News From the Red Desert (19 page)

“I think they will dislike it. Look what they read when they come here. Not Chuck Pahalniuk novels. Tom Clancy,
Soldier of Fortune Magazine,
things like that…”

“I do look. And I see that anti-materialism and reverence for the community is as much a military thing as a left-wing thing. What our customers here recoil against is compulsion. This is actually the sentiment of
Fight Cub.
It's almost libertarian.”

“Boss, keep your voice down.” Switching into Urdu: “You can't be seen to be political in any way.”

“It'll be fine. If anyone objects, it was Ramstein's doing. Let us have a cup of chai.”

And they walked from the storeroom into the front of the café. It was busy. Little Mohammed and Amr were working hard. It was consistently busier than it had been. The chess sets were part of it. But there were more non-players coming in, too. Rashid thought that the presence of the chess players had altered the feeling of the place, made it seem less bleakly functional, and that drew soldiers.

Rami asked Amr to make two cups of chai. As Amr nodded and went to prepare them his irritation was as obvious to Rashid as it was invisible to their boss. Amr's cheeks had flushed subtly beneath his beard
and his eyes had tightened with restrained violence. Amr had been operating the espresso machine just as fast as he could, pulling double shots and steaming cups of milk one after the other in a steady blur and shriek. Mohammed scurried from table to table, his devotion to his position at all times evident. He made no mistakes with orders. Amr's point was: Rami Issay and Rashid Siddiqui could make their own chais—and would have, if they'd bothered to think about the people they were supposed to be working with rather than this blasphemy of a cinema show they were planning.

Mohammed put their chais up on the counter. They picked them up and surveyed the café. They sipped their chais. Eventually Rami Issay said, “It must be time, my young friend.”

Rashid rose without answering and walked outside the café with a crowbar. He opened the crate the projector had been shipped in. Taped to the projector was its operator's manual. Relieved, Rashid sat down on the crate and opened it.

Rami Issay watched through the window as Rashid consulted the manual and then set up the projector such that it would illuminate an outside wall of the café. They had borrowed enough chairs and benches from the big sergeant to seat two hundred people.

The screening was to begin a half-hour after sundown—an hour away. There were some rules. The projector was never to face the airstrip, lest it cost a pilot night vision. In the event of a rocket attack, the screening was to be halted immediately. No smoking would be permitted in the audience. Fazil had been working in the back kitchen since dawn. He had baked three hundred apple carrot muffins and made one hundred roast beef sandwiches. Whenever he lifted his eyes from arrays of sliced bread in front of him, he glowered at whomever he saw. Rami Issay had stayed out of his way since ten that morning.

He turned away from the window to survey the café, which was buzzing away happily enough under the attentions of Amr and Mohammed. There were four chess games going of unremarkable quality. Just Amachai sat alone and drank her tea and watched everyone. Deirdre O'Malley walked in, sat down, and immediately descended into her laptop.

Deirdre looked up as a UPI reporter whose name she couldn't remember, uninvited, sat down at her table. “Hey O'Malley, I was hoping I'd run into you.”

She couldn't recall meeting him. Then, after a moment, she remembered. “Oh, hi.” He had been in Baghdad doing vacation relief for someone for a few weeks three years ago.

“So, have you seen—?”

She cut him off. “Listen…”

“Don.”

“Dude, I'm on deadline here.”

“Okay, okay. I didn't see you writing.”

She watched him get up and walk out of the café. She looked back at her computer: every journalist who had ever been in Iraq and then run home, overwhelmed, had attached themselves to this story. An ex-boyfriend had just published the transcript of the helicopter crew's conversation, salted in a few mostly inaccurate explanations of the technical terms, and got the front page over the fold of the
Independent.
Another ex-less-than-a-boyfriend got a quarter-page op-ed decrying the media co-operation with the leaker:
THIS IS DAMAGING
, his headline protested, before he launched a rant upon the leaker. “The soldiers I embedded with did not endure all manner of threat so that their most difficult moments would be served up on the internet…” Three weeks in Iraq and one IED and one firefight and he had been finished. Pale and anxious and unable to work.

The real question—the story—was still: where had the leak come from? InformationIsFree wasn't saying. No one in the media tent seemed to know anything. Maybe someone in Bagram had leaked it. Or even Langley. But it was only a mission like ten thousand others, so why would anyone on the inside bother? She wondered then if it hadn't been exchanged informally. War porn.

Just then Mohammed approached her and asked if she wanted another cappuccino. She did not say anything for a moment, just looked at him,
as he looked back at her, nervous and quizzical. “Sure, Mohammed.” It was the first time she had used, or let him know that she knew, his name.

What she thought was, the spooks would find the leaker. And then there would be an arrest followed by a helicopter ride to an aircraft carrier. And the story would be released in a choreographed sequence of Bob Woodward whisperings and then news conferences with slides and evidence displays. She and every other field journalist would be left on the outside while the Sunday morning shows would clean up. It would be the year's biggest story. You could already tell that audiences were getting bored with the combat camera pieces. Urgent-sounding correspondent speaking excitedly into a mic. Helmet askew. In the background, dust and mud-brick huts. All that no longer captured people's eye the way it had. People already had their Call of Duty. They wanted something with narrative, now. A spy novel. Secrecy and treason.

As the café filled to capacity, Fazil appeared from the back and put on an apron and began taking orders. Rashid began helping behind the counter, too. They were none of them happy except Rami Issay. He leaned back in his chair beside the back door and closed his eyes, smiling. Amr muttered to Fazil that it looked like the boss was having a shit. Fazil scowled at the indecorous language but did not rebuke him.

Jeremy Jackson and Fred Shaw came in then, bending low and removing their Oakleys in the dimness. They both scanned for and saw Deirdre, who was staring at the wall three feet over Anakopoulus's head. They looked away. Shaw thought she was probably ignoring them; Jackson thought he would have been able to tell if it was purposeful. They sat down, Jackson with his back to her. Mohammed brought over a chess board, unbidden. They thanked him, and asked for drip coffees, black.

As the sun slipped behind the mountain, Rashid, operation manual in hand, walked outside to turn the projector on to prewarm the bulb. After confirming that the cooling fan was turning and that the vents
were unobstructed, he said to Rami Issay that it looked like everything was working fine.

The twilight sky was still a little too bright, but along Screaming Eagle Way soldiers were walking toward them. Most of these were unfamiliar faces—dressed in varieties of Under Armour and North Face fleeces. As they coalesced into a crowd outside the café, it became clear there were far too few chairs. Rami Issay grinned at his agitated young friend. Some of the audience sat down on the ground beside the chairs and others stood behind them. The popcorn maker was soon going full blast and notwithstanding the enormous sack of kernels that had accompanied it, Rashid worried that they would run out.

The sun dipped farther behind the mountain and Rashid watched the shadow racing across the airfield toward them. And then the moonless night descended, black and silky and punctured only by stars. He hit the button, the film flickered to life and conversation stopped. But the opening sequence contained no fighting at all and those in the audience who had been led to believe they would be watching a mixed martial arts flick shifted in their chairs. Rashid thought, this was the minute the success or failure of the Kandahar film club would turn upon. And then the title sequence lit up the screen. And the people almost all stayed, for the same reason almost all of them had come. Spectacle captures the brain by wrapping a fist around each eye.