News From the Red Desert (6 page)

That was five years ago, already. When she got the call from New York to wrap up her business in Kabul and move to Kuwait City she had not been surprised. Her colleagues were all getting the same calls. It was clear what it meant. The Afghanistan project was looking like the most successful large-scale intervention ever. Another year or two and
Afghanistan would be Nepal. Iraq had even more potential: Dubai, but with oil, elections, and universities with women professors. She left Afghanistan for Iraq eagerly, hoping for the best, and expecting that the best was the most likely outcome. Why wouldn't it be?

The ebullience on the plane to Kuwait City was like nothing she had seen since she had covered a college football game. There were contractors and soldiers and journalists and men and women with the State Department and the Coast Guard, Department of Energy, Justice: America was all there for the party. Fortune favours the bold. Afghanistan had just been the proof-of-concept experiment.

Anakopoulus was glad tonight was one of the few times a month that he got together with his counterparts in the British supply warehouses. As he sat down in the British camp he felt something approaching ease settle over him. Around other Americans, he never relaxed. The request for a favour—that he overlook a lost weapon, that he replace something that could be repaired—was only ever a matter of time. The other senior logistics NCOs of the various ISAF national forces understood one another's problems in a way that their own non-logistician countrymen never could. They were all in the same position: guardians of the cargo, but without officer rank or stature. Warrant Officer David Shipman, his parallel in the Royal Engineers, had brought a keg of ale—forbidden to deployed American soldiers—to one of his less-used tents and Anakopoulus had filled his coffee cup appreciatively.

“How exactly did you wind up here?” Shipman asked.

“I volunteered. You know this.”

“The question is, why?”

“When the attacks came I was getting ready to put in my retirement papers. I had never realized how bored I had been my whole life. Suddenly everyone, me included, came alive. It was soldiers that would save our country. Everything stopped being a hypothetical and became real. Everything came into focus.”

“Jesus fuck,” Shipman said. “You're here because you think it's interesting? You have a weird sense of adventure.”

Anakopoulus said, “I'm not here for any adventure.”

“I'm here for my pension. Six more years.”

“Which will make what, eight years in?” Anakopoulus said. “European fucking pensions.”

“Twenty, cocksucker. And you're just jealous of our more civilized society.”

If Anakopoulus had a friend, it was him. Not exactly Shipman so much as his position. Anakopoulus had been close to Shipman's predecessor, too, and the man before him and the man before that. He had trusted and felt trusted by each iteration of these men. They were outside one another's chain of command, but they did the same job and often helped one another out. Circumstances brought and kept them here and inevitably, a mutual sympathy developed.

Shipman, who had more of an air of felony about him than any of his predecessors, took a long pull of beer. “Hey, before I forget, I have something for you,” he said, and reached into his pocket and handed Anakopoulus a thumb drive. “These are from a mate of mine who was through here last week. Most of the stuff in here was shot in Iraq. We think things are crazy here, but Iraq is a real shit show.” Anakopoulus accepted the gift without excitement.

“Have a look through them,” Shipman said. “Maybe you haven't seen it all.”

“I used to look at all the pictures and the videos everyone passed around. I had the idea that it had something to do with me. But war porn gets dull—all those bodies being propped up, all those intestines—the same way porn-porn gets dull.”

This last shocked Shipman. “You, my friend, are getting old. And you have been here too long. I heard about you when I was still in Basra. They called you the fuckin' Highlander. Legendary Immortal within the ISAF logistics community. In KAF continuously since 2002.”

“Not continuously.” Two years ago, Anakopoulus had a few weeks out, at the insistence of his boss. He spent his time in a hotel room in
Cyprus, reading spy novels. Later, he told everyone he had the best time ever.

“Still. Close enough. Rest of us, we all wish we had that kind of endurance.”

“It's not endurance.”

“In the UK, the supply techs who had been through here told me about you, too. They made you sound like a cartoon. In reality you are much less hairy.”

“Thanks for that.”

“There is a story, though, isn't there? A reason you feel so comfortable here and never get sick of it?”

Eventually everyone always probes. “I get fucking sick of it. So what's the rest of
your
story? What made you volunteer to come to Afghanistan?”

“It's my generation's war,” Shipman shrugged. And then he poured himself more beer.

