
It wasn't quite daybreak and he hadn't had more than three hours of sleep at a time for the past two days but Silas still knew, as he knocked on Jamila's door without the usual circuitousness that got him there when he could get away, that he was once again being an idiot. He switched his helmet from under one arm to the other and leaned his forehead on the cold concrete of her second floor porch wall then fell asleep; really truly, asleep for twenty seconds until she opened the door. Jamila mumbled her welcome through a mouthful of toothpaste and gave him a smile topped with the handle of a red, plastic toothbrush. She looked at both sides of the alley between her building and the next, wrapped her hand around his wrist and pulled him inside.
She disappeared into the bedroom and came back sans toothpaste or the bottom half of her prayer outfit, wrapped in a silky, green robe. Silas had used the time alone to catalogue her living room or more to the point, the missing additions that had seemed so important less than a week earlier. He had changed before coming, or rather traded clothes with someone who stank a little less than he did after two days of being able to clean up with nothing wetter than baby wipes. His aura was sweaty socks and baby powder all rolled into one.
"Are you okay? I didn't think I would see you this soon."
"I've just… missed you. A lot." Silas took her face in his hands, reminding himself that care, like water, had to be sipped after long periods of going without. Jamila threw her arms around his neck and hugged him, balanced on the very tip of her toes. He winced, shying away from the well meaning but nonetheless painful gesture.
"What's wrong? Are you hurt?" She began yanking Velcro and undoing buttons before he could think of way to reply that might prepare her for the ugly bruise under his shirt.
"It's not as bad as he looks," he said sheepishly.
-X-
Johanna Gilchrist was chain smoking on her issued cot in the trailer she shared with the BBC correspondent who had replaced her, enjoying being back to the familiar pleasure den in Camp Marez reserved for civilian contractors filling army jobs that couldn't be hired out to third country nationals, and of course the press. Her camera bag had been returned without tapes or an explanation, by a man even more pissed off, if that was even possible, than any of the others she had rubbed elbows with since her return from Bina.
Just as the interrogation room where she had been held for eight hours began to close in on her, a man in khaki work pants, the rigueur thigh holster and black body armor over an olive long-sleeved shirt, had half pushed her, half guided to the open back doors of a black, armored, civilian use Humvee parked in a windowless room. She had bent her head to be crowned with the hood she'd worn after the last transfer, reasoning that that these angry, nameless people she was sure weren't soldier although they spoke perfect English wouldn't bother with hoods or returned equipment if they had more macabre intentions in store.
A black sheet of Plexiglas between the driver and his cargo and the heavily tinted windows in the back sides and doors had blocked out all the light and scenery while an impossibly loud selection of Mariachi tunes had taken care of any ambient noise that could have filtered in. These measures were especially necessary because unbeknown to Johanna, who at the moment could have cared less, the Humvee's driver did little more than drive around Camp Marez making sharp turns at the motor pool for twenty minutes to give the soldiers who had returned Johanna to her trailer time to finish their dinner.
She counted the cash she had stashed throughout her side of the room for the third time. It was of littler solace each time she took stock but in the end, the bill rolls between her camera equipment and the lumpy filling in her mattress usually brought a smile to Johanna's face. Her bible had runneth over with Grants and Benjamins as had her socks. The best she could say of her employer was the cash only payment policy that Her Majesty's Revenue didn't have to find out about. Everything else about Iraq sucked except the tax free $89,000 that would support her for a year of fun in London or three if she lived within more modest means.
Dana Stokes barged in on the relative peace within the trailer, letting in the never ending construction noises from the camp's continuous expansion. Her tan face was blotchy from running the length of trailer row after trailer row trying to locate the one her key would open amidst the identical, maddening maze. Dana rifled through a camera bag not unlike Johanna's and fished out her press jacket and a spare battery pack. She stuffed a small notebook in the back pocket of her jeans, checked the tape in a backup recorder and finally noticed Johanna sitting sullenly on her bed.
"What are you doing? There's a press conference about that raid in Bina in less than two minutes. My source told me they picked up some high profiles and leveled the place. Come on!"
"I don't care. It's not worth it. A raid is not a story, there's nothing to cover!"
"Don't you get it Grumps? The shit's really gonna hit the fan. I shouldn't be telling you this but my guy in intake says they can't find that police Colonel anywhere."
-X-
Silas tried to count the calls to prayer in his head, to guess an accurate enough time range without having to search for his watch, wherever it had landed when Jamila took it off his wrist and flung it across the room in response to its incessant beeping. He pegged the number at two because it was the number of times she's stirred beside him and disappeared for several minutes. Her hair had been wet when she came back the second time, having been gone longer.
