ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

BY DAVID LAWRENCE CADE

CHAPTER SIX

One of the first sights that Omar observed as Abdullah drove him through the northeast of Baghdad toward Saddam City was at an outpost where unemployed Iraqi military officers who were willing to sign pledges that they were no longer loyal to the Baathist party were being given stipends by the U.S. Army command.

"Pull over and stop," Omar said. "I want to get out and see this."

One former Iraqi lieutenant colonel was standing stiffly in the heat and openly complaining about passersby mocking the once proud elitist officers now taking a handout of one hundred dollars each to give them funds to survive on until a new Iraqi army could be formed.

"Why do they laugh at us?" he asked another Iraqi soldier. "This is humiliating."

Omar walked over to the long line of men and talked a minute to a black-haired, lean, twenty-one year old lieutenant from Samarra who said he had just graduated from the Iraqi military academy the month before the war broke out in March.

"Who cares if I completed my training and am a lieutenant?" he asked.

Omar got back in the car, and Abdullah drove on past an area of archeological excavations alongside which stood an ornate mosque little touched by the war’s bombing.

"Azure," Omar said. "The pure azure and emerald of the tiles on the mosques. I had forgotten how like pure velvet, like tortoise shell, and the women with only their fair round faces behind their scarves, the old men with snowy beard."

"Look," Abdullah said. "More Americans in armor. How the heat must stifle them."

They were at a traffic stop at an intersection with a two-lane street blocked off to cars and trucks, with pedestrians and shoppers staring at the cold-faced American soldiers walking along the sidewalk without saying anything.

"Why do they not talk to the children they pass?" Omar said.

"That little girl," Abdullah said. "I have seen her before. I have seen her gaze, as the soldiers glide in, and not a word to her as they pass. They have violated our country, our customs, our way of living. They act like they are a stream passing through the desert of our people, and offer nothing to the hapless little nymphs as they pass, not even a whisper."

"I wish," Omar said, studying the scene, the busy white cars, dented, marked with graffiti, stalling and restarting in the brutal mesh of vehicles pursuing spaces where pedestrians had to flee to avoid being run over. "I wish this vanity to end."

"Vanity?" Abdullah said.

"America has gone fishing, and they despise the catch," Omar said. "They presume with their intent looks, stretching out their arms with those monstrous machine-guns trained at out towns, and then they smile."

"A slippery fish, Al-Iraq," Abdullah said.

"We are swimming upstream to the oldest tributaries of the Tigris," Omar said, "and the military coalition think they will emerge from the flood, as if they are the eighth wonder of the world and shielded by a watery god."

"Allah speed us and send us enough water this month, as our people are desperate in the west, and the south, everywhere, just for water to drink," Abdullah said.

"At night, what is it like in Al-Nasiriyah?" Omar asked.

"Hardly anyone stirs, they are so afraid. The women, afraid of being raped, and the men now."

"The men also?"

"I have heard of some of the younger men being assaulted."

"How cruel," Omar said.

"One false step, and I won’t deceive you, and caution will not hold back the temptation to retrieve control of our country. This is not lawful what the Americans are doing. Mr. Bush take heed."

"When is the curfew?" Omar asked.

"Seven p.m. We will find out. Perhaps later, perhaps earlier. Parting with the military will not weary most of us, even those who cooperate with them."

"Has Saddam left the world?" Omar asked.

"He left Iraq to darkness, and to you and me," Abdullah said.

"Homeward," Omar said, "after this place to the northeast."

They watched the Iraqis out looking for work, anything to do, weary of the tanks, humvees, cars, the chaos, the hardened faces of the older men in worn, sometimes soiled galabiyyas, the defiant young Iraqi men walking just to exercise their legs, working off the tension of being among the sixty percent of their population unemployed.

"Always that glimmer of hope," Omar said. "Even if all they have for an afternoon is the air to breathe. This is a landscape of air. Baghdad has become a landscape of air, solemn still air, then violent windswept, like the hope in their faces."

There were five or six beetles crawling about the back seat of the car, near the window, several that had been sucked in through the open windows. The droning of another C130 overhead in flight drowned out the squalor of the crowd for a moment.

"I am so drowsy," Omar said.

The tinkling of bells on a herd of goats added to the clamor as they turned onto another side street.

