News From the Red Desert (14 page)

Rashid sat behind the café on a trash can and listened intently to the evening sky, but all he could hear was conversation from the coffee shop and steam hissing from the espresso maker. He stared south, concentrating on the line where the mountains abraded the sky. He saw nothing. It grew darker. Then he heard them.

The drones sounded like faraway chainsaws; high-pitched and buzzing, fading and resurging as stray air currents brought the sound forward
or arrested it. They were audible long before they could be seen. A few seconds later, he spotted them descending abruptly out of the sky, their stick-insect landing gear unfolding and flaps hung low. Rashid thought they were beautiful, otherworldly and chilling. He loved that they could fly for days, and, apparently, tell the time showing on your watch from twenty thousand feet. He presumed that he could be seen even now, as he watched them line up and plunge toward the airstrip. The first of them taxied toward its handlers, its missile rack empty. Imagine sitting and drinking tea with your comrades or your family, no idea there were Americans anywhere near. And then, boom. You could see why, when they got it wrong, the survivors were so upset. Why everyone in the Tribal Areas seethed about them. Which didn't change how beautiful they were.

The last of the drones landed just before the night's blackness came and taxied to its handler before shutting off the engine, and for the first time since Rashid sat down to watch, it was quiet. Then the Apache and Blackhawk helicopters began winding up and the night raid soldiers lined up beside them.

As the sun set, the shadows from the mountains to the southwest raced out across the plain. When they reached the airfield, darkness swept over it as if sprayed from a hose. The sun slid below the mountains and in a moment the stars emerged. Lights all over the base flicked on and the helicopters began taking off. The Apaches left first, and then the long stream of Blackhawks and then finally the twin-rotor Chinooks, with their heavier thumping beat. A few minutes of noise and then they were all gone. Great plumes of dust settled back on the base. The lights of the helicopters winked out one by one in the distance. Tonight, like most nights, they flew south, into the Red Desert, where the trouble came from. Rashid waited until the last of those lights were gone and then he walked back into the café.

Deirdre stood and put her laptop back in its case. She looked right at Rashid as he came in but did not acknowledge his nod. She flung her bag over her shoulder and left. The place was empty except for a pair of chess players. Rashid filled the mop pail.

J
oint Special Operations Command insisted on autonomy and so General Lattice, the commander of American Special Forces in Afghanistan did not report to General Jackson, the commander of the rest of the American forces in the country. This would have been less of an affront to Jackson if Special Forces had remained the niche asset they were considered to be when that division of responsibility was negotiated. But the war had now become largely a Special Forces undertaking, and General Lattice would hardly return General Jackson's calls, which made Jackson seethe. Lattice had the latitude he needed to do anything he wanted, operationally, and all the political blowback, the outraged calls from Afghan leaders, even from the Afghan and American presidents, would be directed to Jackson. Accountability without control or even much influence: Jackson felt like the electrocuted dog in the box in a 1950s behavioural experiment.

His protests about this state of affairs achieved nothing. He had been in Afghanistan four months now, and the magic he had wrought in Iraq was impossible here. So his star was fractionally less bright than it had been, and Special Forces—as an idea, as a community—just rose higher and higher in the estimation of the Congress and the media. SF were the
only ones who ever seemed to get anything done. And they never took casualties. Or photographs of themselves defiling bodies.

The first rule of war is: don't fight wars you won't win.

Lately, Jackson had been waking up at three, his thoughts roiling with the complexity of the situation. Tonight on the Kandahar base, with thoughts of the leak on his mind, and somewhere, circling, if he had to be honest, the notion that he might run into Deirdre O'Malley, he rose and put on his running gear rather than lie there the prisoner of his own problems.

Lattice was famous for his own early morning runs. The nonsense the media wrote about him—abstemious of alcohol and caffeine, sleeps three hours a night, sips only cups of hot water—always mentioned his four a.m. runs. As if one million middle managers at home who were trying to lose weight didn't jog in the morning, too.

As Jackson slipped out of his room and into the pitch-black night, he was aware that Lattice was likely doing the same thing.

