Now and Again (40 page)

Penn had wondered if the colonel knew who was behind the website, but as he paged through the document, he concluded he didn't. The knot in his chest dissolved as he listened to a rambling story about burning oil fields and a botched tank attack, where the moral seemed to be about second chances and where the punch line seemed to be “the smog of war.”

“I see something in you,” said the colonel. “And what I see is me.”

“Yes sir,” said Penn.

The bird was back, fooled by the expanse of glass and probably by the reflections in it of the view from the hotel window: the blue sky and the puffy clouds and a chevron of geese silhouetted against a disc-like sun. Penn decided it wanted in after all, but only because it thought that in was out.

“That was a defining moment for me,” said the colonel. “Things could have gone one way and they could have gone another. The thing is, my commanding officer had my back. The thing is, I learned from my mistakes.”

“But what if the war itself was the mistake?” asked Penn. “That's what I'm trying to figure out.”

“I have to admit I think about that too, but the bottom line is, deciding that is not our job. Our job is to get the supplies from point A to point B. Our job is to find and defuse the IEDs.” He reached out to tap the papers Penn was holding. “Our job is to run patrols and build infrastructure like water treatment plants and even schools. I'm here for another couple of months, but then I'm headed back. I can take you with me if you want.”

“Let me think about it, sir,” said Penn.

“It's another chance,” said the colonel. “It's another chance to get it right.”

M
eaning had always eluded Kelly until he started fighting for his country, and then it suddenly seemed embedded in the smallest of events. He would be eating breakfast or loading a truck or cleaning his weapon or buckling into his body armor when a blast of meaning would nearly knock him over: One for all and all for one! You're with us or you're with the terrorists! Live free or die! Now he thought, People have a right to know
.
It felt good to see the big picture. It was gratifying to know the big picture had a place in it for him. Maybe he was a businessman after all. Maybe he'd buy himself a suit. Ha! Every now and then he got up to stretch and tried to see what Danny was doing because when Danny went down the rabbit hole with his epic poem, it was hard to get him out. But it seemed like that morning everyone was busy with work-related tasks. Everyone except the captain, who had driven down to DC to visit with the colonel.

Kelly worked through the emails, feeling a zap of pleasure whenever he handled one particularly efficiently. If he came upon something unusual, he would say, “Hey, Le Roy, I need your wizard skills,” and now and then Le Roy would lean over Kelly's screen and say, “Ya got anything new for me to post?”

Kelly almost always did. In the past two weeks alone he had gotten photographs of flag-draped coffins and a story about how pre-election fear-mongering had incited someone in Ohio to spray a chemical irritant into a room full of Muslim children and statistics showing that one third of female troops would be raped by fellow service members and that some of the victims would subsequently die under suspicious circumstances of non-combat-related injuries. He'd gotten reports that post-9/11 security measures had led to spying on American citizens and that a facility was being built in the Utah desert large enough to store data at the rate of an entire Library of Congress every minute and that twelve billion dollars in shrink-wrapped hundred-dollar bills had been sent to Iraq only to—go figure—be squandered or lost. And just that morning he'd received a story about a unit that was ordered to kill all military-age Iraqi males, after which four low-ranking soldiers were arrested and caged for twenty-three hours a day in seven-by-seven cells while sworn testimony was shredded to ensure they took the fall for their commanding officers.

At first, they were stories and reports sent to him by soldiers, but then it wasn't just soldiers posting on the site. There was Mark O'Hara of Tampa, whose war involved being sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for possessing a bottle of Vicodin for which he had a valid prescription, but because the prosecutor charged him with trafficking rather than possession, no prescription defense was allowed. And there was Genarlow Wilson, who was seventeen when he had consensual oral sex with his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, an act that earned him ten years in prison. Vaginal penetration would have been okay. Girls who were arrested for dropping chewing gum on the sidewalk—black girls, that is. The white girls could put their gum anywhere they wanted, but they couldn't jaywalk near the University of Texas without carrying an ID card. Then they risked being slapped in handcuffs and hauled off to jail.

