The sky above is blue and beautiful and cloudless except from the smoke trail exhaled from cracked lips. The wind blows southwards, rushing down from the mountains in the northeast and rolling over the Assyrian plains and to the western bank of the Tigris River and it snares the cigarillo’s plume within its molecules and takes it on its journey, wherever that journey takes it. By the time the column has dissipated it’s been replaced with another from the same origin.
<
For Dawn, it tastes like peppers – ground jalapeno, cayenne, habanero – and tobacco. If smoke could smell spicy this would be the smoke to do so. Another cool breeze takes the pall backwards towards the river and the particles separate to the point of invisibility.
She looks down about eight stories to the roads below. The city of Mosul bustles far underfoot, a strange mix of regular people just trying to get by alongside and intermingling with the more opportunistic sort, gang members and gunmen who provide the de facto law enforcement in these streets. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out just who is who. The official policy of the Twin Rivers Republic is to assume anyone cavorting with the myriad gangs and factions are part of those factions but enforcing that policy would amount to genocide.
Or at least a more active form of it.
<
Dawn exhales again, the smoke from her lips drifting high into the air before being swept away. She figures that if she’s lucky the same will happen to her. Complete atomic disassociation is, for the moment, more preferable to this liquid heat. The digits hovering a millimetre off of her watch tell her with their orange glare that it’s ‘1:35’ p.m. and the sun beats down ninety-three million miles away, feeling like an oppressive next-door neighbour.
She’s compounding this by wearing an all-black ensemble: cargo pants, pockets stuffed with full magazines and medical supplies, flat-soled Air Force 1s, a turtleneck interwoven with titanium and graphene and Chyrsomallos all overtop a micrometer thick layer of ceramic armour, disks overlapping each other like the scales of a dragon, gloves that conceal her hands, a jacket that reaches her waist with more pockets, and her lucky scarf – black and white checkerboard, wrapped almost like a shayla or hijab just to make sure her brain doesn’t overheat.
She’s gone and primed herself for heatstroke but in her mind she looks tremendously cool. Such trade-offs are part of life.
<
She takes another pull from her cigarillo, precariously close to the red-stripe three-quarters of the way down. It would begin to taste like ass when it reached the line so she flicks it off to the side, spiralling end-over-end to the ground, covering the entire height of the old, decrepit Dafnat al-Nahr hotel that she stands upon at this minute. It’s the highest building in the neighbourhood and thus provides zero shade atop it’s roof. But her target is eight stories downwards, just across the street; an old police station in a city lacking any. For all intents and purposes, it is a square block of concrete two floors high with windows encircling the upper floor.
Out front is an overhang held up by granite-carved Corinthian columns. Behind that is a U-Shaped warehouse that surrounds the building on three sides. Local militants occupy the complex but she can’t figure out if they’re Ikhwan or the other, less important ones. They’re all armed, carrying AK-style rifles and handguns and old Uzis and a shotgun and somehow a flintlock rifle that almost certainly doesn’t work.
One of the dozen permanent residents of the building wears a Barcelona F.C jersey, red and navy stripes with a SOFINDUS logo plastered on the front, a Spanish corporation entirely dedicated to money laundering. The number 10 sits on the back – Paolo Jimenez, a world-class striker who moved to Juventus four years back. Dawn’s more of a Manchester City fan anyways.
<
She pulls another cigarillo from a gleaming aluminum case, ‘Manuel’s Havana Palace’ and ‘Palacio La Havana de Manuel’ stamped above and below a monocoloured Cuban flag, three red stripes on the brown paper. Her eyes flick to the left, towards the Mosuli city center. Mosul has seen far better days and the people stuck on this side of the river have fully internalized it. A scythe cut across its skyline decades ago, cutting down almost any building taller than four stories and it still hasn’t recovered. Buildings have holes in walls, foundations in the midst of crumbling, broken windows and shattered glass.
