News From the Red Desert (27 page)

Lattice, on the other hand, played steadily better through the day. The next two opponents did not give him anything like the difficulty the Polish captain had. He checked the time often; he had not expected the tournament to take as long as it did. As he progressed, he relearned some long-ago lessons about flashy attacks and pawn development and patience. And then he was up against the other undefeated player—the Romanian who had dispatched General Jackson.

The Romanian felt the game with a depth that Lattice did not. They were both clever enough players but there was a nuance to the Romanian's game that was not in the general's, and the victory eventually was his.

Lattice posed uncomfortably as he was presented with the small, second-place trophy Rami Issay had had built by one of the carpenters. When the general said he would not allow photographs, Simpson stepped forward. “General, what would make a photo acceptable to you? Are you concerned about the trophy?”

Lattice turned to her as if only noticing her now. “No. No more photographs. Please put down your camera.” Simpson found herself, for the first time in her professional life, acceding to such a request and lowering her camera.

Deirdre was supposed to meet the general at the café with her gear. She had come ten minutes before the appointed time, and now stood at the door watching Lattice dismiss the photographer. When he saw her there, he caught her eye and nodded. He strode to the door and held it open for her. “Is that going in your piece?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“Just for the record, I had no idea there would be a camera there. Did you bring rain gear?”

“Impermeable and semi-permeable both. Like your man said.”

“Good. There's a low-pressure system coming in off the Indian Ocean.”

He walked so fast she had to run to keep pace with him. She was carrying ten kilos: besides the rain gear, a thin sleeping bag, a single change of clothes, camera and film. It was about as light as you could go for a long trip and too light if they were going into altitude, but she didn't want the general's man going through her stuff and tossing things out.

“Throw your gear in the back of the truck and get in with it,” he said, nodding to the deuce-and-a-half parked near the SF compound. It had just started its engine. He climbed into the cab. She did as she was told, and with a heave, pulled herself up the five feet to the top of the tailgate. When she rolled into the truck's covered box she found herself among unsmiling bearded men in Afghan garb. “Hello,” she said.

“Hey,” the man nearest her replied, with a deep Alabaman accent that was the only American thing evident about him. He moved to make room on the bench. There was no rank insignia on his clothes, but she thought he was probably the squad leader. She sat down beside him. Someone slid her pack toward her. The truck was put into gear and they lurched off to the flight line.

On the tarmac, five Chinooks were waiting for them. The two-and-a-half-ton trucks began disgorging men in a steady stream from their boxes and straight into the backs of the helicopters. Deirdre was directed into the back of the fourth bird in line. She watched as Lattice spoke with the meteorology officer at the edge of the tarmac for a most recent weather update and then turned and ran into the back of the first helicopter. She wedged in between two silent young riflemen. SF was not used to embeds—everything they did was by definition secret.

Lattice had proposed at a senior OPS meeting earlier that month, that if they allowed more discussion of things that weren't really secret, they could draw a sharper circle around the stuff that was. That started a debate. One battalion commander said that the mystique their secret status lent them was valuable. Another said, “Look, the media can become the enemy, like it was in Vietnam, or it can remain our ally the way it has been so far. But you have to give your allies reasons to be your ally. Find a particularly loyal one, and give him a glimpse. Flatter him.”

There had been no riflemen at that meeting and so the men in the truck were not aware of the debate. What they did think they knew was that the journalist was here because the general was. And, to the extent that the patrol did anything different for her sake or his, they would be paying for it. She read this thought in the half-dozen exchanged glances she caught in the first minute after she sat down. She kept her mouth shut. Then the ramps went up and the engines started.

With the generals gone, Simpson put down her camera. Amr and Mohammed began moving the tables back to their original places, and she reviewed some of the footage she had shot. As she made notes in a large black binder, Rami Issay brought her a cup of tea and a piece of poppy seed cake. He sat down with her. “Did you get what you need?”

She looked at him. Then she pulled her toque lower on her head and put a large pair of earphones on so that she might assess the audio. Ms Simpson lifted the cup of tea and mouthed, “Is this decaf?”

“No, but I could bring you some chamomile if you prefer.”

“Thank you.”

He took her tea back to the counter and filled a pot with steaming water and put a bag of chamomile in it. He brought it back.

“Do you have Sweet'n Low?”

He did not know what that meant. But he was pretty sure he did not have it. “I do not, I am sorry to say.”

“It's okay,” she said, and resumed watching the video on her Alienware laptop, which was the size of a large atlas. She did not touch her tea or her cake.

