News From the Red Desert (22 page)

A hundred feet from them, John Wayne was sobbing noiselessly, his head on the table in front of him. His voice was shattered; it was all he could do to whisper. The terp who had been hitting him was spent but still enraged. He had beaten the man so hard for so long that both of them were covered in perspiration and blood, and it wasn't until John Wayne's head was pulled up once again by his hair that you could tell who had been beaten and who had been doing the beating. CIA did the lifting by the hair. Captain Waller leaned into the corner of the sea can and listened for
intelligible words. Nothing had been intelligible to him since about ten minutes into the session, the sobbing being pretty much a one-note song.

Every time a fragment of a word was said in Pashto or English, CIA directed the SF terp to ask him to expand. Then it was the SF terp hitting him some more and the CIA officer asking questions. The terp relayed them, but the effort of the beating took nearly everything he had. And anyway, the sobbing required no particular interpretation. It was the first the time the SF terp had been so involved in an interrogation. The CIA guy had been in many of these and sobbing was nothing new to him. It irritated him, because it functioned as a kind of screen to hide behind. The weeping, the despair, the no words at all. The CIA guy stood now, and directed to the terp to stand aside. He adjusted his smock.

The point now wasn't to get him to say anything. The point was to seal the impression they had made. To make the contrast between this and the reasonable man he would meet tomorrow as striking as possible. He wiped and then put away his notepad. He told the terp to go get a shower. He suggested the captain do the same. Captain Waller replied that he would remain. The CIA officer shrugged. He put on a pair of disposable latex gloves and lifted a paddle from his case.

Deirdre could hear none of this. She waited for one of the soldiers to either ask her to leave or to invite her in. They remained seated in the same position they'd been in when she arrived. They were experts at making regular army feel unwelcome—a civilian was hardly worth their effort. Had she not known some of these guys in Iraq, she would have already been escorted to the gate. She tried to think of something she could engage them with—but remembered watching them laugh in Iraq at every rookie journalist who tried that. Still.

The door behind the desk opened then and Thomas Lattice walked through it. He seemed unsurprised to see Deirdre there, though no one had phoned anyone since she'd arrived and no one had left. She looked around for CC cameras.

“You harassing my guys, Deirdre?”

“They're like a brick wall, general. You picked them well.”

He nodded curtly. “Come this way.”

“How long have you been in KAF, now?” Lattice asked when they were settled in his office.

“Couple months.”

“Who have you interviewed?”

“A few NCOs, for perspective—the PA guys approved it. A couple of battalion commanders, who said nothing meaningful at all. Some Canadians. Why? Wanna talk?”

He dismissed the suggestion as a joke, waving his fingers. “You filed a good piece about that patrol in the Panjwai the other day. Got a sense of how limited conventional army tactics are here, without saying it in so many words.”

He was talking despite himself, she realized. “Those guys I was with wouldn't put it that way.”

“Course not. They're still waiting for the Soviets to break out of the Fulda Gap. They think artillery and armour are the keys to dominating a piece of territory.”

“Can we get into this a bit more?” she asked, pulling out her notepad.

“No.”

“How about the leak?”

“That is a serious business. No war porn in SF. My guys are the real thing. None of them needs photographs to remind them what they're capable of.”

“Every division and nearly every brigade in Afghanistan or Iraq seems to be in those files. But so far no SF, you're right.”

“We take OPSEC a little more seriously.”

“To say the very least.”

He almost smiled. “But you know all this.”

“I don't know much about the leaker. Are you involved in the search for him?”

“I'm an operational commander. I'm too busy trying to find bad guys to worry about some whiny twenty-one-year-old sharing his war porn
with the world. I know it matters. It's serious. But it's not my mission to solve.”

“Whose is it?”

“SIGINT. NSA. Your friend's.”

Ah. Jeremy. So he knew. Knows.
“Will it affect your tactical decisions?”

“You know I'm not going to answer that.”

“Okay. Have you seen a change in the population's attitude toward your forces since these videos were made public?”

“I haven't seen evidence of that yet.”

“Really? You're more plugged in to local attitudes than any of the regular army guys, aren't you? How could it not have?”

“You heard my answer. But the local liaison officers don't report to me. Maybe ask them, if you need to get the answer you want. Maybe ask the guy who wrote the manual on counter-insurgency.”

She set her notepad on her knee and eyed him. “Is there something you're trying to say here, general?” He had not been spoken to like that by anyone in ten years, not since he made colonel, and never by a journalist.

