Read The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit Online
Authors: Richard House
Let’s say it’s only temporary. Let’s say it’s in your power to grant someone a reprieve. You can snatch them away, and offer a short respite. And maybe what’s coming might become less of a certainty?
Rem slept, woke, slept again, revived the same dream of scooping people from highways, buildings, cars – elemental dreams with floods and fires. Dreams of stress not salvation. The last hours of the night he slept heavily and decided on a plan. These men in Fatboy’s book were lined up, dead certainties while they remained at ACSB.
The story as Watts tells it goes something like this: it’s his third time in Iraq, he’s working directly with Southern-CIPA on comms across the entire South-Central region – we’re talking basic communications, because everything digital and terrestrial has been looted, bombed, looted. Not one hub or exchange has survived intact. They haven’t come close to re-establishing the basic services available fifteen years ago, it’s that backward. (Watts sits in a folding chair. Magisterial. Elbows on knees, thick forearms, a broad forehead, and explains himself in a voice Rem would describe as Midwestern, grained, husky, rangy.) What you have to understand, he says, is the mentality of the Iraqi versus the mentality of the average Westerner. An Iraqi, for example, can’t be relied on to innovate. You can’t give an Iraqi a job and expect it to be done; these guys have been trained over decades to do nothing. This isn’t your average Arab. You have to give explicit instructions and tell them step by step what you want and exactly how it’s going to happen, and even then you have to supervise. Why? Because these people don’t
improvise
. They have to be told. Free food and regular government handouts have made them lazy and unambitious. It’s all clan-like, top-down,
individual responsibility
just isn’t in the picture. Alongside this, there’s the talent of the Iraqi to completely fuck up anything that might look like progress. Which brings him to Rule Number 1: if something can be dismantled
it will disappear
. He’s seen whole substations stripped in one evening.
So anyway, the story: they’re scrambling to establish basic communications, with the mightily reduced aim of refitting a minimal seven out of the seventy-nine exchanges and substations. That’s seven. Count them. Seven. Less than nine per cent of the number they’ve been paid to complete. Alongside this his team is also responsible for the main communications router for the company – that’s HOSCO, remember – so every speck of information, every byte, comes through his small four-man team, and they get to hear
everything
. Every blip of information the parent company is telling its subsidiaries, and every anxious twitch those subsidiaries are feeding on to their project managers, everything but everything is filtered through this team.
And let me tell you, it’s chaos.
So, early one morning, HOSCO’s network goes wild. A message from one of the division directors announces that a statement will be made in Washington that very morning and the content of this announcement is to be passed, immediately, to all senior staff. According to this director, the statement they are waiting for is a follow-up to a statement made by the President himself, in which, while touring southern Iraq, he inadvertently blabbed out information on a project that was not intended to be made public. At. This. Point. This
statement
has slipped out so far ahead of schedule it threatens to kill the project unless they act quickly. You follow? Washington is now obliged to dump a fuckton of money upon said project, and unless HOSCO is ready for this shit-shower of money, they’ll miss out altogether on the mother of all projects. The story, Watts says, is a classic.
First though comes the story about the trip.
The commander-in-chief’s visit has been scheduled for a long time. The visit is little more than a fly-’n’-stop, a series of parsed hand-waves at relevant outposts along the Iraq–Kuwait border. Things aren’t right in Washington, and what was a planned pre-exit howdy to the remaining teams has become politically toxic.
Picture this: Air Force One, accompanied by small fighter jets prowling wing-tip to wing-tip, wasps cutting through a blue hood of sky toward a copper horizon, a jagged edge of what might be mountains but is in fact the smoke of burning refineries. The mission is important. Everyone agrees that there are few usable photographs of the commander-in-chief alongside his forces because he has the bad habit of looking bored while speaking with people he does not know.
At Camp Navistar the commander-in-chief and team decamp to a fleet of helicopters to be flown direct to the 0-9 at Camp Hope. In readiness the base has long been secured and emptied of all non-nationals, but right at the last minute the media-unfriendly wounding of four Iraqi civilians outside the compound makes the stop at Camp Hope
ill-advised
. Instead, the commander-in-chief will make his announcement on changes to the Third Iraq Key Strategic Plan at the next nearest manned station, Provision Camp Liberty on Route 567 in South-West District 2 near Amrah City. The change, mid-transit, makes it necessary to gather a great deal of information en route.