Chris went to Tariq with the questions on culture and Islam he didn't dare Google on the public terminals in the communications tent, to learn the difference between the partial cleaning called wudu and the more thorough ghusl or that the latter was needed to pray after having sex. Jamila's hair was damp when he stretched his hand to touch her and he decided it had to be somewhere around two.
The air coming in through the open bedroom window was too cold; too cold especially for a country where many a bored soldier had succeeded at frying eggs on the hood of cars parked in the shade. Coldness hugged him when Jamila pulled the frayed chenille bedspread down to his ankles and braced her knees on either side of his hips but it took the rat-tat-tat of automatic gunfire to pry his eyes open. They listened for a minute, each one trying to answer their own set of questions.
They weren't American bullets. They sounded more like the work of a couple of Kalashnikovs. The cheering that followed was fainter; like something for a wedding or a funeral but not an ambush and aside from the questionable rationale of emptying a magazine into the air, nothing much would probably go wrong.
"So you'll wake-up for bullets but not for me?" She asked huskily, bending forward to kiss him, careful to hover just above his purple CD sized bruise on Silas' chest. "Lazy bones."
"Take pity on a hungry man and feed him," he managed at the breathing break when her mouth left his lips long enough for him to get in a full sentence, dreaming of the warm flat bread and loose meat Jamila fed him on his previous visit; meat that he still didn't know had once belonged to her dead goat. Rest in peace Lexus the Goat.
"There's no electricity remember? I have to cook downstairs, unless you want one of those plastic bricks you silly Americans keep trying to unload on us."
"Why do you think it's silly to try to help?" He asked holding her back with his hands on her waist, complete with eye contact and earnest interest, tired and hungry and achy enough to set aside the fact that he had a beautiful, naked woman on top of him and a real mattress underneath. Jamila dismounted.
"Because we'll never hear the end of American generosity towards the grimy, backwards Iraqis and even though it has cost the Army hundreds of thousands of dollars to distribute food and water this past month, you might as well be setting the money on fire in Daglesh Square for all the good it is going to do in the long run."
"What are we supposed to do then? Teach all the men to fish?"
"We're tugging at opposite ends of the rope Confucius. Let's just let it be?" She pulled the covers over her head.
"I'm an Army of One remember?" Chris said folding back the blanket as she rolled her eyes. He chuckled amused and tucked an arm behind his head. "I want to know what you think about me." He hooked the fingers of his left hand through her right. Jamila scooted closer until she was lying side by side with him.
"I think you are pig-headed, passionate and very, very smart. You share a lot of that with your Army or maybe it is the other way around and being a soldier has made you more like the Army but you can't defend the logistics of something like paying a foreign company fifty million dollars to rebuild the Diyala Bridge when the same could be accomplished for a tiny fraction of only one million if the very same work were to be completed by my countrymen." She loosened her hold of his hand, just in case, but he didn't pull away.
-X-
There should have been harp music coming out of the speakers high up on the walls of the first class waiting lounge at the Baghdad International Airport. Johanna Gilchrist watched enraptured while the proper measures of gin, vodka and vermouth dripped into the stainless steel tumbler her bartender had settled in front of her to forge a perfect James Bond martini. The man's attention to detail was utmost, as if the drink's projected lifespan was longer than twelve seconds and he was creating on a work of art.
She had a one way ticket to London in her pocket and all her cash stashed alongside the tapes and notebooks in her carry on bag, having left everything else in her trailer for the BBC's own Dana Stokes to use or give away to her fellow newsies. Johanna thought she was particularly fed up of the tiny bathroom stalls in Camp Marez and the poor water pressure in the showers but as she knocked back her dry martini, she realized she was mostly just fed up of bad, expensive booze.
As the bitter burn of the drink warmed her throat on the way down, she wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. By the time she boarded, with the selfless help of the two stewardesses it took to drag her to her seat and stuff her carry-on in the overhead compartment next to her equally sloshed seatmate's, the heat of Iraq, the lack of a worthy story except perhaps the one she'd been easily and successfully threatened out of covering only hours earlier and all the time she had spent culling news briefs from the endless feet of tape in her possession was nothing but a dull blur.
-X-
They were making out in the dusky darkness to a soundtrack of poppy Egyptian music and the lazy hum of a motor pumping water from the underground cisterns to the rooftop tanks, gearing up for something of a farewell fuck when the music and the droning both stopped. For the second time that same day, the streetlights died too. Their ability to see each other didn't change, it'd been pretty dark under the covers but the mood was ruined nonetheless. Jamila kicked off the bedspread. She sat up and cursed and Silas knew from her inflection that whoever was in charge of electric repairs had better have plenty of good karma saved up if he planned to leave his house in the future without every bird in creation shitting on his head.
