News From the Red Desert (44 page)

“Now then, about your relationship with the
Stars Earn Stripes
show. Why were you so intent on appearing on it? Were you planning a massacre of the stars? Did you have a special plan for Mr. Palin?”

Rami Issay said nothing.

Mr. Clark lifted a balloon-tipped rectal tube the CIA doctor had given him. He knelt down. Rami Issay shut his eyes tighter. Mr. Clark inserted the tube and inflated the balloon. It hurt, but not as much as being hit. Mr. Clark hung a plastic bag from one of the hooks on the ceiling. He connected the rectal tube to it. He opened a valve.

Rob Waller stepped outside.

Overhead, the Afghan sun flared. The desert all around reflected back brightly and it felt like the light was falling on him from a hose. The air was cleansed by the light and the desert wind that never stopped blowing. He smelled woodsmoke, vaguely. Maybe someone was cooking with garlic somewhere. Inside, he heard a soft thud and a groan. He was supposed to be present for every second of the interrogations. He would file a report on the process for KAF in another couple of days. This was
the highest profile green-on-blue yet, and at the hands of a fifteen-year-old. Some evidence of progress toward understanding it had to be made and presented to the public. Fifteen-years-olds don't just do something like that. Apparently he had been learning English and wanted to continue his education. Someone had got to him. Even if it wasn't Issay, Issay knew who it was. And that he wasn't giving him up said everything you had to know about where his sympathies lay. Which made it even more likely that it was him. Who else could it be?

Waller turned and re-entered the room. His eyes had accustomed themselves to the bright, and he could see nothing. He heard another thud, and the sound of breath being forced from lungs.

Once they got south of the Panjwai, they saw fewer soldiers. The farther south they went, the fewer drones and helicopters they saw. They decided to start sleeping at night and travel during the day. They stole some hoes to carry, so they would look more innocent as they walked. They didn't imagine they would fool any of the people whose lands they walked through, but if they looked like farmers to a drone camera, perhaps they would be less likely to hear that sudden shriek. Anyone could see that none of them was carrying a rifle. Apart from the hoes, they carried nothing at all. A pack on any of their backs could mean the end of all them.

The season made their escape possible. In the late summer, the orchards and vineyards were heavy with fruit, which allowed for easy grazing. They stopped in drying huts when they saw them and helped themselves to raisins. Still, they craved rice and meat. They were all so thin, from the diet and the abuse and the dysentery of the prison. Though walking twelve hours a day did not make gaining weight likely, they each felt better every day. One night, over a handful of raisins, one of the men looked up at Rashid and told him, “You know, you don't even look like the same man we started out with. You almost look like a
real person now.” Rashid shrugged. He didn't care what he looked like. He had noticed, though, that his mind felt like it was uncoiling.

He had begun to think again, and to wonder and to look forward. All those habits had disappeared while he was being interrogated. He had crouched internally as much as he had externally. This represented a change far more important than some bruises healing. And as his thoughts began to uncoil, they let slip anger like he had never known in his life. When he felt it emerge, the unfamiliar insistence of it felt so uncomfortable he wished he were still crouching. This was a demon that could take him over, entirely. He pushed aside the anger and thought about his parents. He reviewed the fundamental theorem of calculus. He remembered being hung by those chains. And that filthy man hitting him. Calculus is the mathematics of change.

To say that any of them was no longer afraid would be entirely wrong. Every moment of the day they glanced skyward, looking for drones and aircraft. They stayed away from any road solid enough to accommodate a LAV or an MRV. They preferred footpaths and would take them even if they added miles to their journey. And they knew at all times that as conscious as they were of these threats, they could not be eliminated. Every one of them had heard stories of relatives and friends, uninterested in any aspect of the insurgency except as a danger to avoid, being killed by missiles. And they were considerably less innocent than that. Since the jailbreak, they imagined, the ferenghee must be scouring the countryside for men just like them.

The sooner they made it to the mountains, the happier they would all be.

On KAF, the UK supply sergeant, David Shipman, sat in his chair in his office. It was the first day things had seemed partway normal since the shooting. His friend Anakopoulus had gone home. His own deployment had another two months to run. Then he would go back home, probably
for the rest of his time in. The Brits were almost out of Iraq, and he had done his share here now—unless he wanted to be promoted, which he most certainly did not. The good news is that those InformationIsFree leaks seem to have been pushed to the back burner. All anyone wanted to talk about was terrorist cells on NATO bases.

Shipman looked out his window at the mountains to the south. He thought about the Sarpoza breakout. Where do twelve hundred men go? Into the homes and houses all around them, he thought. Which told you where the sympathies of the people in those homes must lie. Some of the escapees were probably making for their own home villages, and some of them for Pakistan. Look at those mountains. Imagine climbing them in the night, in sandals without a map. Twelve hundred men and they were soaked up in the countryside, just like that. Like summer rain, gone an hour after it fell.

He had met Anakopoulus's replacement. Harold Thorvaldson, from Minneapolis. He was less snarky than Anakopoulus, though Shipman wondered how much of his friend's sourness was the product of the years-at-an-end deployment he had endured. Not all of it, probably. Thorvaldson marvelled at how well run the supply depot was, said Anakopoulus was hard to replace, especially without having been able to get a handover from him. Fortunately, his subordinates were pretty well trained and they had a handle on how things worked. Shipman had told him that if he needed help, all he had to do was call. He was ready to give him some pointers.

Oh my God. He had turned into Anakopoulus. Shipman laughed and reached into his desk for his flask. Well, he could do worse, he thought.