Thomas Lattice asked Jeremy Jackson to be the best man at his wedding after they graduated from West Point because he had never in his life met anyone with the vigour and presence of his classmate; their friendship had expanded Lattice's understanding of the possible. Knowing Jeremy had inspired Thomas for the first time to aim for the very highest results, and aspire to the best and most demanding appointments. Thomas had stopped thinking of himself as well above average and started thing of himself as singular. That's what Jeremy did.

When they'd emerged into the spotlight as superstar generals, it felt to Jackson like his due, and to Lattice, like unending enhanced interrogation. But Lattice had come to believe fervently in his vision: for the SF, for the war, for Afghanistan. And when he was persuaded that his celebrity could be used to further those ends, he used it as he would any other useful weapon. He hated that Jeremy was so much more comfortable and skilled
with this stuff than he was. He hated that it mattered. Professionally, though, they had never been rivals until Iraq went so bad.

As the two men headed out into the night to run around the airfield, there was almost no sound. The flight line was quiet for the moment. Jackson saw Lattice halfway down the airstrip, a thousand yards away. It looked like it could be him, anyway. Lean almost to the point of skeletal and remorselessly fast. He could not try to catch him, Jackson realized.

Of course Lattice had spotted Jackson, long before he even reached the airfield. He got a thousand yards up in just a few minutes and when Jackson reached the running path around the airstrip, Lattice was far enough away that he did not even have to acknowledge seeing his former best man. Lattice would not look back.

They ran like this for an hour. At the end of the hour, they had covered fifteen kilometres and Jackson was on the verge of vomiting. Lattice had the kept the distance between them constant, and even now remained a distant dot, his posture and his pace nearly exactly what it had been.

Jackson was going to be late for his first meeting. He took an exit and ran, but not as fast as he had been running, back to his barracks to shower. Lattice saw him leave. He waited another five minutes to make sure Jackson wasn't coming back and then he slowed to a walk and then he hunched over, his hands on his knees. He vomited once and then stood straight. He started running again, but more slowly, toward the Special Forces compound.

I
t was the first time the sergeant—now captain—from Boise had been back to Kandahar. The remustering into intelligence had not been as complicated as he expected; he had been commissioned and promoted and right away sent to Baghdad. He had been surprised by how much he missed the Special Forces. He found the regular army uninspired. NCOs did not know their soldiers the way they did in the SF, and the difference in level of physical fitness was shocking. For the first few months he was in Baghdad it had been all he could do to bite his tongue. To his new colleagues, he knew he seemed standard issue SF: arrogant and contemptuous. When he saw himself in their eyes his first response was to stand even straighter—but then he remembered whose patches he wore on his shoulders now.

Since he was out of Special Forces, he could go by his real name: Rob Waller.

When the order came through for him to return to Afghanistan he had been surprised. He asked his company commander if he had put his name forward. His company commander assured him he would have discussed it with him before doing something like that. “I would have asked you not to,” Captain Waller said.

“Really?”

“Yes. I need to establish myself here. I can't always be the ex-SF guy.”

“The order came through to me as a done deal.”

“Okay.”

“They remember you well there, I'm told. I hope you've kept in shape.”

Waller nodded. His superior held out his hand and they shook.

“Stay safe,” he told him. Waller nodded again.

He had not forgotten that he'd liked Afghanistan so much better than Iraq, but the particulars of that affection started to come back to him even as he walked off the airplane. He remembered the smell of the Arghandab River and the scent of trees that grow at altitude—resinous and sharp. No palms here. Which was fine by him. Cold winters and summer nights and real trees, real country, real people. Real reason to be here in the first place.

The private-now-sergeant from Bar Harbor met him at the airstrip. “Good to see you again, uh, sir.”

“Yeah, get used to it.”

“Figured you were an SF lifer for sure.”

“Like you?”

“Well, who knows? Till something better comes along. Just hard to imagine what that could be.”

“Wars end, buddy.”

“I know. Not for a while though, it looks like. You here for long?”

“Probably not. Just looking into a few things.”

“That leak come from here, then?”

Waller met his eyes.

“OPSEC, huh?”

“I didn't say anything,” Waller said.

“Yessir.”

“Why do you think I'm looking into that?”

“It's all anyone is talking about. INT dudes and FBI and CIA have
been pouring in for the last three days, from Iraq and the States, both. Guys in the field are furious, apparently. Everyone says we're gonna see way more action out on the FOBs now, way more suicide bombers around KAF. In town you can tell everyone has watched those videos just by the way they look at us.”

