News From the Red Desert (16 page)

That night, Facebook and YouTube leapt to life after InformationIsFree posted another treasure: 9 minutes and 42 seconds of a helmet cam–recorded assault on a compound near Gardez crowded with senior Taliban leaders meeting to discuss the upcoming fighting season. An AC-130 led it off with a two-minute-long 30-mm cannon burst—eight thousand rounds—through the walls and the ceiling of the compound, immediately followed by tracer fire from three platoons of Marine infantry. It was like watching an explosion in reverse, sucking in all that light and heat and ferocity.

And then the fire team advanced through the objective and secured the target. Shattered men lay behind the compound's gate, groaning and expiring. It was the women who caught the eye, though. Among them, bedecked in wedding silks, growing dull with congealing blood, was the bride.

The company commander could be heard giving a rapid series of unintelligible orders. Then came the last one, loud and clear. “Cut out the bullets. This was the Taliban that did this.” A soldier looked at him for a moment afterwards, not moving. “You know they'd do it to us,” the commander said.

The camera was turned off then.

Anakopoulus had not seen this clip before. Surely that had been faked.

A
sunny late-spring afternoon, warm enough that all the windows of the café had been flung open and the door jammed wide, but not yet hot-hot, in the ferocious way it would be in a few weeks.

More, better: Rami Issay had not been in the café since dawn. The mood of the place reflected these two gifts. Even Amr smiled as he instructed Mohammed at chess. The coffee shop glowed with reflected golden light and the usual squalor retreated. The warmth of the sun brought out the odours of damp soil and desert flowers; even the tired eucalyptus tree beside Taliban's Last Stand was obvious to the senses, a hundred metres away, mingling with the scent of the coffee and the baking pastries. Fazil swept the floor and Deirdre O'Malley paused for a moment in her texting and laptopping and looked out the window at a platoon of Jordanian soldiers lined up outside the PX waiting to buy personal hygiene articles and then she looked at Fazil, and then her gaze wandered over to Rashid, who sat behind the counter reading a copy of the
Stars and Stripes.
Mohammed moved his king's knight to king's bishop three. Amr let slip a low whistle.

Just Amachai walked past outside, carrying a parcel. She glanced toward the café but did not wave. Anakopoulus, on one of his increasingly
extended coffee breaks, drank his latte and watched her until she disappeared behind the hospital. The young colonels had been through the café earlier in the morning, oddly energetic. Something going on in the OPS world, Anakopoulus supposed.

He was not interested in what it was exactly, because in a way, he already knew: a brigade-scale sweep through the Panjwai was coming. Or a new movement of Taliban elements through the mountain passes. Or semi-credible reports of hand-held surface-to-air missiles being deployed by Taliban elements in the east.

Anakopoulus wondered why Rami Issay was not around. He'd eavesdropped on Fazil explaining to Rashid that, at dawn, General Jeremy Jackson had stopped in alone for a cup of hot water after his twenty-klick run. He had surveyed the night-shift chess players and the small lending library, then had picked up a copy of
The Things They Carried.
An hour later, someone from Kellogg Brown and Root, the company that managed the civilian-provided services on the base, had called and left a message requesting the manager come to the headquarters building to see him.

The collective suspicion was that Rami Issay was now riding a bus to the Khyber Pass. More hostile imaginings chose different geographies: Bagram's black prison; ISI compounds and hoods. He had turned out to be a spy, an AQ operative, a brother-in-law of Mullah Omar. He had been caught embezzling or diverting hundred-kilo bags of coffee beans to friends of his in exchange for opium. He was behind the much-whispered-about canola oil incident last month. None of the worst suspicions were said aloud.

Deirdre noticed Anakopoulus sitting alone, as usual, resolutely not noticing her. She was used to men who adopted that posture, just to show how indifferent they are, and she understood what it meant. There is a kind of war that is intensely sexual, where the soldiers, women and men, all want only to fuck and tell stories and exult and drink. Gulf War One had been like that, apparently. The first two weeks of Iraq, maybe. But not this, and not what Iraq became. Sour misogyny ran through it
now, with weariness and cynicism flowing alongside—different results from a common origin.