"Have you enough gasoline for this tour?" Omar asked.

"I can get more. I believe I can get more, if you have the money. Oil, like that ivy-covered tower of the mosque, is forever ours."

"Is that an owl?" Omar asked.

"A small barn owl," Abdullah said. "She waits for tonight’s moon, almost full. She has her secret bower away from all this ancient molestation."

"A solitary reign, like that of Saddam," Omar said. "Perhaps she has flown over where he is hiding or buried."

"I would insult his bones, even if protected by some monument," Abdullah said.

They passed a square, with a statue of cat atop a fountain.

"We pay tribute now to her, as Saddam can no longer implore us to sigh at his every word," Abdullah said.

"How many years have you lived in Baghdad?" Omar asked.

"Close to twenty. It was the place of fame. I came from Mosul. I was questioned once, for two days, and released. One of my brothers was tortured and has never recovered fully. He is my oldest brother, and we are sure he protected us. They could not break him."

"And many a holy text will be read," Omar said, "passed around, as they teach the urban and the rustic how to forget, to forget being a prey, dumb, anxious."

"We are still anxious," Abdullah said. "We are no longer sovereign. We are the man who came in from the cold, perched atop a wall, and if we do not hurry, the Iraqis will become like the man who had no country."

"America cannot resign from this warm precinct now," Omar said. "Even with those young boys in uniform telling the cameras they don’t care anymore why they’re here, the long lingering looks to the people back home.

"Then some fond soul in New Jersey is interviewed, says they still support the war, they rely on Bush to do the right thing, and some pious closing remark required about wanting their son or husband home by September."

"It is a tomb for more and more of them," Abdullah said. "The enlisted men, the American boys in those heavy suffocating armor suits, I have seen them close their eyes and cry, as if their ashes will be scattered to the wind here."

"The honored dead," Omar said.

"The unhonored dead," Abdullah said. "And there are things happen in this part of Baghdad. There is no art to tell, no lines will ever relate the lonely, the fate if chance give out for the people here."

They soon arrived in one section of the area of a million or more who lived in the worst poverty in Baghdad, known before the war as Saddam City. They were at a square with some older buildings and some cheap pre-fab housing ordered by the Baathist regime in the nineteen-sixties, concrete structures with no windows for people to get air, no plumbing, no exterior light.

A heavy-handed young man in a plain white galabiyya was pushing two boys out of the way at an antiquated water well in a square in that part of the slum.

"Stop," Omar said.

"Are you sure? We could be robbed," Abdullah said.

"I have something to say to that young man," Omar said. "Can I give something to these people?"

"It could cause a riot. We could be mobbed. I’ll stop if you insist."

"Yes."

Omar got out, coughing once in the thick dry air and acrid stench in the square. There were over fifty people, one man in the remnants of an Iraqi soldier’s uniform standing nearby, missing one arm.

An old feeble man sat on a metal chair with an old cotton quilt on his legs near the well, which had a slow trickling fountain that the two boys had tried to reach.

Eye to eye with the thick-set young man who had shoved the boys aside, Omar said, "Let them drink."

The young man glared at Omar in his clean clothes, American style short sleeve dress shirt in white, comfortable walking shoes, khaki tan slacks. Omar stood his ground. The boys went back to the fountain while the young man stood stiffly, ashamed that the others in the square had seen him stared down.

The boys had only tattered blue knee-length shorts, no shoes. They turned in opposite directions as if to run, and Omar said, pointing to an injured former Iraqi soldier laying exhausted along the sidewalk beside a run-down shop, "His cup needs filling. Can’t you help him?"

Without saying a word, one boy ran to the invalided soldier and got his cup, filled it at the well, and took it back to him.

The square was over two hundred feet in length, two hundred fifty in width. The noontime sun was bearing down so that they had almost no shadows.

Omar counted six other soldiers in similar state, lying on crude pallets, wounds that had not healed completely, reddened and some oozing puss.

There was a street musician playing faintly on a sort of mandolin near the corner of a building. Omar gestured to Abdullah to stay in the car. He walked over to the musician and handed him five dollars in American money. The musician stared in disbelief. A twenty-six year old woman in black dress and veil, only her face showing, stood beside him and smiled. She turned to a basket behind her and picked up a two-year old baby whose condition, even though only in a soiled diaper, was becoming desperate in the heat. It was a girl.