There were Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson, who, under civil property forfeiture laws, were stripped of the cash with which they had planned to buy a used car when a police officer pulled them over, found the money, and threatened charges of child endangerment and money laundering if they tried to get it back. The usual constitutional protections didn't apply because it wasn't Boatright and Henderson who were the named defendants in the case, it was the $6,037, which went straight into the coffers of the police department that had seized it, where it joined the money that was supposed to pay for James Morrow's dental work.

There was Irma Alred, who got thirty years, and Theresa Brown, who got life, both for drug charges where no drugs had been found and the only evidence was the word of people who were given immunity in return for their testimony. There were the seventeen Uighurs who escaped Chinese persecution only to wind up in Guantanamo Bay and remain there because no nation wanted to upset the Chinese government by granting them asylum. There was Otto Zehm, developmentally disabled and wrongly suspected of robbing an ATM, who was batoned seven times from behind, Tasered, hog-tied, and fitted with a non-rebreather mask that was not attached to an oxygen tank. There was twelve-year-old DeAunta Farrow, who was playing with a toy gun when he died.

“I thought we weren't going to post that stuff,” said the captain when he came back from DC. “I thought we were going to focus on information pertaining to the war.”

“There's more than one war going on,” said Kelly.

“But they're not our war,” said the captain.

“That's 'cuz you're rich and white,” said Kelly.

“Well, we can't post everything we get. That stuff just takes away from our mission. Tell Le Roy to take it down.”

Ever since the
Times
article, the captain had been going on about tough choices, but it seemed to Kelly that “choice” was the captain's way of saying, This is how it's gonna be.

“And what's our mission?” asked Kelly. And then he said, “Captain, sir.”

“Helping other soldiers, you know that.”

“What if there's other people I want to help? People who didn't get to choose the war they're fighting. Believe it or not, I even want to help myself.” Kelly was eager to explore the site's commercial potential, but he had been waiting for the right time to press the issue. “I'm thinking the human-interest stories might attract advertising, so if we concentrate on those…”

“Commercial potential is something I think about too,” said the captain. “The practical answer is that it's pretty darn hard to make money on news. And the philosophical one is that I don't think we should be making money on the war.”

“So everyone can make money on the war but us?” asked Kelly.

It was cold in the warehouse. Danny talked about installing storm windows, but they were expensive, so Kelly had been sitting with a blanket around his shoulders. Now he took it off and paced to the refrigerator, but it was empty. “Shee-it. We couldn't afford new windows, and now we can't afford beer?”

“The thing about making money off the war is, then there's no incentive for peace,” said the captain.

“Is it wrong for farmers to make money off of hungry people or doctors off of sick people?” asked Kelly. “Or should everybody just focus on selling people shit they don't need?”

“Martin agrees with me that the documents are the important thing,” replied the captain.

“Martin isn't my boss, and neither, frankly, are you.”

Martin was working on a new series of articles, which would be published in the
Guardian
, and would only communicate with them via secure back channels or on the burner phones he sent them. “That's where our focus should be,” said Penn. “The documents are the thing people can't get anywhere else.”

Instead of arguing further, Kelly went on a beer run, and an hour later Danny said he wouldn't mind a little food. “Burgers or pizza?” he asked.

“I'd go for some Chinese food,” said Kelly. He didn't really care what they ate, but there was a pretty girl at the Chinese restaurant, and if they wanted Chinese, he'd go for it himself so he could see her shock of black hair bob around her ears as she shook her wok back and forth and dipped rice out of a big metal vat.

The beer worked on all of them differently. Danny would get hungry, Le Roy would get even quieter than usual and eventually fall asleep, and the captain would start dwelling on everything he was doing or had ever done wrong. Kelly thought he was immune to beer. He wished he had some of those pills Harraday used to give him. If he had those pills, he'd go back and get to know the Chinese girl better. He'd like to see the shock of hair without the pointed cap the owner of the restaurant made her wear. It had been a long time since he'd really had some fun, but then he realized he was having fun now. Mostly he was having fun, even if it was of a tamer variety than he was used to.

