The Second Saladin

3

He assumed they would be hunting him, but it did not matter and did not particularly frighten him. He had been hunted before — by Iraqi soldiers and policemen, by Arabs, by Iranians, by Kurds even. Now Americans.

But what could they do? For he was in the mountains now. Ulu Beg felt almost comfortable here; he knew this place. He had been born and raised in mountains and fought in mountains and these, though in many ways different, were in just as many ways the same as his own.

They were known as the Sierritas, ranging northward from the border for twenty or thirty kilometers before panning out into cruel desert plain on the way to the American city of Tucson.

These mountains were perfect, a wilderness of bucking scrub foothills shot with oaks and bitter, brittle little plants poking through the stony ground; until, reaching the altitude of 5,000 feet, they exploded suddenly into stone, a cap, a head of pure rock, bare and raw and forbidding. The saying went, “Each mountain is a fortress,” and he felt the security of a fortress up here.

Let them come. He’d learned his skills in a hundred hard places and tested them in a hundred more and would set his against anybody’s in mountains. But he doubted Americans would try him. They were said to be a people of pleasure, not bravery. Still, suppose they had a Jardi to send against him?

The Kurd paused on a ledge, staring at the peaks about him, dun-colored in the bright sun. Everywhere he looked it was still and silent, except for a push of wind against his face.

What if it were written above that a Jardi would be sent against him? What if that were God’s will?

Who knew the will of God? What point was there in worrying about it? Yet, still …

But there was another advantage, beyond security, to the solitude in the higher altitudes. And that was privacy: he could still think like a Kurd, move like a Kurd, be a Kurd. There wasn’t the press of maintaining a fictitious identity, which was as hard as anything he’d ever done.

“You must be one of them,” he had been instructed. “But it won’t be hard,” they assured him. “Americans think only of themselves. They have no eyes for the man next to them. But of course, certain small adjustments must be made in your natural ways. Do you agree?”

“Yes,” he said. “Teach me. I will make any sacrifice, pay any cost. My life is nothing. It has no meaning other than as the instrument of my vengeance.”

“Excellent,” they complimented him. “Your hate is very pure, and to be nourished. It will sustain you through many difficulties. Some men must be taught to hate. You come to it with a gift. You are holy. You make a holy war.”

“This is not holy,” he had said, glaring, and watched them show their discomfort at the force of his glare. “It is a blasphemy. I must defile myself. But it is no matter.”

He moved northward through the mountains slowly, enjoying his journey. He crossed a dirt road late in the night in a low place. He skirted campsites, places where Americans came to play. The sky was fiercely blue, angrily blue, and in it a sun of almost pure whiteness, a radiance, beat down. The clouds were thin and scattered. At the top of one mountain he could see nothing but other mountains. One spine of crests gave way to another. There was dust everywhere, carried by the wind, and even patches of snow, scaly and weak, that gave when he put his American boots through them. At twilight the mountains were at their richest and in the shadows and the soft air they seemed almost kesk o sheen, a certain blue-green shade close to the Kurdish heart which spoke of spring and, more deeply, of freedom to travel the passes, to move through what they held to be theirs by right of two thousand years of occupation: Kurdistan.

At one point he saw a vehicle. He ducked back, for just a second, terrified. The thing lurched up a gravel track, an ungainly beast. Something in the way it moved: sluggish yet determined. He felt his body tensing, and a feeling of nakedness — the nakedness of the prey — overwhelmed him.

The vehicle pulled to a level stretch. He saw it was almost a bus, gaudily painted, an expensive thing. Bicycles were lashed to its rear and the top was bulky with camping gear. He sat back, watching the thing move. It was obviously some kind of vacation truck for rich or fancy Americans, so that they could tour the wilderness in high style, never far from showers and hot water.

He watched it poke along beneath him, pulling a trail of dust, glinting absurdly, its bright colors flashing in the sunlight. It was almost a comical sight, a preposterous American invention. No other country but America could have produced such a thing. He wanted to smile at the idiocy of it.

America!

Land of wealthy fools!

Yet he continued to breathe heavily as the machine passed from view. Why? What frightens me about this monstrosity? You’ll be among them soon, if things go well. Is this how you’ll perform, frozen with terror at the sight of the outlandish?

You’ll never make it.

I must make it.

But it had been terror in his heart. Why?

Was it the shooting at the border? Would there be a huge manhunt for him? Would his mission be endangered? These things troubled him, but not nearly so much as the killing of the two men.

It put a darkness on his journey, a bad beginning. Damn that fat Mexican! They had told him this Mexican knew the best way, the safest way. The Mexican would get him across.

What would happen to the Mexican now? He was glad he wasn’t the Mexican, because he knew now the Mexican was expendable. They would have to take care of the Mexican, because of the stir the shooting would make.