Two junior Islamic clerics standing nearby came up, one leading a small goat. They told Omar that the girl’s mother had been in shock after her other three children were killed in the March bombing of Baghdad by the Americans. That the girl was in declining spirits and now refusing all food except breast feeding.

Omar took out his satellite phone and called a number he had been given for a clinic he believed to be half a mile away. No answer. He gave the mother another five dollars and went over to his car. Abdullah had also been on his satellite phone.

A farmer with a reluctant cow with canvas flap over its back ventured into the square at this point, scaring a flock of doves into flight. He maneuvered his animal over to where three men were waiting to measure its length and height, which they did with agility and then took turns haggling about price.

Omar got back in and asked Abdullah, "Could we take her and her mother to a clinic?"

"They have no electricity most of the day, and chaos when they are open."

"Can you find the nearest clinic?" Omar asked.

"I can try."

"If we were to tell someone in the U.S. military, could they send a mobile med unit, someone to look at her?" Omar asked.

"The military command refuses almost every request to treat injured Iraqis, whether from bombings, or mortar fire, rocket grenades that veer from their targets," Abdullah said. "I have not heard of one instance where the military have helped a sick Iraqi child. They leave that to civilian authorities."

"It’s cruel," Omar said.

"Yes."

"Then I’m going to ask her to come with me," Omar said.

Omar walked back to the musician and his wife and daughter. They immediately protested, saying "no" to his offer, insisting that they had done everything they could for the child.

Abdullah turned on his satellite phone and called Phillip Goransson at the U.S. embassy and told him where they were and what Omar was attempting to do.

"Turn on your global positioning device," Goransson said, "so we can get a lock on the exact spot." He turned to an aide, a tall white man about thirty-five years old, curly brown hair, looking a touch resigned, sun-burnt, a diplomatic pouch on his desk. "Just don’t let him know you called," he said over the phone.

Then he asked the aide, "How soon could we get medical aid to this street in the old sector?"

"We have only one mobile medical unit available today," the aide replied. "They have only two doctors and two nurses working sixteen hour days. And they do not like to venture into that part of Baghdad at any time of day."

"Who else?" Goransson asked. "There must be someone else."

"All of Baghdad’s doctors are either working in dilapidated clinics that have been looted, or hospitals with no power much of the day, or are themselves sick, and they all demand cash for payment."

"What about the embassy?" Goransson asked.

"The embassy doctor personally treated General Franks when he was visiting here," the aide said. "And he ordered a prescription for Paul Bremer just this morning."

"So?"

"So I could ask him."

"Do so," Goransson said. Activating his phone again, he said, "Thank you, Abdullah. Stick with him wherever he goes. And do not continue if you encounter any guerilla activity on the road to An-Nasiriyah."

"We’re worried about the curfew on the highway south," Abdullah, nervously eying Omar out in the crowd.

"It’s been moved up to eight p.m.," Goransson said. "That’s the best we could do."

Back in the square, the man with the blanketed cow had completed his transaction and, since he knew the young parents, he tried to persuade them to accept Omar’s offer. The musician strummed his mandolin louder and louder for a moment, as if giving it thought. Two other men, apparently from the wife’s family, walked up and talked to her, but she refused, as did her husband. The two men were short, in black slacks, plaid shirts, looking intently in Omar’s eyes. They gave him their names, the child’s name.

Two men wearing galabiyyas with dark brown stripes and carrying bags of grain came out of a shop. Another man with a bundle tied to a pallet that he carried on his back stepped into the front entrance to a three story apartment building. He was followed by his son carrying a smaller bundle also on his back.

There was a large dog on the street, standing faithfully by a man with an old vase from which he threw some scraps for his pet, who downed the food instantly and then stood still. An elderly man, bald, stooped over, dressed in white full-length robe with rope belt, walked into another shop, looking over at Omar.

"If I were to leave you money for the girl," Omar said to her two relatives, "can you try to find extra food, the right food, and visit the clinic?"

Omar gave them thirty dollars each. They exchanged names, and he told them he was headed for An-Nasiriyah.

Crossing the square again to get back to his taxi, with Abdullah seated impatiently in the front looking a bit scared and hot, Omar saw what looked like wide brush strokes of red paint on the other side of the well, and realized it was dried blood from an exchange of gunfire, as there were bullet holes in that side of the fountain.

