The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (56 page)

‘Two things.’ Watts hesitated at the door, a little sulky Rem thought. ‘First, we’re supposed to make reports. Every day. CIPA want a log of when the trucks arrive and when they leave.’

‘You can manage this?’

‘Sure.’ Watts remained at the door. ‘The second thing – they want you to check Highway 80, see what the problem is. They’ll send a team from Amrah to fix it.’

As Rem stood up he told Watts to pass the news to Santo, as Santo, Pakosta, Clark, Chimeno, and possibly Samuels, were now working security.

‘Tell him to take the guns if he’s confident they can use them safely.’ Rem didn’t see much choice. If they were to go off-base, they shouldn’t go unarmed.

While Santo organized the new detail, Rem took Kiprowski with him to Highway 80 to see the damage for himself.

As he drove off the camp, Kiprowski pointed to the east. At some distance, four Chinooks approached with vehicles slung beneath them, all heading toward the camp.

The vehicle ran well, Rem could feel it in his grip, an easy thrum, a satisfying throaty roll.

‘Another delivery?’

Rem said he didn’t know, but it looked that way.

‘You look at that boat? It’s all new.’

Rem asked if Kiprowski had ever been to Europe, if he’d ever travelled before. It didn’t matter if he hadn’t. Kiprowski didn’t respond.

‘We’ve never spoken about Chicago. What neighbourhood are you from?’

‘West Ridge.’

‘I don’t know where that is exactly.’

‘Back from the lake. Bryn Mawr to Howard.’

‘I’m Rogers Park. Clark and Lunt.’

‘Rockwell and Coyle.’

They both nodded.

‘You know it?’

Rem shrugged. ‘I have – I had – a dog, so I spend most of the time closer to the lake.’

‘Some parts of it are fancy.’

‘You mind if I ask something personal?’

The boy looked right ahead, and said cautiously he didn’t mind.

‘It’s just most people have their reasons for being here, and I was wondering about yours . . .’

Most of their stories ran to the same narrative. While Pakosta was dodging personal debt, and maybe some unspecified trouble (same as Clark, Samuels, and in his own way, Watts), Kiprowski was avoiding debt of a different kind: the near-poverty that locked his family to a small railroad apartment, night school and service jobs. The promise of money was more than enough to draw him to Iraq – food services couldn’t be a safer proposition. Rem tried to curb his impatience as Kiprowski told his story, about how he was the first in his family to travel to the Middle East. In every story the same tidy tax-free $100,000 figured as the basic lure. This money would be used to provide a decent house, settle parents’ or spouse’s debt, or children’s medical expenses, be seed money for a business they would start with a brother, father, cousin – who knows? Everyone had the same idea, or something close. That money would turn around a life that otherwise had no direction but forward and down.

Kiprowski had the idea more polished than others. He’d picked out a storefront on Howard, right at the Chicago–Evanston border. A café, a small restaurant. Maybe buy into a franchise. Kiprowski’s plan sounded dryer than the landscape they were passing through. If Rem breathed deeply enough he could smell the boy’s future: a body sweating labour through unbroken years.

Not that Rem wasn’t prone to this romance himself. Weren’t there properties in Evanston he’d imagined Cathy inside, perhaps even a family, but no matter how much money he earned, this wouldn’t be his leafy lane.
And wasn’t this the point of Evanston, somehow, to offer up modest but unattainable possibilities?

They found the damaged intersection shortly after they left Route 567. An oval pit, about nine metres in circumference and one metre at its deepest, broke the highway. Upside down, on either side, lay the stripped blown fragments of a car.

‘This isn’t good.’

Until Highway 80 could be repaired Route 567 would need to handle the traffic between Kuwait and Baghdad, which brought potential danger to Camp Liberty.

‘Doesn’t look like much to fix.’

Kiprowski was right: one or two days and the highway could open. Rem wound down his window, leaned on his forearm and smoked. ‘It’s just a hole.’

His optimism didn’t last. On the journey back the radio buzzed with news of two bombings on the outskirts of Amrah City. Jalla Road. Looting stirred up by the bombing had spread from the city centre to the outlying neighbourhoods with less protected FOBs. The sooner the section base closed the better.

As soon as they passed Khat they could see the black plumes from Camp Liberty, two separate strands conjoining as a single cloud to signal the precise location of the burn pits. Rem punched the steering wheel. ‘Look at that!’ He opened his hands at the horizon. ‘Could they make it more obvious?’ The convoy from Amrah had made it through. He should have left instruction that there were to be no fires until the highway was secured. He should have considered this.

As they drove in silence the columns grew fatter and more ominous.

In the late afternoon Rem held his first ‘three-point’ briefing. Southern-CIPA had divided Route 567 into zones. Zone B15 included Camp Liberty and would be monitored by Rem’s team. The men were to build two blockhouses out of sandbags and set chains across the road. Signals would alert them of the convoys heading to Amrah City. The plan would become operational immediately.

