Fobbit (39 page)

The CG resumed his toenail clipping and stared at a blank spot of air, furrowing his brow and giving the matter his deepest attention. Colonel Belcher looked sideways at Harkleroad and couldn’t stop grinning.

. . .
snick snick snick SNICK
(a particularly troublesome cuticle) . . .

The CG looked up, as if surprised to see the two men still standing in his office.

“Hm. Yes,” he said. “Well . . .”

Harkleroad’s fingers turned acrobatic flips as he leaned forward on his toes. He did
not
want to go back to the
Times
with bad news one more time.

The commanding general looked at the chief of staff and said, “You tell PAO I think it’s a brilliant idea, putting a reporter with 4-23.”

Belcher choked on a string of saliva. “Sir?”

“Sure,” Bright said, “let the reporter have at it—full access, talk to anyone he wants, show him all the maps, get him involved in the whole planning process, throw our arms wide open, and give him an honorary Classified clearance.”

Now the chief was starting to grin big time. His lips were loose rubber across his face.

“If he says Victim Number Two Thousand is gonna come from 4-23, then I think we should respect his powers of psychic observation,” the CG continued. “While we’re at it, have Harkleroad here personally escort the
New York Times
when they go out on patrol. I’ve even got a special flak vest he can wear.”

“You do, sir?” The chief was barely keeping it in at this point.

“Sure, I do. It’s got a big ole red bull’s-eye painted on the back—makes it easier for Johnny Terrorist to see when he’s aiming at Number Two Thousand. This way, we can be assured the reporter can be right there on the spot when the blessed event happens.”

“Brilliant, sir! Brilly-fucking-int!”

Harkleroad’s face throbbed with shame.

The general’s face rippled downward, all humor gone from his eyes and mouth. “Now get the fuck out of my office, both of you!”

The chief herded Harkleroad ahead of him out the door, turning once to give the Old Man an unanswered wink before leaving.

When Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad learned the identity of Soldier Number Two Thousand, his guts torqued and blood predictably seeped from his nostrils. This was not how he’d expected it to play out, not in the least little dilly-dink bit. From Number 1990 onward, he’d been keeping track with tick marks on the dry-erase board mounted on the wall next to his desk.

Private Ralph J. Egbert, KIA, Salman Pak.
Tick.

Sergeant First Class Israel Munoz, KIA, Sadr City.
Tick.

Specialist James D. Apgar, KIA, Sadr City.
Tick.

Private Ellis Wheeler Jr., KIA, Mosul.
Tick.

Private First Class Andrew C. Mount, KIA, Mosul.
Tick.

Second Lieutenant Erika Sheridan, KIA, Adhamiya.
Tick.

Specialist Isaiah D. Washington, KIA, Ramadi.
Tick.

Specialist Aaron L. Karst, KIA, Ramadi.
Tick.

Private Jamie Rosen, KIA, Ramadi.
Tick.

For days, he’d stared at that next blank spot, playing guessing games with gender, rank, location. If he had his druthers, who would he, Eustace L. Harkleroad, prefer the two thousandth American casualty to be? A Hispanic sergeant who leaves behind a wife and eight children in El Paso when his too-fast Humvee hits a bad bump in the road and flips into a canal? A milk-fed Midwestern boy, so quickly promoted to captain, barely five years out of West Point, who burns to a crisp in the back of an armored personnel carrier? A black female medic stabbed to death by one of her patients, a crazed Local National whose bandages she’d been so lovingly, tenderly,
heroically
changing as he lay on a cot in the Combat Support Hospital when, with a sudden crescendoing growl, he reared up, whipped out a box cutter, and sliced her jugular (investigation still pending)? He prayed to God that Number Two Thousand wouldn’t be just another bland, run-of-the-mill death—blah-blah patrol struck an IED in the neighborhood of blah-blah, killing Private Joe Blah-Blah. When it finally came, Harkleroad hoped the last tick mark would have the punch of patriotism, a heart-tugging story that would bring a misty tear to the eye of even the most callous, hard-drinking reporter in the Associated Press. America deserved a grand, glorious death to mark this most ignoble of occasions (he could never use that phrase, of course, but he sure liked the sound of it).

