News From the Red Desert (12 page)

“Perhaps you could ask him to teach you about the periodic table of the elements. A knowledge of science is a useful thing.”

“In Taiwan, does everyone go to school until they are married?”

“Not Taiwan,” she said gently. “Thailand. No, not always. The rich do, though. Which is part of how they stay rich.”

“What is the religion in Thailand?”

“Buddhism, mostly. There are Muslims in the south.”

“Are they persecuted?”

“They would say they are.”

“Is Buddhism an old religion?”

“One of the oldest.”

“Why does it mistreat Muslims?”

“It isn't the religion that mistreats them, my dear. It's the army.”

“Which is not Muslim.”

“Yes.”

“Muslims are mistreated wherever they are not the majority,” the boy said.

“Is that true?”

“Yes. My teacher told me that.”

“Who is your teacher?”

“I must not say.”

“Oh, so mysterious. Well, my dear, you may have your secrets. I certainly have mine.”

“If you really want, I would tell you.”

“You should not betray a confidence, Mohammed.”

“Okay.”

“Where does your family live?”

“I have no family now, ma'am. But my father lived in a village in North Waziristan. It is where he is buried.”

“Oh, I am very sorry.”

“It is okay. I am reconciled to it. My mother had to remarry and her new husband was not interested in me living with them. He already had many children.”

“Do you have contact with your mother at all?”

“I have not spoken to her since she told me I must leave.”

“Do you understand the position she was in?”

“Of course. It was her wish.”

“That you not contact her again?”

“No. What came before.” And with that his voice broke and he stood and wiped her table with his cloth repeatedly until he could talk again. “I must return to work now, ma'am.”

“Mohammed, you are a beautiful boy, and I know your mother loves you.”

He nodded.

“Go back to work before you get into trouble.”

Mohammed scurried back to the counter, where Amr had been watching his exchange with the masseuse. Business was very quiet that afternoon. Fazil had been doing books in the back. He had poked his head into the kitchen looked out at the café, surveying the room. He looked at Mohammed cleaning the coffee machine and then he went back to his books. Once he was gone, Amr pointed to the chess sets and raised his eyebrows at Mohammed. Mohammed looked toward the back, where Fazil had just retreated, and nodded.

A soldier walked through the door and took off his hat. For a moment no one realized who he was. And then the contractors did and they abandoned their chess game and stood. Rami Issay glanced over to see who had checkmated who. Seeing that no resolution had been achieved,
he looked up at the men and then followed their eyes to the door. Another younger officer had come in behind the soldier, following him closely. The contractors slid past them and out the door.

The soldier was Lieutenant General Jeremy Jackson, United States Army, the ISAF commander in Afghanistan. His companion was his chief of staff, Colonel Fred Shaw from Fayetteville. “Would you like a game?” the younger man asked the older.

“I would.”

Shaw collected one of the onyx and alabaster sets from the shelf beside the till. He carried it back to a table and began setting it up. Fazil approached and Jackson ordered two cappuccinos. Fazil nodded and retreated. Shaw held out his closed fists to Jackson. Jackson picked the left. Shaw opened his hand. White. He nodded.

Shaw replaced the two pawns and considered his opening. His objective here was complex. He could not, would not, try any less than his hardest against the general. But there were other considerations. In baseball, Jackson was fascinated by knuckleballers. Shaw decided the Reti flank opening would be better, here. King's knight to f3. This was the hypermodern style, where the goal is to control, rather than occupy, the centre of the board. It would strike the general as creative. Shaw moved his king's knight.

Lately General Jackson was spending more time in Kandahar than in Kabul. The war was going poorly here. He had been in meetings all day with the regional district commanders, reviewing the progress of the war in the south. The Brits and the Canadians were taking casualties and holding the most contested territory, as they pointed out, endlessly; the Dutch, the least of either. All were doing about as well as far as quantifiable metrics went: girls in school, electricity availability. Lots was being done, but not much was being achieved. Iraq had been like that when Jackson took command of his division there, too. If it was a simple problem to solve it would have been solved already.

