IN SPECIAL FORCES you automatically learn reverse thinking. It’s not taught, it comes from experience. You identify a goal and imagine being there, then figure how you got there, going backward step by step.
As always, asking what can go wrong at each step, and what if they all go wrong together? As they usually do.
An exercise old as the first humans. The homicidal mind, working things out.
So now I tried to imagine Mustafa in a police van, manacled, in a jail cell, his hopeless face staring between the bars.
Even better: his dying eyes gazing into mine.
But I could find no way to envision it.
—
“ANOTHER MATCH!” Thierry charged out of his office, pulling me in.
I stumbled in, still stunned by Gisèle’s latest message and by what Peter had just said.
“The red Clio” – Thierry jabbed a finger at his screen – “was a 2014 Handi Rental then got bought by a woman in Melun then got stolen ...”
My chest felt crushed, still thinking of Gisèle’s message and Peter’s news; I couldn’t breathe. “I don’t care who owned it.”
“... We ran lots of DNA. And found someone bumped their nose against the driver’s side window. Anyone who knew what he’s doing would’ve wiped it off. But this guy didn’t.”
I sat, watched him. “Who?”
“Tariq,” Thierry smiled. “He of the broken jaw and two missing teeth.”
I exhaled. “It’s enough to bring him in –”
“But do we?”
I leaned at him. “We know Tariq was in on Bruno’s killing. Now we know he was one of Gisèle’s keepers.”
“And he’s Abdel’s brother.”
“Abdel who talks to Mustafa.”
“Who talks to Rachid.”
“Who talks to Élysée and all that crowd ...”
It was beginning to tie together. Slowly we were drawing a net around Mustafa. But we didn’t have time for slowly, not with the Iranian bombmaker circling closer, an attack coming on the Tower, and Mack and Gisèle on the knife edge.
Though for the first time I had a slight feeling of optimism: We’re closing in ... “Let’s get him,” I said.
Thierry leaned back in his chair. “Think it through.”
I paced to the window and stared angrily at the rain-drenched courtyard, the sad Paris sky, the gray stone walls. “Two options.”
“I’m all ears.”
“One, we only bring in Tariq. We’ve got him on two deals, Gisèle and Bruno. Or Two, we also bring in Nassim for the keffiyeh DNA, and Abdel as a potential co-conspirator.”
“We still need an Abdel-Rachid link.” Thierry stood beside me staring out the rain-slick window; I watched his half-reflection in the glass, his face bitter with fear of the losses to come.
“What the fuck,” I sighed, “do we do?”
“Nothing.”
I nodded, turned from the window. Anyone we grabbed would never give us Mack and Gisèle, nor Mustafa. Mack and Gisèle would die and Mustafa would back off to wait a while and hit us again. And none of these bastards would even do time.
—
“I DO LOVE YOU, my chicken ...” It was a gravelly deep voice, recorded perfectly by ATS surveillance.
“What are you going to do to me,” she said, “tomorrow night?”
“I won’t tell you now. You’ll have an orgasm even thinking about it.”
“Dirty Arab.”
“I love it when you say that.”
“That’s why I say it.”
“Dear friend, I do have a small favor to ask –”
“How many times have I told you,” she giggled. “I won’t do anal.”
“You,” he chuckled. “You are funny.” His voice softened. “Can you put out some more good news for us?”
“What do I get?”
“You already know, little chicken, what you get ... Here it is: I’m hearing, through the grapevine of course, a big Islamic event is coming very soon. Even bigger than Notre Dame. A protest against all this discrimination against us ...”
She sighed. “It’s about time.”
“You must remind everyone about why we’re forced to do these things, because of the yoke on our necks. The police violence, the discrimination, the prisons, the refusal to ban pork or teach our language in their schools ...”
“Everything you do makes things better.”
“You can’t source me on this, remember. It may be bigger than you think.”
“Good.”
“I’ll give you more background soon. But to highlight our grievances, all the terrible things French culture does to ours, how they’re arresting our young men, they don’t respect our religion ...”
“It’s true ...”
“Can you send something out tomorrow?” His voice grew seductive. “Like what would happen if Paris got hit by a meteor? But no one knew why?”
“I’ll send it out. But you better be here tomorrow night.”
“I’ll be there ten-thirty, maybe eleven.”
“I’ll wait up, you big rooster. I’m going to bang your brains out.”