He liked her courage, a little. Not enough to listen to much more of that tone. But he liked it.

“My men and I, we spend less time theorizing.”

“I see.” She picked up her pad again. “Last time we spoke, you said you thought that industrial armies were obsolete, that mechanized divisions were the battleships of this century. Is that as true here?”

“More.”

“Why?”

“It costs a million dollars per soldier per year to put them either here or in Iraq. Twenty billion dollars for an infantry division, with all its bottle washers and mechanics and clerks. Per year. And when regular army gets here it puts up wire and stays behind it mostly, except to go out from time to time and try to find the IEDs the locals planted the night before—by driving over them. No one speaks the local languages. What they know really well is how to fight World War II over again. And if there were a Wehrmacht or a Red Army out there wanting to
fight us, that would be fine. But our problems aren't like that anymore. There isn't a front line. Or if there is, it's the wire around the FOBs.”

“So the whole army should be SF?”

“Should be multilingual and exceptionally fit and mobile and smart. And organized in much smaller independent units. Able to move and sustain itself anywhere.”

“Doesn't someone have to wash the bottles?”

“Here, KBR does it. Have you gone to that coffee shop?”

He knew she had. “Yes.”

“Those aren't soldiers making you your coffee.”

“They're Pakistanis.”

“Exactly.”

“Do you approve?”

“Of the Pakistanis or the coffee shop?”

“Either.”

“I approve of Pakistanis. They're ferocious. Coffee shops are part of what industrial armies bring with them. They make it easier to stay here, when soldiers should want to get it done, get out and go home.”

“SF: men of peace.”

“SF: men who get the job done.”

“They call you the warrior monk here.”

“I don't care what they call me.”

“Do you really only drink hot water? Sleep three hours a night?”

“How does any of that matter?”

“What do you think of the president's strategy in Afghanistan?”

“Well, it's gotten worse here. I was here in 2001, as a colonel. We had it settled down.”

“Was it Iraq that got in the way?”

“It was incompetence.”

“Really?” Meaning: are you sure you want to say that? I'm writing it down. You can see my notepad.

“Of course.”

“At what level?”

“At the level where the decisions were made that let the Taliban leadership escape through Tora Bora, let them regroup in Pakistan, to not control the border, to not learn the local languages and customs and become a part of these communities, to stay in our convoys and drive sixty miles an hour through the villages. To run over their kids and buy the silence of aggrieved parents and the co-operation of corrupt tribal chiefs with dollars instead of deeds.”

“What should be done differently?”

“Watch this space.”

“How is Mary, if I may ask? You've been deployed for what, seven straight years now?”

“Mrs. Lattice,” he said, correcting her, “knows what it is to be a soldier's wife. She does a lot of volunteer work with one of the veterans' support organizations—Fallen Fighters.”

“Runs it, actually, doesn't she?”

“She's the CEO, yes.”

“And founder?”

“Along with Sherry Jackson,” he said, deadpan.
Fucker.
She had forgotten about that. And she'd walked right into it. Jeremy's wife was not a subject she wanted to discuss. “But she's not so involved anymore,” he added.

It was a famous story, about how the two women, intimate friends at the start of the decade, became antagonists as their husbands were promoted. By the time the husbands each had their own divisions, their wives refused to speak to one another. Deirdre had met Jeremy's wife once, when she'd visited Baghdad at Christmas. Deirdre felt an ache in her gut when she thought of Sherry. Guilt. Jealousy. Anger.

Lattice was playing with her and was so accustomed to having people submit to him that he was surprised for the second time when she asked him if she could go out on patrol with him.

“Our patrols are very, very difficult.”

“I'm up to it, General.”

“Are you?”

“You know I am.” Meaning, she had covered Lattice's execution of her own rescue at length. She did the first interview about it as she was being driven back to the Green Zone. It had helped Lattice. Tit for tat.

“My men will be in touch,” he said, smiling. And then he stood and walked out one of the room's two doors. She finished the note she was making and then tried the knob of the door he had just walked through. It was locked. She tried the other one. It led back to the office she'd been waiting in. The sergeant from Bar Harbor nodded at her. “Lawson here will show you to the gate, ma'am.”

“Thank you.”

And then she was back on Screaming Eagle Way and making her way to the Green Beans, still wondering what the hell had just happened and whether Lattice meant it when he said she could accompany him on a patrol. His offer was unprecedented and would make his PA staff, who spent their time refusing to elaborate and declining interview requests, howl. But she knew that he would not allow himself to be seen to be overruled. She would be available the moment he offered.