The Prologue of “Goshawk:”
“Like a grotesque nightmare, a silent slide show of horrors cycled through Layla’s exhausted brain. She relived pushing her younger brother, Sami, on an old tire hanging from a frayed rope behind Liberate the Delta Secondary School in Basra. The first sign of trouble was reflected in his eyes—men in work clothes running toward them. Layla could still feel callused hands grabbing her arms and legs, holding her down, tearing at her robe. First, one forcing himself on her while others cheered, then another and another. Then just a boy wearing a T-shirt with a picture of five colored rings and the words “MOSCOW 1980” in big, dirty letters. At last, she slipped into blessed unconsciousness, but the possibility of her own children had been torn from her insides that afternoon.
The only sound in Layla’s nightmare was her mother’s calm voice: “come and have some hot mint tea, Layla, dear. You’ll feel so much better if you relax and try not to think about the school yard and the shame of what they did to you.”
A loud, wooden thump jarred Layla out of the fog on the last afternoon of her life. She was disoriented and fearful, suspended in half-awake, patting herself in search of a weapon without success.
Then Layla popped to the surface of where she was and what she was supposed to be doing. A mound of the equipment lay on the rocky ground between her dark winter boots—two pair of gold, anodized aluminum tree spurs, dual coils of twelve-ply nylon rope, and six extra magazines of dum- dum bullets for both AK-47s, which all reminded her of the challenge ahead.
Glancing over the desolate landscape, Layla remembered only she and pudgy Fatima from the original team had survived the trip.
She growled impatiently at Fatima, “you empty boat?”
Layla looked over at the carvel-built Pearson 24 inboard rocking in the heavy chop, its bow knocking repeatedly against a nearby granite finger jutting out into the nearly frozen fresh water. She watched the burly pilot who had ferried them to this desolate part of the lake country of Finland as he busied himself about the boat’s cockpit. Layla could tell from the way he pretended to ignore the two Iraqi women that the pilot felt shamed by the very idea of sending mere women on this important mission. All the while, the pilot puffed furiously on his treat of the chocolaty taste of a Turkish cigarette of Diyarbakir tobacco clenched between richly stained teeth. With little success, he kept trying to ward off the wintry wind by drawing a cheap plastic raincoat close about his ample frame.
Finally acknowledging Layla’s dismissive flick of the fingers of her good left hand, the shivering pilot tossed the butt of his glowing cigarette into the darkening waves and watched it hiss out. He motioned for Fatima, Layla’s ungainly helper, to push the boat’s bow away from shore then engaged its clutch and grumbled the wooden craft slowly backward, churning toward deeper water. His twirl of its small aluminum steering wheel pointed the powerboat’s bow southwest, toward the last faint glow of afternoon light. Grinding its clutch again, he revved its sputtering engine as the single propeller bit into the dark blue water, pushing the boat forward with slowly increasing speed.
Layla again wearily surveyed the pile of supplies on the frozen ground in front of her, which included a small, waterproof black plastic pouch of emergency rations, a larger canvas bag, and her own AK-47. The weapon leaned on the stack of six spare magazines of bullets for the automatic weapons, each slug with an X carved into its tip so it would fracture into many tumbling shards at first impact, enhancing damage. There were also four hand grenades, Fatima’s coil of blue-and-white nylon rope, Fatima’s Chinese-made AK-47, and two pair of tree spurs for climbing telephone poles and trees. Her own climbing rope was slung over the shoulder of her own Gore-Tex jumpsuit. Nothing missing!
She poked Fatima in the shoulder. Once the subordinate finally turned to face her, Layla drew her left index finger sharply across her own throat. Fatima looked anxiously from the mound of equipment to the rapidly receding motorboat, then to Layla and back to the increasingly distant craft. The younger woman kept gnawing the knuckle of her right index
finger, looking back and forth from boat to shore. “Now, FATima! Finish it NOW, RIGHT NOW!” “Where is thing?”
“Worthless bitch,” Layla muttered, ignoring the question, as she jerked a tiny black box from a single waterproof pocket inside the larger canvas bag and pointed it toward the slowly accelerating powerboat.”
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