Mazy did not lie to Phebe in Book One, for she only referred to the POW captivity experience with the other female intel operatives. She left out what preceded this. Mostly, Mazy blocked it out of her mind. Rarely, did she ever talk about it. But it began to rear its head in Book Four when Phebe, Ben, and Tyler decapitated the enemy and put their heads on stakes.
After years of intense therapy at the VA, Mazy had been one of the groundbreaking cases of modern treatment for PTSD, called eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR. She had returned from Iraq entirely dysfunctional. More than unable to work, she could not go with her sister to the corner store. She lived in her childhood bedroom, rarely leaving, and constantly haunted by what preceded her captivity. The trauma full-on hit when returning home, whereas it stayed in its place when in captivity and living under the threat of danger.
Over and over again, she relived the execution of her field partner and her own death seeming imminent. When anything touched her face – a bug, a hair, a splash of water – she freaked out, reliving the splatter of her partner’s blood on her face as his head was cut off at the neck.
In reaction to the horrific event, while it happened, her mind went someplace few ever visited. Even fewer ever returned. On her knees, his blood seeping into the cloth of her pants, a pistol pressed to the back of her neck, she went insane. His body twitched after losing the head. The eyes at least faced the other direction. Her mind snapped.
He had been an Arab-descent American. His grandparents immigrated from Saudi Arabia. He had been raised speaking their dialect of Arabic, which proved highly helpful. An Annapolis Naval Academy graduate, he chose the Marine Corps and went into military intelligence. He had not been a practicing Muslim as a child. His family had grown very Western. His grandparents and parents were scientists. He had been someone Americans did not guess was an Arab until he told his last name. His first name was Scott.
All of this about him mattered to her in the aftermath, because of who did it: a German member of ISIS, as blond and blue as the day was long. From a Christian family going all the way back. His ancestors probably caught up in the Reformation and then burned women as witches in the Seventeenth century, then became Nazis in the Twentieth century, followed by the open-minded German nation fantastic at making cars in the Twenty-first. One day some of them decided to join an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organization, turning their backs on everything they had been, including their own families. The irony struck her and stuck with her. She could find no logic in what happened.
As a partner team, her field partner and she had been originally assigned to infiltrate and spy on an Arab insurgent group, which his background and both of their physical appearances worked well to infiltrate. The cover story was that they were a married Saudi couple and zealots. They ran into members of the Islamic State. Their handler changed their target to this growing insurgent group, which back then was barely heard of.
Infiltration, which had been comparably easier than most insurgent groups, proved some shocking things. Many of the recruits were made up of white people from Europe and North America, even Australia and New Zealand, and some black people from the Caribbean and the United States. All heavily Christian ancestral and cultural areas.
The American kids – for they tended to be quite young adults – really shocked Mazy and her partner. As apple pie as they came, which meant ISIS could be anywhere at any given time with no profiling triggers. No children of immigrants or anything. Apple pie and football Midwestern American white kids. Blue-as-the-sky eyes peering out of burqas made Mazy want to start slapping some girls, demanding they think about what they were doing.
The North Americans – for some were Canadians as well as Americans – proved to be harder than anything else the duo had faced, since their cover story had been Saudis and not Americans. They had to pretend they knew little of the United States and Canada, something that stressed them to do. Too easy to trip up.
On the day of the capture, she was set up. How their cover was burned, she never learned.
When women hung out together, they could remove not only the hair covering but the entire black burqa. Mazy hung out with the girls, talking about outfits and shoes. Without the dress, Mazy could not hide her Glock pistol, so it lay hidden in her folded burqa.
The girls excused themselves to go look at something in the apartment’s bedroom. They returned to the living room, wearing burqas – it meant men would soon arrive. Mazy rushed for her Glock. One of the bitches clocked her in the head just as her hand reached the pistol. As she passed out, a North American accented voice said, “You traitor bitch.” Simultaneously, a British accented voice called her a “cunt.”
Her mind would relive it. Desiring to fight them but in the nightmares never able to do so. The only damn traitors were them! She raged in her nightmares and raged after she awakened, hating them with every ounce of her being. Awake at the wee hours, watching TV, and hating them with every fiber. ISIS made it feel so much more personal than the other terrorist insurgent groups. They recruited from the underbelly of unsuspecting nations.
Children of Muslim immigrants in Western nations made sense. Confused – do you drink alcohol, eat pork, or have sex before marriage? The things the Western world did were taboos in the Muslim world. As females, the question of wearing a headscarf or not? Western nations found that alien and weird. The sharp contrasts in cultures could make for identity crises in young adults. Are you American if you are Muslim? Are you British if you’re Muslim? Are you Australian? Kiwi? French? What are you? They could be easy pickings for terrorist recruiters.
A logic to it being the children of immigrants in the West. But these were not the children of immigrants. Mazy could not get over the sense of betrayal.
Her African American stepfather, a professor of history specializing in black American history at a historically black university and a Southern Baptist church deacon, felt the betrayal, too. He felt it very deeply at seeing what happened to her and hearing her story. He got himself in trouble at his university for politically incorrect, anti-Muslim comments. He never saw himself as a prejudiced man, but he turned out to have a big one.
