News From the Red Desert (31 page)

That night at their barracks, Simpson sat on Sara Miller's bed, taking notes. They'd spent an hour or two at the café, watching how it all worked while Rami Issay did his best to impress them.

“The thing is, we need a narrative entry point, to bring Rami Issay into the arc of the show,” Miller said. “I'm not sure what that will be, but we have to find it and find it fast.”

“Which episode do you see using them for?”

“We are still thinking ‘Stolen Information.' We'd use Rami Issay as an entertaining stand-in for some local man who has somehow gotten hold of some information—like the InformationIsFree leak or something. We could have the celebrities ‘interrogate' him. Afterward, he could award them points based on how intimidating they were. What d'ya think?”

Simpson could not think of anything to say.

“I know, lame. But obviously he's a talent. Charming and odd. Big presence.”

“Plus there's the Rashid relationship mixed in.”

“Are they an item?”

“I don't think so.”

“They might be though, right?”

“I don't know.”

“That could help with our demographics.”

“Your audience will have tuned in to watch Todd Palin shooting targets.”

“Don't stereotype. We have to find some way of injecting narrative tension into this. It can't just be Nick Lachey racing Picabo Street and Todd Palin over an obstacle course. What does Todd Palin represent? The father of a soldier in peril. Why does he care about stolen information? Because of his son, who is in combat. He hates the leaker. The leaker represents everything wrong with our society. Selfishness, indifference to community, cowardice. What about Nick?”

“You can't smoke in here.”

“Relax, it's an e-cigarette.”

“Ah.”

“Nick is a patriot.”

“Aren't we all patriots?”

Sara Miller looked over her glasses at Simpson. “I would not say that for a second, Chayse. Are you? Am I? How can you know?”

“Taliban move at night, so if you want to catch them on the march, this is when you have to do it.”

“Makes sense to me. Where are they during the day?”

The general looked at her. She was smarter than that. “Where do you think? Sleeping.”

“Where?”

“Under trees. In grape-drying huts. In the grass.”

There was no moon, and if it weren't for the ambient light amplification devices, it would not have been possible to see one's own hand in front of one's face. The general had provided Deirdre with a set. She had worn night goggles before, in Iraq, but these were better and sharper
and lighter. The whole valley beneath them was lit up by the stars themselves. In the distance, a farmhouse had a candle lit within and the entire building glowed with a pale green light.

“See them?”

“No. Where?”

“In that millet field, one o'clock. A thousand metres.”

“I have the field. But there's no ‘they' there.”

“Look harder. The far edge. Moving east.”

“I'm looking.”

“Now they're coming up to the corner of the field.”

“Wait. Yes. I see something.”

“There are nine men.”

“There are not.”

“Yes, there are.”

“Jesus. I must be blind.”

“No. You have to learn to see.”

“Yes, sensei.”

“See them?”

“Yes. Not nine. But I see a moving dot. Dots. Not nine.”

“Want to know who they are?”

“Yes.”

“They're part of the outfit that ambushed your Canadians.”

“Really?”

“Want to get them?”

“Yes.”

“The mistake amateurs make in ambushes is scripting the whole thing in their heads. You imagine the enemy will come in from this direction and then respond to your attack in that way, but often they don't do what they're supposed to. You have to be flexible. And have a range of responses prepared for different situations. Still, when you have tech, and you do them well, ambushes are highly satisfying.”

“Sir.”

The general looked up at the sergeant who had just whispered to him. He nodded. He thought he had been speaking quietly enough that no
one could hear him, whispering directly into Deirdre's ear, breathing the words as much as he had been enunciating them. It was exactly the same way he spoke to his men when he wanted to be maximally quiet. But yes. He had wanted to continue talking to her. Which was the next best reason to have stopped. He glanced over at the sergeant in gratitude and closed his eyes tightly for a moment and then opened them.

T
hey were four hundred yards back from the trail behind a low ridge of dirt that afforded them just enough cover to be able to glimpse the path without exposing themselves. Deirdre, the general, the medic and a radioman hung back. The Taliban were coming.