One of the injured soldiers lying on a cot waved faintly to him. He waved back, got back in the car, and asked Abdullah to drive back to the main highway.

"This is chaos," Omar said. "Bedlam. There is no word to describe it. I wish I could do more, but we must get back on our timetable."

"They’re afraid of being seen cooperating, or even accepting help, from an American," Abdullah said.

"How could they know I’ve been living in the U.S.?" Omar asked.

"You’re right. The way you are dressed, it would lead some to guess you have been abroad. Not many Iraqi men have good clean clothes these days."

"Mine will soon be in similar condition, from what we hear about water, the lack of clean water."

"We will have to stop at that hotel in Hillah or Ad-Diwaniyah and stay the night if we don’t hurry, because of the curfew," Abdullah said.

"I know. But I had to see all this. Are you all right?"

"Yes, except that I’m melting from the heat," Abdullah said, "even with the air-conditioning on full blast."

They had soon made it to the main highway and were competing with military vehicles, convoys, Iraqi men driving in haste to what they imagined to be their share of the new power structure, many a dust-covered passenger car, the occasional freight truck, the steady flow of people afoot enduring the heat to walk place to place, injured former Iraqi soldiers hobbling on the dry dead grass along the road, prisoners in open military conveyances with hands bound staring bleakly out at the desert, and the occasional imam walking beside other clerics.

Omar sat quietly in the front seat for several minutes and then said, "What about the spies?"

"The spies?" Abdullah said.

"All of Saddam’s thugs and smiling villains betraying their neighbors and family, year after year, so that no one knew whom to trust."

"Everyone knew a spy, but did not dare confront them about it," Abdullah said. "There were the wars, the war with Iran, and the First Gulf War, and it all worked for Saddam like solar power, beyond anyone’s control. We thought the overthrow of Saddam would break the twilight gloom, but now we shiver in fear, even in this heat."

"I feel so dull," Omar said. "Like an ignorant native who never left his marsh abode."

They noticed many areas with shade where someone, a man, woman, or child was seated or standing beneath it to find any sort of barrier from the sun.

About forty-five minutes after Omar left the square in Saddam City, a conspicuously undented white four-door car followed by an army detachment of six in an open vehicle pulled up near one of the shops across from the fountain. Out of the car stepped the U.S. embassy doctor, wearing a long sleeve dress shirt, slacks, no doctor’s white smock, a nurse, and an interpreter who promptly called out in sharp perfect Arabic for help, and who asked who knew of the musician and his daughter.

Several of the men who had talked to Omar, including the girl’s uncles, were still in the plaza. They came over and pointed out where the mother was still standing.

The doctor and nurse went over to them. They explained they were there to help. The mother turned to the child sadly, picked her up, and handed her in a bundle to the doctor. He noticed she had signs of anemia and gave her an injection, which made her cry.

"Ask her if we can take her to the hospital for two days observation," the doctor said to the interpreter, who explained rather defiantly to the mother what was wanted, adding, without the doctor or the nurse realizing it, that it was the will of Allah and she should respect her uncles’ judgment.

The mother agreed, but only if she and her husband could come along. They got into the embassy car with the medical personnel who had arrived and they drove off, followed by the military escort.

Back in the taxi headed on Highway One to the south, Omar asked, "You’re sure this won’t die on us before we reach Al-Musayyib?"

"We can always call Triple A if it does," Abdullah said.

They could feel the late afternoon sun beating in through the window on the passenger’s side as they sped along at around sixty mph.

Overhead there was the occasional helicopter or supply plane flying across the four-lane divided main route to the Gulf.

Military vehicles were proceeding steadily in both directions along the highway, leading to intermittent bottlenecks. At one point just a few miles outside Baghdad, all northbound traffic had formed one lane due to an overturned flat bed trailer.

"The powers that be have no objections to violating the rules," Omar said.

"Something is going to snap," Abdullah said. "If I were unemployed for three to four months, like the millions of others, I would join the resistance."

Back in the U.S. legation office in Baghdad, Goransson was finishing a call from the embassy doctor about the girl, who had been admitted to a clinic for observation. He looked up from his PC and turned to another aide, a white man from Washington, D.C. who had been transferred to Baghdad in June, with almost no knowledge of Arabic and little understanding of Iraq that he had not obtained from cable TV over the previous months.