“Where are you?” he asked the blank spot on his dry-erase board. “
Who
are you?”

When he finally got his answer, late in the evening after the evening BUB and just before he was about to leave the palace for his hooch, he was stunned into disbelief. And nosebleeds.

“Are you sure?” he asked the major from G-1 who had just set the fresh-printed file on his desk. After reading the contents—three pieces of paper: a SMOG report and the personnel file—he closed the folder and asked again, “Are we absolutely certain he’s the one?”

“Certain to the nth degree,” the major said wearily. He’d just come on shift, but this already looked like it would be a long one. “He’s the only U.S. casualty in all of Iraq today. Hard to believe, I know, but we’ve been on the phone with Basra and Taji for the last two hours and they’ve confirmed they have no kills in their sector, which
never
happens but apparently it did today. Blue moons are on the rise.”

“But—”

“I’m afraid there are no
buts,
sir. We’ve done the arithmetic five times and this—” he craned his neck to read the file label “—Captain Shrinkle is the one. He’s Number Two Thousand.”

Harkleroad read the SMOG report again and shook his head. “Are we absolutely certain of the circumstances? We’ve confirmed it was the Australian pool and there were no other Americans present?”

“Check, check, and triple check.”

“And this affadavit from the Australian officer about the alleged false identity. You’ve confirmed with the British em—”

“Ad nauseam, sir.” The major sighed. “Like I said, we’ve done the math, we’ve made the calls, we’ve eliminated any doubt. Now, if you’ve got nothing more for me, sir, I need to get back—”

“Yes, yes, go ahead.” Harkleroad leaned back in his chair and clutched the file folder to his chest. When the major had gone, whisking out with a grating officiousness, Eustace started muttering, “No, no, no,
NO
!”

After another five minutes of rocking and moaning, stanching his nostrils, and failing to deny the undeniable, he got himself together and climbed the stairs to the second floor. He knew what he had to do, where he had to go, who he had to face.

The chief of staff was sitting behind his desk, clicking his mouse and scowling at the screen. The overhead fluorescent lights winked off his polished head like a warning beacon. He’d been called back to the palace before he’d had a chance to finish his dinner. It was Italian night at the dining facility and there was a dime-sized spot of spaghetti sauce on his cheek, dried and forgotten.

“PAO!” he barked, not even looking up from the report scrolling across his screen. Somehow, he’d sensed Harkleroad was standing there in his doorway. Perhaps snuffling back the still-prickling nosebleed had given him away; or maybe he just oozed fear like a pheromone. Eustace advanced a few feet inside the carpeted room.

“Sir?”

“You’ve seen this shit-doggle I’m looking at right now?”

“The casualty report on Captain Shrinkle, sir?”

“Of
course
the casualty report on Shrinkle—what the fuck else would I be doing back here in my office at this hour? What I want to know is, what are we going to do about it? What plan have you come up with for addressing this little problem of ours in the media? I’m assuming you’ve got a plan and the reason it’s not sitting at the top of my in-box right now is only because you haven’t had time to print it out and carry it up to me.” He pulled his eyes away from the computer screen and looked at Harkleroad’s empty hands.

“Of course, sir. That’s exactly it.” Harkleroad had no plan. His mind had been stunned into temporary stasis and he had no clue what he would do about Shrinkle, the disgraced American officer (murderer! towel jockey!) who had been masquerading (deception!) as a British national (international complications!) while carousing (drinking! bikinis! swimming!) with the Australians (polynational complications!). It was a scandal on so many levels he couldn’t even begin to count. Oh, good gravy! Even if Shrinkle had not been Number Two Thousand, this would still be a problem, most certainly a whopping migraine for the PAO staff. But now that he’d drawn the winning lottery number—

“So . . . ?”

“Sir?”