Deirdre thought about the Canadian boys who had been killed when they had been the ambushed, and of the gurgling sound that young man had made as he had bled into the dirt.

Lattice had said that these men approaching them were under the command of the same man who had directed the ambush on the Canadians. The fighters who did that had all been killed, but they would have been known to these ones. Would have eaten together, trained together, prayed together. They could as easily have been the men that crouched behind that treeline and trained their weapons on those beautiful boys. They would have been pleased to learn of those deaths. Would have prayed for the souls of the martyred. She thought,
Kill them. Kill them.

The trail doglegged sharply to the left thirty metres past where the soldiers lay, perhaps eighty metres now from the lead man in the column of Taliban. In the dark, the insurgents had bunched up tightly, so as to not lose track of one another. More experienced men would not have
done that, would have just moved more slowly, carefully maintaining long spaces between them. Several valleys to the east, a shepherd boy had told them about being compelled to give a team of white Taliban one of his favourite goats. So they knew that there were ferenghee, probably SF, about. They knew that the drones watched these trails every minute. And so they walked close to one another and, were they not carrying weapons, would very much have preferred to hold hands. A night ambush, which is what they feared now, turns into chaos more quickly than any other type of combat. In the dark, the roar of machine guns and rockets sound twice as loud and close and there is no reassurance to be found in the faces of ones unseen comrades. Night ambushes were a specialty of the white Taliban, whose night vision aids gave them the advantage in such scenarios. It felt to these men like they were young goats themselves, being led toward a tree.

Lattice had had to force himself not to direct the ambush personally. Lieutenant Colonel Matheson was a strong man, too, was the problem, which was, after all, why he had come to command a battalion of SF infantry deep in the wilds of Kandahar. He had been the captain in charge of the final assault on Taliban's Last Stand, and had enjoyed a reputation ever since of being a man who would bring tasks to their conclusion. Once the general had made the men cook that goat, the colonel had become so brittle and terse, Lattice worried that Matheson's head might just pop right off his shoulders. Lattice wished he could have explained the goat to the colonel, but that the war was going to be won or lost on the cover of
Rolling Stone
and on the set of the
Daily Show
was not a thing he was able to say to men who had been in the field continuously for most of a decade.

He would have dispersed the belt-fed weapons a little more, though he liked how the claymore mines were positioned. And the choice of the doglegged part of the trail was good. The eight automatic weapons that would imminently open up along the length of the enemy column would be devastating. Night combat always gives an extra fifteen seconds to the initiator. It takes that long for the men being shot to realize just what
is happening, what direction the threat is coming from, and where they should hide.

What happened in those first fifteen seconds was that men started dying, fast, and their first response—the leaping to the side—did nothing to stop the dying.

And what happened next is that the ambushed realized that they were not safer, lying flat beside the trail, that the fire was coming from above and in front of them and that the men lying with them were being quickly killed. And so they stood up together and made to break away to the forest and the dark, as far from this shrieking inferno and one another as they could get.

Which was just the moment the ambushers set off the claymores, spraying ball bearings through the chest of every man standing in front of them. The stragglers—the few remaining paralyzed and too-frightened men—went down too. Even if they were not hit by the claymores, they were no more able to move and stand and escape than their mortally wounded compatriots. And so ensured their own death.

Beside the trail huddled one last undamaged man who, looking around himself, could see only muzzle flashes in the dark, like two dozen fluttering torches. He aimed his rifle at one of them and fired three-shot bursts at it, over and over again, until one of the machine gunners spotted his muzzle flash and trained his own weapon on where the last flash had come from. The machine gunner waited. And when three quick pulses appeared again, the man fired one hundred rounds at the spot. Seven of those rounds entered the body of his target, the only man who had been firing back at the ferenghee. His name was Mahmoud Daoust and he was twenty-two years old and had begun fighting with the Taliban for one excruciating year, since his father's house had been night raided, his younger brother taken away in a helicopter and not returned. His enraged grief lead to him to approach a man who lived in his valley. A week later he was walking in the night with a rifle and convinced of his own righteousness. In the subsequent year he had mostly slaughtered Afghans, people like him. He shot a farmer who had taken money from
the Americans to compensate for damage they had done to his buildings. He shot a schoolteacher who might have been his own teacher for the three years he attended. He had killed and killed. And every time the ferenghee's airplanes and tanks appeared, his experienced and respected commander had made them hide. He had killed no Americans, had not even shot at one. Mahmoud Daoust died with those seven bullets in his chest, his lungs welling up with blood. What he felt mostly was relief.

