A Mountain Walked, page 44
There was no time to consider. The chitinous buzzing sounded not far behind. I guessed at the mark made by Clyde’s hammer and took that way. When I reached the next intersection, I found that the same trick had been played. The deception would have proved completely effective had the passages been level, but in my progress into the maze of tunnels I had noticed that Clyde had taken a descending route, choosing those passages that slanted downward. With this in mind, I took the way that inclined upward, and continued this practice. Every conjunction of the passages had been baited with false scratches on the stones intended to mislead me, but I ignored all the marks and paid sole attention to the slope of the floor.
In this way, I soon outdistanced the buzzing, rustling sounds of pursuit. It was evident that the monsters could not move as rapidly as a human being. My relief when I found myself back at the archway that opened onto the hole was intense, but it quickly vanished as I searched for my rope, which I had left dangling just to the right of the opening. With one hand grasping the frame of the arch, I leaned dangerously far out over the surging column of water and shone my flash on both sides. The rope was gone.
A sense of despair sapped my strength. I slid to the floor, with my pack pressed against the stone wall of the passage, and sat there for a time, empty of thought, empty even of feeling. Then a glimmer of hope stirred in my heart and brought me back to my feet. I could move around the cylinder wall of the hole on the pitons Clyde had driven in and climb Clyde’s second rope, which was still attached. True, that would leave a hundred yards of sheer rock face, but by using and reusing the pitons on my harness, together with the rope, I could probably work my way back to the surface.
I felt with my hand at my harness, and it was only then that I finally realized that I was lost. My climbing hammer—it was still embedded in Clyde’s skull. There was no way I could drive the pitons home in the sheer rock face without a hammer. I had nothing else with which to strike them, nothing but my fists, and they would quickly have turned to bloody stumps were I to try to use them in this way. Through my head ran that absurd little nursery rhyme:
For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For want of a horse the rider was lost,
And all for the loss of a horseshoe nail.
Presently, I am sitting with my legs crossed at the mouth of the passage, the abyss of the hole in front of me, horrors unimaginable behind. I have just heard that hellish buzzing again. It is coming nearer. Before it reaches me I intend to hurl myself into the darkness below and let the surging water take me to wherever it goes when it recedes. I will not suffer the same abominable fate as poor Clyde.
You who read these words, in the event that this journal is ever found, tell everyone that Virgin’s Island is accursed and must never be disturbed. Make up whatever story you can imagine to keep them away, but never allow anyone else to come here. This evil has slumbered for a very long time, perhaps tens of thousands of years, and if we are fortunate it may slumber for a few years still. I only wish there were some way to stop those damned boats from saluting the cliff with their horns. It may attract the attention of these things, and that could be very bad for the future of our race. Make no attempt to find my corpse. Leave this hateful rock to the birds that roost here, and to the horrors that crawl within.
IN THE SHADOW OF SWORDS
CODY GOODFELLOW
Warren Revell has never considered himself a religious man, let alone a superstitious one, but the midsummer midday Iraqi heat quickens the ascetic core of any soul who stays out in it too long. For months it has feasted mellowly on his idealism but is now leaping the firebreak into his poorly defended will to work at all. As he waits, he contemplates how a place from which the first civilizations reared themselves up out of mud, where God and/or Allah set down the first man and woman and witnessed their fall from grace, could have come to this. We’re still falling, he tells himself. If there ever was a Paradise, we’ve never been further from it. If you’re up there, God, show me the truth behind all this before I have to go. Let me go knowing what’s at the bottom of all this and I won’t bother you again.
Revell’s team is camped out at an annex building of the Istachbarat on the outskirts of Baghdad on the day his prayers are answered. They’ve been sitting there since before dawn, in a line of white Nissan Patrol SUVs with blue UN logo placards on the doors and dashboards. They remind Revell of another blue placard from back home, which would serve just as well in this situation.