“Inshallah!”
“Inshallah!” The phone died.
“His voice,” I said. “When I chased those two guys in the Forest. The guy with the Maserati.”
“Rachid, last night,” Tomàs smiled. “Speaking to his beloved Élysée Pétain.”
“Does he say the same stuff,” I said, “to his three wives?”
Tomàs made a sour face. “I can you show you pictures. They’re fat.”
I checked my phone: “So what’s the big Islamic event that’s coming soon? When would that be?”
“Like if a meteor hit Paris?” Thierry checked his phone. “According to Rachid, about eleven-thirty tonight.”
—
IN MUSTAFA’S MOSUL PRISON Mack and I had had no way to escape. Amid intensive security in an extremely hostile environment, we were taken out to be killed almost daily, then taunted with death and returned to our cells.
It was, I think, the seventh day. That’s what, in any case, the later investigation determined. For me and Mack until then was an unending time of sorrow and pain, one torture after another, a rain of hatred poured down on us.
In SF we’d been taught the usual E&E regimes, Escape and Evasion, but they were little help. We were in two different cells – cells are not the word, they were four-foot tall concrete coffins in which you couldn’t sit, lie down or stand. You squatted with your chin on your knees and your arms crossed or hanging along your sides; after a while your knees began to hurt so bad you couldn’t stand even if that option were available. They thought it was funny, our jailers, and when they took us out to use the hole in the back yard they would kick us in the knees to prove how funny it was.
I had no contact with Mack, no way to reach anyone but the bearded men guarding my door, and then of course Mustafa and his buddies when they took us out to cut our throats or shoot us.
There was a water leak down the side of my little coffin that made a steady plunk plunk plunk on the floor next to my left foot. It was comforting, that sound, almost friendly like a ticking clock. By comparing it to my pulse, which in resting situations is about forty-eight beats a minute, I figured it made about sixty drops a minute, or three thousand six hundred beats an hour. In this way I measured the passing time, tried to take my mind off the agony in my knees and the pounding headache from being hit by the rifle butt.
Not that I felt sorry for myself. We, the Americans, had invaded Iraq in 2003 without, as the textbooks have it, any pretext. There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction, anybody with any experience already knew that.
I’d had no conflict with this shitty, sad little nation. Not a nation anyway, just a bunch of competing territories cobbled together by British and American oil companies.
I’d joined up after 9/11 to fight Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but after barely a year there, when we were starting to win, we’d all been hijacked to Iraq by the GW/Cheney/Powell/Hillary pro-war cabal, and once the Iraqis started killing my friends I’d gotten locked into the conflict. But basically what US troops were trying to do now, when Mack and I had been captured, was to enforce some kind of peace among the battered remnants of poor Iraq, and we had little patience for those fanatics who wished to widen and continue the conflict. And in truth, once you’ve scraped the remains of a good friend off a cratered street you no longer have the desire to be neutral.
It was late afternoon, from the cast of the sun on the opposite concrete walls, when Mack and I were led out to be killed again. It was our fifth “execution,” and maybe this one would be real. I hadn’t eaten in days, my stomach contorted with fear, hunger, and dysentery. No matter how tough you are, how you have prepared yourself for death, it is still terrifying. You think of all the things you didn’t do, all the joys; you misremember the sorrows.
Just Mack and me, shoved down on our knees before the camera as if it were a red-eyed god. Mustafa prancing with a big kitchen cleaver, swearing at us and spitting on our heads and calling us “idolatrous monkeys” and “kaffirs” and shit like that.
My heart thundered in my chest, I had trouble breathing, my mouth full of saliva that choked me when I tried to swallow.
He stood over me. “Say how sorry you are!”
I said nothing.
He kicked me in the face; I kept my balance, head down, saying nothing. Blood was running down the inside of my mouth; I would not spit it out and show he’d hurt me.
“Say it!” he yelled again. “How sorry you are.”
It’s a terrible temptation, when you know you’re going to get hurt, to say what they want; your body begs for it. “I am sorry,” I said, “for nothing.”
He didn’t kick me, instead turned to Mack. “You! You say it!”
Mack hunched, waiting for the kick. Mustafa swung the cleaver down and stopped it just under Mack’s chin. He rested the blade against Mack’s throat, yanked it sideways.
“You!” he called to me, “you can watch this – how I’m going to cut his throat, little at a time, let him drown in his own blood, yes?”