K
elly was thinking about the Chinese girl, who had turned out to be engaged, when he opened an email that had no subject line and no signature, just a compressed file containing a clip of videotape and a message that said, “I want to make sure I have the right recipient. Tell me what this means to you, and if I'm satisfied with your answer, I'll send you the rest.”

The video clip showed Kelly and Pig Eye up on the Toyota. It showed them raising their fists in the air. It showed Pig Eye stepping up on the truck and standing beside and slightly behind Kelly. “Stand right up next to me, motherfucker!” Kelly hissed at the screen, but even though he watched the video several times, Pig Eye never did.

Kelly played the clip a total of five times before it vanished. “Hey, Le Roy,” he called out. “Is it possible for emails to self-destruct?”

“Yeah, man. I think I heard of that,” replied Le Roy.

But what did the video mean to him, and what was he supposed to say to the person who had sent it?

He could answer with his name and rank, but the sender hadn't given a name, which made Kelly apprehensive about giving his. He finally wrote, “I'm the guy with his fist in the air. Who the fuck are you?” As an afterthought, he asked the date of the event. He figured that was something only someone who had been there would know.

The next bit of film didn't come until almost a week later. Although Kelly had been expecting it, he jumped in his chair when he saw it in his in-box. The new clip was date- and time-stamped. It showed a television crew milling around while a convoy was preparing for departure. Thirty seconds into the tape, Colonel Falwell drove by and waved. Someone called out from off screen, “Colonel, is it true that Al Anbar Province is lost?”

The colonel gestured for the driver to stop the vehicle. “The situation there is certainly deteriorating,” he said. “But lost? Not by a long shot.”

“Should we go there then, or accompany this unit to Tikrit?”

“That unit isn't going to Tikrit,” said Falwell. “But keep that to yourselves for now. They'll get the news soon enough. Now I've got a chopper to catch.”

This clip didn't self-destruct, and Kelly watched it again and again, letting his head of steam build until he couldn't contain it any longer. When the captain came back with Subway sandwiches for everybody, he called out, “Hey, Captain! Get a load of this!” The captain didn't immediately answer him, so Kelly walked around the table and grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and hauled him over to his computer terminal and pushed him down into his chair.

“Did you know?” he shouted. “Did you know that we were never going north, that we weren't waiting for orders, that even the film crew knew the supplies were going west—that everybody knew it except for you?”

“I knew it was a possibility,” said Penn. “Falwell told me I should sit tight until I heard from him. The new orders finally came through about three hours after you left that morning.”

Kelly played the tape for the captain, and then he played it again, and again after that.

“Who sent it?” asked the captain.

“The television crew, obviously.”

“Why is it obvious? Did they say so?”

“Because they were a film crew. Because it's a piece of fucking film. They must have seen our website. They must have seen your email exposing the cover-up of the IED incident and noticed that the dates didn't match up, and now I'm seeing that the colonel knew the supplies weren't going north before he even left for HQ.”

“He didn't tell me,” said Penn. “He acknowledges that right in the film. Maybe he wanted to be absolutely sure first. Hell, that wouldn't be the first time he held information until he couldn't hold it any longer—like the way he sat on the stop-loss orders.”

Then Kelly told Penn about the vanishing email that showed him up on the Toyota with Pig Eye.

“The film crew didn't send it,” said the captain. “Think about it. The first clip showing you and Pig Eye was the teaser. That was just to get your attention. The second clip was what whoever sent it really wanted you to see. But it wasn't sent for the website. It won't mean anything to anybody but us—who else is going to spend the time to work out where the convoy was going and when the orders changed and who knew about it and exactly when they knew it? And why would the film crew send you something that can only have one effect?”