“Is there anything else you need?”

She looked up from the screen. “No, thank you. I think I'm good.”

He sat there for a few more minutes and then he got up and went back behind the counter. Mohammed was sitting there. The café was quiet, for the first time in hours.

“Anything you need, Mohammed?”

“Like what?”

Rami Issay shrugged.

Mohammed got up to clear off the tables.

A
s the Chinook lifted off, a great cloud of dust rose up around them and for a moment nothing could be seen through it. Deirdre always found helicopter takeoffs in dirt claustrophobic and imagined that it must be worse for the pilots. They needed the helicopters to rise faster than the clouds they created, lest the dust destroy the turbines—and so they rose quickly. Within a few seconds they were through to blue sky and KAF itself fell away under them like a big olive-drab tarp. Dust billowed beneath them, obscuring the airstrip but otherwise all was sharp. The ordered lines and ranks of barracks and tents covered an area even more vast than she would ever have supposed walking around it. The sewage treatment plant—universally called “the Romanian swimming pool”—shone pungently green in the afternoon light, and the rows and rows of new construction ran around the perimeter of existing buildings like a thick, pallet-crowded shell.

The birds skirted Kandahar City for safety reasons—one of these days a shoulder-launched SAM was going to appear—but the prominent buildings were nevertheless visible: the governor's palace, the central market, the football stadium, Mir Weis hospital, Sarpoza prison. She had patrolled through these areas as an embed half a dozen times since she
had returned from Iraq. In 2002, she went anywhere she wanted, with only her translator for company. She had known those places before; now she knew them again, in their altered version—more moneyed and more scared. There were things in the shops. There were cars on the streets. And in some of the cars were bombs.

It's not like there hadn't always been violence in Kandahar—the whole of the senior Taliban leadership came from here, and the civil war that had erupted after the departure of the Soviets scarred this city almost as much as it did Kabul. Asceticism and fury seemed to grow out of the parched soil itself. And now the land was in full blossom.

Sarpoza prison. As they passed over it, Deirdre wondered if this was where John Wayne had wound up. The first rumours that he was the leaker of the collateral-murder video had died away and from number of FBI and MPs running in and out of the command headquarters, she could only conclude that no one thought the problem had been solved. So what had they accused the terp of now?

She pictured the terp in a cell below her, his alert features blunted by beating and weeping and no sun. She wondered if he had in fact done anything wrong. She hoped not. The innocent stand up better, she had found. Though no one stands up well after having their kneecaps shattered—a favourite introductory gift of the NDS, when they've decided they're not likely to let you go. She thought for a moment about the ferocity of the Iraqi interrogators in Baghdad and how the Americans had looked away as their allies did exactly what was expected of them. She had had friends—local journalists, sources—who had wound up in the vortex and miraculously emerged alive. They had no interest in discussing what had been done to them but neither was it necessary. There was more information about it on their faces than she could bear thinking about.

She forced herself to study the fields. She had memorized the important landmarks around Kandahar, the crossings of the Arghandab, the principal and secondary roads, the feeder towns, the FOBs. She thought for a moment that she had found the road on which the British Scorpion
had been destroyed. She looked for the wreck but either it had been removed or she was wrong about the location. To take her mind off the terp, she began mentally naming the villages she recognized.

Sarpoza
was
where the terp had ended up. He'd heard the rotors of the helicopters overhead and he lifted his head to listen carefully. He had long fantasized about the soldiers he had worked with learning of his mistreatment and coming to rectify things. He knew it would never happen. He guessed that they knew where he was. But he was not one of them, and was no longer useful to them. He clung to the rescue fantasy anyway, because there was nothing else in reach except concrete and straw. Lately, the fantasy had taken shape around the embed learning of his circumstances and doing a story on the way the NATO armies used NDS as their torturers. He knew enough of how reporters thought to know that they would be shocked. For that matter, even the soldiers who sent him here would be shocked. Even the ones who had beaten him first, who thought they were the dangerous men.

His thought, about Deirdre writing an exposé of the treatment of prisoners handed over by ISAF to the NDS, leapt through the air from him to her as she passed overhead. She received it and considered it, thinking it had arisen out of her own anxieties. That sort of story was part of what she had expected to be doing here when she first came. She had been in Iraq when Sy Hersh had written the first Abu Ghraib story. He had been able to write it because he was at the end of a great career and could neither be punished nor lose any future opportunities. And, most of all, because he was eighty and did not travel out on combat patrols as one of the platoon. He did not love soldiers the way she and the other embeds ended up doing. At one level or another, ever since he broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, he'd probably hated soldiers. And you couldn't blame him. That was his experience of them. Neither could Deirdre and her colleagues be blamed: their experience was of
wise-cracking, brave and terrified young men, with more love and loyalty in them in those circumstances than anyone could know in any other.

