Cold Snap (45 page)

"Precautions against what? Who expects to
come home and get bombed?" Ben shook his head. "I didn't do
anything special in Iraq, except..."

"Kill Iraqis?"

"Maybe a couple. But in that case you're
talking about a gang taking revenge on every GI who served over
there and every Iraqi who collaborated."

"That wouldn't be practical," Ari said. Then
he found himself wondering briefly if, in fact, it was that
farfetched. Saddam Hussein had managed to eliminate quite a few
enemies from a distance, as Ari well knew.

"I did bring back one thing," Ben said with a
rueful grin. "'Scenic Iraq'."

"A book?"

"A DVD. Like one of those old travelogues.
You know. 'Here are the picturesque natives picking dates in Dhi
Qar.' Nothing special. I took it back to base and we got a hoot
watching it. I guess Saddam had it made back when he still thought
he could get tourists into the country."

"May I see it?"

"Right there...in the CD stack." Ben stood
and retrieved a DVD from a wire rack next to the television. He
handed it to Ari. The plastic case cover showed the Imam Ali Mosque
lit up in the middle of the night. The title was printed in several
languages, but they all amounted to:

'Scenic Iraq'.

"May I watch it?"

"Sure, if you have 45 minutes to waste," Ben
shrugged. "It's in English, with subtitles in Arabic, French and
German."

"I am very keen to see it."

Ben opened the case and slid the disc into
the DVD player. He turned on the TV.

Bland music from the Arabic version of Musak
swelled from the speakers. The first image was of the ruins of
Babylon, and the first words were:

"Cradle of civilization, Iraq is the home of
writing, astronomy, philosophy ..."

"The Greeks and Egyptians might have
something to say about that," said Ahmad without looking up from
his laptop.

"Shush," said Ari.

"Through the fabled cities of Sumer, Ur and
Babylon marched the armies of Babylonia, Assyria and Sargon of
Akkad..."

"What, no 1st Armored?" Ben griped.

"Here are the ruins of Akkad, destroyed by
the famous Curse of the Oracles of Nippur..."

"Sort of like 'Mission Accomplished," said
Ben.

"And here is the Victory Stele of Naram-Sin,
with mace and lion-headed eagle..."

Ben was visibly agitated. He reached for a
bag of chips sitting on the side table.

"And now, Babylon, beautifully restored in
1983 by President Hussein, son of Nebuchadnezzar."

"And now home of Camp Alpha," Ben quipped
maliciously. "Where's the helipad?"

"Very amusing," said Ari.

"Sorry. Young guys under stress...you
know."

"Just like your enemy. And you are no longer
so young."

"Can I interrupt?" Ahmad asked. "I mean, I'm
sort of under stress here, too."

"What is it?"

"Those dozen or so guys we were talking
about, with X's?"

"Yes?"

"Three died in the States...bombs."

"The others?"

"One in Germany, one in Holland, one in
France. According to the news, they were all accidents."

"It appears Europe does a better job
controlling illegal explosives," said Ari.

"Doesn't keep people from dying," said
Ben.

"Indeed..."

He switched his attention back to the
television. A gorgeous golden dome filled the screen. "Such a
lovely country," said Ari. "That's the Al-Askari Shrine, very holy
to Shiiites."

"If you're into sandboxes," came Ben's
surprising assessment. "And wasn't the dome blown to bits a couple
years ago?"

Ari wondered if, having come from the lush
Virginia countryside, deserts held no appeal to the veteran.

Five minutes later, as they watched Bedouins
accompanying their camels over a barren landscape, Ari realized the
sound of fingers traipsing across the keyboard had stopped. He
found Ahmad watching Scenic Iraq.

"You are interested in your nomadic roots?"
Ari asked him.

"My roots are in Chicago. You mind if I look
at that disc?"

"The movie?"

A grand swelling of lush Western-style
violins signaled the arrival of a grand climax. Probably a return
to the ruins of Babylon and Sumer.

"Yes, I think we've seen enough."

Ben got up and took the DVD out of the
player. He handed it to Ahmad, who held it up and grinned. "I was
wondering about that."

Ari nodded for him to continue.