Death, more death, still more death. It was a chain. Every little thing leading out of the past into the future: heavy with death.

The two policemen, dead, for being in the wrong place. The Mexican, dead. And he himself, ultimately, finally …

“If they catch you, you have failed. They will never free you. They will use you and use you. Do you understand this?”

“I do.”

“It is not that in captivity you no longer can advance your cause; it is that you hurt it. You destroy it. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“Swear then. We will help and support you, but you must swear. You will not be taken alive. Do you swear?”

“Kurdistan ya naman,” he swore. Kurdistan or death.

He lingered in the mountains a week, for in them he went unhunted. He lived on the flat Mexican bread in his pack and on jojoba nuts and mesquite beans, as he had been instructed. But the land began to flatten beneath him until on the eighth morning there were no mountains except the ones rimming the horizon, crusty brown in the distance, and to get there he had to cross the flatness wavering before him in the sun, sending off a smoky radiance of pure heat. It was the desert valley that led to Tucson, a journey too dangerous for the dark.

“Beware the desert,” he’d been told. “If you have to cross the desert you are an unlucky man.”

But beyond the desert lay Tucson and in Tucson lay a bus route into America and toward the Northeast, where his destiny was ser nivisht, written above.

He set out early. He found it a wilderness of needles, of things that could hurt. It was, in its cruel way, quite beautiful too, an abstract of the textures of death. Over each rise or gentle dip, through the crumbling rocky passes, down the easy glades, up the rock buttes, each shift yielded a new panorama. Yet what impressed him most in this long day’s journey was not the danger or the beauty but something entirely else: the silence.

There is no silence in the mountains, for always there is wind, and always something to blow in its path. Here, on the bright floor of the earth, he could hear nothing. There was no wind, no noise, nothing but the sound of his own boots sloughing through the dust or across the fine rocks.

There was no water either, and the heat was suffocating. He thought only of water. But there was no water and no mercy, only the sense that he had to move ahead. Miles beyond stood a last escarpment of hills, and beyond that had to lie Tucson.

He hurried onward, the dust thick in his throat. The saguaro cactus towered above him, exotic and beckoning. And a hundred other needled monsters, some whose delicate flowers mocked their ugly spikes. Small tough leaves slashed at his boots. He raced ahead, exposed in the great undulating flatness. He knew he had only a day to make the journey, for he’d freeze out here at night, and the next day the sun would come and bake him.

“A day, if it comes to a desert crossing. You’ve got a day. Your body can take no more.” They told him stories of Mexican illegals who’d been led into the desert by unscrupulous smugglers and abandoned and how they’d died in horrible agony in just hours at the hottest time of the day.

He pushed ahead, feeling the blood pulsing in his temples. The shirt off and wrapped about his head in the fashion of a turban gave some relief from the heat; he wore only an undershirt over his body. But at each rise he prayed the mountains had moved closer and at each rise he was disappointed.

Kurdistan ya naman.

The pack had become hugely heavy, yet he clung to it.

He pushed ahead.

In the early afternoon, there was a helicopter, low off the horizon.

Always helicopters, he thought, always helicopters.

He ducked quickly into a ravine, opening his wrist on the knifelike leaves of some grotesque plant. The blood spurted. He listened to the roar of the machine, an almost liquid sloshing, the rising pulse.

He crouched into the side of the ravine as the noise grew. He reached inside the pack and touched the Skorpion.

But the noise died.

He climbed and faced the same bright frozen sea of sand and spiny vegetation. His head now ached and the wrist would not stop stinging. In all directions it was the same — the crests of sand, the cacti, the cruel scrub under a broad sky and a fierce sun. In the distance, the mountains. Ulu Beg rose and headed on, facing death.

By midafternoon he began to get groggy. He fell once and didn’t remember falling, only finding himself on his knees at the bottom of a slope. He stood, his knees buckled, he went down again. He got up slowly, breathing hard, stopping to rest with his hands on his knees. He thought he saw that bus, that crazy bus pulling toward him, full of blond Americans, rich and well-fed, their children riding before them on bicycles.

He blinked and it was all gone.

Or was it? Caught in his mind was a memory of the vehicle, the awkwardness of a thing so huge. In its tentativeness, its absurdity — but also its determination — there’d been a memory.

He called it up before him.

They had marched for days down through the mountains to the foothills near Rawāndūz, and set the ambush well, with great patience and cunning. Jardi was with them. No, Jardi was one of them.

There had been thirty of them altogether, with Ulu Beg’s own son Apo along because he’d begged to go. They had the new AKs that Jardi had brought and the RPG rockets that he’d shown them how to use, and a light machine gun; and Jardi had his dynamite, which he’d planted in the road.

