Michael Gruber - The Good Son

“Where the prisoners start sympathizing with the captors. Patty Hearst.”

“Yes. Well, it works the other way around too. We’ll see if we can make that happen. With God’s help, of course.”

After that, they both take to their charpoys and fall into instant exhausted sleep.

Sonia, however, has always been an early riser, and the events of the past days have not changed that. Dawn is just dribbling through the slats of the shutters when she slides out from under the quilt, performs her ablutions, and, searching under her charpoy, finds what she expects, a worn but clean prayer rug. She prays the two raka’ah of the dawn prayer, the Fajr, and then goes to the door, intending to knock on it to summon the guards. But she hears voices in the hallway outside and instead places her ear against a crack in the rough boards. She recognizes one of the voices and listens with interest.

More footsteps outside and the door lock squeals open. A guard enters and looks around. Sonia sees it is the boy, Patang, from the incident on the trail. He backs out and an old woman in black enters. She deposits a tray with naan and tea on it, picks up last night’s tray, and leaves without a word.

Sonia awakens Annette and they eat and drink. They have barely finished when Patang returns with another guard, also masked, this one with a bushy dark beard sprouting out from under his ski mask. Both are armed with Kalashnikovs. Patang says, “Come,” and the two women leave the room.

They are taken to the courtyard of the hujra and made to stand against the wall. In a few minutes, the male captives enter, accompanied by guards. They are all bruised to varying extents and covered with dust. Schildkraut can barely stand and is supported by Porter Cosgrove and Father Shea. When Annette sees her husband, she calls out and tries to go to him, but the guards bar her way with pointed Kalashnikovs.

The captives are now lined up against the wall. Across the courtyard the mujahideen stand in small dark groups, hefting their rifles. It is the classic scene, familiar from the movies, the pathetic last moments of the hostages: up against the wall. Sonia starts to wonder if she has been mistaken, whether for some tactical reason or on orders from a higher level of the insurgency they are all to be executed now. She steps away from the wall and looks down the line of her fellow prisoners, to the left and the right. Next to her, Annette is rigid, her expression a startled one that says, This cannot be happening to me. Manjit stands on the other side and seems to be engaged in some kind of breathing exercise; his brown face is calm. William Craig has lost his glasses and peers out at the morning with the face of a terrified rabbit. Father Shea is moving his lips in obvious prayer. Amin next to him looks like he is waiting for a bus, as if the doings in the courtyard are of no concern to him. Ashton is paper pale but slouches against the wall, hands in his pockets, showing the natives class. Porter Cosgrove, last in the line, seems ready to break down in hysterics, his face contorted like a baby who’s about to bawl. Sonia is ordered back to the wall with shouts and hostile gestures,

Now a man comes out of the hujra carrying a tripod, but instead of a machine gun, the tripod mounts an expensive-looking video camera. Sonia releases a breath she didn’t know she was holding. The man sets his camera up some distance from the wall, peers into the finder, makes adjustments. Then the leader of the band appears, the man in the black turban, masked with a scarf wrapped around his face. He stands in front of the prisoners and reads from a paper. As Sonia expected, it is the usual terrorist want list: removal of infidel troops from Muslim lands, release of prisoners, and then the threat-the infidel spies will be executed if any more Muslims are killed by the crusaders. God is great. Fade to black.

After the video session, the prisoners are allowed to use the latrine behind the hujra and are then returned to where they came from. Patang escorts Annette and Sonia back to their room. Just as they are about to enter the doorway, Sonia stops short and turns to the boy, looking him in the eye. She says, “I can tell you what your dream means: the black horse, and the white, and the cliff.”

The gape of shock on his face as she closes the door on it gives her a good deal of satisfaction.

T he next day, I was in the kitchen drinking coffee and watching the news on TV when the doorbell rang. It was a reporter from the Washington Post. For the past couple of days we’d had some press interest, reporters wanting to know how we felt that our wife and mother was in the hands of murderous fanatics, but we didn’t talk to any of them. I guess this particular woman was more hard up for a human-interest story than the others. I spoke to her in the doorway, long enough to brush her off, but she gave me her card anyway in case I changed my mind and decided to bask in the glow of public sympathy. I was going to toss it away, but then I had a thought.

I needed some time off and the army wasn’t about to give it to me because our unit was due to start our rotation downrange and there was no leave, so when I looked at the reporter’s card and had that thought I got my Washington Military District directory and looked up Major Lepinski. I typed out a friendly note and clipped the reporter’s card to it and called a courier service and had it sent over to his office. The note said I’d just had a visit from a reporter who was doing a story on the blue-on-blue incident we’d both been involved in out in Waziristan, where we weren’t supposed to be in the first place. I said the reporter didn’t know it had gone down across the Pak border but she had a lot of details. She’d heard that a certain Special Forces captain had called down a big bomb on his own side and one guy had been killed and one ruined and one (me) wounded and would I confirm that such was indeed the case and did I know the captain’s name? She’d heard that this officer had not only not been reprimanded for the blunder but had been promoted to major.

I said I hadn’t told her anything; I’d said I’d call her back, because I wanted to talk to you first, sir. And later that day my phone rang and it was Major Lepinski and we had a nice chat. He explained that the whole mission had been secret, national security at stake, and the army had held a full (secret) investigation and cleared him of all wrongdoing; it was just the fog of war; and I said I understood, sir, and I would keep it tight for the good of the service. And now that I was his very favorite trooper in the whole army, I thought I could impose on him for a little favor, because I didn’t want to go along with my unit on this current rotation; I had a few weeks of urgent personal business I needed leave for and could he help me out? And he could, he would take care of it, he would cut orders for a couple of weeks of temporary duty at the Special Operations Command HQ (that is, a no-show assignment); I could rejoin my unit whenever. I thanked him and assured him, Sir, I would definitely shine my reporter the fuck on. I told him I might be going out of the country for a while starting tomorrow, and he said, Go, he’d be happy to cover for me, and I could hear the relief in his voice.

Gloria had called me when the news of the kidnap broke and she was pretty good about it, being a trauma nurse and used to dealing with people on the edges of catastrophe. She asked if I wanted her to come over, and I said no and told her I was going away for an indefinite time. There was a pause on the line. I could tell she was waiting for some kind of good-bye, and I thought about my mother just taking off on me without a word and found I couldn’t do that, even though we’d agreed to no commitments and all.