#KillAydaKhoury

The Pitch

Sacha Hamadeh

Syrian Airspace

Ali returns with food and gives Ayda more painkillers and the quick psychiatric once-over. Zara goes over the script with Ayda while we eat, for the video they'll make in Iran. Ali says the Syrian army will fly us out of the closed military-controlled airport to Tehran, if we keep our mouths shut and don't contradict the story they're giving Assad's central command.

We're protected by people we defended in Qusayr and here in Damascus. They owe us, not al-Beyruthi. Ali says he threw my name around and calls me a spoiled brat, but his voice is strained, and I think he's taunting me to pretend everything's normal and that he's not afraid the Party will use Maryam as collateral against him.

He's going back, to Beirut with Omy and Baba and Maryam. He's going back to where the Islamic State might invade from the north and the Israelis might roll in with their tanks.

Zara and the defectors and I take a rough military flight toward Tehran. It's familiar and reassuring, and fits the political battle we're headed into. I play with Rasim's key and look down over flyover country.

The dusty hills below are broken by flashes of artillery fire, mortars, rockets. Towns that were worth fighting over when someone lived in them are nothing but militant soup now. Al-Nusra, Abdullah Azzam, the Islamic State, the universally hated American-backed Free Syrian Army, are all fighting each other and advertising that they're fighting us.

We pass over the area the Americans call Kurdistan, quiet and solidly held, and then we're over Iraq, lit up with artillery fire, the Islamic State taking advantage of the infighting between its enemies. I want Zara to distract me before we cross into Iranian airspace. I don't want to feel sick like I did on the long flight from Syria to Lebanon.

I should let Ali introduce me to his psychologist friend.

I won't. I'm not letting them say El-Shafei came back damaged from Syria. After resisting the occupation, I know how to fight a war.

All of Bir Hassan would hear about it, and quickly. They'd look at my parents with that pitying look, because no one knows what to do with a son who's not a martyr but didn't come back.

Zara's asking the Israeli about serving in the occupation, and what living in Israel is like, and why she left Israel.

"Are you recording?" asks Farida. "I should practice the press version. I wanted to get away from the prospect of having to figure out how to live there, in a country I fought for covertly all my life and only saw in snatches of vacations and debriefings. It hasn't really been my home since I was a little girl, and how do you say that about a place you love?"

"You'll never get any sympathy with that one," I tell her.

She pretends not to hear me.

I want to get up and walk around the cabin to take the edge off, but I'd have to think about the confines of the cabin, the inevitability of Iran. A little propaganda scheme and the moral weight of debts owed to my family are the only weapons we have left against the weight and statecraft of a regional hegemon.

Ayda's attention is buried in Zara's laptop. I tap the top edge of the monitor to get her attention. "Hey, Shaheeda."

She startles. I don't know how to stop doing that either, jumping at shadows, reacting to nothing.

"What are you going to do when you get home?" I ask her.

"I don't know. Not be a spy. Not for all the money in North Ridge's pockets."