O
n the twenty-ninth day after the shooting, Master Sergeant Anakopoulus was in Walter Reed, doing rehab for his shoulder. He didn't want to go home to Texas. He found Washington more pleasant than he could ever have expected. The hospital itself was a miracle of light and high, white walls and glass atria around every other corner. Anything the wounded soldiers wanted was made available to them, in the way of tickets to football or baseball games. There were excursions laid on to all of the local national parks. He had visited the Smithsonian several times.

He was just walking back from the pool when he saw the physiotherapist, a sexy captain from Seattle, coming toward him. “Hello, ma'am,” he said.

“Hey, Master Sergeant, good to see you. Listen, there's someone from public affairs who wants to talk to you. Some reporter who met you in KAF, wants to do a story on you or something? I have a number I'm supposed to give you. Sergeant? Are you okay, do you want to sit down?”
Major Horner's agenda was lighter than it had been in months. CENTCOM had flown out some help after General Jackson's surprise resignation. Horner was still held responsible for that, because the general had so clearly communicated his intentions to him. And somehow, the shooting itself was partly his fault, too. Mark Burnett and Sara Miller's witnessing of it could have been prevented, had he only foreseen that it was coming. It wasn't like the Pentagon itself hadn't had the biggest hard-on in the world about
Stars Earn Stripes,
too. That was still going ahead, though they had decided to shoot it entirely in the States now. Probably the safest—and most beside the point—thing to do.

Anakopoulus sat beside the Washington Mall Pond and watched it shimmer. The water was the most beautiful thing he could remember ever seeing. Behind him was the Lincoln Monument. The water in the reflecting pool looked like cool molten metal.

He wanted to phone Susie to give her a heads-up about this, but he couldn't bring himself to. He had sent her a three-line email from the Landstuhl hospital, just to let her know that he was okay. The shooting had been all over the news. She had written back, long and tenderly, thankful that he was okay, and thanking him, on behalf of the kid and her new boyfriend Scott, for his service to his country.

He hadn't answered that. “On behalf of Scott and myself.” Nice.

At one time, walking for twelve hours a day would have struck Rashid as its own kind of torture, but as they walked in file along the narrow footpaths through these fields, he felt a kind of ease return to him that he had not known in many years. He recoiled from even the idea of the city, now, which he had once considered mankind's highest accomplishment.

He had lived his whole life in cities of one hundred thousand or more. With his family, in Peshawar, and then Islamabad for school, and then Boston. KAF was the smallest community he had lived in in his life, and there was nothing non-frenetic about it, either. This, he realized, this around him: the sunshine and the wheat and millet fields and the vineyards and the orchards, this is where he wanted to live now.

He had not been afraid of strangers before the detention. He had not recoiled from settlements. Now, his idea of paradise was just him, sitting on a hill that allowed him to see in every direction for thirty miles and no one at all to be seen.

As they made their way south, the land gradually became more hilly and the houses farther apart. The mountains loomed up in front of him. All they had on their feet were sandals. Would these “friends” meet them before they had to climb the mountains, or were they going to do that in their sandals?

It didn't matter. They would not be going back so they had to move ahead. They would do what was necessary and if that meant climbing mountains barefooted then that is what they would do. And they could all just stop talking about these friends who would meet them. The harder they made it to be found by them or anyone else, the better. There were no friends. There were soldiers with cameras that could see forever, looking for them. They had to keep going, as fast as they could.

It was late in the day and Anakopoulus worried that no one would be around. Military police detachments at military hospitals are not generally staffed with prospects for accelerated promotion. A couple dozen cases of petty theft a year, a sexual harassment charge or two, and that was about what constituted the case load at a hospital's MP detachment. When prisoners from Quantico or one of the other big detention barracks got sick and were sent here, sometimes they got involved with the guarding of such patients, but mostly the sending organizations took
care of that. They understood the staffing levels of the hospital detachment. And with whom it was staffed.

When he found the office, a pleasant young woman was working behind the desk, processing a stack of parking tickets. She didn't even notice him walk in. After a few minutes he had to clear his throat to draw her attention.

She looked up. “Oh, hello, Master Sergeant.”

“Hi.”

“I'll be with you in just a moment.”

“Take your time.”

“Thanks.” She grinned at him. He had a lot of ribbons, and sometimes those long-time field guys were permanently pissed off. It was nice to see one with a bit of patience for a change.

When she was finally done, and asked him how she could help him, he set down the magazine he was reading and stood up. “I'm afraid I might be about to ruin your evening, Sergeant,” he said.

“Why?”

“Here,” he said, holding out his wrists. “You'll want to handcuff me.”

She backed away from the counter and fingered her sidearm. “Tom! Can I have some help out here?” she called to someone not visible.

“What?” a sleepy voiced called back from somewhere.

“Tom!”

“Coming.”

A portly white-haired man with sergeant's chevrons on his wrinkled shirt appeared from out of the back.

“This man wants to be handcuffed.”

“Why?”

She looked at Anakopoulus, who thought that his last minutes of freedom were proving odder than he had expected. “It's not that I want to be handcuffed, it's that I think you'll want to handcuff me.”

“Why would we want to handcuff you?” the older man said.

“Because I'm the guy who leaked that helicopter video to InformationIsFree.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about. Do you, Susan?”

Susan shook her head.

“I think we'll be giving the psychiatry inpatient unit a call. Who did you say your doctor is? And what's your name?”

Anakopoulus sighed. “I'm not a psychiatry patient. I'm the leaker everyone is looking for. Call your boss. Or his boss.”

“What should we tell them?”

“Tell them you have the InformationIsFree leaker.”

“How do you spell that?”

“I-n-f-o-r-m…”

“Slow down, mister.”