The aide, who wore blue slacks, a white short-sleeve dress shirt with two pockets and a blue tie with yellow dots, had a light brown moustache. He was about six feet tall, thirty years old, with his arms shaved, wearing a thin silver watchband. He had an intent look on his face as he stared at the computer speaker over which Goransson conducted his calls.

"Fancy that," the aide said.

"Gives you a warm feeling, to help the kids like this," Goransson said.

"Recess," the aide said and went down the hall to the men’s room. On his way there, he passed a military attaché whom he told about what Goransson was doing, "…keeping tabs on an Iraqi native who’s been living in the states for twenty years, homesick for his Sumerian village and all the shrines and temples."

"Why?" the attaché asked.

"I have no idea. It appears to have something to do with getting medical help to the civilians, but there’s more to it. I’m not sure."

The aide finished his visit to the men’s room and returned to find Goransson talking on his speaker phone, over a PC connection, to someone in Washington.

"Get Stephen Bradley for me, would you?" Goransson said over the phone.

"The wind will be raging again," Omar said as they drove on. "I remember those desert storms."

"First silence, then the heat, then the rough blinding sands," Abdullah said. "We thought it would stop the Americans in April, but no."

"We’ll have to stop before close of day, in Hillah or Ad-Diwaniyah," Omar said.

"I would like to try to make it all the way to Al-Nasiriyah," Abdullah said.

"Not if it violates the curfew," Omar said.

"Not in that case."

They drove on, facing another ten minute delay at a checkpoint.

As they sped up from where all vehicles were being stopped and searched briefly by U.S. infantrymen, they noticed two Blackhawk helicopters overhead, along either side of the highway.

One by one, the two would fly over the highway, just ahead of Omar’s taxi, about three hundred feet in the air. This happened twice.

"What are they doing?" Omar asked.

"Showoffs," Abdullah said.

The third pass, one of the Blackhawks descended to just forty feet over the highway, about fifty feet in front of Omar’s taxi, then going about fifty mph.

"Crazies," Omar said.

The second helicopter buzzed the taxi at about the same distance.

"Are we in any danger?" Omar asked.

"I don’t know."

"Is it past curfew?" Omar asked. "My watch says six-thirty. We have until eight p.m. to reach another town, if that soldier was right."

As quickly as they had descended upon that stretch of the highway, the two rogue helicopters disappeared from view.

The steady flow of traffic on three lanes to the southeast, and three toward the northwest, resumed.

They saw more humvees, U.S. officers and enlisted men crossing a bridge on a stretch of the Euphrates that they had encountered.

"This is the hot spot," Abdullah said.

There were dense groves of palm trees along the banks near the bridge. A high dune across the river was topped by U.S. military vehicles with tents and a large radar apparatus.

The remote desert was turning a faint pink in the aura of the evening sun.

The turreted walls of a faded ziggurat in the far distance looked like a fallen wayfarer.

"This is still the life of Iraq," Omar said. "The Euphrates and Tigris are Iraq, mud for brick and pottery, reeds for weaving boats and huts."

Omar sat still as he scanned the nearby brush and mud brick homes along the highway.

Back in Chicago, Kamal Mumtaz Hunarfar was again at his computer. It was around 9:30 a.m.

Ramesh stepped in from the balcony dressed in long bermuda shorts and tan t-shirt and said, "Akbar, do you think Aboudi and his driver were in danger from those helicopters?"

"Medical helicopters, it says here. Look, they’ve sent another e-mail."

Akbar stood up so that Ramesh could sit down and read the messages scrolling down the computer in code.

Ramesh said.

They had been in contact with members of the Iraqi resistance who were following Omar and who had done so since his arrival at the Eastern Railway Station Wednesday morning. Using satellite phones and laptops, the operatives in Baghdad had sent daily, even hourly updates to Akbar about Omar’s activities. They were to send e-mails about any dangers Omar encountered. It was all being saved to hard drive with backups, and there were already fifty pages of data about Omar that Akbar had accumulated since his flight from New York on Monday. They had hacked into airline computers, the Paradise Hotel computer, and almost successfully into the U.S. embassy computer in Baghdad.

"Here it is," Ramesh said. "The helicopters were buzzing Omar’s taxi like birds chasing a cat."

