Page 116 of Whisper

“He’s fucking one of us.” Kris smoothed back David’s hair.

David held his wrists. “What happened?” Sand and blood smeared on his lips as he spoke.

Tears simmered at the edges of Kris’s eyes. His lips moved, but nothing came out. He cupped David’s cheek, his thumb stroking over David’s growing bruise, the knot from the sergeant’s love tap. “Fallujah,” he whispered. “Everythinghas changed.”

The command center was deathly quiet.

Sixteen video cameras played different angles of the same scene. Two dilapidated SUVs, burning to a husk. Their metal frames were ashy skeletons, engulfed in an inferno.

Charred bodies, Blackcreek contractors, pulled from the flames. Beaten. Dragged through the streets.

“Oh God, they were Blackcreek contractors,” Kris whispered. “They wereBlackcreek! Do you have any idea what I thought, when the first reports came in? Do you have any idea—”

He grabbed Kris and pulled him into his arms, held him as Kris sobbed, his muffled cries against David’s chest the only sound in the command center. Kris clung to him, his fingers digging in to his skin, as if David would disappear, as if he wasn’t really there, was only a figment of Kris’s imagination.

“I’m okay,” he breathed into Kris’s hair. “I’m okay, Kris.”

The screens kept playing, revealing the barbarity of the morning. Blackened bodies dragged across the road. A riot had formed around the bodies. Chanting, cheering, faces bursting with excitement. The madness of a mob. Insurgents, jihadis, masked men in black, in the center. Taking the burned bodies, the corpses. Dragging them to a steel lattice bridge, notated on the military’s maps as landmark “Brooklyn”.

Sometimes, it looked just like America, like looking at the steel girders of the Big Apple, and it was easy to imagine the Hudson or the East River was just beyond, instead of the endless wash of desert.

Ropes were thrown over the girders.

Kris squeezed his eyes shut. He wouldn’t watch. His lips thinned, pressed together until they went white.

David had to see. He had to see the swing, the strain in the rope. Had to see the crazed crowd cheer, chant wildly, convinced they had just done something wonderful, something to celebrate. He had to see the bodies, broken and suspended, left for all to stare at, to judge. And for the world to judge them, in return.

He had to see.

He’d seen bloodlust consume people’s soul, their humanity, until there was nothing left.

He’d seen a man hung before.

Baghdad, Iraq

April 28, 2004

“This is a picture of an Iraqi prisoner of war, and according to the US Army, Americans did this to him.”

The man stood on a crate, hooded, with wires stuck to his fingers, his penis, and shoved up his ass.

His image went around the world in four seconds.

More pictures followed. Iraqis in dog collars and on leashes. Naked, and forced to masturbate. Naked, and staked in pyramids. Covered in feces. Bound and stretched against metal bars. Hooded, and forced to simulate sex with one another.

Humiliation screamed from the images. Ravaging, aching, burning humiliation.

Every Arab felt it, in their bones. The past and the present, eternally connected in the Arab soul, twisted again. A thousand years of Western aggression distilled into a series of photos, proof positive of a thousand years of mistrust, betrayal, and anguish.

Iraqis flooded the streets. Riots erupted around the Middle East. US Embassies locked their gates.

“It’s Abu Ghraib,” David breathed, watching the news report for the fifteenth time. “We walked down that hallway. We saw those prisoners.”

If Kris hadn’t come for him that day he was on the ground at the military checkpoint, would he have been taken to Abu Ghraib? He was nothing but an Arab to the soldiers, and Arabs were just targets. Humiliation had washed his soul on the street, shoved to the ground and stepped on, treated like an animal. They would have thought nothing of sending him to Abu Ghraib, where he would have been treated the same way.

David rewound the tape and watched the news report again.

Once, when he was a boy, he’d looked at the United States of America with hope. His tearstained soul had lost his father, and he’d been promised that things would be better in America. Everyone told him,America is free. America is good. America is where you will have a better life.