Down on the ground, a Colonel Pritzker, is the first to learn that the commander-in-chief has come to Iraq to announce a new development in strategy and now intends to visit Camp Liberty. That day. In fact, within minutes.
Pritzker is suspicious: there are radio shows that do this kind of thing, and he can taste the end of his career. First off, he’s never heard of a
provision camp
before, and he has no idea who is in residence at Camp Liberty. Camp Liberty, to his memory, is a lowly set of HOSCO cabins, a star-like arrangement of burn pits, and a vacant squatter camp.
The colonel’s advice is passed back to the team, and after some discussion the secretary gets back to Pritzker and says, great, we’re going to run with this. It’s a go. And it finally occurs to Pritzker that this really is the President, and that Air Force One is, as he speaks, winging its way across the Arabian Desert to its imminent arrival at an empty set of burn pits. His final word, the only thing that occurs to him, is to ask the secretary if he knows what a provision camp is. Has he ever heard this term before? The secretary is a little preoccupied because there are other items to concern him now, but the question stops him. No, neither he nor any of the other staffers have heard of a provision camp and presume it is some kind of a place that somehow, you know,
provides
.
Colonel Pritzker says uh-huh, that’s almost right. A provision camp is certainly a place that provides a service. But Provision Camp Liberty is isolated for good reason, because it is the largest site where chemical, human, and animal waste is brought to be destroyed in the desert. You lose a leg in Iraq, a finger, a toenail, if it can be swept up, it’s coming to Camp Liberty. In fact Provision Camp Liberty stinks so bad that it is known by the TCNs as Camp Crapper. You take several tonnes of human waste, add the insane heat of the Arabian Desert, and you have yourself an intense olfactory experience – but, regardless, whoever is currently in occupation at that site would be mightily proud to meet their commander-in-chief.
Watts imagines the quality of the silence that falls across Colonel Pritzker’s comm-link while the information is relayed back to the team.
Two minutes short of their destination the President’s entourage return to Camp Navistar on the Kuwait border, where, in the hangar, surrounded by his retiring troops, the President himself announces the New Strategic Plan, and here the terrible mistake is made. In an answer to a question about the apparent failure to rebuild Amrah City the commander-in-chief mentions that there is a new scheme under consideration. Somewhere, he says,
here
, in southern Iraq, in a place he would not identify, the Corps of Engineers are preparing to build a new military outpost, and this outpost will become the largest military staging-post yet built. Once completed, and once its mission is fulfilled, the base will be converted for civilian use and will become the first new city in a peaceful Iraq.
At this announcement HOSCO goes wild. The lines are crazy. Speculation crosses the globe. One hour after the commander-in-chief’s unguarded statement the Secretary of State back in Washington confirms the details, but adds, with caution, that the intended base is still little more than ‘a good intention’. They’re looking at four sites and are sending point-men to evaluate these sites
as we speak
. While this, initially, is to be a military ‘advisory’ base, an integral part of the New Strategic Plan. Never again will a foreign power enter Iraq territory and occupy its oil fields (a chuckle from the Press Corps to this one).
In a voice of creamy sincerity the Secretary of State insists that the administration is looking to the future. And then that smile. Everybody loves that smile.
You know what this means? Watts asks. You know when this happened? This all happened pre-withdrawal plans and pre-basic implementation. Which means that something has to be done about this now. Like,
yesterday
. Because there’s money attached to the idea, and the period in which that money remains available is near its expiration.
This is how government works. They make decisions, they appoint money to those decisions, and they expect others to bid and take on those projects. There’s a whole complicated structure for this which has government agencies and private businesses at each other neck and neck. It’s in everyone’s interest to have this money used up before it gets sucked back. That’s how everything works around here. At the last minute whole schemes suddenly materialize.
Watts salutes the air.
Goodbye, Southern-CIPA.
Hello, Camp Crapper.
✩
The convoy gathered at the Transport dock.