Despite the all-encompassing desolation and the boot on their necks the people go undaunted about their days. There’s a bazaar somewhere around there, maybe the only functioning one in the city. A woman exchanges Russian vodarubles for gallons of water and dozens of apples and pears and peaches; a man hands over a briefcase of German platinmarks for what appears to be a truck’s worth of assault rifles. Further beyond that is an old football stadium, the bleachers and stands annihilated by time and the grass decomposed to hard, dry earth. The grounds are full of people, easily two thousand strong, watching one man give a speech. His name is Malik ibn Hassan, his hair wrapped in a turban and dressed in a pristine white robe. He speaks with the utmost conviction.
Dawn’s Arabic is inexcusably lousy for living and plying her trade in the Middle East for the past eighteen months but she understands the gist of it.
<
The people behind him look like paramilitary lieutenants. One looks like Saddam Hussein, a bright red beret and a thick moustache and green and olive fatigues and a chest full of war medals. Another is short and stocky with a white peaked cap like an admiral, another has a beard to his stomach and a black cloak, another is in grey fatigues and a dark blue kepi and a moustache with twirled tips. Dawn figures that none of them are going to be alive by the end of the hour.
<
To her right she sees – after checking her watch again, which reports back ‘1:37’ – more of the same aside from a vessel looming over the harbour, maybe the last remaining economic connection between Mosul and the outside world. It’s sapphire blue, crimson, and rusted orange metal, and the name M/V BRIGHTON stands out in snow white against the rest. It’s pointed upriver and has been since Dawn stepped foot atop the hotel.
<
Normally this is fine because vessels travel upriver from the Persian Gulf all the time and turn around at the artificial Lake Archer, the Tigris’s terraformed source. But, further behind the vessel sits, or stands, the mighty al-Jilali lift bridge, named after some old Mosuli noble family during the Ottoman years. It’s segmented in half, the bridge split halfway by a fortress ostensibly to protect the city against massed air and missile attacks by the Iranians. It’s six stories tall and resembles an oil platform in aesthetic. Behind the bridge is a metro-sized traffic jam of cargo ships because a group of Ikhwan have hijacked the fortress, preventing traffic both up and downriver. The Brighton looks too big to sneak underneath. It's too hot outside for Dawn to consider the implications. That’s someone else’s job.
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Stolen story; please report.
Behind her, someone hums a tune, gently, barely audible over ibn Hassan’s warlike speech. Dawn can only vaguely place it, some downtempo hip-hop song from the 2080s, calming and depressing, yearning for something greater. Dawn keeps her back to him. She knows the lyrics because he’s listened to it so many fucking times.
Looks like the life I need
Seems like the life I need’s a little distant
My girl wants to up and leave
Could’ve had that life I think I missed it
If she looked at him, she’d keep looking at him until he caught her. He was almost incandescent. A human eclipse. Only look with specialized equipment or not at all. Leaves burnt irises and lonely hearts in his wake. She glances his way out of the corner of her eye.
Much of his face is wreathed in red, an old scarf knit a dozen years ago that’s seen three dozen wars. The two tails trail behind him, kept aloft in the wind like small windsocks.
Simultaneously she can’t stop looking at him and can’t bring herself to look at him, leaving him to her peripheral vision. He’s dressed similarly to her except in all-brown, his hooded jacket to his hips, the turtleneck exchanged for a thinner t-shirt similarly woven with bulletproof Chrysomallos, and the Air Force 1s traded for combat boots. His skin is darker than hers, far darker, bordering on onyx or obsidian compared to Dawn’s fawn brown.
Enough, she thinks.
Under his eyes, his face is flecked with gold-white freckles, apparently a by-product of aether exposure at a young age. His hair is as dark as his skin, tumbling to his shoulders where it sits, occasionally disturbed by a gentle gust of wind. The tie that held it back hours ago now sits around his right wrist, his bangs hanging low past his eyes aside from the incessant cowlick that perpetually stands up at an angle on the right side of his head.
Fucking, knock it off!