When he learned African Americans had joined ISIS, he went berserk. Full-blown anti-Muslim prejudice began in him, and he tolerated nothing Muslim except for those generations born to it. He ended up joining an anti-Muslim group that was logged as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list. A non-violent man devoted to the teachings and preaching of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – a man who always said, “I have no room for hate in me” was a hater. He went to the pulpit, speaking anti-Muslim beliefs, and the black Baptist congregation approved, being hardcore pro-Christian. But his university did not approve. He was sanctioned and came close to suspension – he was a tenured professor.
These ISIS recruits were people not born to the conflict, the Western black recruits would say otherwise – it was not the same conflict or the level of conflict. They were not doing the deeds of the desperate. Comparably rich Western young people, that was who had been recruited. Not even the poorest people of the Western nations, since they were rarely on the internet, the big recruitment ground. Middle-class young people. Most began with just a beef against George Bush, Jr. and the Coalition invasion of Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein. Once the recruiters got their hooks into them, they fully turned them, brainwashing them and getting them to move to Syria. The females were just as bad as the males.
With the trauma combined with the lust for vengeance against those young women, Mazy wanted to get in their faces. Let’s do this, sister! Let’s fucking dance, bitch! She longed for hand-to-hand with them in her dreams. But that was not what happened.
Struck from behind and awakened as a hostage with a life expectancy of days or hours. She was then in the men’s hands, and they punched her. They dragged her into a room decorated with small tile blocks as an older model home tile bathroom would have; a Turkish bath, it reminded her of. Her field partner was already there, beaten, face swollen, and on his knees with his hands bound behind his back. Westerners had seen this on TV for decades – the beheading of Western prisoners by Islamic fanatics – the first thought she had at seeing him.
Dropped on the floor, but her wrists not bound, she pulled herself onto her knees, clasped her hands together, and whispered a prayer to the Christian version of God. She received a kick in the stomach for that.
Surrounded by Western men in paramilitary garb, they were tenderly young, painfully young. They should have been attending a music concert or getting high with their buddies, traveling and sleeping at hostels, not this. Only one man was Middle Eastern, and he was the least aggressive and violent. He was older than them, in his thirties.
They mostly focused on her partner and used her as the threat – we’ll kill her in front of you if you don’t speak. He was a Marine. He would not tell them what they wanted to know. Though not a practicing Muslim, his cover was a zealot Muslim, and he prayed in Arabic as they harassed the both of them. The Muslim version of God was all he knew. They kicked him for those prayers, too, proclaiming him a traitor to Allah.
She had never been so terrified in her life. Why did she not foresee this as the end point of going into deep field cover? Her family disapproved of her going into intel, once they learned intelligence operatives had the highest mortality rate in the military. Being young and headstrong, she had not heeded their worries. She regretted this as she knelt on aching knees on the tile floor, thinking of the Professor, her mother Bootsie, and sister Desiree. She would not be able to say goodbye to them.
The room smelled of stale men’s sweat mixed with stale bleach and stale tobacco. She’d always have a problem with the scent of male sweat thereafter, the memories flashing back, which posed a particular challenge in the Zone when no one could bathe. She made Ben Raven wear extra deodorant in Charleston. Sympathizing with her trauma, he complied.
The German rested the blade of a sword on her field partner’s shoulder. He threatened in Arabic, which he spoke poorly, showing himself new to the language. She remembered the chilled albeit goofy Germans she had known. They would be shocked and appalled, especially considering their shameful history. She wanted to curse him with that but feared his retaliation. He seemed not altogether well hinged.
Struggling with Arabic, he and another young man switched to German. She suspected from the accent and colloquialisms that the other young man was Dutch from the Netherlands. Talk about a laid-back nation of people – they would be aghast at one of their own doing this.
The thoughts were fleeting about their backgrounds. Her mind desperately wanted these thoughts, but sheer terror was her primary sensation. Heart racing as fast as a pursued rabbit’s, her entire body profusely sweating, and her hands shook.
The glint of the silver blade in the overhead lighting. The German drew the sword back. The unbelievable happened. She viscerally screamed. Her partner’s blood splattered onto her face. A second whack and his head came off. All too fast and surreal to have closed her eyes in time. His headless body twitched. Her mind snapped.
Despite the pistol pressed to the back of her head, she leaned forward. With her shaking hand, her index finger dipped into her partner’s blood, which spread out into a pool from the headless corpse. As if her finger acted of its own mind, she drew Bootsie’s family veve. The symbol of her family going back possibly to Haiti. In Creole French, she recited syncretized Catholic-Voodoo prayers passed down through the generations. She called upon her ancestors, the Blessed Mother, and the Saints to protect her.
They screamed at her to stop it. She vaguely heard, as if they were in the distance, words such as sahira and hex. They were calling her a ‘witch,’ taking what she did as a blood curse against them instead of protection for herself. On a kind of terrified autopilot, she began to speak Cajun French, a language they would not understand. The words were meaningless for the situation, but they did not know this and assumed it was more cursing them. Any Cajun sentence that rose up in her memory she spoke with passion. Her blood-caked, shaking hand continued to draw the veve on the tile floor.
In Arabic, her voice gravelly and raw, she spoke a curse to them that her blood spell called upon the evil jinn to exact vengeance for her death if they dared kill her, and the jinn would inflict their wraith on their families as well as themselves. Most of them stepped away from her, eyes widening with fear. The German did not believe it, but the Middle Easterner full-heartily believed it. He called a halt to her execution, despite the German’s protests. For superstition, her life was spared.
To learn more about European ISIS Fighters. The American ISIS Fighters as well as from the US Dept. of Justice.
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