"Not good," Akbar said.

"What can we do?" Ramesh asked.

"You don’t know?"

"What?"

"Wait." Akbar sent another coded message that read, "If helicopters come too close again, use the rocket."

Ramesh blinked. "They have a rocket in the pursuit car?"

"They have two RPG’s."

"Can it be fired from a vehicle moving sixty miles per hour?"

"If the helicopters swoop in, they will have to slow down and we will see," Akbar said.

"How can they fire from the window of a moving vehicle and not risk hitting the car ahead of them, or cars in the oncoming lane?" Ramesh asked.

"The car has a sunroof, and it opens automatically," Akbar said.

Back on Highway One headed south, Omar and Abdullah were now halfway between Al-Musayyib and Hillah. The highway was still three lanes each way, with more sporadic traffic as it was now close to seven p.m. and fewer people ventured out at this time.

Omar could see an old settlement atop a hill to their right, the slender white tower of a mosque with a fenced-in ledge at least forty feet up where a door with semi-circle opening had a view to the south. He could make out a windtower perched atop a low fortress that loomed at the edge of another hill, and further along the ruins of another mosque dating from at least the eleventh century or earlier, as far as he could tell.

There was a faint pink and reddish hue beginning to glimmer in the west.

"We can stop in Hillah and have dinner," Omar said, "and ask if it is safe to continue driving much farther."

"I know a place where they serve the best food in town," Abdullah said.

"Good. We’ll go there. I’ll pay."

Just a few minutes after the hour, with the flow of other civilian and mostly military vehicles thinning out more along the highway, they could hear the steady pulse of helicopters coming from the northwest.

"I think it’s the same ones," Omar said. "They’re U.S. army. I see one of them. They’re closing in again. Look out!"

The two copters flew within just forty feet over Omar’s taxi and even lower just fifty feet in front of them.

"Do they expect us to stop?" Abdullah asked.

"Don’t stop. I don’t think this is right," Omar said.

"They’re up."

"The number, the serial number on one is the same as back up the road. I read it clearly," Omar said.

"They’re trying to kill us," Abdullah shouted.

"Swerve!" Omar shouted as the copters buzzed them again.

The pursuit car manned by three Iraqi men who had been in contact with Akbar in Chicago via the Internet was now about one hundred feet behind Omar and Abdullah. This car had been following them at a distance of anywhere from three hundred feet to almost half a mile, just keeping the taxi in view at all times. Just as Abdullah swerved to make sure he did not run into the helicopters if they landed on the road, the sunroof opened and a tall grim-faced Iraqi man of about twenty-six years wearing a white galabiyya and black turban stood up, pulled out a long rocket grenade launcher that was almost as tall as he was, aimed it, and fired at the closer of the two helicopters.

"What was that?" Omar shouted.

"There’s a car behind us. I can’t believe this. They fired a grenade. I thought they were going to fire at us."

"Why didn’t you tell me?" Omar asked.

"I didn’t want to panic you," Abdullah said, "and it’s happening so fast, too fast, and I could lose control of the car."

The first helicopter was hit on its left rear side while lifting up to about sixty feet. The explosion caused it to begin flipping over in midair, and as it did so it veered toward the center median, above which the other copter was flying even lower at forty feet. The two aircraft collided and there was an explosion as they both hit the center median creating a fireball. Debris scattered into both lanes.

In the instant it took for the crash to occur, Abdullah had sped just out of range of the disabled copters and their flames. Omar turned to look back through the left window to see the spectacle of the craft hitting the ground.

"Allah be praised," Abdullah said.

"You saved my life," Omar said.

"And the men in the vehicle behind us. They are still driving behind us."

"Who are they?" Omar asked.

"I don’t know them. They’re slowing down." The taxi passed an intersection. "They’re turning off back there."

"Hillah is just a mile ahead. This is incredible. We could have been killed."

"The Americans were trying to kill us. I’m sure of it."

"Why?" Omar asked.

"I’m not sure I have much stomach for dinner now," Abdullah said.

"Nor I," Omar said. "Should we report it?"

"I do not see why," Abdullah said. "Unless you want to be interrogated about the men who shot them down."

"If anyone asks, I know nothing of what happened," Omar said. "How do you feel about it?"

