News From the Red Desert (13 page)

But everyone was a whore here. Himself included. Taking money from the Franks to make them coffee. Dishing up their little pastries. Doing these accounts.

It was much too hot to do this work. He got up and walked back out to the counter. He watched General Jackson finish his cappuccino and stand. The general nodded at Fazil and Fazil smiled back. The general's servant stood, too. The general walked out the door. His servant followed him.

Ten minutes later Deirdre came back into the café and sat down. She did not want any more coffee. She wanted a moment to think. Fazil began to
approach her and then, reading her correctly, turned around and went back to the till.

This was going to be the biggest story of the year and her service had been completely left out of it. You could tell it was important by how quickly the lies had started coming when she'd asked her colleagues about the leak. “Sorry, I haven't been kept in the loop on this. Sounds like a huge story, though. Let me know what you hear?” Not that lying wasn't normal, but normally journalists lie in the other direction: they say they know all about everything. The
Guardian
's Mick Sheppard had been marginally less deceptive: “If the London and New York reporters can do this story, sharing credit with and involving the people in the field isn't going to be top of mind for them, is it? They resent us like ass itch, Deirdre, you know it.” Which was all true, but did not answer her question. The CBS reporter, David Mitchell, was more frank: “Honestly, it sounds like it could mean my job. All anyone back home can talk about is how we haven't been included and how that must be my fault somehow. Who have I pissed off? As if pissing people off isn't supposed to kinda be our jobs—there and over here. What are you hearing, Deirdre?”

“Not much.” Already she was scanning the media tent for other people to talk to. In a moment he would be telling her how much he admired her Iraq work, and suggesting they go for coffee sometime.

“So listen…”

“Talk to you later, David.” She spun away. That had been close.

Master Sergeant Anakopoulus walked into Green Beans having just seen the stories about the helicopter video. They had seared his eyes. So much for this blowing over.

He ordered his usual coffee and cherry pie. He did not end up even picking up his fork, but he sipped his coffee and held that down, at least. It had surprised him how quickly the first of the snipers-with-trophies pictures had been disseminated. He'd have thought there would have
been more fact checking, more verification. Nobody had yet mentioned the embed-in-arms pic, the one he had intended to send.

The trick with the laptop and the inactive email account wouldn't keep him safe for long. He had taken that computer and burned it at the dump, but the signal traffic from his location to the dropbox could still give him away. Did the NSA monitor all the dropbox's incoming traffic? They would if they could. If they had thought of it. Certainly he couldn't access the dead man's account ever again. The only way forward was to act perfectly normal and pretend nothing had happened. Probably five thousand wireless accounts on the base. Just don't give them any way to narrow it down. Every one of their suspects would be under surveillance today. He looked around the café. There were no unfamiliar faces. So either he wasn't being watched, or he wasn't being watched by amateurs.

Normal. Act normal. Do what he usually did. Come for his coffee and then go back to work. Look after his guys. Snarl from time to time. Don't drink anymore. Write emails to Susie and don't send them. He stood up and made his way back to his warehouse. His coffee cup was almost full and the pie untouched.

There were no televisions in the café—this had been one of Rami Issay's non-negotiables—and so those who spent much of the day there remained unaware of the collective frenzy over the leaks. A few hours after the journalists had begun to hover anxiously at the press tent to whisper about how little they knew, and a couple of hours before Anakopoulus had come over to not eat a slice of pie and not drink a cup of coffee, the websites of the
Times
and the
Guardian
and
Le Monde
and
Der Spiegel
all put up preliminary stories about the magnitude of the leaks that had been shared with them—though they were all assiduous about not saying anything precise about their content. That discipline had not lasted long. Pretty quickly, the
Guardian
decided that
Der Spiegel
had broken their agreed-upon rules of disclosure, and responded by
releasing the helicopter video, with the justification that there were no secrets in it, merely embarrassments. The
Times'
editors wrote to each of the German and British editors reprimanding them and, receiving no immediate response, went retaliatory and released three snipers-with-trophies videos and two more guided bomb-sight clips.

In the café, all anyone noticed was that the journalists were absent that afternoon. If it was something going on with war, the flight line would have been active, but it wasn't. Maybe a party of some sort, then.

In the early evening Rashid slipped into the back of the shop and went to stand in the open doorway facing the airstrip. He could see uniformed men working on the rows of Chinooks and Blackhawks and Apaches; khaki-grey clothed men stood on ladders and looked at rotor gearboxes.

When the pilots came into the coffee shop they described the war as almost entirely an air-to-ground effort. Regular force infantry maintained the perimeter around the airfields at KAF and Bagram and patrolled some of the roads radiating out from them. From the airstrips, and from the carriers in the Indian Ocean, and from Diego Garcia, and from the smaller airstrips across the country, the Air Force flew thousands of missions a day—during large ops, tens of thousands—air strikes, medevacs, reconnaissance, resupply and personnel rotation: everything by air. The SF teams dropped off in the villages by helicopter at night were just another payload—for which there were other, equally lethal, alternatives, which never had to be subsequently extracted under fire.