On his knees is balanced an ancient, torn-down and rebuilt Lee-Enfield rifle with all the modern accoutrements of the 22nd century – a re-rifled barrel and a carbon fibre frame disguising itself as wood are the most noticeable. He calmly loads the rifle with .303 British, 7.7x56mm. His face is soft and sharp at the same time, high cheekbones and a straight nose, an angular jawline and pointed chin. He’s utterly gorgeous by any imaginative standard. Under suboptimal lighting a stupid person might think he’s a woman. It is always funny and is a reason he does not frequent nightclubs. As bad as a regular patron of any nightclub might be, Nineveh is the world multiplied by two or three or four factors.
STOP FUCKING LOOKING AT HIM
What’s your fucking problem? She asks herself. Are you a fucking adult or some love-struck thirteen-year old?
She checks her watch – it’s 1:39 in the afternoon now and she comes to the conclusion that she was staring around him for far too long for it to be acceptable. But his focus is psionically welded to the rifle and it’s ten-round magazine despite the one-hundred-and-twenty-degree heat index – subtract thirty-two and divide by two to get the Centigrade, so approximately 44. She wipes beads of sweat from her forehead and it evaporates off her glove nigh-instantaneously. She takes another pull and sighs out the fumes. The rest bellow out her nostrils like she’s some furious wyvern. The skies remain conspicuously void of SaudiAir jumbo jets, the signal she’s been waiting for since the previous night unlit in perpetuity until something vibrates in the back pocket of her cargo pants.
Her phone is scorching hot even underneath her gloves and warns her that it’s at risk of overheating. Someone’s calling, obviously, the name – Scott Davison – attached to a man’s professional headshot, middle-aged, the slight hint of wrinkles on his face, and hair almost entirely grey. Something about him has convinced Dawn that he’d fit well in Hollywood.
The cigarillo’s fumes bellow out of her mouth as she answers. Finally, something to do around here.
Dawn tunes out ibn Hassan’s speech, as entertaining as it was.
“Chief.”
The Chief responds just as curtly.
“Anything happen yet, kid?”
Dawn shakes her head, then remembers that he can’t see her. “Nothing, sir. We’re just killing time until the flyover.”
On the otherer end off the line, the Chief exhales the kind of exhale one does after being confronted with some sort of advanced, incomprehensible mathematics problem.
“Well, kid. Got some bad news.”
A deep, smokeless sigh originates from Dawn’s mouth. She turns back to her partner, who finally looks up from his rifle. He points to his left ear, where a Bluetooth earpiece sits. She lingers on his gaze for a microsecond longer than she knows she should.
“There’s never any good news around here, is there,” she mutters and the Chief chuckles on the other side of the line. If she’s lucky the Chief won’t notice the missing microsecond.
“No such thing as good news around here,” he replies, jovial given the circumstances. “Chalk up the delay to pilot issues.”
Out of all the things to cause a delay. Pilot issues?
“Pilot issues?” Dawn echoes, mostly for confirmation.
“We agreed with SaudiAir that we’d use one of their planes for a decoy flyover, but as of this mom–”
“Chief, where’s the fucking plane?”
She interrupts him despite her better judgement. She hears him exhale over the line.
“The pilot’s asking for a raise.”
For a moment, Dawn is remarkably still. Almost peaceful. Of course, on the inside she’s struck by a paroxysm of rage. Then the lit cigarillo in her hands finds itself crushed into dust by gloved hands and her feet take her from side to side along the edge of the rooftop. She mutters obscenities too quiet for anyone to hear and too foul to put to paper. The loudest of them are the last.
“Fucking, Christ, you’ve gotta be fuckin-”
“Dawn?” the Chief asks, worried about her blood pressure.
“Fucking find another one!”
She feels like she’s exploded but there’s nitroglycerine within her soul.
“I’m standing on a fucking hotel roof like an asshole, the building creaks if I step on it wrong because it was fucking derelict twenty years ago, I slept on concrete last night because there’s no fucking beds in this fucking hotel, it’s ten trillion degrees out, I’m wearing all black, I smell like shit, I fucking want to die, fucking, figure it out!”
