News From the Red Desert (43 page)

Rami Issay was on a stretcher the whole time. It was easier to restrain him safely with his ankles strapped to the rails of his stretcher, and anyway no one could say for sure whether or not he could walk.

It turned out he could, barely. They established this when they lifted him out of the stretcher and helped him sit down on the floor of his cell. The CIA physician and nurse who had accompanied him left then, and only Rob Waller and the CIA case officer from KAF were there, together with the Salt Pit staff. Who were keen to complete the intake paperwork and then get back to sleep. It was 0200 and they had been pulled from their beds for his arrival.

“A lot of this can wait until morning. We have a process,” the senior man said.

Waller said, “He's army property. The only process that matters is mine. Is that understood?”

W
hen Deirdre was wheeled into the Manhattan offices of the American News Syndicate, the staff lined up at the foyer of their building to greet her. She had gotten back to New York two days earlier, after a stop in Landstuhl, where her external fixation apparatus was replaced with internal plates and screws. She'd spent a week recovering from that and had then got on a plane, desperate with boredom. In the interim, her piece on the SF atrocity had appeared and been picked up around the world, and on top of all that, she had been wounded. In theatre.

In New York, her employers had rented her a suite in a hotel she could never have afforded herself. There was an assistant, Kendra, waiting for her at the airport and she took her into town in a hired car—all this was new. She had leaned against the back corner of the seat as it approached Manhattan and tried to understand what was going on. Kendra explained that she was supposed to stay with Deirdre, make sure she had whatever help she needed, given that both her arms were in casts. When she saw Deirdre's look in response, she added, “Of course, if you'd prefer, I could tell them you declined.”

Now, at offices she'd rarely visited, applause broke out. Kenwood stood at the front of the crowd, waiting to greet her. They embraced and Deirdre leaned into his ear, “Kenwood: whiskey tango foxtrot?”

He whispered back, “You're a rock star now, Deirdre.”

“Since when?”

“Since the beginning, if you ask me.”

“You're not getting all wobbly on me?”

“Is that you, turning into Margaret Thatcher?”

She smirked. “I was always partly her. What am I supposed to do now?”

“Say thanks. Shake a few hands. So to speak.”

She nodded and turned around. Her casted arms were in slings tied from Versace scarves that the stylist had brought. The stylist. She made a motion to raise them in acknowledgement. The crowd loved that. There was a CNN film crew here and they caught it. The producer gestured to her do it again. She did. The producer gave her a thumbs-up.

“Not in Front of the Embed” was already considered by the bookies as the probable Pulitzer Prize winner for long-form journalism. Everyone was commenting on what an evolution it represented in her style—sombre and restrained and so much more potent as a result. She was asked a dozen times whether it would become a book.

It was complicated, getting so much attention over a piece she would have paid money not to have written. After she filed it, it just spun away on its own trajectory. The fact checkers called her a few times while she was still in Afghanistan about trivial questions, and then the chief fact checker got in touch to ask if she had made some arrangement with Lattice, since he had confirmed every single quote without objection—unheard of—and had even expanded on several of the most graphic and damning anecdotes she had reported. The chief quoted him: “Ms O'Malley is, if anything, being too restrained. What I recall saying is, ‘Not in front of the fucking embed, are you crazy?' ”

She twisted for Lattice. First, the news that she had been hurt in the shooting broke and everyone in the media assumed the posture of a worried friend. And then the piece appeared and
that
was all anyone
could talk about. The link between the two stories being her incredible courage. Lightning was caught in a bottle and out of thousands of journalists covering those wars, she became the celebrity. This morning, before her car had picked her up to bring her here, Kendra had appeared with that stylist plus a makeup artist at her hotel room.
Jesus Christ.

John Wayne whispered to him as the lights were turned off, “Brother, do not sleep tonight.”

He took it as a warning. The guards had been hard on him that day, but not much harder than they had been on every other day in the two weeks he had been in the prison. He had been beaten and tripped to the floor and thrown into the stone walls of the interrogation room, as on every other day since he had been detained. Nevertheless, this was nothing as bad as what the Americans had done to him, and he was stronger now than he had been when he arrived. The food was foul, but he had resolved to eat every bit he was given, even if he had to hold his nose to get it down.

He thought it was just a matter of time before they really got to work on him. He thought he had a better chance of surviving it, now that he had healed a bit. The question he pushed out of his thoughts every time it intruded was,
For what?
What did getting through any of these sessions mean except that there would be more?