"It's DVD-RW. Commercially produced movies on
DVD's can't be erased because the session has been closed. But
ten-to-one this is a bootleg. Whoever made the copy probably had a
bunch of blank DVD-RW's he wanted to get rid of and used them for
this."

"Which means?"

"You can re-open the session and burn more
files on the disc."

"But that's the only video on there," Ben
protested. "We just watched it."

"But if the file isn't in a format your
player recognizes, you won't see it."

"There could be invisible files on there?"
Ari asked.

"Not invisible." Ahmad put the disk into his
laptop. There was a tiny electronic whine as the contents loaded.
Ari rose and looked over the young man's shoulder as he opened the
drive.

"Do you see anything?"

"Oh yeah," said Ahmad. "See? The video you
were watching was mpeg. So long as you set up the burn properly,
you can watch it on TV. But there's this other file in wmv format,
which won't play on a basic DVD player."

"And you can view it?"

"On the laptop, sure."

"Then do so."

Ahmad clicked on the unnamed wmv file. A
moment later, two orange and black logos appeared on the
screen.

"You know those, Colonel?"

Ari pointed at the one on the left.

"This is the symbol for the University of
Mosul. You should be able to read the inscription. It's from the
Sura Ta-Ha."

"Uh..." Ahmad squinted at the Arabic letters.
"'Say, My Lord, grant me more knowledge'."

"Excellent! You would do well to heed. This
second logo is of the University's College of Medicine."

"How do you know?"

"That image of the falcon represents Horus,
and of course the staff with curling serpents is a caduceus."

"Gotcha."

They waited fifteen seconds, which was an
eternity to Ahmad. "When's the show begin?"

The image of the logos faded, replaced by
white lettering:

'College of Medicine, Al-Shefaa Sector,
Nineveh School of Medicine. Presentation by Prof. Dr. Azz edin
Shkara.'

Ari grunted.

"You know him?" Ahmad asked.

"I know of him. He made the mistake of joking
with the IAEA people. I think he was only practicing his
English."

"So...what happened to the professor?"

"I believe he is no longer among the
living."

"What, he was killed for joking?"

"Saddam took a very dim view of joking with
weapons inspectors."

The titles gave way to a view of two sizable
four-story buildings, their white exteriors shining in the
sunlight. The medical campus. This dissolved into a close-up of
around a dozen domed squat barrels lined up on what appeared to be
a basement floor. They were orange, and all bore the tri-foil (in
this case black on a yellow background) that was the international
symbol for hazardous radiation. Labels had been affixed to all of
the barrels, and while the writing in the fill-in blanks was
smudged an illegible purple, the printed categories were clear:

Name:

Department:

Authorization No.:

Nuclide(s):

Amount(s):

Date:

Major Solvents:

The camera turned to a group of men emerging
from a hallway. There was Dr. edin Shkara, along with the Dean of
the University. Then came Sultan Hashim Ahmad al-Tai (Minister of
Defense through 2003 and condemned to death by an Iraqi court after
the war, a sentence indefinitely postponed), Tariq Aziz, Deputy
Prime Minister (his death sentence also indefinitely postponed) who
had gotten a lot of face time on international television during
the run-up to the war and who was smoking his trademark Cuban
cigar—maybe Bush declared war because the Iraqis flaunted the
embargo. In other words, tobacco envy. And then, much to Ari's
surprise, came Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, the leading tribal sheik in
Anbar. He had been assassinated in 2007 for dealing with the new
government—the usual fate of moderates. Behind him came a bigger
surprise: Dr. Ibrahim, the Sunni cleric Ari had more or less
insulted in the souk in Fallujah. Seeing the orange canisters, his
eyes hardened.

"The college grants Doctorate degrees with
the Iraqi and Arabic Boards," the Dean was saying to the men
following him. He looked uncertainly about him, as if wanting to
tell his visitors this was not really part of the university. It
was only a storage room. You did not take notable guests on tours
of one's closets. Nervously, he added: "We are very proud of our
reputation."

"If you are so proud, why are you speaking in
English?" said Dr. Ibrahim in Arabic from the back of the
group.

Ahmad al-Tai laughed this off. Dr. Shkara
scowled. Aiziz sighed. Abu Risha looked down. Dr. Ibrahim did not
belong in this cultured group.

