Bestiary

to see. Sadowski leaned toward the windshield and stared through the glare. He couldn’t get the question of land mines out of his head; two of his pals from the 3rd Infantry Division had been in a nineteen-ton Stryker armored combat vehicle that had been hit by a roadside bomb just the week before, and each had left a leg behind.

Far ahead, unless he was imagining it, he thought he saw some whitewashed walls rising like a mirage out of the desert sands. If these were the walls Hasan had been talking about, his estimate was way too low — these walls were more like fifteen or twenty feet high, if he could judge from this distance. And they went on for what looked like a quarter of a mile, on one side alone. Sadowski had already “liberated” two of Saddam’s palaces — they hadn’t really seemed all that much more spectacular than the houses he saw on MTV’s Cribs, and nothing like what he thought of when he heard the word “palace”—but this place looked like something else.

“Should be dead ahead, about a half mile due west,” Donlan reported.

“I can see it,” Sadowski replied.

There were towers, too, narrow white columns set far back from the walls and rising like gleaming needles into the air; the whole compound had to be enormous. Even the roadside began to change. There were date palms lining both sides of the road, along with the desiccated remains of other plants that had died from lack of water. Sadowski could imagine that this was once a very grand entryway.

Captain Greer picked up a pair of binoculars and scanned the walls ahead for enemy activity. But the only sign of life he saw was a flock of evil-looking crows, lining the parapets above the main gate. The gates themselves, as Hasan had predicted, were intact; no telling whether they were locked or not. Just in case, he’d brought along a couple of plastic explosives charges.

“Stop about fifty yards short,” Greer told Sadowski, then added, “You’ll stay with the vehicle, and keep the motor running.”

The Humvee ground to a slow halt on the sandy road, and Hasan said a silent prayer. No one he knew had ever penetrated the al-Kalli palace walls; no one he knew had ever wanted to. For generations, mothers in the region had warned their unruly children that if they didn’t behave, they would be sold to the al-Kallis. And whenever anyone went missing, it was darkly hinted that they had strayed too close to the al-Kalli palace.

On some nights, when the wind was right, local villagers claimed that they could hear strange and savage cries.

While Sadowski waited in the Humvee, the others all got out.

“Looks like nobody’s home so far,” Greer announced as he approached the gates with his Beretta in hand. Donlan stayed a few feet behind Hasan, who had nothing to protect him but the Koran pressed between his cuffed hands as if his life depended on it.

Greer went to the gates, which were also at least twenty feet high, and although they were stiff from disuse, their hinges choked with sand, they weren’t locked; he was actually able to push one a few feet back; to work so well now, they must have been made with fantastic precision in their day. There was a design of some kind, elaborate flourishes of metalwork that looked like writing. He turned to Hasan.

“Does this say something?”

Hasan nodded.

“Well?”

How could he translate this properly? Hasan wondered. It was archaic, a few lines of verse that even he could not entirely make out. But the gist of it was clear. “It’s a welcome, and it is a warning.”

“That’s what I’ve been hearing ever since I got here,” Donlan said.

“Just tell me what it says,” Greer said.

“It says, ‘Welcome to the traveler of good…’” He couldn’t come up with the word. He’d studied English in school, and he’d even once spent a summer with an uncle in Miami, but he couldn’t find the equivalent now.

“Go on.”

“‘Such a traveler may stay the night inside these walls. But the traveler who does not have a heart so… good, he will regret his mother ever gave him milk.’”

“Not exactly ‘mi casa es su casa,’” Greer remarked before slipping through the opening between the two gates.

Hasan looked up at the fat crows above the gate. Their wings fluttered and their hoarse cawing was carried down to him on the hot desert wind. How, he thought, had he come to be in this place, with these men? One night, bombs had landed all over his village; he’d been at the soccer field. By the time he’d run home, his house was a pile of swirling dust and broken bricks — with his wife and children inside. And then he’d been arrested. For what — not dying?

He felt a rifle poke him in the back. “Come on, Hasan,” Donlan said, “you might still come in handy.”

With Greer leading the way, they entered the palace grounds. First, there was a tunnel, big enough to drive a truck through, which appeared to end in another iron gate, this one with sharpened spikes at its base, raised high above their heads. Their footsteps echoed around them.

“Yo-de-lay-e-hoo!” Lopez crooned softly, and Greer whirled around with his gun pointed straight at Lopez’s head.

“What the fuck?” he whispered angrily.

Lopez stood, chastened, the gun still aimed at his forehead. He’d just wanted to make a joke — you know, lighten things up a little. It was the way he’d always been.

“You out of your mind, Lopez?”

“Sorry, Captain.” He kept his eyes down; he knew Greer was right. He’d been told before that his mouth would wind up getting him killed. “Won’t happen again.”

“Next time I just shoot.”

Greer turned around again, and one by one, instinctively spreading out, they emerged from the tunnel and into what looked like a huge forecourt to the palace. It must have been several acres of land, all covered with something under all the sand that felt as smooth and hard as marble. In front of them, at the top of a wide set of steps, was a huge and very grand palace of pale yellow stone, several stories high, and topped with the kind of dome Greer normally associated with a mosque. He pulled from the inside pocket of his jacket the folded map, sealed in a plastic sheath, that he’d been sent when he accepted this gig. He oriented himself quickly, and determined that this was indeed the main house — there were others in the compound, for servants and the like — and that what he was looking for lay somewhere behind it, off to the right.

He turned and gestured for the soldiers, and Hasan, to follow him. The soldiers looked puzzled for a moment and glanced longingly at the palace, as if to say, “Aren’t we busting in there?” and Greer understood their impulse. God knew what stuff might still be lying around inside, especially if Hasan was right, and the locals were too scared to set foot in there — but that wasn’t what he’d come to do. He’d come to find, and retrieve, one thing, and once he had that, he was out of here.

It was a long walk around the side of the palace, but fortunately there was a sort of colonnade that provided some shade from the rays of the late afternoon sun. The heat was still nearly unbearable and, apparently, it had been too much for a couple of birds, whose bodies lay sprawled in the dust, their tail feathers spread like fans around them.

“Peacocks,” Hasan said. “It was the al-Kallis’ favorite.”

But these looked like they’d been picked clean with a knife and fork. All that was left were brittle bones and a spray of flattened feathers, a faint vestige of their purple and blue iridescence glinting in the sun.

Greer motioned for the men to keep moving, his eyes swiveling from one side of the grounds to the other. They passed several smaller buildings — in one they could see the dust-choked grillwork of a Rolls-Royce, in another what looked like horse stalls — before coming to a short bridge spanning what was now a stagnant stream of green water. Greer tested the wood, pressing down with his boot, but it seemed solid. They crossed over, and into another vast courtyard, surrounded on all sides by towering palm trees. Underfoot, there was a length of fine meshed chain; Greer bent down to lift it up, but realized then that it was under both his feet — and under the feet of all his men, too. The chain was everywhere.

“What do you think they were trying to catch in this net?” he wondered out loud.

Nobody answered.

Greer look at Hasan, who lifted his cuffed hands to point toward the top of one of the trees. “You see the hook?”