Charles Henderson - Terminal Impact

“Do you know the house?” Jack asked.

“Amira knows it,” Giti said.

“Can you draw me a map?” Jack asked.

Amira looked puzzled. “I am not good with drawing.”

“Just directions to it from Hibhib,” Jack said.

Amira smiled and nodded yes.

“Write them down on paper and hide it,” Jack said. “When we escape, some of us may die. We must promise each other that we will make sure that the directions you write down go with one of us who makes it out alive.”

All three girls looked scared. Fear and the sense of reality rushed upon them with the talk that some of them, or all of them, might really die.

“We will pray,” Giti said, and gave Jack a stern look. “You, too, must pray. Jesus loves you. Love Him, and He will take care of you.”

Jack smiled. “Yes, Jesus loves all the little children of the world.” A hint of sarcasm showing.

Giti smiled. “Yes, and He loves their mommies and daddies, too.”

“Even the bad ones?” Jack asked.

“They make Him weep,” Giti said.

“I will say my prayers,” Jack promised.

“Good,” Giti said. “We must have a plan, if we do this. What shall we do?”

“Best time to escape is during the wee hours of the morning, when men standing guard can’t keep their eyes open,” Jack said.

“When we start our cooking, no one is awake, even the men outside keeping watch always have their eyes closed,” Miriam said. “We can sneak away without them noticing?”

Giti smiled. “No one gets hurt. I like this.”

“Sorry, but shit happens,” Jack said, and the three girls frowned.

“It does!” Jack said.

“Yasir has the keys to the doors and to a truck that he uses to get supplies,” Amira said.

“You swipe the keys, unlock me, we steal the truck, and run,” Jack said. “Very simple.”

Giti smiled.

“Simple plans work best,” Jack said, “but we always hit a snag when the mouse tries to sneak past the cat. We need a distraction, and a way to take out the guards. Timing. We must pick a time when they are weakest.”

The three girls looked puzzled. Impossible.

“Think about it,” Jack said.

“We will come up with a plan of dealing with Yasir and his guards in the next day or two,” Giti said.

Jack didn’t like the idea of waiting. He wanted to leave now. But considering that the people that Omar had watching him would be on their toes this first night, and in a day or two they might then fall back into more comfortable, complacent routines, he told Giti, “Give it three days.”

Giti looked at her sisters. “Three days?”

“Yes,” Miriam said. “But no more than three. Abu Omar may decide to take matters in his own hands, especially if he does not want to share the fame as the one who captured and now executes this man they call the Ghost of Anbar.”

“My name is Jack,” the gunny said. “Jack Valentine.”

“We never knew you by anything except Ash’abah al-Anbar , as the men call you,” Giti said. “Valentine you say? Like the celebrated day of love?”

“That’s me.” Jack smiled.

“What about Sabeen?” Amira asked Giti.

“We must take her, too,” Giti said.

“She is so slow and always afraid,” Miriam cautioned.

“All the more reason she must come,” Giti said.

“And Yasir?” Amira asked.

“I have an idea, and Sabeen can help,” Giti said.

“So today’s jihadi show is what?” Jack asked, looking at the blue medical scrubs that Amira had brought him.

“A display, I suspect,” Giti said. “They want to draw attention to you, and themselves as such heroes, capturing the Ghost of Anbar. All the men upstairs are talking about you and how great they now are. They want the notoriety among the other factions.”

“But what’s to stop old Abu Omar from deciding to hog the show all to himself? Cut my head off in the morning, and as you say, not share fame and glory with Zarqawi.”

“As you said”—Giti smiled at Jack—“we must trust God. He has brought you this far.”

“Yeah, but I could have done without the part where I’m sitting naked in an ancient Persian dungeon with my wrists chained to my ankles,” Jack said.

Voices grew louder as Yasir and two other gunmen came down the passageway to the cell where Jack sat chained, naked and freshly washed, with the blue medical scrubs folded on his lap.

“Good,” Yasir told the girls as he walked in the room and saw them sitting quietly with their backs turned toward Jack, waiting for the guards. He gave Miriam a push with the toe of his boot, looking tough for the two younger al-Qaeda gunmen. “Go upstairs and get to work with Sabeen, cooking our dinner.”

“What about food for him?” Giti asked, as she and the two other sisters hurried out the door, bowing their heads so that they did not make eye contact with any of the men.

“Abu Omar said nothing of feeding this snake,” Yasir said, again in his commanding voice to impress his subordinate guards.

“Very good, master,” Giti said, and that made Yasir smile. He liked the show of respect, especially in front of the men. “Get going! If I need you, I will call you.”

Jack watched the girls hustle away, then looked at Yasir and the two young henchmen with him.

“You boys suck each other’s dicks? Or do you prefer giving blow jobs to strangers?” Jack asked them with a smile, as if he had just complimented the three men.

Yasir and one young man cracked half smiles, taking the compliment that they did not understand. But the other gunman slapped Jack on the side of his face with the flat side of the wooden buttstock on his AK rifle.

“Americans speak such filth!” the young jihadi said.

“Two of you don’t understand a word I say, but one does,” Jack said, smiling bloody teeth at the angry guard.

“I should hit you again for provoking me,” the one who understood English said.

“You should not react to bullshit prisoners say,” Jack told the young man. “If you’d played dumb-ass with fucktard and dipshit here, I might have said something important, thinking you didn’t understand me.”

“Shut up,” the Haji said.

“Don’t say I never taught you anything.” Jack smiled, nodding down at the locked chains.

The one who understood English told Yasir in Arabic, “Unlock the chains. If he moves, we will shoot him.”

Then he looked at Jack, and said, “You will get dressed. If you raise a finger, as if you want to escape, I will shoot you in the head.”

“Abu Omar won’t like it.” Jack smiled and spit a glob of blood on the floor between Yasir’s toes as he went to unlock the padlock between the gunny’s ankles. Then Jack looked back at the English-speaking Haji and smiled more. “I dare you to shoot me.”

A range of mountains lay northwest of Haditha Dam and lake, and Elmore Snow looked at them with orange clouds from the sunset shrouding their distant peaks. Standing in the blockhouse atop the high hard wall, he thought of home, and of his wife, June, and his daughter, Katherine. The girl was growing up too fast. How sweet life would be right now, he thought, if he had already retired from the Marine Corps.

He thought of Rowdy Yates, lying at rest in the Evansville National Veterans Cemetery on the outskirts of Casper, Wyoming. He thought of Brenda Kay, now living at home with her family up Headgate Draw, and wondered how she would live her life without Rowdy, the new baby coming soon.

Elmore stared out at the sunset, the great flat desert and small hills, and thousands of empty square miles where Jack Valentine fought to stay alive, the proverbial needle in a haystack.

“Colonel Snow,” Captain Charlie Crenshaw called from the ground on the inside of the high, hard wall. “Our CIA contingent has beamed up something on their computer that al-Qaeda sent to Al Jazeera about an hour ago, and they posted it to their Web site.”