Taylor Smith - Slim To None

The old woman glanced over at the next bed. Yasmin was sitting up but she was restrained by a stocky, dark-haired soldier. The child’s eyes were huge and frightened. The soldier held her firmly but his expression seemed apologetic. Zaynab spotted two other burly, camouflage-clad soldiers in the room, guarding the door and peering around the edges of paisley window curtains that had grown tattered and thin. Their fingers were poised on the triggers of terrible-looking rifles. None of them looked like Iraqis. They were too well-fed.

How could they have entered so silently? Of course, Zaynab’s ears were getting old and feeble, but surely Yasmin would have heard something? Or the chickens they kept in the courtyard? How had these soldiers gotten by without the hens raising a squawk? Not to mention Salahuddin’s men, who were said to patrol the town all night long? Ostensibly there to guard against infidel invaders, as often as not Salahuddin’s men, most of whom were not even from Al Zawra, just strutted around, lording it over everyone, stealing whatever they pleased, and harassing farmers and shopkeepers who were up to nothing more nefarious than trying to provide for their families.

Even in the time of Saddam, may his name be cursed forever, the town had not lost so many innocents to senseless, ugly violence. These foreigners had good reason to be nervous, Zaynab thought. If Salahuddin’s men found them, they would be dead before sunup.

She studied the strange warrior-woman and her comrades, and they in turn studied her, all of them weighing their risks. Finally, Zaynab nodded. Only then did she realize that the warrior-woman had been holding her breath. She exhaled heavily now and released her grip on Zaynab’s shoulder, allowing her to sit up. The soldier holding Yasmin released her, too, and as soon as he did, the girl leapt across the space between the two beds. Grandmother and granddaughter wrapped themselves in each others’ arms, then looked back at the warrior-woman, who seemed to be the speaker for the others.

“My name is Hannah,” she said. She had a rifle slung over her chest, but she shrugged out of it, set it aside, then settled herself at the foot of Zaynab’s mattress. Her hair was very dark, most of it caught up in a plait except for wisps that clung to the damp skin of her forehead, cheeks and neck.

“Are you American soldiers?” Zaynab asked.

“My commander here is British,” the woman named Hannah said, nodding at the wiry man guarding the door. “The rest of us are American. We’re not soldiers, though.”

“You look like soldiers.”

“Think of us as protectors.”

“Protectors of whom?”

“At the moment, you and Yasmin.”

“I don’t understand. How can that be?”

“I told you, it was your daughter Mumtaz who asked that we come here.”

The warrior-woman unbuttoned a pocket on the leg of her pants and withdrew a folded piece of paper, then unclipped a small flashlight from her belt and turned it on. Like the men’s, it had a red shield around the lens, narrowing its beam. “This is from your daughter,” she said.

Being careful to keep the light aimed low and away from the window, she handed the paper to the old woman, holding the light on it. Zaynab took the paper.

“Is it really from Auntie Mumtaz?” Yasmin asked.

Hands trembling, Zaynab unfolded the note. She peered at the writing, and gasped. “Yes! I recognize her handwriting!”

“Shhh,” Hannah murmured, touching her arm. “Whisper. Tell your granddaughter what it says.”

Zaynab read:

Mama,

Please, you must do what these people say. They are friends and will keep you safe. Go with them. We have arranged visas for you and Yasmin to come and live in London with Zamir and me and the boys. Yasmin, you will go to school here and we will love you as our own daughter. Neither of you need ever be afraid again. It is for the best, I promise you. Come away from that terrible place.

We send you love and a thousand kisses.

Mumtaz

The old woman’s eyes misted as she clutched the note to her broken heart. Then, she looked up at the soldier-woman and nodded. “Tell us what we are to do.”

Al Zawra: Compound of Sheikh Ali Mokhtar Salahuddin

The man known as George Kenner had gone by many names in his lifetime, taking on and casting off identities as easily as most people switched hats. At the moment, as far as the sheikh and his followers knew, Kenner was a Canadian-born ex-paratrooper-turned-private-military-contractor who had converted to Islam twenty years earlier while helping Afghan freedom fighters expel Russian invaders from their country.

It did no good for Kenner to try to pass as an Arab, not with his startling, pale blue eyes, fair skin and white-blond hair. Brown contact lenses and a dye job might have camouflaged his eye and hair color temporarily, but those solutions were unsuited to the kind of open-ended operation on which he was currently engaged.

In any case, the language would have given him away as soon as he opened his mouth. There were myriad accents and dialects throughout the Arabic-speaking world, but none of these came naturally to Kenner. As gifted a linguist as he was, having been trained from youth to blend like a native into certain foreign milieus, he would never speak better than kitchen Arabic. He’d come too recently to the language. Better to adopt the identity of a sympathetic former infidel from a country deemed relatively benign and then get on with the job of infiltrating Salahuddin’s inner circle.

Kenner had come to Salahuddin on the recommendation of a mujaheddin chief in Kabul, who’d praised his foreign-born brother for his piety, his ruthless devotion to the cause and his superior tactical skills. Inside the jihadist movement, the Kabul contact reported to Salahuddin, Kenner was called “Juma Kamal,” but his brethren accepted that his Muslim identity should remain secret to all but a select few. Kenner was of more use to them traveling incognito under his infidel name and that useful Canadian passport, which rarely received more than a cursory glance from border guards.

That Kenner’s Canadian background was fiction, his religious conversion a farce and his Kabul sponsor long since turned by U.S. intelligence remained a secret to all but a tiny handful of individuals back in the American capital. Washington had a miserable track record for running humint—human intelligence—sources, inside the nearly impenetrable fundamentalist Islamic warrior movement. The only reason Kenner’s cover had remained intact thus far was that the existence of the double agent was known to so few.

Here in the so-called Sunni Triangle, the self-styled Sheikh Salahuddin had seized on the opportunity offered by the current confusion to return to his hometown, wrest control of it and then extend that control over the region. If his campaign went as planned, he would be a major force to be reckoned with, playing a key role in the formation of the new national government.

Salahuddin claimed to hate the traitor Saddam Hussein, a fellow Sunni who paid lip service to Islam when it suited his aims but who, together with his corrupt sons, lived like the worst of infidels. If Salahuddin had once enjoyed a decadent life himself, his time in prison had allegedly convinced him there was more glory to be found in being a holy war leader. Now that Saddam had been overthrown, he had no wish to see the Americans’ tame Shia lapdogs take over the country, divvying it up between themselves and Kurdish riffraff. While a power vacuum existed, Salahuddin told his followers, the time was ripe to exert the moral authority of the Prophet’s true way—and there was no shortage of potential followers among the country’s Sunni minority, which was terrified at the prospect of rule by Shias and Kurds, gunning for bear after Saddam’s long, dark reign.