Outside, the military intelligence annex ripples like a flag in the churning heat haze. Modern military drab, hastily patched up after a partial hit in Desert Storm, its façade is nonetheless festooned with a judicious smattering of the tapered doorways and window frames and minarets that mark it as a proudly Arabic edifice. This morning, Revell has seen for the first time the practical features of this style, which camouflages the building in the convection currents as a cheetah’s spots hide it on the veldt. If not for the anti-aircraft guns and the Russian surplus APCs parked out front, one could mistake it for a sultan’s palace, or at least the storage facility where said mythic potentate kept records of all his war atrocities.
His mind has been slogging such backwater currents for a while now. They arrived two hours before their scheduled oh-eight-hundred appointment with the Military Intelligence Ministry and have been sitting in their vans, since it became too hot to pace in front of the line of Iraqi soldiers arrayed across the approach to the Ministry. It is fast approaching noon on the first day of August.
Three years of waiting outside sensitive Iraqi sites has taught him that you can’t expect to catch them red-handed. You arrive early in hopes of seeing them frenziedly stuffing cartons of documents and fragile, astronomically expensive scientific gear onto trucks and speeding off in the night to bury them under farms in Saddam’s native Tikrit, or in the asparagus-tinted depths of the Tigris. You photograph the trucks and try to stop them, but usually you wait and make phone calls, with military officials shouting, minders apologizing, and flies buzzing in your eyes and ears until the sanitized site is cleared to enter, or the Executive Chairman orders you back to Bahrain.
This time, there’s been no attempt to clear the place out, and no deadpan tall tales of honest clerical errors offered to explain the delay. Even now, the UN Secretary General is meeting with the Iraqi Foreign Minister in Paris, the two of them sipping tea and shaking their heads at the vicious cycle of sanctions and fruitless inspections, vowing to implement a civilized solution. UNSCOM will be called home in a few days.
Major Ibrahim al-Majid, the chief minder, has standing orders to wait outside Revell’s refrigerated Patrol and shrug every so often, as if to say, Who can explain such things? Revell nods understanding and places another call on a satphone to the UNSCOM HQ in Baghdad, and through a relay to the United Nations. The Executive Chairman is in meetings, even though it’s 4 am in New York, and Revell has already clogged his voicemail, but the secretary would be happy to pass on the message that their mandate in Iraq is being completely disregarded.
Al-Majid knocks on the window. Revell rolls it down a few inches, and the Iraqi presses his Stalinesque walrus-mustache into the crack, sipping off jeweled drops of freon-cooled air. Revell is no wilting violet when it comes to heat. He was born and raised in Austin and spent most of his tour with the Army in Panama, but the heat in Iraq has worn him down. At over 110 degrees with no humidity to speak of, it clamps onto you in the morning and commences to suck moisture out of your eyes, the palms of your hands turn to sandpaper, and your mouth gums itself shut. It had burned every last mote of flinch out of the natives, who could look you in the eye and lie or threaten to kill you in more assured tones than white Europeans can profess undying love, but it has only burned the last atom of nerve out of Revell. For three years, he stood outside the truck, watching the guards for a moment of distraction to press closer to the sensitive site to see what would shake loose. But in these last days, he, too, has abandoned pretense.
“News?” he asks.
“Apologies, Mr. Revell, but I was only going to ask you for some water. A small cup, you can spare it?”
“Sure, Ibrahim, but wouldn’t it be unseemly?”
Al-Majid looks around at the other soldiers on the road. “When you are gone, I will be regarded as a hero for my work to protect the sovereignty of my nation. Who would begrudge a hero a cup of water?” Al-Majid wears his mustache a shade longer than most because it hides his most rare ability, among Iraqis of the military caste, to smile. Revell has kept the secret of al-Majid’s sense of humor, the twinkle in his eye when he’s feeding the inspectors a line of state-crafted bullshit. He’s going to miss having al-Majid to lie to him.