Mack said nothing, facing down. In some silly Hollywood movie, maybe the hero would say, “whatever turns you on” or something “courageous” like that. But in real life, when the blade’s really against your throat, you’re so terrified and traumatized and fighting to keep control and not give your fear away, not give this assassin a reason to gloat or feel good about himself, that you are speechless. Focused in these last instants on the beauty of life and the infinite sorrow of its loss.
Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, the saying goes. Or can traumatize you for life. Make you jump at every passing car or unexpected footstep. Fourth of July fireworks make you feel you’re being shot at, bombarded ... You go to any length to avoid this celebration, hide in the north woods, go abroad, or sit in a cellar smoking grass and listening to AC/DC to remind yourself what we should love most in life is freedom, love and sex, and what we should hate most is fakery, domination, murder and lies.
Mustafa didn’t seem happy with our lack of response. He and his henchmen clearly wanted us to give in, to say something he could promote on the terrorist networks run on Facebook and Twitter and all those fools.
I feared he might kill us out of disappointment or anger, but he seemed almost resigned. Maybe being a terrorist isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In any case, he ordered his fetid acolytes to untie the ropes linking our wrists to our ankles so we could stand.
As they led us back to our concrete coffins, Mack, just behind me, turned as if to call something back to Mustafa, an apology in Arabic, and as he did he bumped against me and in a quick downward motion cut the rope tying my wrists with something pinched between his thumb and forefinger and in the same motion handed it to me.
It took a half-second for me to realize what he’d done, that he’d handed me a broken piece of glass, as slowly, very slowly, the realization traveled from my fingers to my brain. He slapped his roped wrists against my back to remind me that we didn’t have all day here, and though slow on the uptake I did the same, managing also to take a nice slice out of his wrist.
There we were, shambling down this corridor of doom with our hands no longer roped behind our backs. There was one bastard in front of us and two behind; you could smell their bad breath and bad teeth and unwashed clothes the way you can smell shit in the hippo cage at the zoo.
Not that we smelled any better.
We reached my cell, with Mack’s just beyond. It was dark here, confined. One of the two bastards behind Mack fumbled keys at the lock of my cell; there’s always time, in microseconds, to worry is this the best moment, but I didn’t, simply reached around his neck and cut his throat with the glass as Mack grabbed the guy behind him and quickly poked out both his eyes and crushed his chin in one fast jab of his palm while I attended to the guy with the keys. In less than four seconds my first guy and the guy with the keys were bleeding out through cut throats and choking as they tried to yell and Mack’s guy had slumped down the wall toward the floor. I gave him the same throat treatment as the others. We grabbed the keys and their guns – how stupid can you be to let jailers have guns?
“Where the fuck are we?” Mack whispered.
“Don’t know. Let’s find Mustafa.”
“We do and we never get out. We get him later.”
“Let’s get him now.” I knew this was crazy but I had to do it.
“No!” Mack grabbed my arm. “Let’s put on their clothes.”
It astounded me I hadn’t thought of this. We stripped two of the three dead guys, tugged on their black pajamas over our own clothes, wiping off the blood as best we could, squeezed all three into my little coffin and locked the door.
At the end of this insalubrious corridor was a stairway that led to a door bathed in sunlight, and a minute later we were on a back alley in the wilds of Mosul, two more ragged Arabs in the throng.
“Where’d you get the glass?” I whispered as we padded along in our Arab flipflops.
“Some poor bastard left it in my cell. He was using it to write goodbye on the wall.”
Watching for pursuit we made our way west toward the coalition zone, where we were almost shot by a nasty bunch of SAS who then hugged us nearly to death, poured a bottle of Oban down our throats and conducted us through low-level fire to our own nearest and dearest CO, ruthless Major Larraty, actually in tears to see us.
Twenty-one minutes later we led a group of fourteen SF back exactly to that building where we’d escaped, only to find it empty. Even the three corpses we’d left were gone.
No blood.
No Mustafa either.
At that moment I hardly cared, I was so happy Mack and I were free and alive. Then two weeks later when we were told that Mustafa had been killed by the French Foreign Legion north of Mosul, we were relieved and gratified. We didn’t know, then, that it was another guy the Legion had killed, and that Mustafa had lived to slaughter many more people in the years to come.
And now in France I’d lost him once again.
And Mack and Gisèle too.