They caught the Iraqi convoy in a narrow enfilade in the foothills, men of the 11th Mechanized Brigade who had not a week before razed a Kurdish village, killing everybody. Jardi exploded his dynamite on the lead truck and they’d all fired and thirty seconds later the road was jammed with broken, burning vehicles, mostly trucks.

“Keep firing,” Jardi yelled, for the shooting had trailed off after the initial frenzy.

“But—”

“Keep firing!”

Jardi was a fierce man, crazy in action, a driven man. The Kurds had a phrase: a fool for war. He stood behind them, his eyes dark and angry, gesturing madly, screaming, exhorting them in a language only Ulu Beg could understand, communicating nevertheless out of sheer intensity. Standing now, striding up and down the line, howling like a dog, his turban pushed off so that his short American hair showed, oblivious totally to the bullets that had begun to fly up from the dying convoy at them.

He was in some ways more Kurdish than any of them, a Saladin himself, who could inspire them to heroic deeds by nothing greater than his own ruthless passion. He loved to destroy his enemies.

“Pour it on. Keep pouring it on,” he yelled.

Ulu Beg, firing clip after clip of his AK-47 into the burning trucks and the huddled or fleeing figures, watched as the Kurdish fire devastated the convoy. He could see glass shattering, the canvas of the trucks shredding, the tires deflating. Now and then a smaller explosion and a puff of flame rolled up as one or another of the petrol tanks detonated. And soon no fire came from the trucks.

“Cut,” Jardi yelled.

The Kurdish fire died down.

“Let’s get ’em out of here,” Jardi yelled to Ulu Beg.

“But, Jardi,” Ulu Beg called, “there’s weapons and booty down there.”

“Not enough time,” said Jardi. “Look, that scout car.” He pointed to a Russian vehicle on its side at the head of the convoy. “Look at the aerial on that baby. The jets’ll be here in a few minutes.”

That was Jardi too: in the middle of battle, with bullets flying about, he was coolly noting which vehicles had radios — and estimating what their range was and how soon MiGs would respond to the ambush.

Ulu Beg stood.

“It’s time to flee,” Ulu Beg yelled.

But it was too late. Far down the line he saw three men break cover and begin to gallop toward the crippled vehicles, their weapons high over their heads in exultation.

“No,” commanded Ulu Beg, “stop—”

But two more broke from the line and others turned back toward him, frozen in indecision.

“Back,” he shouted.

“We must leave the others,” Jardi said. “The jets’ll be here in seconds.”

But one of the men was Kamran Beg, a cousin, who had been bodyguard to the boy Apo.

Ulu Beg saw his own child rise from the gully and begin to run down the hill.

“What the hell,” said Jardi. “Why the hell did you—”

“I did nothing. I—”

Then they saw the tank. It was a Russian T-54, huge as a dragon. It swung into the enfilade. Tanks had never come this high before. Ulu Beg watched as the creature swung along on its tracks, its turret cranking. It moved with awkwardness, tentative even, despite its weight.

“Down!” Jardi yelled, in the second before the tank fired.

The shell exploded under the first three running men. They were gone in the blast. Others raced up the hill. The machine gun in the turret cut them down.

The small boy lay still on the ground.

Ulu Beg rose to run to him, but something pressed him to the earth.

“No,” somebody hissed in his ear.

Jardi vaulted free and raced down the slope. He had abandoned his rifle and held only a rocket-propelled grenade. He ran crazily, not bothering to veer or dodge. He ran right at the tank.

Its turret swung to him. Machine-gun bullets cut at the earth and Ulu Beg could see them reaching for Jardi, who seemed to slide in a shower of dust as the bullets kicked by him.

He lay still.

The tank began to heave up the ridge toward them.

Ulu Beg saw that they were finished. They couldn’t get back up the slope; the tank would shoot them down. A tank. Where had it come from?

He tried to clear his brain. He could think only of his son, dead on the slope, the brave American, dead on the slope, his men, his tribe, dead on the slope.

But Jardi rose. He was not hit at all. He rose, sheathed in the dust he’d fallen through, and stood, one leg cocked insolently on a stone. A wind came and his jacket billowed. From down the slope they could hear Jardi cursing loudly, almost — the man was crazy — laughing.

The tank turret swung to him again. But Ulu Beg saw that Jardi was close enough now and that the big gun would never reach him in time, and as its barrel swung on to him Jardi fired the RPG one-handed, like a pistol.

The rocket left in a fury of flame, spitting fire as it flew, and struck the tank on the flat part of the hull, just beneath the turret.

The tank began to burn. It fell back on its treads and flames began to pour from its hatch and from its engines. Smoke rose and blew in the breeze.