When Hersh's
New Yorker
story appeared, the hurt and frustration of the soldiers still in Iraq was impossible to convey to unembedded journalists or editors back home. The sense of betrayal among the soldiers was deep and sincere and pre-rational. Because she loved these goofy, earnest young men, Deirdre felt it as well.

She thought about asking Jeremy if she could tour Sarpoza, him saying yes, and her writing about the broken terp, chained to a wall. She had given up everything for this life here—Peter, her friends back home, even maybe her ability to live back home again. She imagined the soldiers talking about her the way they'd talked about Hersh. For a moment she felt paralyzed. Like when that hand had grabbed her ankle in the Baghdad bazaar. Then she went back to naming the villages.

The helicopters flew south, toward the mountains. No conversation was possible over the noise of the rotors. The loadmaster eventually handed Deirdre a pair of earplugs and she nodded thank you and put them in. The man beside her, who looked to be twenty years old at the outside, was sleeping, his hairy chin on his chest. Underneath the Afghan garb was a kind of body armour she hadn't seen before, so thin you could barely tell it was there. Like Frodo Baggins and his mithril. What the regular army guys would give for that, she thought. And then, “Really?
Lord of the Rings
? I have spent too much time around twenty-year-old men.”

Four Apaches met up with them as they approached the mountains. Sleeker and more lethal looking in flight even than they were on the ground, they flew beneath the Chinooks and scanned the valley for radar or thermal traces of the enemy. Helicopters settling into a hot LZ being the nightmare scenario they wished most to avoid.

The Chinooks held back as the Apaches scouted the primary and alternate insertion sites. Drones would already have been monitoring movement in the area for the last several days, she supposed, but
a hovering helicopter is vulnerable to RPG or machine-gun fire: the rotors and turbines cannot be armoured and still function, and the two-hundred-gallon tanks of Jet-A are bombs awaiting sparks. They could search the area just as much as they wanted, she thought to herself, and maybe a bit more than that, just to be safe.

When the Chinooks approached the insertion site, they dropped into it quickly and threw open the ramp the moment the bird was down. The engines remained at a roar and the men sprinted off, as eager to get back into the comfortable terrain of sharp grass and spiny succulents as the pilots were to get some altitude. Deirdre followed the man beside her off the ramp and ran as fast as she could to the perimeter they formed. Their Chinook roared up off into the sky toward KAF. The Apaches were still circling around the insertion site. The arrival of the helicopters had alerted local forces to their presence, and their thermal imaging now detected activity on two ridgelines. Probably Taliban, but you couldn't know they weren't just shepherds. There was no knowing anything until an RPG was fired at them.

The soldiers plunged into the grass, one after the other, as the other helicopters disgorged their passengers. It felt strange to Deirdre, watching the familiar drills being run by men who looked hardly at all like soldiers—so sun- and wind-burnt they were the same colour as the red earth they trod upon. Gowned in coarse woollen shawls, and carrying AK-47s, they looked more like the men they were trying to find than American infanteers.

The last man off the last helicopter had just thrown himself into the grass when the group got up as one and began moving to the closest treeline. Deirdre could hear no commands being barked, nor did she see any hand signals being exchanged. The long familiarity with one another allowed them to rely on subtler cues. For the platoon commander, it was like driving a car that knows where you want to go. The sergeant walking in front of Deirdre had been a private in 2001, and had ridden a shaggy Afghan horse through these same hills for the few weeks they were in this area. He thought about that now. It was surprising how much he remembered of this terrain, considering how much he
had been through since—Iraq and the Korengal and Waziristan. But it had been his first taste of sustained lethal operations and those memories were bound to linger. He thought about all the crazy shit he had seen and done since and still he recalled the ridgeline to the west perfectly: Ghar Mabar it was called on the map. He could remember his younger self marvelling at its knife-edged profile.

Deirdre would have been interested to know this, but not a word was said to her as she walk-ran in the file of silent men. It was just as well, since she would not have been able to converse and move at that speed. And she knew that all eyes were upon her, waiting to find something that would allow them to call in a helicopter and extract her.