“The plan, PAO, the plan! In less than ten minutes, I’ll have the Old Man on the horn wanting to know how we’re going to approach this in the media and I’ve got to have at least one little fucking bone I can throw his way. What have you got for me? Sum it up now and you can turn in the written report later tonight.” The lights blinked cruelly off the chief’s dome.

Think, think,
think
. Like a dog emerging from a frigid lake, Harkleroad shook off the paralysis. A plan. A bone. A doorway out of this mess. “What if . . .”

The chief cocked his head, light bouncing all about the room. “Ye-es . . . ?”

Just as certainly, light trickled into Lieutenant Colonel Eustace Harkleroad’s mind. “What if, sir, what if this KIA
wasn’t
one of ours?”

“Come again?” Colonel Belcher shoved a pinkie into his ear and comically wriggled it. “I think my hearing’s gone on the fritz.”

If that was a personal dig, Harkleroad chose to ignore it. He brazenly picked up the personnel file from the chief’s desk. “This may be the worst idea in the history of man, but what if the deceased person in this SMOG report wasn’t Captain Shrinkle? What if somebody got it wrong? What if the deceased really was a British national named—” he flipped open the folder “—Richard Belmouth and we incorrectly identified him as our Captain Shrinkle?”

“PAO, it seems to me you’re still suffering from cranial-anal dislodgement.” He looked back at his computer screen. “The report I’m looking at here says it was Shrinkle—”

“According to whom, sir?” His voice was winding up to a higher pitch as the plan flooded every crevice of his brain. “According to the Australians at the pool? According to the ones who knew him as a Brit named Belmouth? According to a bunch of beer-swilling Aussies who never met our Captain Abe Shrinkle?” He was on a roll now. His mother would be so proud if she were standing here watching his mind unfolding like a flower. “I say we stick with the fiction that the deceased is an unfortunate British archaeologist. We’ll figure out what to do with Captain Shrinkle later.”

The chief’s jaw had long ago dropped open and stayed there. “Ho-ly shit, PAO. When you come up with a whopper, you really deliver a big one, don’t you?”

Harkleroad couldn’t stop himself—he was rolling uphill at full speed now. “As for forensics, sir—well, from what I’ve been able to gather, nothing remained of
Richard Belmouth
other than an arm. No dental, no dog tags, not even any swim trunks. He was completely and totally vaporized by the mortar.”

“That arm have any fingerprints?”

“Sir, if you look at the report, you’ll see the fingers were burned down to nothing but nubs, every last one of them. You couldn’t really call it an arm anymore, for all intents and purposes.” He sniffed and swallowed a snot-gob of blood. “Lucky for us, if I do say so myself.”

The chief sat back in his chair and jiggled his mouse a few times. “You’re right . . . obliterated. Wiped off the face of the earth. Well, I’ll be fucked . . .” The chief of staff sank into deep, troubled thought. Then he started to growl. “That’s all well and good but the fact remains we still have Shrinkle to deal with. The gym will be calling before long, wanting to know why he’s not there to hand out towels.”

“Oh. Errr . . . ummm . . .” Harkleroad’s brain clicked and whirred.

“We can call him whoever we want, but he’ll still be a hot poker up our ass.”

“That’s true, sir, and to be honest
. . .
” His nose started to retingle. “To be honest, I haven’t thought it all the way through. That—that aspect. But, um, I have faith a solution will eventually come along and we’ll know how to handle Captain Shrinkle.” He pressed forward valiantly. (Good gravy, his mother would be proud!) “The most important thing at the moment is denial of identification. If we say the body isn’t ours, then it isn’t, is it, sir?”

The chief was still growling but the growls were starting to die down to mere grunts. “Denial of identification, huh? I don’t know if the Old Man will buy off on it.”

“He doesn’t have to, sir. In fact, he shouldn’t. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, et cetera. In fact,” here he allowed himself a small smile, “in fact, I’m starting to believe in Richard Belmouth myself, sir. I don’t know why we’re even bringing Captain Shrinkle into the conversation.”