“If your whole clan isn’t purged for some real or imagined threat to Saddam, I expect to see your face all up and down Airport Road when we come back.” He fills a cup from a collapsible cooler on the seat beside him. Despite the air conditioner, the water is almost hot and tastes strongly of the plastic container. Al-Majid closes his eyes in pure pleasure as he sips. When he looks up again, he is all business.
“It must be a relief to you, Mr. Revell, the impending completion of your mission.”
“What?”
“Soon you will be able to return to honest work on behalf of all nations. You will no longer be a pawn of Israel and the American CIA.” Revell’s gotten used to this weird shift in al-Majid’s manner, as if a puppeteer’s hand has reached up his ass and is yanking his cord. He has always assumed the Iraqi minder is bugged and has to deliver these propaganda speeches from time to time to satisfy his minders.
“We’ve had a long time to establish that I don’t work for the U.S. government in any capacity. UNSCOM enforces the mandate of the UN Security Council, which includes Iraq’s staunch allies, the Russians, the French, and the Chinese, to complete its abolition of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs. We’re the only thing between you and being bombed back into the stone age—again.”
Al-Majid’s smile peeks out through his soupbroom. “Iraq will never be defeated. You need us too much, I am thinking.”
“So what’s the delay now? This site was approved by both sides last week.”
“Apologies, but a new list of sensitive classifications is delivered to your UN this morning.”
“There’s new classifications? Jesus …” The rules of engagement for the UNSCOM inspections are labyrinthine and ridiculous, like a scavenger hunt run by ultra-paranoid corporate lawyers. After a string of tense and embarrassing incidents where the Iraqis waved guns in the inspectors’ faces while soldiers and civil servants scrambled out the back with documents and equipment and were caught by the UNSCOM anti-concealment teams, the foreign minister had demanded that certain sites be held sacrosanct on grounds of national and (especially) presidential security. Incredibly, the Security Council gave its approval. The teams could still pop surprise inspections, but the Iraqis could now deny or delay access by saying Saddam liked to get naked and strangle dancing girls there.
“This site is deemed ‘sensitive sensitive political.’” The Iraqis seem to think that repetition makes things sound more important. “It contains records pertaining to political dissidents and internal security actions, which your American military would like to have for itself. Would make invasion—less foolish than otherwise.”
“The inspections in the south will go smoothly then, right?” He’s trying to make the minder laugh; the Basra inspections scheduled for tomorrow are sure to be murder. A month ago, a retired Pentagon analyst idly speculated on CNN that the best plan for overthrowing Saddam would be to demand seizing the south and installing a puppet government at Basra, composed either of radical Islamic defectors from the Iraqi army or Kurdish guerrillas. Saddam bristled at the notion of an UNSCOM force led by a former American military officer snooping around the south, or pawing through his mountainous enemies lists.
“Very few of the declared sites are controversial,” al-Majid answers deadpan. “If your superiors do not have any ugly surprises planned, we will all be released from this farce soon.” He returns the cup and brushes his hands through his mustache. He puts on a rigid scowl and turns to deal with the soldiers.
Revell’s satphone trills. He seals the window, clicks the scrambler on, and picks up, fully expecting to hear the Executive Chairman tell him to pack up and go home.
“Revell, we’ve got an intercept.” It’s Luscombe, the senior communications tech. “It’s—you really should get here immediately.” Luscombe doesn’t sound like Luscombe. Revell has heard him talk about things he saw in Bosnia with his impregnable Oxford-bred good humor, which would make some think he was a thick-skinned twit, if not for the nervous wringing of his hands. Luscombe’s hands must be strangling each other in his lap right now, because he sounds horrified.
“I’m sitting watch out here, Graham. What’s the point of origin?”
“From the south, within our theater of operation for tomorrow, but I don’t see a site of any kind out there on any of our maps.”
“Not even the special maps?” The “special” maps are satellite imagery interpreted by Mossad—infinitely more current and accurate than the CIA’s best output, and strictly forbidden by the Iraqis.
“No, sir. It’s something else.”
