The Last Mission

Ignacio didn’t tell me the details. He never talks about the gore of battle.

Fiction by Barbara Mujica, Winter 2016

*

Only nine days left. Lt. Ignacio Montez would be leaving Iraq in a little more than a week, and he still had a lot left to do. There was Akram the carpenter, for example. The son of a bitch had hidden a bomb in a quiet intersection where kids liked to play soccer. It exploded and killed six innocent ten-year-olds. Then, there was Mahmod the sweeper. Barrel-shaped and soft-featured with the smile of a cherub, he looked like your favorite uncle, but he had gunned down a popular sheik in cold blood because the guy refused to cooperate with Al-Qaida. And what about Yazen the medic? The one who stuffed corpses with dynamite and then left them at the entrance to the souk or some other well-trafficked area. When a curious crowd—or better yet, a couple of American soldiers—gathered to examine the victim, Yazen would detonate the explosives. These were evil men, men who deliberately killed noncombatants. Montez had vowed that he and his marines would catch them and bring them in, but so far the thugs had eluded them. And then, there was Rahim the jeweler. Montez had to get to him, too. Montez glared at the calendar and bit his lip.

Akram was almost never in his carpenter’s shop, but neighbors saw his wife, Noora, at the market, and she seemed to have money. No one was hiring Akram to build fences or ceiling moldings because no one was about to invest in property that might be blown up any moment. Besides, cash was tight. Lots of people were out of work. If Noora was parading around with fancy sandals and spending dinars on meat, Akram had to be getting cash from somewhere. Obviously he was working for Al-Qaida, but the marines didn’t have much intel to go on. Even those people in this tight-knit little corner of Ramadi who hated Al-Qaida weren’t willing to talk to the Americans. Al-Qaida was brutal, they thought, but the Americans were foreign occupiers.

Montez thought the deaths of the ten-year-olds might change things.

“I think folks are going to start talking, sir,” Ken Pitney told Montez. “They’ve had it with the violence. They’re not going to stand by while these motherfuckers murder their children."

Pitney was a thirty-seven-year-old staff sergeant with twenty years in the military. A bulky black man with sharp perceptions and a fast draw, he had won six or eight medals for pulling marines out of burning trucks or pushing them out of the line of fire. Montez felt ridiculous every time Pitney called him “sir,” even though that was what military protocol required.

“I felt like I should be calling him ‘sir,’” he once told me. “I was only twenty-four years old. He was the one with the experience, sometimes the only one who knew what the hell was going on.

Pitney was perpetually optimistic.

“The joy of the Lord courses through my veins,” he told Montez, “especially when I’m about to go out on a raid.”

“Well, we only have a week to catch Akram.”

“His neighbors hate him. Someone’s going to turn him in.”

Montez thought Pitney might be right. Al-Qaida’s diabolical tactic of killing children to coerce their parents’ cooperation was becoming counterproductive. Sometimes the insurgents decapitated the kids and sometimes they shot them. Until now, parents had been so terrified they gave the thugs whatever they wanted—money, food, a place to hide men and supplies. But now, the buzz on the street was that a rebellion was brewing.

Akram’s job was to plant bombs in places where youngsters gathered: streets where they played soccer or marbles, storefronts with television sets. Neighbors whispered that his mission gave him some kind of personal catharsis: he took out his anger against Allah for giving him only daughters by killing other people’s sons.

As usual, Pitney was right.

“He’s going to go home tonight,” he told Montez. “That’s what they say.”

“Who says?”

“Bab the clothier. The one who sells kaftans. You know, the one with pustules.”

“The guy with a face like a potato with eyes sprouting out all over it?”

“Yeah. Bab overheard Akram’s cousin say something. Bab lost a nephew to one of Akram’s bombs. That’s why he told me. Like I told you, sir, people are fed up.”

At 3:00 a.m., Montez and his team were creeping through the shadows to the modest house attached to Akram’s shop. A gloomy moon offered feeble light, but darkness was a blessing. If the marines were lucky, they’d catch the carpenter in his sleep. Pitney would be in the most danger because he was in the lead position. Akram was surely armed, and if he was awake, he’d fire at the first moving silhouette he saw. He probably had armed guards. If so, they’d pull the women and children in front of them to prevent the marines from firing. It was also possible that Noora would have a pistol as well.

Revolver drawn, Montez kicked in the door as noiselessly as possible.

“The first split second is always the worst,” Ignacio told me. “You never know what to expect. It might be a barrage of fire. It might be a lone gunman.”

Ignacio held his breath. Pitney was already inside. One by one, four other marines followed. They met no resistance. That could mean Akram and his guys were waiting for all of them to enter the house to mow them down, or it could mean the house was booby-trapped and would blow up any minute.

Pitney turned on a low-beam flashlight. Four little girls appeared to be deep in slumber on the floor, each on a mat.

“They looked like angels,” said Ignacio, “their hair spilling over their shoulders, their tiny noses spreading and contracting, their delicately arched eyebrows, their ears like perfectly tied bows. Please, God, I thought, don’t let anything happen to these children.”

Pitney looked around the room. No Akram. No Noora.