“They always looked at us like that. One Afghan in a hundred, maybe, has access to a computer.”

“Well, they hate us now.”

“They started hating us the day after we arrived. And have hated us a little more every day since.”

“If you say so. Sir.”

Waller let it drop. “It's strange being back.”

“It's not Falluja, anyway.”

“It's not just the not-Falluja part that I like about this place. There's going to be plenty of fighting here, too.”

“So what is it?”

“The smell, maybe.”

“Doesn't Jet-A smell the same everywhere?”

“It's clean.”

“It's always clean. Pilots are fussy like that.”

“Iraq is an unholy mess.”

“So is this, Rob.”

They walked on.

“I mean sir.”

They saw the hole in the road from a thousand metres away. Deirdre and the soldiers knew what had happened long before they reached the remains of a burnt-out British Scorpion lying on its side in the ditch. At last, the Taliban had learned that they, like everyone else, would always lose firefights with ISAF soldiers. But in any country with fertilizer, kerosene and pressure cookers, there were other, one-sided, ways to fight an occupier.

The scene was days old. It had rained enough since that you could no longer smell blood, except when you got too close to the shattered vehicle. There were no bodies.

It pissed Warrant Officer Fortin off that the Brits had not removed the Scorpion yet. “People see something like this and they reach conclusions,” he grumbled. He turned to his soldiers. “Move on. Don't touch anything.” The platoon took a last look at the death site and resumed walking. Deirdre took a quick photograph and followed them. They were relieved when the road finally turned and they could no longer see the shattered British vehicle.

It was overcast for once and the heat had given way to a still coolness that had the soldiers wearing jackets. The rain had greened the country appreciably, washed the dust from the tree leaves. For once the landscape seemed to contain something other than desiccated menace. But intention does not live within landscape. Mountains are indifferent to humans. What they are is gorgeous. And large. Way bigger than you.

The soldiers lifted their eyes beyond the closest treelines, to the mountains in the east and the ridgelines and valley bottom before them. The sense of foreboding that the shattered British Scorpion had brought to the day lifted a little. A bit of breeze played among them. They stopped scanning every hollow for evidence of a sniper blind and started looking at the country itself. They were not used to its austere beauty yet.

Deirdre remembered the place as it had been when she first arrived, when optimism hung over it like a weather system. She remembered it as greener and less hot then, but war distorts every lens. It was true that the drought that had come with the war's resurgence was not caused by the war. But without the revived war, the irrigation canals would be working. When there's a war going on, most of the bad things that happen can be blamed on it.

Optimism. Once it's gone, how do you get it back? Vanished hope is worse than original skepticism, because of the hole it leaves behind. So long as they'd felt invincible, they had done amazing things. Build three thousand clinics and schools in fourteen months. Walk across
the country with nothing but a dog and daring. Rout the only fighting force that ever defeated the Red Army with air strikes and a handful of bearded soldiers. The world really was tipped in their favour those days, like the first flush of love, summer sunshine, and he likes you back.

Most of these guys here now knew nothing about what the place felt like back then. Some of them would have been in middle school. She watched them looking around, their eyes lifted a degree or two higher than usual, and she felt what they felt—a pause in the sense of jeopardy that allowed the loveliness of the place to sneak into them. Like when you're in the process of moving your stuff out of a boyfriend's apartment and you stop and notice how kind a man he is, really, however flawed. A hole in the cloud wall. Just to make it all maximally painful, later, when you find yourself yelling again.

Four in the afternoon, and the day had brought to them no other sign of war. Fortin realized his men were relaxing. That worried him, and he scanned constantly for a reason to start shouting. But there was none. And the harder he looked at the edges of the fields and down the road stretching before him, the more this looked like the land outside Pincher Creek, Alberta. Without the oil or order. Or Seagram's Five Star Canadian Rye Whisky. Or hockey. Or Ford F-150 pickups.

But the size of the sky felt the exactly same. And the blue mountains on the horizon. And the arid foothills that seemed barely to hold grass between rainstorms and erupted in green every time the sky darkened. And the ferocious love the people who lived on it had for the land.