“So you were bored and wanted to be a badass.”

Shipman: “We're
quartermasters.
None of us are badasses.”

Anakopoulus: “I'm a fucking badass quartermaster.”

Shipman: “Well, then I am, too. But we were badasses before we came here.”

“You can't say you're not a badass and then turn around and say you are. Badasses know their badassishness. Badasses have no doubt.”

Shipman, feeling the drink, said, “You are full of doubt, you lying motherfucker. You doubt everything.”

“Everything except my badassishness. Which is the lodestar by which I navigate.”

“You hear that in a movie?”

“Maybe.”

“It probably sounded smarter coming out of the mouth of someone better looking.”

Anakopoulus laughed. It was time to go. When he had this much to drink he started thinking about Susie. He stood up and waved.

“Goodbye, Highlander,” Shipman said.

When he got back to his warehouse, Anakopoulus sat down at his desk in the dark and listened to the helicopters heading off. Night raids left just after midnight, usually, and came back around five. The uninformed admiration his British colleague had directed at him had left him sour. He really was a cartoon, hairy or not. Living his empty life here in dusty Kandahar. Hanging out with a guy he pretended was, but who wasn't really, his friend—just an occupier of a position comparable to his.

He turned on his laptop and checked his private email. Penis Extenderz, and a barrister from Togo with a dead client. Some friends, dropping lines, wondering why he'd been so quiet. There was no email from her. There never was. She was signed into Facebook, though. One of these days she would defriend him. If she had any idea how much time he spent creeping her, she would have, already. She'd posted that her son was about to graduate from middle school. The boy had been in grade two when he was first deployed here. Which put things in perspective.

He dug into his pocket and pulled out the thumb drive Shipman had given him. He plugged it in and the contents fluttered up as thumbnails over the screen. Even in miniature, they were horrifying—or would have been, had he not become so used to everything.

He started scrolling through them. One of the contributors to this file was actually an ambitious photographer. There was a shot of tailors in a shattered shop making suits that caught his eye. Inevitably, there were the bodies, and the many indignities offered to them. Canadian snipers up in Tora Bora posing with necklaces of little fingers. American Marines pissing on corpses. Danes shooting motionless bodies lying in a ditch. He clicked through the carnage, looking for interesting photos. There weren't many.

And there. Who was that blonde? The fucking embed. Posing with Lancaster Fusiliers in Iraq. Arms around the smiling men on either side of her. Another of her holding an AK-47. Posing like a killer.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he whispered. And he thought again of how she had spoken to his clerk. And he remembered the way that media liaison had
spoken to him. Reporters posing with weapons. They did it sometimes, especially the young ones and especially in the first few weeks. But those kinds of images? Among other reporters, better a sex tape emerge than a senior journalist be caught posing like that. He thought for a moment about her sneer and then he took a new laptop from a stack of cases in one corner of his crowded office. In a few minutes he had it up and running. Then he signed into the civilian Wi-Fi net and Yahoo using an account that had been dormant for a year—guys who had come through over the years gave him their Wi-Fi and email account names and passwords for lots of reasons. To send things off for them. To say goodbye to someone, if something bad happened. To delete every single JPEG in their account. One of them got killed. A couple of the others killed themselves. He had done his duty by all of them, but he still had a handful of account passwords. He used one of them now. One of the suicides.

He went into a VPN and entered the address for the InformationIsFree dropbox, which he'd heard about it in a routine security briefing months ago. Some joker in Iraq had sent out some documents about prisoner abuse. It was a problem, apparently, because they hadn't been able to trace the leak. So if any of your guys are talking about that site, let us know, okay? Those documents got into the papers just after the Abu Ghraib scandal blew up. Caused all kinds of trouble.

The dropbox was simple to use. Which was good. Because he was still drunk. But not too drunk to find the embed's photo and click send, and shamble off to his cot. Not too drunk to wake up an hour later and wonder why the laptop was still whirring and clicking. He got up, scratching his balls through his military issue green boxers, and peered at the screen. And then he was abruptly sober.

Select all.

He pulled the thumb drive and frantically signed off the internet and out of the Wi-Fi. He flushed so deeply his hair hurt. And then he puked into his wastebasket. He had sent every file on that thumb drive to the dropbox. Every fucking cuntsucking file.