He dreamed of Tol-e-Khomri as the sun rose, full and hot. Neighbors mowed lawns. Children passed on bikes, outside the porthole. Tom began to sweat and moan.
The bombardment signaled that the main attack would begin soon. Mortar rounds travel slower than sound, and the high-pitched whistle was caused by air rushing over the fins. The melon field began splitting apart. The fighters crouched in the ravine by the village shoved cotton in their ears. Animal parts — a sheep, a donkey — flew into the air and into the village well, which crumbled, the stone sides falling in.
“Get your families out,” the commander ordered his men. “In the refugee camp they will be safe.”
Tom’s brother fighters took turns hustling their loved ones away from the line, a mile back, to the Roman-era road that led north to the border. The land was arid here in a way that surpassed Colorado, with rugged mountains and wadis in the distance, but the angles were soft, blunted by time. Limestone outcrops protruded as if they were the calcified skull of the planet, worn smooth by rain, sandals, donkey hooves. He’d found an old Roman winepress once, a museum-quality wheel made of raw stone. His sneakers crunched over clay splinters from pottery fashioned a thousand years ago. A few weeks back the fighters had seen a lone sheep charging them but at wolf speed, which was impossible. Then they’d heard small boys laughing. The boys had tied a sheepskin over a dog as a joke. It had been funny.
Now Tom told his wife, Sakina, as they reached the road, “I will come and get you after the fighting is over.”
Sakina clutched their infant son, Ayman, to her breast.
That this far-off place felt like home was a miracle. He’d not previously known that such a powerful sense of belonging could exist. It had certainly not existed in the U.S. He’d expected to find prayer and austerity here as he made his way overseas, following website instructions for incoming foreign fighters. He’d gotten what he expected. But he had not expected poetry readings, too, and fellowship. The sports events and arranged marriage. Or that on his wedding day, he would learn that Sakina had chosen him, not the other way around. She’d seen him from her house. I want him, she had told her dad, his commander, fifty-year-old Mohammed al Ricki, who wept with emotion at invocations, or while singing a cappella jihadist religious hymns, as the use of instruments was illegal. Mohammed was called He Who Weeps. But he did not weep when they fought.
Life here when there was no fighting was affectionate and playful. There was basketball and storytelling. Tom felt lucky because in other villages the commanders were brutal in the treatment of women. They encouraged rape; captive teenage girls married by Imams temporarily, so they could have sex with fighters under Sharia law. Birth control mandatory. Girls locked up all day, used at night.
But Tom had come for justice, not sex. He’d made that plain when he volunteered to fight. He’d been questioned by three men… one from London… before being sent to this unit, which had a high percentage of foreign fighters. In photos released by the Caliphate on the Internet they looked terrifying in black balaclavas, raising their AK-47s into the air. But with balaclavas off they became individuals: fat Mahmoud al-Hamsi from Saudi Arabia, complaining about toenail fungus and telling his dreams each day; Amin Saedi, a Belgian nineteen-year-old butterfly collector, who carried a tooth-cleaning twig called a miswak, and wore nonalcoholic perfume; Abdel Regeni, the skinny philosophy professor from Macedonia, half blind in his left eye, who favored Pakistani gowns and flak jackets; Martin Blake, from Toronto, an ex — drug user convict who had gotten religion in prison, and boomed out Ahlam al-Nasr’s poetry at night.
“Shake the throne of the cross,” he’d recite. “Extinguish the fire of the Zoroastrians. Strike down every adversity, and go reap those heads!”
Now lines of civilians and disguised fighters headed north on the blasted-up highway, on foot, on a donkey, on a white horse. A parade of vehicles sent up steady exhaust.
The Americans and their paid allies were coming. Tom had refused to fight Americans when he volunteered. “I’ll fight anyone else,” he had said. “If you don’t like that, I’ll leave. I came here for God. Not to kill Americans.”
Up until today, he’d not hurt them.
Tom watched his wife and baby climb into the dump truck. Normally it conveyed militia, but today all he saw were head scarves and frightened female faces. He had not conceived, when his marriage was arranged, that he would find love here. It had not occurred to him that his trip would bring him home.
She left in the parade of terrified civilians, hidden fighters, and jury-rigged conveyances: a bicycle with a wooden milk-crate seat, a Volkswagen pulled by mules, a horse cart with a windshield attached by bungee cords, hauling boxes of pilfered U.S. Army self-heating meals.
That night the main artillery barrage started, and in the morning men to the left and right of him in the ravine lay still. Sullamed, the Somalian, blown to pieces; Martin Blake, screaming for his mother; Abdel Regeni, a rat running out of his body, dragging a piece of red intestine.
Tom knew he was going to die as the enemy moved forward. But the high-quality Iraqi equipment never matched their will to fight. The Kurds opened the assault, coming hard on the right. The Sunni militia advanced on the left. The Iraqis, center, were sluggish, even prodded by the Americans. Iraqi soldiers hid behind their Humvees. As the attack faltered, Caliphate reinforcements arrived.
Then the Iraqi troops pulled back and their allies had to do the same. A sure victory had turned into a rout, and the fighters thanked God for another day of life.
Afterward, it was easy for Tom to get over the border, to fetch his family back. The Turkish guards had been bribed, and knew if they stopped fighters, they would be attacked.
In a dream, Tom remembered the refugee camp, the smell of pit latrines and unwashed bodies, gasoline generators, the mountain of discarded food cans, the medicine and viscera reek from Red Cross and Red Crescent hospital tents. Hobart Haines peered out of one tent, dressed like a doctor. Gunther the ski instructor out of another. Hodge lay beneath an overturned van, blood gushing from his mouth.
“People got sick after eating,” Hodge told him, in the voice of a middle-aged French doctor. “Your wife was one of them. I am very sorry. She is dead.”
He woke and squeezed his eyes shut and tried to escape back to the camp. He could still feel the clammy cold of Sakina’s skin on his cheeks, and saw the tiny face of his son, blue. He lay in the double bed in Atlanta and smelled refugees. His son, Ayman, had been trampled during the riot.
Tom swung his legs out of bed, said his morning prayers, facing east. They made me this way. He did not mind that today or tomorrow might be his last on earth. He’d known from the first that his life might end here. And if he got out, and made it back to Brazil, he would trust God to determine whether Cardozo would keep him alive, now that he’d been identified by the Americans. But nothing succeeds like success. Tom would take the chance.
Maybe Cardozo would send him back to the Caliphate.
Tom Fargo sat at the woman’s dressing table and shaved his head, careful not to cut the skin. He would have preferred dentistry to plug the gap between his teeth, but the over-the-counter resin would work for two days before it crumbled. He patted his skull dry and fitted on the $4,000 wig, bought with cash in a Rio shop that served the city’s millionaires; industrialists and oil folks, models and TV stars. The wig, Swiss virgin hair, gave his head a wiry look. “This makes your chin weak,” the “hair advisor” had protested when he bought it. “You are more handsome than this! This makes you look plain!”