He didn’t hesitate. “Write about Baghdad, circa 2006. Write about the Americans, make them as bad as you can.”

“Well, they weren’t exactly angels.”

“Don’t interrupt. Baghdad 2006. Scenario: Our guys have a few operatives in there. You’ll need one main guy. A hero. In charge of . . . well, you know the rest.”

“Your people need a TV series about us against the Americans? Is this why I’m here today?”

H shrugged. “Consider it a favor to me.”

“If I write this, they’ll give you a promotion?”

“They might.”

“I’ll think about it then.”

“Do more than that.”

3

By the time Saeed and I got to the legendary sniper he already had more kills than damn near anyone else in this war. He was a philosopher of his craft. My inadequate Arabic did not catch everything he said, but I could tell that at some point he had decided he’d had enough; he was ready to die. He had come out of retirement only because the great grand cleric in Najaf had spoken. Every able-bodied man had a duty to stand up for the country and fight the enemy. Two years later, by the time they brought him down at Hawija, the sniper’s body count had become a Mesopotamian myth. I could not fathom that number of concentrated, individual kills and didn’t want to think about it every time they showed him on Iraqi TV as a war hero. This war had so many impostors that when you came across a guy like Abu Abbas, you became a believer. Even the way he did the ritual wash before prayer had a sort of deliberateness that made you think of yoga and mindfulness and saintly patience. The Russians, he told Saeed and me, had been his original teachers, way back in the 1970s. He held women snipers in high regard because of their unflappability and fortitude and said that if trained properly, no man could ever match them.

I wanted him. Abbas was the unwavering rock of the war, its cedar of Lebanon. The way he carried that SV rifle, one imagined prophets returning to speak in tongue in this godforsaken land. In Basra he admitted to us he’d never shoot a man unless he was armed, even if that man had the blood of Abbas’s brothers on his hands. I believed him; I needed my champion. And when Saeed, my onetime partner, stole all the footage we had of him to make his own documentary about the war hero, I hunkered down and wrote a pilot for an action TV series based on the great man. But then, just as Saeed had stolen our collective footage of Abbas, the TV writers and producers in Tehran stole my pilot about him. Abbas was bringing me only grief. The idea of him was too good for people not to steal. He wasn’t like other war heroes, people like the “Father of Death” who was a bodybuilder and a showoff. Abbas had the humility that comes with ultimate agency, that of holding the power of life or death over any man or woman at any time from long distance. He took that responsibility seriously. Which was why he hadn’t trained anyone to follow in his footsteps. His takedown at Hawija had thrown my world into disarray. It was like losing a father. The enemy websites were full of celebrations of his death, and the more they celebrated the more I hated the enemy.