"Medical instruction...scientific
instruction...is given in English," the Dean said apologetically.
"Forgive me for using it out of habit."

Dr. Shkara continued in Arabic.

"Of course, we do mainly medical research,
but the medical colleges are only a short walk—"

Dr. Ibrahim forced his way past the speaker
and stood close to the orange drums. "This is radioactive
material?"

"For research purposes—"

"Has Blix seen it?"

Hans Blix, former head of the U.N.
Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission. Ari guessed
that, when this video was made, Blix had already made it known that
there was almost zero probability of there being WMD's of the
nuclear variety in Iraq, a conclusion the United States lost no
time in ridiculing.

"His inspectors have been here," Dr. Shkara
answered. "We were able to satisfy them as to the harmlessness of
this material."

"If it's so harmless, why does it have a
warning on it?" Dr. Ibrahim persisted.

"It's for X-rays and such things, that's
all," said Aziz, turning to Dr. Shkara. "I am right in this?"

"But could it be weaponized?" said Dr.
Ibrahim.

"As you can see, the Commission saw no need
to leave remote cameras to monitor the canisters," said Dr. Shkara
with a gentle wave at the ceiling, as if inviting the visitors to
see for themselves.

"But if you packed this material around a
conventional bomb, it would be more effective?" said Dr.
Ibrahim.

"It would be useless," the Minister of
Defense asserted.

"Please..." As Abu Risha began to raise a
placating hand when the laptop screen went blank.

"That's it?" Ari asked after a moment.

"The program's still running." Ahmad glanced
down at the information bar. "According to this, there's still ten
minutes left in the video. I'll fast forward..."

But the screen remained obstinately blank.
Ahmad shook his head.

"What a bust. That's the only file hidden on
the disk. Everything else is just the same old scenic Iraq."

"Can you tell when the video was made?"

"Before the war, obviously," said Ahmad.

"I mean, when it was put on this disk?"

"You mean burned? Sure. Just look at the
detailed view." Ahmad switched screens. "Here...July 6, 2002. And
Scenic Iraq was burned in 1999. The producer was some place called
To the Ends of the Earth Travel Bureau."

Ari thought of a day in April, 2003, when he
had heard the explosion that signaled the end of the travel agency.
He turned to Ben, who had come up on the other side of Ahmad to
watch. "Where did you get this?"

"In the Green Zone," Ben answered. "Some guy
had set up a magazine kiosk and these were on the counter. I didn't
see anything I wanted to read, but I felt sorry for him so I got
this for a couple of bucks."

"Why did you feel sorry for him?"

"He was an Iraqi, but his English was good.
He told me he was about to be kicked out because some American
distributor held a monopoly on publications being sold to troops in
the safe area. Of course, they told him it was for security
reasons. It was too bad, he'd gone to a lot of trouble to set
things up. He even took plastic."

"I don't recall Iraqi vendors accepting
credit card payments so soon after the invasion."

"Some of them did in the Green Zone.," said
Ben. "Not the troops, though. We used Eagle Cash."

"Ah, yes," said Ari. "Your military credit
cards."

"Not really," said Ben. "More like a debit
card. You take the card to an EZPay kiosk, which is like a bank
teller machine. They're on all the base camps, here and overseas.
You stick your card in the machine, punch in your code, and the
card reloads for whatever amount you ask for, so long as you have
the cash in your account. The military set it all up after the war
in Bosnia." He stopped, blushing.

"What is it?" Ari asked him.

"We weren't supposed to take credit cards
with us. I mean, in a war zone...what if you're captured? Some
jihadist lifts your card and wipes out your account. But some of us
set up new accounts with limited credit before going over, because
you never know if you come to a place where you want to buy
something but don't have the cash for it. And what the hell, the
Army still puts our Social Security numbers on our dogtags, which
is the biggest security risk of all. Identity theft is pretty bad
among the troops."

"You used your new credit card to buy the
video, then?"

"I remember...I didn't have any cash on me
and I didn't know where the nearest EZPay kiosk was. We were in the
Green Zone, and I figure the guy had been vetted or something.
Anyway, I only had a $500 credit line, so the most a thief could
buy with it...well, maybe a bicycle, or a week in a motel..."