She’s silent once the words are finished their flight. So is Davison. She can’t bring herself to look at her partner but he’s almost certainly entertained. The silence drills in a particularly intrusive thought – what if she pissed him off?
Dawn inhales through her nose. Figures if anyone should break the silence, it should be here.
“Chief?”
“Well, what does Jake think?”
A wave of relief washes over her as she turns to face her partner. He’s still loading rounds into magazines, but this time instead of .303 rounds they’re heavily modified 5.56 Short Magnum cases that can achieve muzzle velocities quadruple the speed of sound. Each of the magazines can hold about twenty of the bullets and he has a quartet of magazines sitting next to him. Good for snipers, like him, even if the original, non-military round was made for varmint hunting.
Despite his serene expression and posture, his brows are furrowed. He’s been listening in. He looks at her, his eyes lunar silver, as piercing as an arrowhead with thin gold rings around his dark pupils just like hers.
“Do we really need it?” he asks. His voice is soft, like a calming spring breeze or a soft down pillow to the face. Everything seems slower now. Calmer. Maybe they don’t need it.
“He says we don’t need it.” The Chief seems to agree. His voice is smaller, farther away. He’s speaking to someone off the call.
Whoever he’s speaking to says something unintelligible; even a stenographer couldn’t transcribe it. Luckily, the Chief’s right next to the owner of the voice.
“Ash says we never needed it, but the Saudis wanted it for marketing or something. And because the Saudis are investing twenty billion dollars into Nineveh, we’re letting them do this.”
Dawn sighs and hangs her head. Her eyes look down at the streets below – a group of four military-types have arrived at the police station; camo fatigues and body armour and American-style assault rifles. Probably the Republican Military. Her thumb and forefinger drag themselves from the corners of her eyes to the bridge of her nose. She doesn’t want to imagine how dark the circles under her eyes are.
“So,” she finally says. “What now? Are we just fucked?”
“Not yet. Xiuying and her team are inside the fortress. I’ll pull the trigger, let them handle whatever’s in there. It’s a glorified toll booth anyways.”
The Chief seems confident. Her feet feel lighter beneath her legs, the aching of her soles dissipates. But her spine still feels tight, as do the muscles of her shoulders.
“Do you really think there’s a nuke in there?”
She hears the Chief exhale on the other end of the call. He audibly takes a sip of something. She wishes she could do the same – the pair’s water rations ran out hours ago.
“Well, Palantir said there’s a nuke somewhere.”
“Do you believe them?”
More silence.
“I don’t want them to be right, but the last thing we need right now is a rogue nuclear weapon. If they’re wrong, add it to the list. It’s not like the Mosuli can hate us anymore than they already do, you’know?”
She does know, even if knowing it has led to a number of sleepless nights during her eighteen-month tenure. She rifles through all of her pockets and her hands eventually reach the cigarillo case and the white lighter. She pulls out a third and lights it up and inhales and exhales and feels all her problems fly far, far overhead. Behind her, Jacob looks disapprovingly at her habit – she notices and mimes blowing her brains out of her head with a finger gun, then returns to the business at hand.
“I do. We’ll get it done, sir. All of it.”
“I know you will, kid. Wait for a signal – it might not be the one we want but you’ll know it when you see it. That’s when you move.”
And he ends the call. No formal goodbyes because he knows he’ll see her later today. Dawn shoves her phone back into her pocket and her right hand unconsciously resurfaces with an electric vaporizer despite the lit cigarillo between her lips. She turns to Jake, who still seems disappointed.
“Something clever to say?” she asks.
“Not yet,” he replies. “You put me on the spot.”
She waits and he doesn’t respond. In her heart she knows she should probably quit, but they’re not the gross American cigarettes that taste like rat poison and right now is a bad time to go cold turkey. But all that’s left for her to do is to wait, return to her prior activities.
The squadron of soldiers below have vanished – maybe into the police station, maybe into the streets beyond. It doesn’t matter; if they’re rogue she’ll deal with them. She watches the streets anyways, doing her best to get heatstroke.
She figures it might be a while.