Shaw had heard about the chess sets at the coffee shop and thought that after the long morning of bad news meetings, Jackson would like to play. As he thought about his own answering move, Jackson
wondered how Tom Lattice, the Special Forces—outside Jackson's control—commander felt about it. No doubt it would strike him as a distraction. With the recently escalating tempo of operations, Lattice was in KAF frequently these days, too. A lot of the time he was the ranking general on the base. To Lattice, pretty much everything was a distraction—even eating. Right now, he was probably resentfully chewing on some uncooked rice in the Special Forces compound, a hundred metres from the coffee shop, with its own walls and wire and gate and sentries and prison even within the base: the whole SF mindset rendered physical.

“I'm surprised this exists, a hundred metres from the SF compound,” Jackson said to Shaw.

“A bit frivolous for the likes of them, isn't it?”

Shaw wondered why Jackson had never transferred to SF. In the months after 9/11 it had been clear that it would be the growth industry in the military. Jackson would have been a lieutenant colonel then. A little senior to make the move, maybe. Shaw had been a captain, and had known Jackson only by reputation. He was famous for taking his battalion's second lieutenants—twenty-four-year-olds—running every Friday afternoon. And not stopping until they asked if they could. When they learned later, over beer and Tylenol in the officers' mess, about his Princeton PhD and fluency in Arabic, it wasn't from him. And so they would be impressed by it twice over. From those stories, Shaw hadn't liked him.

Jackson was still staring at the board. It had been a long time since he had had to respond to the Reti opening. The general's estimation of Shaw, already high, rose incrementally. Meticulous, but sometimes unorthodox—a useful pairing of traits. It was how he viewed himself, of course. Queen's pawn, up two. Predictable, but still the strongest response. The interesting part of that opening would unfold in the next half-dozen moves.

“Here's the thing,” Jackson said, scanning the room. “Places like this should be less strange. The only way to win this war is over years and years. We should build these bases with the presumption that we'll
be here for years and years. Because we will be. The alternative is just losing. We should be building with brick, not plywood and canvas.”

Shaw moved his king's bishop to king's knight two. Immediately he was taking control of the centre of the board. Jackson stopped talking for a moment.

He moved his knight to cover the pawn. Reacting, not initiating. He had to brief the Joint Chiefs of Staff the following week and he had been thinking about how he would describe the situation here. He had been brought here to do the same magic he had done in Anbar. It's dangerous to be considered a magician.

“Of course, the country is sick of war. More tired of it than anyone even realizes. No one wants to talk about being here for decades to come,” Jackson said. The country he was referring to wasn't Afghanistan.

Shaw brought out his own queen's knight.

“I like this place. I like that no one here even knows who I am,” the general said.

“The contractors who left when we walked in knew who you are.”

“Oh.” That disappointed Jackson. He had flattered himself to think he could be anonymous if he wanted and he had flattered himself that he could tell if he wasn't.

Jackson decided that if Lattice moved to shut the coffee shop down, the way he had the Burger King, he would veto him. He also decided that if a surge was coming, he had to figure out how or even if he could steer it to any purpose. Otherwise, he should get as far away from here as possible. While he waited for Shaw to move, he took out and wrote on his field message pad: Ret'ment Date? Across the room from him, two South Asian men, possibly Bangladeshis, played chess. A father and son, from the similarity of their noses. Likely from Dacca, given the chess playing. Their positions were carefully constructed, but both players betrayed an excess of caution: they had each castled within the first five moves. Reasonably well thought out aggression would shatter either of them. Get a rook onto the father's seventh rank and his position falls apart. The son's queen's rook was vulnerable in half a dozen ways.
Clearly he was still learning the game. What kind of man would make his son work in a café in a war zone when he should be in school?

This place was unexpected, like Shaw's Reti opening. The soldiering part of these wars was all anyone at home talked about. But wars are way more than the shooting. Even within the same side, they're about competing ideas about how to live, about what is disposable and what is essential. A place like this stands for something. Which is why Lattice would be so suspicious of it. And why Jackson thought he should defend it.

In the back, Fazil paused in his bookkeeping to twirl his pencil around his finger and stare at the little jets of light that spurted through gaps in the café walls. It was so hot his hands ran with sweat, but that was not what distracted him. He had seen Mohammed talking to Just Amachai and was surprised by how much his acquaintance with her was starting to bother him. He did not know what the Thai woman wanted with the boy. If Mohammed were another year older, he would have told him not to talk to her, but he was still such a child, and he had to sympathize with Mohammed's desire to talk to someone the same age as his mother. Even if she was a whore.