He signaled two marines to follow him and went to check out the rest of the house. Ignacio and two others stayed by the entrance guarding the girls. Pitney examined the walls for false doors leading to rooms where a person or weapons could be hidden. He checked the perimeter. Nothing.

Ignacio closed the door carefully, and they left.

“Well, that was anticlimactic,” he muttered.

“But isn’t that the damnedest thing?” murmured Pitney. “We searched the whole house and those little girls never woke up.”

“Too bad Akram wasn’t there.”

“We have eight more days.”

“We have intel that Mahmod the sweeper is hiding in the mosque.”

 “Crap,” growled Pitney. “I hate to go into the mosque.”

“Yeah, me too. It’s their sacred space, but we’re going to have to. I just hope we can find Akram and Yazen within the next couple of days. And then there’s Rahim the jeweler.”

“Rahim isn’t so important.”

“Yeah, he is. It’s a personal thing.”

The moon was dying. They had to check out the mosque and get back to base by daybreak. Montez imagined he would be busy all day getting their quarters ready to turn over to the next battalion, and of course, they had to train the new men.

“None of us have slept for thirty-six hours, sir. With all due respect, I think you should forget about Rahim.”

“You guys can sleep a couple of hours when we get back, Pitney. I’ll visit Rahim.”

The mosque operation turned out to be easy. They found Mahmod the sweeper prostrate in prayer, alone and in full view.

“He just shot an innocent man, a sheik that the whole fucking neighborhood loved,” hissed Pitney. “For sure, God is going to tell him to piss off.”

“Who knows what God is going to do? Surround him, but let him finish.”

The minute he lifted his head, Mahmod knew it was all over. He didn’t even reach for his gun. Ignacio handcuffed him and threw him into the truck. He followed Ignacio into the interrogation room like a lamb waiting for the knife.

“Not so bad,” Montez told Captain Bari, the commanding officer. “One out of three. And then, of course, there’s Rahim.”

“Forget Rahim,” said Bari. “There’s no time.”

“I’ll make time for Rahim,” said Montez, tightening his jaw. He began to write up his report on Mahmod.

At 3:00 a.m. the next morning, Montez’s team was on its way to an abandoned shack on the outskirts of Ramadi. That was where Yazen the medic brought the corpses to perform his gruesome operation. He slit the bodies from breastbone to pubis, removed the guts, and filled the cavity with explosives to be detonated at the moment when they could produce the most horror. He had a bunch of assistants, seasoned killers known to be crack shots. Montez brought a bigger team with him than the night before.

“They’re heavily armed. Guns, RPGs, you name it,” Pitney told Montez. “We might need air cover.”

Yazen’s men had either been tipped off or seen them coming. They fired the first shot.

Ignacio didn’t tell me the details. He never talks about the gore of battle. All I know is that the firefight lasted more than four hours. Yazen had more men with him than Ignacio had anticipated. I can imagine the screaming bullets, the flying debris. In my mind, I can smell the sweat and the burning flesh. In the end, Yazen lay dead over one of his cadavers. Most of his men met the same fate. A few were captured. One of the marines caught a bullet in the shoulder and another had his hand blown to dust. By the time Ignacio attended to the injured and handed over the detainees, he’d slept less than five hours in two-and-a-half days. The computer, the printer, and the paperweight on his desk all seemed to dissolve into each other. It was like watching ice sculptures melt in a desert, he said. He put his head on his desk and slept.

It was only a catnap, but that’s all he had time for. Twenty minutes later, he was off to patrol the souk with Shem the interpreter and three marines.

“We’re going in here,” he said, when they reached the shop of Rahim the jeweler. 

Rahim, by all accounts, was a gentle man, good-natured and big-hearted, but no friend to Americans. He stared warily at the four heavily armed infantrymen entering his shop. 

“Wait outside,” said Montez to the marines. “I’ll stay here with Shem.”

“As-salām ‘alaykum,” said Montez to the jeweler. 

Rahim’s eyes grew large and seemed to spin like pinwheels.

“Tell him I’d like to buy a necklace,” Montez said to Shem.

He removed his helmet so the jeweler could see his face. Then he put down his guns, his knife, his rucksack, and even his flak jacket. Now he was just a man, not a solider.

“I’m leaving in a few days,” he explained, “and I want to buy a present for my mother.”

Without taking his eyes off Montez, Rahim took out five gold necklaces and laid them on a black velvet cloth. Exquisite pieces. Delicate gold filigree, teeming with intricate twirls and arabesques.

Montez made his selection. He knew he was supposed to haggle, but he didn’t have much time.

“I wish you peace and happiness,” Montez said after they had decided on a price and he was getting ready to leave. Rahim’s features softened. He could certainly understand a young man’s affection for his mother.

“I wish you the same,” he said.

Ignacio gave me the necklace for Christmas, when he told me this story. It was hard for me to hold back the tears—to think that in the middle of a war, he had remembered to buy his mother a Christmas gift.

“Did you get Akram?” I asked finally.

“Unfortunately not,” he said. “But at least I got to Rahim.”

*

Barbara Mujica is a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and professor at Georgetown University. Her novels include Frida, an international bestseller that appeared in seventeen languages, Sister Teresa, adapted for the stage at the Actor's Studio in Los Angeles, and I Am Venus, a Maryland Writers' Association prizewinner.