Cold Snap (24 page)

The first man lay groaning. Ghaith had hoped
his blow had snapped his neck, then decided he had seen too many
movies. He took aim at the man before remembering the mortar
shells. Dragging the moaning man a short distance away, he dropped
the leg and pressed the barrel of the gun to his head.

He fired two shots.

Though his ears were ringing, he still sensed
someone's approach. He had turned, gun raised, when the teacher
stumbled into the meeting room. He had drawn a Parabellum from
under his robe.

"I heard shots—"

When he saw Ghaith taking aim at him the
placid face he had been born with drooped in resignation. Coming to
life's end was to be expected, but coming to a stupid end by
running into a traitor's gun was to be greatly regretted.

"Drop it," said Ghaith.

"This is treachery," said the teacher, the
gun wobbling in his hand. It was still pointed at the far wall.

"Sending those boys to their deaths is
treachery," Ghaith said. "I think you know that. Drop it."

The teacher slowly bent over and began to
place his gun neatly on the floor.

There was a breath-sucking blast from the
building across the alley and the windows blew in. Ghaith dropped
as glass flew like razors across the room. When he jumped back to
his feet, he saw the teacher on his knees, looking around in
confusion as blood from a cut poured down the side of his face. The
gun was still in his hand. He was turning. Ghaith wasn't sure he
intended to fire at him and there was no time to find out. He
pulled the trigger the instant the teacher began to speak.

He was glad Al Jazeera wasn't there to see.
Or God.

Racing back to the classroom, he found the
boys sprawled on the floor. A few had suffered cuts from flying
glass. A few of the youngest were whimpering, though it seemed to
Ghaith it was more from confusion than pain.

"That's good," he said. "Stay that way. The
enemy is at hand."

"But we have to go to the battle!" the sura
boy protested, pushing up to his knees.

"The Americans will take one look at you and
pass by," Ghaith reasoned. "Then you can run back to your
neighborhoods and begin blowing them up. The enemy, I mean."

"We need to stop them from attacking our
school," the sura boy persisted. "Where is our teacher? We heard
shooting. Is he all right? Where are those other men?"

When Ghaith did not answer right away, he
continued:

"Rise up! Everyone! We have to defend the
school!"

The boys began stirring.

"Stop!" Ghaith's command was like a hammer on
a nail head. The boys froze.

"Lie down!"

The boys fell flat. All but the sura boy, who
trembled but remained up on his knees. Striding over to him, Ghaith
met his defiance with a blazing glare. "Lie down!"

The sura boy's lips worked fearfully around
clenched teeth.

"Lie down!"

"Are you going to shoot me?"

Ghaith had forgotten he was still carrying
the Kalashnikov. He went over to the piled furniture and placed it
on a desk.

"See? You are not prisoners. I have no
intention of shooting you in the back of the head while your face
is on the floor. Not like others you've heard about, maybe even
know. But you know what I will do if you don't obey me? I'll slap
you so hard your father will mistake you for a pomegranate."

"My father was killed fighting the infidels,"
the boy said bitterly. He looked around. "All of our fathers
were."

Orphans with a grudge, Ghaith thought
angrily. Perfect weapons straight from the shelves in the misery
department.

"Your fathers were heroes, and you must live
to sing their praises." He leaned down to the sura boy, who
flinched under his gaze. "Isn't that right?"

Slowly, the boy lowered himself back onto the
floor.

Ghaith heard a distinctive whine through the
broken windows.

"I'm going to step out for a moment to see
how close the enemy is. If I don't come back, stay as you are."

And pray the Americans don't toss a few
grenades into the room before entering.

He went to the front of the room and picked
up a large white rag used to clean the chalk board, tucking it
discreetly into his pocket before crossing back to the door.

He stepped outside.

He no longer heard the peculiar whine, but
that might have been due to another flux of explosions north of the
souk. He trudged through the muddy courtyard and stood out on the
street. There was no one in sight, but that did not mean no one was
looking. He took the rag out of his pocket and began waving it over
his head. When neither American nor insurgent shot at him, he waved
more vigorously.

The mechanical whine returned. He scanned the
sky and saw nothing but smoke. But the whining grew louder.

