Escape from Baghdad! (32 page)

The bomb squad had even brought back a Humvee, that most prized possession of American soldiers and rap stars alike. And now, they were on the way to the abandoned safehouse to correct the one blot on the imam's record, the final and just punishment of the murderer of his son. Yakin, by this point, was heartily sick of the imam's dead son, who in life had been a fickle dilettante of lost causes, not much good to anybody, and most likely impotent to boot. In life the imam, too, had hated him. In death, however, he had developed some kind of inconceivable status, an unlikely martyrdom imbuing him with all sorts of virtues.

Fanatics on the street now claimed that he was 6'6", when he had in fact been 5'8". They said he had had a full beard of unusual lustrousity, when he had in fact worn a womanish pencil thin goatee. They said that he had been a devout Shi'a, when in fact he had on many occasions declared his disbelief in any deity higher than the US dollar.

Now they were bouncing along on a half-sprung truck, going to avenge this good for nothing. Yakin had his Bangladeshi gun, his pistol, and an old knife. He sat in the back of the covered van with half of their force. The imam was an egalitarian. He rode in front with the driver, wearing a vest, but no helmet. It was unusual for him to go murdering in person, but this was an issue of family honor, and he had lost a lot of face over the continued defiance of these petty criminals.

Yakin wanted to pee, but there was no way they were going to stop the truck for him. People in the neighborhood had gotten wind of this upcoming disaster and were making themselves scarce. Like rats. Fleeing, craven rats. How he wished he was with them.

All too soon, the truck ride was over. It was a dead-end street, and among some abandoned buildings there was an old blue door. Yakin loitered behind, pretending to tie his laces until the others had leapt out. He was sure Kinza would recognize him and shoot him first. Having seen them fight, he had no doubt that this would come to a bloody end. The imam couldn't imagine how a single man could bring his house down and so believed erroneously that this was actually a splinter insurgency band, probably foreigner Sunnis trying to muscle in. Yakin had explained that this was nothing more than the black malign will of Kinza, which had a gravity of its own and could pull innocent bystanders into its bizarre, violent vortex.

The chaos started right away, as the first Fanatic kicked in the door, while the imam chanted obscure suras Yakin had never heard before. Two rifle butts and the blue door slammed back, splintered. Two of the men leapt in, directly into the flaming muzzle of an M60, a swiveling, racketing nightmare of a gun, manned by a cackling ten year old. Splinters and bullets sprayed outside, and Yakin rolled on the floor. Salemi's soldiers were Gulf War veterans. They returned fire, and soon the boy was thrown back from his perch in mangled pieces.

Yakin had no sympathy to waste for the kid. His enemies were already propelling him forward, and all too soon he was clambering over the carcass of the smoking M60. The second he entered, he felt the hair on his neck rise. This was a cursed house. There was an eeriness not entirely produced by the ringing in ears. Yakin tried to position himself into the middle of the convoy following Salemi, whose calm authority had quelled the panic of the Fanatics for a space.

The policy was simple: knock down empty doors and keep firing. The first door was an abandoned room and the second and the third, until Yakin himself was confused whether they were coming or going.
The wall suddenly opened up behind a tapestry, and an ancient cook leapt out. He had his apron and a cleaver and smelled of onion soup. The man was deranged. Within seconds he had chopped off someone's hand and disappeared back into the wall, taking the appendage with him. No doubt he intended to cook it later.

“Get in there after him!” Salemi said over the thunder of gunfire.

“Just a minute, I've got a stitch,” Yakin said. He slumped unconvincingly against a wall well away from that gaping tapestry tunnel.

One of the braver Fanatics rushed in. There were gunshots and terrible splattering noises reminiscent of cleavers hitting raw meat. The noises grew fainter. The tapestry slowly twitched back into place like an awful sphincter closing.

“Imam, perhaps we should retreat,” Yakin said.

“What?”

“It's just that we've lost two Fanatics and one True Believer already,” Yakin said. “Soon we'll be down to a handful of Pious. It doesn't look like Kinza is even here…” He trailed off and started fiddling with his gun, not least because Salemi looked like he wanted to shoot someone.

They were forced to move on. They soon came to a dining room that was filled up with an immense table, seating ten to each side, although there was barely enough room for the chairs. Candles and place settings of tarnished silver gleamed in the darkness. Everything was covered in cobwebs.

“This place is scaring the shit out of me,” Yakin said to one of the Pious.

The next room over was a sitting room, full of mint tea and nice floral chairs. Two ladies in full hijab sat knitting by the window. Yakin was halfway toward them with the intention of yanking off their robes before he remembered that this sort of thing was severely frowned upon by the imam.
It was alright to dismember people and put them in jars, oh yes, but try a little rape and pillage, and it's down the ranks with you.
He wanted to stop for some tea, but the Fanatics were smashing things up, and the mood just didn't seem right.

“Tie them up and take them,” said the imam, putting the matter to rest.

They moved into the next room, swaggering a little bit now, even though they had yet to apprehend any of the prime targets. Yakin figured it was something primal about taking women captives. He tried to get a glimpse of the two prisoners, but they were so thoroughly shielded in black that it was impossible to guess anything; although one pair of eyes looked middle aged and the other seemed nice and young. He contrived to bump against the younger one several times, until one of the Fanatics swore at him and pushed him away.

The younger eyes glared at him, and he could see her lips moving beneath the veil. He felt something shrivel in his crotch and panic flooded his brain.

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, pushing his way to Salemi. “They're witches!”

“So?”

“She made my—ah, that is, she. Shouldn't we just shoot them? Isn't that what the old guy wanted?”

