News From the Red Desert (21 page)

She'd told him that for the Sunnis, it depended on who was in front of them. You want to be less hated, you have to put your face in front of them as little as possible. He said that could be mistaken for a lack of resolve. She said, “By them? Or by your colleagues?”

“Precisely,” he'd said.

He was too disciplined to let the conversation meander too far and anyway he knew how that would be seen. He concluded the discussion and invited her to return to talk any time she thought he might be helpful.

She began getting invitations from his aides to go out on patrols he was accompanying—always in a vehicle other than his. Most of the time they didn't even speak. He was congratulated by his media relations advisers for his press savvy. He got a call from the theatre commander telling him he wished some of his asshat colleagues in the other sectors handled themselves as well.

It was all her. He had given the exact same interview to a dozen other journalists. She was the one who made him sound the way he did. And once that calm competence narrative got started, she propelled it. She changed everything.

Anakopoulus was in line behind Jackson. The general looked distracted and that was fine by Anakopoulus. When he spotted him, his instinct was to go back to his office, but he suppressed it. He was afraid that leaving would call attention to himself.

Another story had come out, up on all the papers' web pages overnight: 101st Airborne troops shooting up a wedding party. Some other joker wearing a body cam. Jesus Christ. Did no one have control of their men?
A body cam? The audio was the worst part. The screams. The shots. The screams ending. Three million YouTube hits in six hours. He'd watched it. Someone will go to jail for that camera, he thought. They'll identify the night and the unit involved and then it will just be a matter of time. Get a list of the names and cross off everyone you see in the shot—then start recording voices and find a match. The moment the guy who made the video saw that it had been released, he would have begun sweating everywhere. Whole days would go by feeling like he was about to pass out. The sound of doors slamming would be terrifying. Every siren would be for him.

And because Deirdre had decided to try to see him right after she had her coffee, while she waited her thoughts turned to Jeremy's rival, Thomas Lattice, whose impact on her life had been just as forceful as Jeremy's. Life-saving, in fact. After she got back from that last night in the hotel in Israel, she had a chance to go on patrol in Sadr City with a Marine rifle company. They had turned a corner onto a narrow street when the ambush erupted. The three men in front of her were shot immediately. The platoon commander called on everyone to withdraw but she was paralyzed by fear and remained huddled beside the body of the man closest to her. She felt his body shaking as more rounds hit him. Then she heard her soldiers returning fire fiercely and her ears rang like a struck steel beam. Something gripped her ankle and she was dragged to the side of the street. She assumed it was someone trying to help her and she wiggled toward them. There were stairs she was dragged down and then a door opened. A basement of some sort.

Inside were tense men speaking Arabic. She was quickly tied with coarse rope that hurt her and she was blindfolded. For the following hour she listened to helicopters and armoured personnel carriers thumping outside. She heard American voices yelling. She tried once to yell back but she was kicked so hard she retched and then a rag was stuffed in her mouth.

There was a lull then. It seemed to her that her soldiers had stopped looking for her. That would be the worst possible development. If the men who held her were able to move her to another place, they would be able to keep her just as long, or as briefly, as they wished. Her Arabic had reached the point that she could understand calmly uttered phrases, but no one in this room was calm. They were much more concerned about the soldiers outside than they were about her, but she agitated them, too. And they wanted no more cause for agitation.

She elected not to reveal that she understood any Arabic. She cried out in English a few times, and she was kicked hard each time she did. “Humanize yourself,” she had been taught, in the class. “Speak to them, weep, show emotion.” She began sobbing. It was not difficult. Then she was dragged into another room and a door closed behind her.

When the soldiers burst through the street door she fell to the floor as fast as she could. Bullets whistled past her, just over her head, through the space she had just occupied. Then the door to her room was kicked open and she was grabbed and a blast blanket was wrapped around her and she was hustled out into the street. There was a Humvee idling and she was propelled into its back seat and they leapt away.

Beside her was an SF intelligence guy who wanted to know right now, as fast she could tell him, everything she had seen or heard or smelled—everything. And she told him everything. Every couple of moments he stopped to bark things into his cell phone. “It's secure,” he said, in reply to her look.

The man in the front passenger seat just stared straight ahead. Did not acknowledge her. Did not look at her. Did not pull his eyes even for one second off the windscreen. Jumped out the passenger door when they slowed for moment, back in the Green Zone. Didn't look back, just walked away fast. Thomas Lattice.

“Could you tell General Lattice that Deirdre O'Malley is here?”

“Hi ma'am,” the private-now-sergeant from Bar Harbor said, abandoning the position that he did not know her. “Nice to see you got out of the Suck.” It was 0700 and the sky was lightening quickly now.

“Good to see you, too, Sergeant. That's two promotions in three years. Things are going okay for you, aren't they?”

“Well enough, ma'am.”

“So is he even around?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that, ma'am. But I will get him a message.”

“You told me you were in KAF at the beginning.” He had told her that in Iraq. He had been, like a thousand other men before and since, trying to impress her.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Here at KAF?”

“Taliban's Last Stand, yes, ma'am.”

“Strange being back?”

He paused for a long beat. “You get used to the strange, after a while.”

“I know. There are problems with that, though.”

“If you say so, ma'am.”

She looked for the smirk she remembered. It didn't come. She wasn't one of them.