News From the Red Desert (40 page)

R
ashid had helped carry wounded people toward the hospital, but within fifteen minutes of Mohammed's death, the medAs took over the process of transport and triage. He circled back from the hospital to the café, giving the stream of wounded a wide berth. Mohammed's body still lay in the dirt where he had fallen. He was not covered. Neither was Amr's. The other dozen dead lay in heaped and inelegant clumps. He didn't know what to do. He didn't know where to begin.

He walked into the café, turning on the lights. He looked for Fazil. He was not there. He walked into the back room, flicking on that light. There was no one there. Everyone else was either dead or at the hospital, except for him and Fazil. He looked at Fazil's bunk. Everything seemed as it usually did. Except for the bundle of letters from his wife that he had kept beside his pillow. It was gone.

Rashid walked back into the café. He had hoped Fazil would tell him what to do. He took a piece of chocolate cake out of the cooler. He made himself a cup of chai. He ate a forkful of the cake. He bent his forehead to the table so that he could weep.

When he lifted his head, a military policeman was standing in front of him.

Major Horner was sitting at his desk. His uniform was blood spattered and bits of bone and gristle were in his hair. He just did not fucking know how to approach this. He was probably supposed to be out there making sure the television people were being looked after. Oh Christ, if any of them had been shot, that would just fucking be it—the end of his career. That asshat colonel at CENTCOM would walk all the way up and down him—and he a fucking rebadged washed-out
logistics
officer, who the fuck does he think knows more about the media? One fucking clue: it would not fucking be
him.
In another hour he could call his wife. No, he couldn't. There would be a base wide PERS COMS shutdown until the NOK were notified. Fuck.

Why did he ever leave New Orleans?

In the morning, the interrogations began.

Rob Waller watched as a sergeant pulled Rashid Siddiqui out of the sea can he had been locked in. Of course he had not got on a plane to Baghdad.

It had been very cold in that steel box all night and Rashid had not slept. He had thought over and over again about his arrest and had theorized that the military was simply casting the widest possible net around Mohammed's acquaintances and would seek to establish whether any of the rest of them were threats, too, whether the café could continue operating safely, whether Rami Issay could have his television show. His best strategy, he thought, would be to remain calm, to not try to declaim his secularism too obviously, and to tell what he knew of his co-workers. Which was that Rami Issay was a fat and lazy man who could no more run a business on his own than make a proper espresso. But that he was not a radical and had not a homicidal bone in him.

And that Amr was a sullen and angry man whose misanthropy extended to the horizons, including imams and teachers and sergeants—there
is a story about the missing eye and his military service—and to any collection of humanity larger than himself and one other, possibly, and on some days not even that. He was a part of no conspiracy because no conspiracy would have been tolerable to him. The moment a collective action would be agreed upon, he would have felt compelled to belittle it.

Fazil was a man for whom only one thing mattered: his family. His need to provide for and eventually reunite with them would surely preclude jihadist nonsense. He loved his wife with the ardour of a schoolboy and worried about his children compulsively. A man like this does not join an insurgency. No doubt he ran away when the shooting began because he was, like any sensible person, frightened.

These were things he expected to be able to say while a tape machine was running and a serious man took notes and asked questions. This is not what happened. He was pulled into the headquarters building and taken into a back room. Not a word was said to him. A hood was put over his head and his clothing was removed. Straps were attached to his ankles, and the straps to a rope. And then he heard a block and tackle squeak and, falling forward, he was hoisted off his feet, his legs pulled up, and like a free-falling naked skydiver he hung there, his head engorging with blood. The rope was tied to a strong point and then the door opened and then it closed again. The pain in his head built. And within a minute the pain in his knees and hips came to almost match it. The worst thing was that no one was in the room with him. There was nothing he could do, nothing he could say, no one he could betray to make this stop. He wondered how long this could go on. And then he made himself stop thinking about that.

When they pulled Rami Issay out of his cell, they had to wake him up. The drugs from the anaesthesia were still in him. He hadn't slept the night before the last screening, and hardly at all for three days before that. And now his entire world had collapsed upon him once again, just as it had in Leeds, just as it had in Lahore. His restaurant was taken from
him, his computer sales network was taken from him, and now even this bloody little café in bloody Kandahar would be taken from him, and just,
just,
as he thought he might make good his losses. It had all been a mirage. It was never going to happen, not really. He was not really going to go to California and star in his own reality television show.

As he sputtered to consciousness he managed to ask how he could help. No one answered him. He, too, was propelled into the headquarters building, into a concrete and well-insulated room. Though he did not see him through the window in his door, he passed Rashid's room. Rashid had stopped yelling already, stopped imploring, though the rooms were quite soundproof and Rami Issay would have heard nothing, anyway. Even if he were not already weeping with fear.

Out on the base, the lockdown had been lifted. The DFACs were still closed and hard rations had been distributed from the backs of trucks in front of every unit headquarters. The journalists from the press tent were given six cartons of boil-in-the-packet ham omelettes, known by the troops as “the lung.” When they emerged from the press tent to retrieve them, they were told that they could move around the base once again, but that the SF compound and the hospital should not be approached.