"I was born yesterday," Abdullah said. "That is true. We can say honestly we knew nothing of it. It was another attack by guerillas and this time the civilians were not hurt."

"But why?" Omar said. "I’m sure the pilots of those helicopters wanted to cause an accident, to scare you into losing control of the vehicle."

They stopped at a restaurant in Hillah where Abdullah knew the staff and had a quick meal. The waiter said that traffic continued often until dark and thereafter, if there had not been any trouble on the highway.

About twenty minutes after arriving, while they were still dining, Omar held his breath as two Iraqi men with their wives came inside dressed in fine clothes and looking comfortable despite the heat, and drew attention by saying that there was news on the local radio station of another helicopter crash. A few men at their tables appeared to cheer on hearing this. People at the cashiers desk talked to the new arrivals about what else they had heard on the radio. "There was a fire. It happened just thirty minutes ago. You can still see the smoke from outside in the distance."

During the Second Gulf War, a tragic and senseless attack upon the defenseless people of Hillah by the U.S.-led Coalition forces that resulted in the deaths of sixty civilians had brought the small town to international prominence.

By the time of Omar’s journey along the highway south of Baghdad, there was still no official explanation of why the American military had dropped cluster bombs in Hillah.

"There is a good hotel here," Abdullah said. "You were going to pay for my stay in An-Nasiriyah anyway. Perhaps it would be safer if we stay the night here."

"We could be questioned."

"We could be questioned in An-Nasiriyah, if anyone reported my license plate to the army."

"I’ve had enough for today," Omar said. "Since you like it so much here, we’ll check out the hotel."

"Thank you, Omar Hammad Aboudi. I have friends here. I want to call them."

Omar found the two-story Hillah Hotel to his taste and paid for two rooms for the night. They could park right outside the main entrance and could see the taxi through the windows to their accommodations on the second floor, and so left most of the luggage locked inside.

"What about looters?" Omar asked the hotel manager.

"We have police here," the manager said. "We are lucky. Our police are being paid. They do not just sit and smoke and think about what to do tomorrow about today’s crime. They are Type-A personalities, as the Americans say. They received training from the Third Infantry specialists last month. The looters are not bothering our town any longer, not this hotel anyway."

Around nine p.m., Abdullah knocked on the door to Omar’s room and asked to have a word with him.

"Come in," Omar said and shut the door.

Abdullah had called his friends in the town. They had told him more about the U.S. attack on the city and of one family in particular who had lost all six of their children.

"So sad, but their father can only show the framed photographs of those six little ones, the girl age twelve, the boys," Abdullah said. "No one has ever come from the American forces to say a word to him or offer condolence. It is as if it were merely a computer error and the high command in the Pentagon have erased it from importance."

"I recall a boy I knew in school," Omar said, "and I intend to call him to find out more of what happened. Iraq is a village. Everyone knows everyone else."

"I know one of your American friends," Abdullah said, standing near the foot of the double bed.

"Who?"

"His name is Phillip Goransson."

Omar stared at Abdullah a moment and straightened up. "How in the world do you know Mr. Goransson?"

"He is with the government," Abdullah said.

"Yes," Omar said. "That would be the same man I know. He’s with our state department."

"I was contacted by agents with the CIA the morning after I picked you up at the train station," Abdullah said. "At my home. My wife was frantic. She thought I was to be arrested. They asked me to go with them to the police station, that it was voluntary, that I could help Iraq. So I went. They told me they wanted to know your whereabouts, where I took you, and to call them if anything unusual happened, about your needs."

"My needs? So they could what?" Omar asked.

"I don’t know. They assured me you would be in no danger, and that in fact they had plans to protect you in case anti-American sentiment grows worse."

"For someone who hates the Americans as much as you do, Abdullah, this sounds very strange," Omar said.

"They paid me in advance. They offered to pay me more after I had taken you wherever you wanted to go. They were excited when I told them you wanted a driver for the rest of the week."

"They thought I was going to rent a car," Omar said.

"They did. I’m sure."

"Help them how?" Omar asked.

"I have been calling them on my satellite phone about what you do, and where we go, and everything about you," Abdullah said.

Omar’s eyes flashed with anger. "Why are you telling me this now?"

"Because I no longer trust them. They have told me nothing about why they want to know all this."