There. The drone.

He looked directly at it and its camera and
flung the rag back and forth violently. The drone buzzed over him
and disappeared beyond the schoolhouse. He lowered the rag to give
his arm a rest.

The deep rumbling of tanks shook the ground.
These streets were too narrow for M-1's. The Americans must be
using Bradleys. He was disappointed when the growling did not
approach, but grinded in the direction of the river. Then a
different type of engine grunted nearby. It stopped and two
infantrymen poked their heads out from a side street. Ghaith raised
the rag.

"Good American boys!" he yelled.

They stared at him.

He tried to think of something to say that
would take their minds off shooting him.

"Hey, Yanks, want to fuck me?"

Their looks of disgust told him he had
probably missed the mark by a wide margin. One of them lifted his
comm link.

"We got one here that speaks English."

"Maybe that's the only English he knows," the
other grunt observed.

"I speak the Queen's English very well,"
Ghaith shouted.

"A queen!"

"We got a fucking queen here! And he talks
better than the Commander in Chief!"

Well, why not? Placing one foot daintily
forward, he raised the rag in one arm while lowering his head
sideways, like a damsel surrendering herself to her fate.

Several more soldiers passed the first two
and took up a position behind the burned hulk of a car.

"You understand English? Then lie down flat
on your stomach, now!"

"This is a madrasa," Ghaith said, raising his
head and cocking it at the building behind him. "There are
twenty-four boys inside. Please do not harm them."

"Lie down! Spread your arms and legs!"

Ghaith obeyed. The soldiers ran up, guns
trained at his head. One of them reached down and flexcuffed him.
Others cautiously entered the school house. A lieutenant trotted up
and complained to a sergeant.

"Kinda bunched up here."

"Spread out, you bozos!"

The lieutenant's comm link sputtered.

"Haji is right," came a voice. "There's a
bunch of kids in here sprawled out like pigeons."

"Since when did pigeons sprawl?" the
lieutenant said. "Are they all right?"

"A few cuts and some teary eyes."

The lieutenant broke contact and swore. "What
am I supposed to do with them?"

"Give them a heartfelt welcome to your
bosom," said Ghaith, his face still on the road.

Over the next quarter hour the soldiers
checked the block while the lieutenant spoke to the drone
controllers at Dreamland. Ghaith was pulled to his feet and stood
against the school building. A guard watched him warily. Ghaith
thought of pursing his lips in an air-kiss but chose to forgo that
pleasure.

Several Humvees pulled up and the boys were
brought out. Ghaith was happy to see none of them were cuffed, a
strange courtesy from the surly officer.

"Better learn to count in English," said the
lieutenant as the boys were piled in and on the vehicles. "We make
twenty-three."

"Please, let me look in the classroom. I need
to see for myself. It's important. I am the missing boy's
uncle."

"You don't think you miscounted?"

"I would have recognized my own nephew."

"Uh-huh." The lieutenant appraised him. Then
he appraised the camera crew dodging from one building to the next,
working their way to the head of the column.

"Al Jazeera," the sergeant said
contemptuously. "Want us to take them out?"

"I hope their camera isn't running," the
lieutenant frowned. "Lip readers the world over would have a field
day."

"They already got our guys shooting a Haji in
a mosque."

"We are not responsible for
misinterpretations." The lieutenant turned back to Ghaith. "My men
found three stiffs in the back room of the school. Did you have
anything to do with that?"

Ghaith shuffled his feet.

"I've got a kit in the Humvee to test for
gunpowder residue on your fingers."

Ghaith was sorry to have killed those men,
the teacher especially. He had no inherent belief in the insurgent
cause, no admiration for the blind courage of the mujahideen. And
if the teacher had had the best interests of his students at heart,
he would have thrown up his hands and announced that everything he
had taught was a lie, that there was no cause good enough to send
children to their deaths. But the truth was these men had been
intent on killing Americans, a people he was not very fond of at
the moment. It had been a waste all round.

"They were going to use those boys in the
mortar crews, weren't they?" said the lieutenant, broaching Gaith's
silence. "We found a shitload of 60 and 81-mm ordinance next to the
dead men."

