Blue Warrior

Mossa had unwrapped the tagelmust from his face and smoked a cigarette. He sat cross-legged, sharpening the takouba resting on his knees with a whetstone. The traditional Tuareg sword was about three feet long and almost two inches wide at the base near the leather-wrapped hilt. The sound of the stone scraping on the ancient steel was the only sound in the air, save for the munching jaws of the camels.

“I want to thank you for saving my life today, Mr. Pearce. Twice.”

“I was just trying to save my own neck. And please, call me Troy.”

Mossa held his takouba up, examining the fine edge he’d just put on it. “You have amazing weapons in your arsenal. Did you invent them yourself?”

“No. I have a research team that sometimes creates new systems, but mostly we take existing technologies and modify or combine them. The grenade launcher you saw me use in the village was off-the-shelf technology, and so were the MetaPro glasses. We just wrote a piece of targeting software to link the two, and to make them function better together.”

“You saved many lives today,” Mossa said. He laid the blade back down across his knees, put the whetstone away.

“And took many more,” Cella added.

“Hardly seems kosher,” Early said. “All this new technology has too many advantages over us mere mortals. Might even make wars obsolete someday.” Early recalled the slaughter at the village, but he’d seen plenty of other examples of technology-induced carnage on too many other battlefields.

“From your lips to God’s ears,” Cella said. “It can’t happen soon enough.”

“Your machines will change wars, but not the men who fight them. There will always be wars, until there are no men,” Mossa said. “When all men are dead, then their machines will still keep fighting for them, because they will have been programmed by the men who made them.”

“It’s Terminator and Skynet,” Early mused.

“I loved that movie,” Mossa said.

Early burst out laughing. Cella and Pearce did, too, infected by Early’s loss of control.

“I said something funny?” Mossa said.

When Early finally recovered, he wiped the tears from his eyes. “No, I’m sorry. I meant no offense. But you look like an ancient warrior from the distant past. The thought of you sitting in a movie theater with your sword, watching a futuristic sci-fi movie, well, it just seemed funny.”

“I watched it on a DVD, actually. At my son’s home in Tripoli, years ago.” Mossa’s eyes misted into a memory. Cella took one of his hands in hers, squeezed it. The others stared into the crackling fire.

Pearce wanted to know more about Cella’s husband. How they met, how he died, and how Cella of all people would be caught up in a genocidal war like this. But now was not the time.

Mossa returned to the present, to his guests. “You two met in your war, yes?”

Pearce nodded.

“In Afghanistan, or Iraq?”

“Iraq,” Early blurted after an uncomfortable silence. “A joint mission, helping the Kurds in the north.”

“You were both CIA?”

“Me? Hell no. U.S. Army Ranger.” Early threw a thumb at Pearce. “He was the spook.”

“A spy. Interesting. I don’t think of spies as fighters.” Mossa flicked his cigarette into the fire.

“I was with the Special Operations Group, part of the CIA’s Special Activities Division. Sort of like their own little army.”

Mossa brightened. “So you were a soldier?”

“Yes.”

“But not now?”

“No.”

“And yet here you are, fighting.”

“That’s different.” Pearce pounded Early on the shoulder. “I came for this knucklehead. But now, no more wars.”

“What did you learn about war in Iraq?”

“He also fought in Afghanistan,” Cella said. “That is where we met. A long time ago.”

“What did I learn? I learned that war is too important to be left to the politicians.”

“And yet they are the ones who want them. But it has always been that way. What else?”

“I know that I fought with good men, mostly.” Thoughts of Annie washed over Pearce. “And women.”

“Women fighters?” Mossa was incredulous. “What a waste.”

“Yes, a few women back then. More now, these days.”

“Why did you fight in Iraq?”

“For my country.”

“What changed?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why did you stop fighting? Did you stop being an American?”

“The war was voluntary. Most Americans didn’t fight in the war. Almost none of the politicians did — neither did their children.”

“You got that damn straight,” Early said. His face soured. “Funny how the guys that never fought are the first to want to fight.”

“That is true everywhere,” Cella said. “Politicians want the votes. They get votes when they bomb other people.”

“We call them ‘chicken hawks’ back home,” Early said.

Mossa lit another cigarette. Pointed at Pearce. “But I asked about you, not about the chickens. Why did you stop fighting?”

“We started two wars we didn’t know how to finish. Too many people I knew got killed waiting for my government to figure that out.”

“We have a saying: ‘It’s easier to fall into a well than to climb out of one.’”

“We jumped into two of them,” Early said. “Now look at them, now that we’re gone.”