“Oh. What’s the content like?”
“I’d rather not discuss it now, if you don’t mind. Suffice to say, it’s a smoking gun. We need to re-evaluate our itinerary, Revell. I think you should have Hideo oversee whatever you’re doing and come back here posthaste.”
Revell turns up the air conditioner. This is what they used to hope for, when the inspections began and UNSCOM had a clear mandate to search and destroy Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, with the mandate in tatters and their permanent evacuation two days away …
“I’ll be right there.”
His first breath of air inside the UNSCOM offices feels like biting down on a cold sword. There should be several airlocks leading into the building, each with successively lower temperatures to prevent thermal bends, but there’s only the foyer, and Revell stands in it for several minutes before proceeding into the communications center. He massages his temples with his eyes clamped shut against the blast-furnace heat from the outer door. Someone is standing in front of him, and he knows who it is from the intense stink of cigarettes, but he keeps his eyes closed.
“You’ve heard it, then?”
Skelton. Revell’s eyes snap open. The lanky British biologist towers over him, rolling an unfiltered Gauloise cigarette between his yellowed thumb and forefinger. Skelton’s long, bulging bald skull reminds Revell of a marabou stork, especially in its current sunburned, peeling glory. His naked scalp produces such excessive quantities of dandruff that he presents the surreal impression of having just walked in out of a blizzard. His features are a bitter caricature of the stereotypical British phenotype—hooked nose, abominable teeth, watery gray eyes, and tangled eyebrows that enhance his carrion-birdish mien. Any expression that means to make itself noticed through Skelton’s default state of droll melancholy has its work cut out for it. Something has made a powerful mark on him, though. He really must remind Luscombe to keep security more compartmentalized.
“What do you know about it?”
“I was just going out to satisfy my Lustmord,” Skelton gestures apologetically with the unignited cigarette. “Graham can fill you in. Rather extraordinary. Changes everything, I daresay. Perhaps I’ll run into you later?”
Skelton ambles to the outer doors, and Revell sprints into the lobby to escape the scouring heat that reaches in for him as the heavy doors swing open. Revell had always figured addiction to things like nicotine was a symptom of simple stupidity, but Skelton is among the most respected savants in the Royal Society and shows no general weakness of character aside from his voracious consumption of tobacco.
Lustmord. A curious German word, meaning, literally, “sex-murder.” Revell reminds himself to ask Skelton what he meant by it.
Revell listens to the message on headphones the first time with Luscombe and Chris Healey, the assistant communications tech. They look expectantly at him, as if he’s the only one who speaks Arabic, but his knowledge of the language is spotty and the garbled transmission is thick with jargon. Two distinct voices snap out brackish streams of technical terms spiked with plenty of obscenities for about two minutes; one voice is considerably more agitated than the other, probably something to do with the sirens blaring, crashing of heavy equipment, and panicked shouting in the background. The other voice is imperturbable in the manner of bored operators everywhere, repeatedly telling the panicked caller to maintain radio silence under penalty of death.
Revell pries the headphones off. “Graham, I can’t make out much from this. Is this an SSO intercept?”
“The call went to the Special Republican Guard Communications Directorate, yes. We have a rough location for the origin of the call pinpointed in the southeast. It came through a relay at al-Amarah. They know we’re coming south tomorrow, I’ll wager, and were taking steps to cover their tracks … when this happened.”
Revell tunes in on the message again, boring through the squalling noise of broken voice encryption to focus on the arguing voices. The caller is desperate, trying to keep from screaming, as he details some kind of emergency. There’s some clattering, and then his voice becomes remote, as if he’s talking from inside a garbage can. He’s put on a gas mask. He demands a containment unit be dispatched, to which the unshakable operator responds that they must sit tight, that help will arrive in forty-eight hours—as soon as the Americans are gone, Revell knows. The heated dialogue goes back and forth in this loop for another minute, then there’s a loud bang, and the caller gasps and the line goes dead.