Rem hadn’t met the men as a group before. Santo, Watts, Pakosta, Samuels, Clark, Chimeno, Kiprowski. Six of the seven picked from Fatboy’s list, seconded from their units and placements. Kiprowski added as a late concession.
He rode Jalla, Death Row, on a push bike
. Kiprowski, by rights, should be a legend already.
Clark held court as they waited. ‘This is all good news,’ he said, ‘they’re shutting down projects, moving people on. This is the last, last chance.’ Clark believed, as did many others, that the section base would soon be closed. ‘The commissary,’ he asked Kiprowski, ‘they’ve cut down on supplies? Am I right? Same with stores. It’s happening. You know it is. The TCNs have their exit papers. The convoys are going directly to the camps. It’s over. The only thing remaining in Amrah is Southern-CIPA because that’s where the money is.’
Rem walked from vehicle to vehicle, shook hands, gave his name and repeated theirs.
Rem took the first Humvee behind the lead and picked Watts and Santo for company. Pakosta, Clark, and Samuels would follow, with Kiprowski and Chimeno coming after with most of the supplies. Behind them a long train of trucks, gun muzzles spiked out of windows. For the first leg they would accompany the convoy on the southward route to Kuwait then separate before the border and make their own way west. As promised Geezler had arranged security for the final stretch, two Cougars, front and back. Pakosta had experience in recovery along Highway 80, and advised that they should keep the spacing between them uneven. Rem couldn’t see how this could be achieved. The map showed nothing west of Highway 80, simply lines indicating the grades of hills and berms, the lengths of dry windswept ditches. No villages, no installations, no pre- or post- war encampments. Nothing until Camp Liberty. A map so blank it might as well be an ocean chart.
‘Doesn’t mean nothing’s there,’ Watts advised. ‘It just means they don’t know.’
Clark’s smile slipped off his face.
Watts slapped his shoulder. ‘If they take anyone out it’s usually the second vehicle. The first pops the mechanism, the second takes the hit, after that they’ll take anyone in their sights and the whole convoy lights up.’
Clark began to buckle his jacket. ‘Much better,’ he spoke to himself. ‘Thanks. Feeling so much better.’
‘I told you what you say if they capture you.’ Santo drew his finger across his throat. ‘Remember. No one loves us. No one’s paying any ransom. We won’t be missed.’
Pakosta standing on the running plate kept up a slow solo jive and paused every now and then to mime being shot in the head, the heart, the crotch.
An hour out of Amrah City and the palms and the villages thinned out and knuckled into the slopes – primitive, Santo called them, pointing as he drove, so that Rem couldn’t be sure if he meant the place or the people. In many ways the villages appeared as tight as the old centre of Halsteren. You’d hear your neighbours, every detail, and you’d know them well. A few of the houses sported satellite discs and long aerials. Santo pointed them out. ‘If you want to fuck with someone, you go right to that house.’
Rem looked back at the line of trucks, Kiprowski’s head struck out of the second-to-last Humvee.
‘You see that?’
Santo turned in his seat and took a while to find what Rem was talking about. ‘Is that boy a retard?’
‘Thinks he’s on vacation.’
Rem called on the radio and asked Kiprowski to draw his head back inside the vehicle. Kiprowski gave a wave as he complied.
Santo tutted. ‘Certified.’
Beyond the groves and villages the land tired itself out, the bluffs and hills became distant, and the sky bifurcated, blue up top and a dirty skin-like pink along the horizon. Not a desert in the way Rem thought of deserts – as something tide-like, the wind working sand into ripples and banks – but instead a scabby gritty wasteland, hammered, used up, not a place of possibility, but a place with an over-busy history. Knackered. After a while they swapped drivers: Watts day-dreamed and Rem drove and Santo chattered to himself.
Rem focused so hard on the vehicle in front that the rough tarpaulin of the square back appeared to float, a soft fluttering box set at a fixed distance. He needed to thank Geezler and couldn’t decide the most appropriate method, then figured that saying nothing would be fine. People have their own reasons for helping you out, and in satisfying his own agenda Geezler probably didn’t realize the extent of the favour anyhow: eight men transferred to safety and security. For the first time he began to think seriously about re-establishing his business.