“We are not the Old Man's errand boys,” Salemi said. “If he wants them dead, he can do the job himself. I don't murder women. I only execute those who have transgressed against the laws of God.”

Yakin, who could not much see the difference between the two, lacked the courage to say so and simply ducked into line behind a veteran Fanatic. They entered another interminable hallway the walls warped and cracked, lathered in crazy shades of white paint. The floors vibrated with a peculiar buzzing sound. It got into Yakin's head like a bee inside his skull, a manly baritone bee droning some kind of Coptic chant just below the frequency of registered speech.

“Can you hear that? What the hell is that?”

“Shut up, peacock.”

Fanatics didn't get nervous, fueled by the same insanity that drove Salemi, but the True Believers had their hands on their triggers and the Opportunistic Faithful class was looking distinctly jittery. It was clear to Yakin that there was something very wrong with this
house, aside from the unnatural width and breadth of its rooms and the impossible number of twisting corridors and staircases. Men were getting lost in here, coming out from distant rooms harried by the lunatic cook who leapt from space to space like a quantum particle with a knife-wielding disdain for things like time and distance.

There was a commotion ahead, and suddenly one wall caved in completely, burying them in moth-eaten books, scrolls, and scabs of gray paint. An Opportunist Faithful, trapped under there, started yelling that the words were sharp. Gunfire riddled into the mound from panicked fingers, and too late they realized that they had simply shot their own man down. Black ink oozed out with blood. There was the dull thud of metal hitting bone, and the man beside Yakin went down, a steel crossbow bored three inches into his head. They all froze. Except for Yakin, who turned to run.

He even got a few steps, until the cold barrel of Salemi's gun brought him up short.

“Turn around, peacock,” Hassan Salemi said. He picked up an errant book, thumbed through it nonchalantly. “These books are very old. This is, I think, what remains of the lost library. These words are all heresies. Burn the place down.”

Later, chased by smoke, Yakin followed shadowy figures through the labyrinth, not sure who was on his side, half terrified of flying cooks and six-inch steel bolts. The buzzing was getting worse. They had taken more prisoners and had lost some men. Salemi was somewhere up ahead; Yakin could hear snatches of commands, translated down with contradictory shouts. Left! Right! Forward! Burn!

It was clear by now that Kinza was not here, although Salemi was unwilling to accept this. The house was on fire, and it was reacting badly to it. They had lost men in the darkness, when corridors looped unaccountably back into each other, causing nervous bursts of friendly fire. The archer was still at large, some kind of expert sniper
with his crossbow, and those dull thuds brought terror to Yakin's brain. They were down to only two Fanatics, the brothers Al-Hama and Borsha, grievous losses considering the paucity of results.

It occurred to Yakin that the Old Man might have sold them down the river, sent them to this mad library house to tie up loose ends. Al-Hama shouldered aside a door and the clammy breath of a rotting seaside hit them in the face. It was a cavernous dark room, sloped like the hull of a ship, and
cold
, at least several degrees below ambient temperature.

Ancient earthenware jars lined the sides of the room, amphorae with red wax seals, slimy with underwater sediment, sweating ooze, and that horrible sawing, vibrating sound was clawing through Yakin making him puke abruptly by Al-Hama's sandaled feet. The Fanatic bulled in, unafraid, his gun out ready to scythe down jars of bellicose mud.

Something terrible happened to Yakin's ears. The pressure changed abruptly, and he found himself on his knees, blood spurting from his nose. Al-Hama was shouting, his figure convulsing on the trigger, making bullets spray. The noise was deafening, even worse, jars were shattering, and gray fog filled the room with the nauseating smell of rotten sea, dead things floating up, and it seemed to Yakin as if terrible demons were lurching out of the amphorae. A change in pressure made his eardrums stretch to bursting.

Al-Hama was reciting verses, shouted words of defiance, while his bullets tore up the fog with little effect until something strangled in his throat, and blood mist rose in fine droplets around him. Yakin staggered away from the Fanatic, trying desperately to get out, out of the cavern, out of the doorway, anywhere but here. The floor was shaking now. It was an earthquake, wood and wall paper and cement all tumbling down around him. Water lapped at his feet, and then his ankles, rising rapidly, a terrible hot kind of water that burned his skin.

Their party was lost, stumbling around, Hassan Salemi trying to rally somewhere far away but his voice was a distant siren, a drowned radio.

“Run!” Yakin savagely pushed Borsha away, who was stupidly blocking the door looking for his dead brother. “Run, you fools!”

He dodged between slices of fog, from demonic grasping hands, from tumbling masonry, and somehow made it to the hallway and then into some other bizarre room that had been overturned by some giant's footfall. He saw bodies floating in the air without gravity and a terrible burning light behind him, dark willowy things his eyes refused to register.
Run, run
. It was the only chord he understood; that he still lived and he had to run. Behind him the house started to burn in earnest.

31: UNEXPECTED HELP

D
AGR WAS COLD, HUNGRY, AND MISERABLE
. H
E HAD NOT
expected to survive this episode and had therefore not bothered to plan for an aftermath. Just his luck. Now, homeless, they squatted in a gutted building with a caved in roof. There was an unexploded shell in the corner, which was why the neighbors left the place alone. It was a dud CBU-105 cluster bomb, a fat torpedo-shaped case with fins, designed to open midair to release its submunitions. This particular bomb, having selfishly kept its bomblets to itself, now nestled peacefully in the corner of the room, lightly peppered in rat droppings, dented, scratched, and rusty, but still smirking. Dagr knew that the little bombs inside were potent and indeed, the cluster bomb was designed with the thought in mind that in case it failed to explode right away, it could function as a very effective land mine and explode at a later date with hardly any reduction in enemy casualties.