"Then they knew I met Professor al-Awadi and his family."

"Yes."

"And today?" Omar asked.

"They knew what I knew, that you were going to leave Baghdad in the afternoon," Abdullah said. "I called them from the square where you tried to help the little girl."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I believe they were trying to kill us today," Abdullah said.

"On the highway?"

"Yes."

"Are you going to tell them this, and that you’re telling me this?" Omar said, his voice growing rather harsh. "What is Mr. Goransson’s phone number?"

"Here, on this paper."

"This is not the number I have for him," Omar said.

"Why would the helicopters attack us?" Abdullah asked.

"I don’t know."

"You are innocent of a crime?" Abdullah asked.

"Yes."

"The Americans kill innocent people," Abdullah said.

"They treat animals better than they do Iraqis," Omar said.

"This is how I feel."

"I don’t know if we should continue on tomorrow. Not together. I can pay you now for your trouble, and we can get my luggage. I can find another taxi here."

"You can do that if you want," Abdullah said.

"I think I will."

"I was going to offer to tell you everything I tell Mr. Goransson from now on," Abdullah said. "I do not know why they are so interested in you, but you can be sure they will pay someone else if I quit on them. I have a wife with another baby on the way. I want you to know I will let you listen when I call them from now on. I will tell them whatever you wish. I believe you are someone more important to them than you realize."

"Then why did those pilots try to drive you off the road this evening?" Omar asked.

"I don’t know. They did not tell you they would follow you?"

"No," Omar said. "But when I last saw Goransson in Rome, I told him I knew I was being stalked."

"We were to part ways tomorrow anyway," Abdullah said.

"Yes. No sense in drawing suspicion. You can drive me on to An-Nasiriyah, and there as I planned I will rent a car."

"Are you disappointed in me now?" Abdullah asked.

"Yes, but I understand. How I understand now what the Americans have done to Iraq. They built up Saddam. He had their help as often as the Soviets or the French. The first President Bush turned his back when the Shiia rebellion was close to defeating Saddam. He was afraid of Muslims running another OPEC nation. So long as we weren’t communist, the Americans used us to counter the Islamic republic of Iran, or to drive the rest of OPEC up the wall with Saddam’s greed and twists and turns. They didn’t care how many millions of Arabs died, even gloated I’m sure in the Reagan White House at all the slaughter of the Iran-Iraq War. Now, they’re using other methods to turn Iraqi against Iraqi, to turn our homeland in upon itself. Farewell until tomorrow. I pray Allah give Iraq back its heart."

"Yes," Abdullah said. "I as well pray for this."

"The Americans cannot have this land for long," Omar said. "Think on it and then let it be."

He closed his hotel door, turned off the lights, and stared out the window at the desert sky.

There was a window of opportunity for stability in Iraq that he saw was closing quickly. A British scholar of Middle Eastern studies had been interviewed on the BBC the previous week. Omar had listened to the radio broadcast from his room in the Palestine Hotel.

"Many Iraqis believe the resistance if succeeding," the commentator had said. "They see the Americans sending people with no knowledge of Iraqi history, language, archeology, or culture. The time has come for turbo-charged change."

Omar stepped out onto the balcony and listened to the sounds of vehicles on the streets below, the distant city sounds of machines, the occasional siren, voices of Muslim men and women calling from somewhere in the dark.

He thought of the valleys of the Karun and Jarrahi rivers not far away. The once flourishing semi-nomadic marsh dwellers, his own people, of the Haur al-Hammar and Haur al-Huwaiza region.

His grandfather Abdullah ibn Hanz al-Aubeidi had told him they also had ancestors among the Bedouin, the Ahl al-Furat, the "people of the Euphrates": the Sada, Humaid, Rufai, and Buaij.

He thought of how wild the land remained, how he had never as a boy imagined their way of life would vanish almost without at trace, with only a few patches of marsh and swamp left after the order to drain most of them by Saddam.

He went over in his mind the many ways to say good-night in the dialects that had once been common just in the southern part of Iraq, many becoming dead languages now that the villages and reed dwellings had been decimated.

Then he thought of what he had as a young man made his personal motto: truth. He was tiring and decided to go to bed.

"Sidij," he murmured to himself as he walked back into his room and closed the sliding glass door. "Sidij."

David Lawrence Cade Copyright 2003 by

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