Jardi threw away his spent launching tube and ran quickly to the boy. He hoisted him and climbed up to them, but he had no smile.

“Come on, get these guys out of here,” he said. “Come on,” he turned to shout at them, “get going, Jesus, you guys, get going!”

The boy was crying.

Ulu Beg was crying.

“You have given my son his life back.”

“Come on, get going,” Jardi urged.

They climbed to the mountains and were over the crest when the first jets arrived.

Ulu Beg smiled in the memory of that day.

Ahead, the mountains loomed.

He reached them at twilight. Toward the end he’d crossed a road and ahead he could see another road, one that crawled up the side of the mountain, but he did not go near it. Cars moved along it. In the falling dark he climbed cold rocks. He found a trickle of water. He tracked it to a pool, and then found the spring. He drank deeply. He sat back. He ate a piece of his dry bread, and drank again. He was in the chill of a shadow but could look out and see the desert, still white and flat and dangerous.

He climbed up. At the top, the city of Tucson lay before him. He saw a city built on sand, on a plain, cupped on all sides by other mountains. A few tall buildings stood in its center but it was mostly a kind of ramshackle newness. It was nothing like Baghdad, which was very, very old, and on a huge river.

God willed it, he thought, and I have made it.

He thought of Jardi and the tank and his son and why he had come to America and he began to weep.

In the morning he rose with the sun. He opened his pack, pushed the machine pistol out of the way, and found his other shirt, a white thing with snap buttons. He pulled the shirt on.

They had prepared him well. But they had also warned him.

“America is like nothing you’ve ever seen. Women walk around with breasts and buttocks exposed. Food and lights everywhere, everywhere. Cars, more cars than you can imagine. And hurry. Americans all hurry. But they have no passion. Any Turk has passion. Among Turks and Mexicans and Arabs, passion runs high. But Americans are even lower, for they feel nothing. They move as though asleep. They do not care for their children or their women. They speak and talk only of themselves.

“In all this, you will be dazzled. Expect it. There is no way we can prepare you for the shock of it all. Even a small city in America is a spectacle. A large one is like a festival of all the peoples of earth. But remember also: the grotesque is common in America. Nobody will notice, nobody will care, nobody will pay you any attention. Nobody will ask you for papers if you are cautious. You need no permits, no licenses. Your face is your passport. You may go anywhere.”

Ulu Beg reinstructed himself in these lessons as he came down the last hill in the dawn light to the road. He moved swiftly. The distance was but a few twisting miles and the cars that sped by paid him no attention. The houses quickly became thick: small places of cinderblock in the sand and scrub. At each house was a car and in some of them men were leaving for work. Ulu Beg walked along the street. He paused to read the sign: SPEEDWAY, it said. He came to a group of men waiting by a corner. A bus arrived and they climbed aboard. He walked another few blocks and again the same thing happened. At a third corner, he climbed aboard himself.

“Hey. Fifty cents,” the driver said angrily. Ulu Beg searched his pockets. They had told him about this. Fifty cents was two quarters. He found the coins and dropped them in the box, and took a seat and rode down the Speedway toward the center of the city.

He got out near the bus station and looked for a hotel.

“Always stay near bus stations. Small places, dirty rooms, cheap. But a hotel, always a hotel. In a motel, they’ll ask about an automobile. You’ll have to explain that you don’t have one. Why not? they’ll ask. They’ll think you’re mad. In America it is exceedingly odd not to have an automobile. Everybody has an automobile.”

He chose a place called the Congress — the name proclaimed proudly on a metal frame on the roof — across from a Mexican theater in a crumbling section of the city. It was a four-story building with a bookstore, a barbershop, and a place that sold gems in it, across from the train station and behind the bus station.

He walked into the dim brown lobby.

A fat lady looked up when he came to the desk.

“Yes?”

“A room. How much?”

“It’s ten-forty, dear. You get your TV and a bath.”

“Sure, okay.”

“Just sign here.”

He signed quickly.

“One night? Two? A week? I have to put it down.” Her face was powdery and mild.

“Two, three maybe. I don’t know.”

“Oh, and hon? You forgot to say where you were from. Here, on the form.”

“Ah,” he said.

He knew what to put. He thought of the only American he knew. Jardi. Where had Jardi grown up?

“Chicago,” he wrote.

“Chicago, now there’s a nice town.” She smiled. “Now I have to have that money, hon.”

He gave her a twenty and got his change.

“You go on up. Those stairs there. Down the hall. It’s in the back, away from all the traffic.”

He climbed the stairs, went down the dark hall and found the room. He went in, locked the door. He pulled the Skorpion from his pack and set it before him on the bed and waited for the police.

Nobody came.

You did it, he thought.

Kurdistan ya naman.