Ghaith looked back at the building. "Alas, it
was my doing."

Warmed by the deed, as well as by the camera
being focused in his direction, the lieutenant allowed his
sensitivity training to kick in. He nodded at the sergeant.

"Go ahead, let him see that there's no one
left inside."

"Cut his cuff?"

"I wouldn't go that far."

When Ghaith was taken into the classroom he
noted that a soldier had written a profanity on the chalkboard,
next to Mohammed's holy words on cleanliness. The man guarding
Ghaith also saw it, and swore. He ran up to the board and used his
sleeve to erase the slur.

Meanwhile, Ghaith surveyed the rest of the
classroom.

The sura boy was missing.

So was the suicide vest.

Ari found it exceedingly annoying whenever he
could not determine who his enemy was. This resulted in frequent
annoyance. Currently, his list of potential adversaries felt as if
it ran into several volumes of densely printed text. In truth, it
was only a few pages, but that still presented him with several
hundred people who might want him dead.

In fact, there was no 'might' about it.

Ari was beginning to feel his years and was
no longer so quick to enter dangerous terrain without some form of
backup. In the past, in similar situations, he had contacted his
personal henchman in Montreal: Abu Jasim, a former double of Saddam
Hussein who owed Ari his life, not to mention his pecker. However,
as a result of recent events, Abu Jasim found it prudent to uproot
his family from Longueuil to parts unknown. He could ask Karen for
help, but the slammed door told him she was out of sorts and not
inclined to assist him. He thought that Elmore Lawson could be more
formidable than he appeared. Yet it was possible he was about the
confront ISAF in the flesh. Ari did not want the detective busily
filling in blanks about his past. That left only Ben Torson, who
had helped Ari before and had a fair grasp on his true identity. He
was a soldier, he was able, and he could be trusted. Now Ari had to
find out if he would be willing.

Ben had told him he had gotten a job slinging
paint at the downtown Lowe's on Broad Street. Going downstairs to
the basement, he went out the sliding door and peered through the
trees into Howie Nottoway's yard. Howie was a compulsive
yard-putterer. Constantly mulching wood or trimming ditches or
replacing landscape timbers on his backyard terraced garden, Howie
treated his property like some people treated their living rooms,
determined to remove every last speck of out-of-place-ness. Ari
would have admired him, except he had seen Howie shake his fist at
a harsh winter blast that had loosened a roof shingle. He was a
lunatic. But lunatics who had no ardent desire to slit your throat
simply for disagreeing were merely eccentrics.

And there he was, dragging a bagful of leaves
across his lawn in the dead of winter. Where had he found the
leaves? He had already raked his yard to death. Perhaps they had
blown in from the adjoining woods, a few feeble leftovers from
autumn. No matter. Ari raced upstairs and grabbed his coat and ran
next door.

"Howie!" Ari exclaimed, as if Howie was the
last person he had expected to see in his own yard.

Howie had been dragging a half-filled brown
plastic leaf bag. Apparently thinking this made him look laggard,
or unmanly, he whipped up the bag and swung it over his
shoulder.

"Ari!" he shouted, cracking a grin against an
icy gust.

"You're just the man I want to see."

This seemed to reassure some deep-seated
insecurity in Howie, whose grin became warm and real.

"How's that?" he asked.

"I need to know where Lowe's is."

Howie beamed and dropped the bag as though it
was a frivolous and unnecessary burden. He was inordinately pleased
by any pleasantry between Ari and himself. As though Ari had
forgiven him for breaking into his house and searching it, though
the subject was never mentioned.

"Three turns...no, four. Left on Beach Court,
down Riverside, down Forest Hill and Semmes, get on Belvedere, left
on Broad. A few blocks and you're there."

Ari felt sympathy for the man. Too often, he
had seen diplomats, officers or ordinary citizens nearly fall down
with relief when Saddam Hussein or his sons evinced forgiveness for
their actions. There was no surety, of course. A man forgiven one
day might be tortured and executed the next. Iraqis lived in an
emotional lottery, which (more than an embargo-enforced diet) did
much to explain their gaunt faces and hollow physiques. Using this
criterion, Ari found it hard to comprehend why there was so much
fear in America. But there it was.