Chris reached for his pants on the floor and the travel-size flashlight in one of its pockets. He held it between his teeth and unscrewed the sooty shade of one of the kerosene lamps on the nightstand, muttering when the lighter in his free hand failed to work long enough to get the wick lit. He shone the light into the drawer looking for a spare.
Jamila brushed his hand aside, edged the drawer closed and lit the lamp, hovering unsure while he decided what to do next. Chris pulled the drawer by its loose hardware, scanned the bare contents and zeroed in on two passports he would have missed without her uneasy reaction. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He sank to the low mattress and flipped through the Jordanian passport first. It was older and already filled out with all the necessary stamps and a recent photo. Something about the British passport was off but it was a good enough rendition that in the poor light he couldn't tell what it was.
"I thought the furnishings looked a little spare earlier. Going somewhere?" Jamila's voice wavered weakly before she gave up trying to form the words she needed to lie.
"You'll never get through airport security on these. The new Jordanian passport is green."
"I know. It costs more."
"Are you seriously planning to cross the border?" She sat down beside him and replied silently, with a slight nod of her head. "Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?"
"I've done it before. I know the man taking me across."
"Where did you get a British passport?"
"My sister bought it from a soldier in Basra." Everything he knew he should be saying and doing, his duty to police, to the law, it didn't register. He couldn't tear his gaze from the passport photos, from eyes too old to be in her 22 year old face.
"You can't do this."
"I can't stay either," she whispered with her mouth bent in a frown. It wasn't a good enough explanation. "I am tired Sergeant. Shari'a is the backbone of the new constitution. Iraq gets closer to becoming an Islamic state every day; I'm not sticking around for when they slap a Kalashnikov on the flag."
"Then leave legally Jamila. Go to Jordan or Lebanon… Jesus, I don't know. Sell that diamond. There are plenty of places where you don't need a fake passport if you have money."
"Don't you think I've tried? Lloyd's of London paid off an insurance claim on the Lesotho in July," she said in a deadpan tone. "I couldn't give it away if I tried and it's only worth real money if I sell it whole. I have pocket change and an ugly rock."
"The Jordanian border with Iraq is closed. The only people going through are smugglers and if you get stopped you'll be going to prison; an American run prison. You can't bribe your way out of those." She didn't say anything. The whole conversation was preposterous, from the content itself to the fact that it was even happening, that he was sitting there trying to convince her not to do something that stupid.
"It's a risk I'll have to take."
"This is not a game Jamila. I don't know what happened to you since Tuesday but you need to snap out of it baby."
"You chose this life Sergeant. You have training and body armor and if you last the year, you can go home but this is it for me and I did not sign up to be An Army of One."
Chris hated himself for asking, about as much as he feared a lot of the possible answers but he asked anyway because it the question nagged him every time he passed Lt. Hunter's memorial with its leering photo warped with urine inside the frame.
"How did you choose me? How did you decide to keep my uniform and not Dim's or Tariq's? Why didn't you pick someone else in the squad Jamila?" He whispered. She doubled the space between them on the edge of the bed.
"Why?" He asked again, louder and angrier in full blown Sgt. Scream mode that startled her.
"You weren't married," she said to the curtain in front of her like it had been the one to ask. "That first night, in the study, you almost shook your head when Mustafa bragged to your men that he bought me. I couldn't read the Iraqi boy," she added referring to Tariq, "and the other two were too far away. I knew you were the safest bet."
"You picked a good horse baby." Silas set the passports aside and began dressing. Boxers, undershirt, pants, all piled together at his feet in the order they'd come off. Jamila reached out in the darkness no more than halfway before Chris arched his body away from her. The bedsprings creaked beneath him.
"Please…"
"I would have helped you anyway," Silas interrupted. Jamila shrugged into her robe like it was a shield.
"I put my life in your hands every time you come here and my neighbors see you but I still ask Allah that He keep you safe so that I might see you again. I'm sorry it is not enough." Jamila picked up the bedside lamp and reached for the passports on the hill the weight of their bodies made on the old mattress. His hand got to them first.
"I can't let you do this," he said flipping open the passports, tearing the pages from their sewn spines. Jamila stared dumbly as the heavy paper surrendered to the pressure of Silas' fingers. Her eyes filled with tears.
"Why do you even care?" She asked. Chris looked at the confetti at his feet and the switch in his brain that modeled concepts into edited speech didn't click.
"Because I love you," he replied.
And that concludes our "grownups emote" section of the program. Tip your waiters and join us next week for a reenactment of Operation Market Garden.
Thy Author.