Scorpia Rising

forty-six were forced to make up the firing squads. When Razim heard about this little twist of cruelty, he realized that his country had been taken over by a man who was very close to his own heart. He began to think how he might get to meet him. Could he find a way into the corridors of power?
    As it happened, the opportunity arose very quickly. It was obvious to many people in Iraq that Saddam was brutal, mad, and dangerous, and in the late summer of that same year, Razim’s parents held a secret meeting in their house with other academics, writers, and well-placed friends to discuss how they might get rid of him. How were they to know that Razim was recording the entire conversation on a tape recorder that they had given him for his fourteenth birthday? The next day, he skipped school and went instead to the local police, taking the evidence with him.
    Revenge came like a desert storm. Razim’s parents were arrested and shot without even the benefit of a trial. Razim never found out what happened to his seventeen-year-old sister—nor did he care. The last he saw of her, she was being dragged screaming from the house by four laughing policemen who threw her into the back of a van. Everyone who had attended the meeting was arrested. None of them was ever seen again.
    As a reward for his loyalty, the local chief of police invited Razim—who was of course an orphan now—to see him in his office above the jail near the Farouk Palace. Sitting behind his desk, with his belly rising above it, the police chief examined the boy who had been brought to him. He did not like what he saw. Razim was small for his age and very slender, more like a girl than a boy. His hair was neatly cut in a fringe and he was wearing his school uniform. But what troubled him was the boy’s complete lack of expression. He had the face of a waxwork, eyes that could have been made of glass. There was no warmth or curiosity. There was nothing at all.
    Even so, he tried to be polite. “You have been of great service to your country,” he began. “Your parents and their friends were traitors. You were right to do what you did.”
    The boy didn’t respond.
    “What would you like to happen to you now?”
    “I thought I might join the police,” Razim said. “I’m sure you have lots of people you have to kill. I’d like to help.”
    The police chief had children of his own, and this boy, whose feet barely reached the floor, sickened him. “You’re too young to join the police,” he said.
    “I don’t want to go back to school. It’s boring.”
    “I think it would be better if you left Tikrit.”
    For a brief moment, the police chief was tempted to take out his gun and shoot the child. There was no particular reason. He would have felt exactly the same if he had found himself faced with a scorpion or a poisonous snake. He had to hold on to his hand to prevent it from dropping down to the holster at his belt. “We will arrange for you to be fostered,” he said. “Somewhere far away.”
    “Don’t I get a reward?”
    “It will come to you. In time.”
    In the end, Razim was sent to live with a wealthy family, distant relatives of the president, in Tehran. The family despised him on first sight but knew better than to ask any questions, and from this moment on he began to thrive. He continued to do brilliantly at school and at seventeen became the youngest student to enter the College of Engineering at Amir Adaad Campus, part of the University of Tehran. By now he had changed his mind about his future. He would use his scientific skills to become a weapons designer. It was well known that Saddam Hussein was developing biological and chemical weapons. Razim himself had a keen interest in small arms. In his first term at university, he had won a commendation for a twenty-page essay on the Yugoslavian Zastava M70, the assault rifle that, he was told, had been used to kill his parents. His dream was that he might one day invent a new weapon that he would name after himself.
    It wasn’t going to happen. On Razim’s eighteenth birthday, he received a letter printed on official government paper. It turned out that someone high up hadn’t forgotten the teenager who had once betrayed his entire family. Razim was to leave the university immediately. He was being invited (and it wasn’t an invitation that anyone could refuse) to join the Mukhabarat. He was to report to their offices the next day.
    The Mukhabarat. Iraq’s dreaded secret