He lay in the straw in his cell and listened to two thousand other men whispering to one another as he considered, or tried not to consider, these questions. This was not like other nights. The intensity of whispering and the sense of electricity in the air was different than it had been for the last two weeks.
What exactly is being planned for me?
he wondered. Then realized this could not be about him. He had suffered, but the remarkable thing about his suffering was just how unremarkable it was in this warehouse of pain. They had all been caught by the Americans, had all been questioned by them and released to NDS.

He could make out individual words in Urdu, Dari, Pashto, Uzbek, Arabic and Farsi. But he could not make out sentences. The meaning in this buzz was not in the sentences but simply in the fact of it.

And instead of fading as the night wore on, as it had every other night, it just kept crackling, thrumming on, not so much indifferent to the audience as being its own audience—Rashid listened to it like it was water music, and felt himself expand with wonder. He stopped worrying about being taken from his cell that night, though if that was not what the warning to stay awake had been about, he could not say what it possibly could be.

When the truck exploded, it caved in eighty feet of the three-foot-thick mud wall of the prison. The entire building nearly collapsed. Forty prisoners were killed outright. The floors on three storeys of the building sagged toward the shattered wall and pulled away from the bars. Within seconds of the first explosion, another rocked the other side of the prison, and another long stretch of mud wall was destroyed. The dust billowing through the abruptly dark prison was suffocating. The steel cages now gapped away from the walls, allowing cell after cell full of men to slip out and into the passageways. Guards could be heard shouting in the distance. And there was something else: the shouts of faithful men, and rifle fire. Someone was suddenly outside his cell, yelling, “Get up, get up! By God, you have your chance now, get up!”

Rashid slipped through the gap in his own bars and followed that voice. Other prisoners fell in behind him and a minute or two later, they were jumping out of a hole in the hall, ten feet down to the courtyard below. Every fifth or sixth man injured his ankle as he landed—the longer they had been in there, the weaker their bones were—and the snapping of bones and groaning could be heard above the whispered exhortations to hurry.

There was another gaping hole in the opposite wall of that courtyard and men streamed through it, dispersing on the other side like an estuary meeting the sea. Rashid stepped over the rubble and ran. After three
or four hundred metres, he was exhausted. He slowed to a lope, and then he walked. He had no idea where he was, except in a field. He stood for a moment and looked at the stars, trying to orient himself. He found the familiar constellations. South and east was where he thought he should head. And away from Kandahar City. He looked around. A trio of ragged men were standing only fifty feet away.

“Brother, are you with us?” one of them asked.

“I am,” he said, not certain who or what he was with, but pretty sure that he had never needed friends more badly in his life.

“Then let's go now. There are food and shelter and friends waiting for us to the south,” one of them said.

They heard the ferenghee soldiers arrive at the prison half an hour later, but by this time they had covered three kilometres. The sound of shooting carried far in that otherwise still night, and it urged them on. Twelve hundred men had been freed with those explosions, and every time they crawled behind a wall or under a tree to rest for a moment, they found the spot occupied by other frightened and eager men. After a whispered consultation, they headed on. Several times, it seemed to Rashid, they accidentally traded members of their groups. In the pitch black, it was not impossible that he, too, had changed groups.

When the sky began to lighten to their left, in the east, they were relieved to see that they had made it well away from Kandahar City. They found a treeline next to a field thick with wheat and far from a nearby road. They lay down silently, deep within shadows. None of them could sleep. They were headed for the mountains, for the border. Toward friends.

Rob Waller spoke from his chair. “Mr. Issay, we have asked you these questions many times, and still you are not being truthful with us. We know this. We have read your emails and we have spoken to witnesses. They contradict every word you have told us. Please stop lying. What we
are interested in is your role in radicalizing the boy. Who put you up to this? Who gave you the AK-47 to give to the boy?”

Rami Issay hung naked from his shackled wrists and did not reply. He had answered these questions many times. He could make up answers for them, but that would only anger them more. They had been down that road already. Anyway, he didn't care. He just didn't care. His god had abandoned him. His friends had abandoned him. His family. He had nothing he feared losing. Shit ran down his bare leg and he scarcely noticed. He didn't reply.

His co-interrogator, who called himself Mr. Clark for Rami Issay's benefit, put on a pair of black leather gloves.

Waller got ready to take notes. Most of the time he looked away and just listened. He told himself he did that to concentrate on the information-rich signal—the detainee's words. His Pashto, his Urdu, and his Dari were all pretty good now. He understood even guttural gasps. To do that, you really had to have a feel for the language.