She had heard of General Jackson's visit here and she wondered what he had thought of the café. He would have liked its scale, she guessed. Just a few tables and a staff so small you knew all their faces by the third visit. If there really was an OPSEC issue with Rami Issay or the coffee shop, the general wouldn't have come near this place; it would all have been dismantled by OGA or the contractors by now. Indeed, he had probably just been curious about the place. Jeremy (she still allowed herself to think of him as Jeremy) was one of the most curious men she had ever known. He had to know about everything he saw, especially anything not in keeping with the pattern. A chess club/café in the middle of his war would catch his eye. It crossed her mind to ask him to pose for a photo here, but she knew that he would never allow that. But still it would make a good picture. For later, maybe. When they'd figured out how to deal with each other again.

She felt the quiet pleasure of the café evaporate abruptly before she knew why it had. And then she saw Rami Issay, beaming his way through the door with the ebullient self-satisfaction of a man who, long derided, believes himself on the verge of vindication. He replied to people who had not greeted him, every word heard throughout the café. In an instant the suffused happiness of the afternoon was replaced by wary irritation. He annoyed, by level of annoyance:

Frowning at Rashid's odd question and ignoring the barbed glances, Rami Issay announced in a whisper easily audible in every corner of the café, “I need to meet with the staff immediately.” Mohammed and Rashid and Fazil all shuffled behind the counter to join Amr.

Puffed up like some giant mushroom burst forth from the forest floor, Issay followed them. His voice breaking, he declared that, in view of his success with the café, he had had the honour of being asked by his employers in the Kellogg Brown and Root corporation, private contractors administering the base's civilian-operated aspects—including the Green Beans—to establish a cinema club for the base.

“I will bring some brief bit of colour to this godforsaken place yet, I tell you,” Rami Issay declared. “And even if that small bloom is buried five minutes later under a great pile of fresh donkey dung, then it will still have been an accomplishment of which I may be proud.”

Fazil and Amr stepped away and resumed cleaning.

“Anyway,” Issay added, after a moment, “I have been a cinephile since I was old enough to sit upon my father's knee on Saturday afternoons and watch Sultan Rahi kill brigands. This will be enjoyable.”

Rashid said, “Boss, listen to me. Nobody—not one person here—wants to watch the legends of the Pakistani silver screen twirl their mustache ends and swing their swords about.”

“Oh, I know that. And I know well who our audience will be and what is the most vital and sophisticated film canon. American movies are what we will show.”

Rashid gestured to the café's patrons. “Can you name a film made in the last decade that these people will be interested in watching?”

“I'm not going to give you the satisfaction of saying
Lawrence of Arabia.
”

“Can you even tell me who is Megan Fox?”

“We will most assuredly not be showing those sorts of films, my young friend.”

“Boss, right now, she's the highest-paid young actress in the feature film industry.”

“Well, then, perhaps I shall be making her acquaintance, one night when the best way I can think of to spend my evening is to watch a film inspired by a plastic car toy.”

That gave Rashid pause. “And where will we be getting our films?” he asked at last.

“I have found a distributor.”

“Do they know they'll have to fly their films into Kandahar?”

“Don't you worry about anything.”

“What is this outfit's name?”

“BitTorrent.”

Rashid rubbed his face with both hands. “This is going to be an almighty disaster.”

“I'm only joking. Must you be so unrelentingly pessimistic, Rashid Siddiqui? The military will try to bring in what we ask for—so long as it is not sexually licentious, they tell me. They've given me a list of films
they have immediately on hand. I will show it to you and perhaps you can suggest some titles that will resonate with the yoot here.”

“The yoot?”

“Have you not watched
My Cousin Vinny
?”

“I have seen it,” Rashid said, into his hands.

Later that afternoon, Rami Issay wandered out and left the nearly empty café to Amr and Mohammed. Amr told the boy to sit down and have something to eat. Mohammed turned on the computer in the back that they were allowed to use. He entered “Taliban” into the YouTube search field and the first result showed the bodies of four schoolteachers who had taught at a school built within sight of Bagram. Mohammed thought they looked like kind men and wondered why anyone would shoot them. What had they been teaching? He would have to ask about that. Then he entered “Americans in Afghanistan” and the first link that came up was the just-released video of the helicopter machine gunning people in the street. And the clip after that was the colonel telling his men to cut the bullets out of the bodies of the women. Then his break was over and so he signed off the computer and walked back into the front of the café to help with the lunch rush. He was so nauseous he was no longer hungry.