But one of his rounds had headed toward the side of the trail where Deirdre and the general were watching. They saw great gorgeous swaths of white tracer fire stretching out in front of them like lethal artwork and then the blue, blindingly bright explosions of the claymores. And then there was a pause in the firing as the men operating the Minimis paused to place new belts of ammunition in their weapons, and the sergeant in charge of them all yelled for them to hold their fire. He listened to his radio, waiting for the colonel to adjust his fire or redirect it, but no direction came. Another of the sergeants, closer to that side of the trail, radioed that he could detect no movement among the enemy.

They all waited for Matheson to reply.

It was the sergeant who had shushed General Lattice who found him. Mahmoud Daoust's AK-47 bullet had caught Matheson in his armpit as he had shifted to see the firefight better. It entered his right chest. The ribs under his armpit were broken and the pleura surrounding the lung was opened. Every time he inhaled he sucked as much air into his chest through his armpit as he did through his mouth. His lung was collapsing. In the abruptly silent night, the whole combat team could hear their colonel's gasping and, as one, they seemed to holler for the medical assistant, who arrived one moment later, with a chest tube and one-way valve in hand.

General Lattice flung himself into action. He directed the men to secure the perimeter, to examine the dead and establish that there was no residual threat. Simultaneously, he called in a medevac and identified a level spot nearby where a helicopter could land.

There was no residual threat. The Taliban were all dead or dying. The medical assistant started IVs on the colonel and began running
concentrated salt solution into him as fast as he could. Within minutes, a medevac helicopter was on site. A medical officer leapt out and helped load him into the bird. The colonel was losing consciousness now, and the doctor put a tube in his trachea to help force air in and out of his undamaged lung. Then he nodded to the pilots and the Blackhawk rose up and away and a moment later, all that could be heard of it was the rapidly fading thump of its rotors.

With the chest tube inserted, and the valve allowing the air around his lungs to exit but not return, his left lung began to re-expand and Matheson did not feel as desperately short of breath as he had. He still coughed up blood and, with each paroxysm of coughing, he felt a stabbing pain in his chest where the chest tube rubbed against his lung. But he felt now that he could survive, whereas back on the ridgeline before the medic put the chest tube in it seemed quite clear he was dying.

He knew if he opened his eyes and revealed that he was awake he would be sedated. He wanted to remain awake and so he kept his eyes closed and listened to the din all around him.

He had seven children stateside. It occurred to him that it would be wildly irresponsible of him to die. He and his wife, Lisa, had gone to church their whole lives and loved one another in a wholehearted way since they were fifteen years old. His oldest daughter was eighteen and a freshman at Brigham Young. His youngest was three, and if he died now, she would not even remember him. Lisa, so bright and lively, would wilt overnight. Everyone would tell her how strong she was, and how lucky she was to have her faith and her community, but the truth was that she would crumble inside though she would confess that to no one.

He knew that she ached during these deployments and that she had spent six years now praying for the wars to end. And now, maybe, they were at an end for him. Even though each breath hurt, it was so much easier to breathe now. Through narrowed eyelids, he watched the valve as it flapped open with each expiration and closed with each inhalation.
He would live, he thought. And now he would go home. With all his limbs, too. Could be worse.

They were scheduled to be out for another three days. Lattice had asked Deirdre if she wanted to go back to KAF on the medevac with Matheson.

“I think this is still where the story is, General. But thanks.”

Lattice shrugged. He would have preferred that she head back behind the wire now, but he would lose more by ordering her to do so than would be worth it.