Markland had specified that all vehicles holding potentially looted goods should be stopped, searched, and held. Rem looked about the group from man to man. ‘If you see anything, step out of the way. Let the people at Zone 14 or Zone 16 deal with it. We can’t hold people here, and we don’t have any kind of authority.’

Clark had a different idea on what was causing the trouble, discussions roiled with conspiracies peeled off the internet. Pakosta agreed. ‘Sixty per cent of the oil that’s shipped overland is stolen. Fact.’

Amer Hassan had stories from other translators. ‘There’s no gas,’ he said. People queue all day in Baghdad, in Nasiriyah, even in Kurdish Mosul. Families risked breaking the curfew to get in line early, and violence while waiting, snipers who would shoot at the cars for sport. ‘It’s no easier buying fuel on the black market.’

Chimeno couldn’t see the logic. They’d seen the convoys on YouTube, the dirty silver tankers in long heavy lines. How was this possible? ‘Just yesterday on CNN, an entire caravan of thirty trucks with Iraqi Ministry of Oil logos was hijacked. It was nothing if not brazen.

Amer Hassan concurred. He’d also heard of this and knew it not to be uncommon.

‘You don’t stop anything,’ Rem repeated. ‘Leave it to the military.’ If there was going to be any activity, he warned, anything which threatened them, it would likely come at night.

Rem held his hands up for silence. ‘Two days. At most. That’s all we have to get through. The highway will be repaired, guaranteed, in two days.’

A groan passed through the group at the word ‘guarantee’. HOSCO, Southern-CIPA, they all knew, were not dependable.

After the briefing, Rem contacted Geezler and left a message explaining their circumstances. While he didn’t ask, he made it clear that he wanted advice. Geezler’s misgivings about them working for CIPA now made sense. ‘I’m concerned that we’ve worked ourselves into a situation we can’t manage.’ He spoke briskly wanting his concern to sound controlled and confident. At the same time he didn’t want Watts to hear him.

Rem joined Pakosta, Kiprowski, and Santo for the first shift. The men held back behind the sandbags and allowed the traffic through.

‘Looks like everyone’s moving house.’ Kiprowski couldn’t quite believe his eyes. Anything that could be pilfered was being pilfered, and in the first night they saw flatbed trucks loaded with bathroom fixtures, toilets, baths, slabs of ceramic tiles, metal rebar hammered out of concrete, metal doors and window frames. One vehicle crammed with the entire contents of a hotel room: a television, telephone, self-assembled furniture, in another, mirrors and bed frames, doors and shower units. A whole truck of dried semolina, a cloud of flour, white from the distance as the top bags were split. Semis came toward them as a hard vibration, a mirage unwrinkling on the road, approaching and promising strangeness as they passed.

‘Guess what we have in this one. Just guess.’

The road brought everything. It brought the dead and the living. It brought people and livestock; oil, kerosene, diesel, and petrol. Hospital equipment, scanners, beds, cots, mattresses, dentists’ chairs. Crates marked ‘popcorn’, ‘peppercorn’, and ‘processed meat’. Milk and honey, and every type of foodstuff. It brought CDs and DVDs. Concrete and tar, stone, brick, clay, paint, and bales of material, canvas, cotton, and silk, stuffed into family cars. Cars, and cars towed by other cars, cars on trailers, car parts, and motors. Machines to break down buildings, military supplies and vehicles. Humvees and Bradleys. One car stuffed entirely with socks and baby clothes stolen from a department store, with the driver lodged into his seat. It was a road of wonders. At dawn, Kiprowski watched a painted stone head with a silent pursed mouth and wide blue eyes agog at the desert, with thin spangled hair flapping in streamers behind it, strapped to the roof of a family car. There were cars with other pieces of cars and sheet metal welded and battened to them for protection, and there were the SUVs black and clean with tinted windows.

Hassan told stories of how women were taken from their houses and brought across the border to Syria or Jordan. Clark had heard similar news on the British World Service. There were hotels in every border country where women were set up as cleaners and prostituted. It was hard to guess how many were involved. Hard also to say what happened to the women who escaped or returned.

The idea was especially repugnant to Kiprowski, who compared everything back to his own family, his three sisters, his mother who’d raised him. He pestered Amer with questions. How could such a thing be conceived? And Amer said that there was always worse, always one more degradation possible. It would be better, he said, that they should die. Amer Hassan instructed them. They should not speak directly to the women, only the men.

Later that night Clark and Pakosta pulled over two black sedans. With the cars stopped off-road Pakosta called Kiprowski and Rem to come immediately. In total there were three men and seven women, all young. Their passes showed the men and women to be unrelated.

Clark shone his torch into the back of the first vehicle and one of the women shielded her eyes and shied away. Clark shook his head, he just didn’t feel easy about the situation. They separated the three men, took them out of the cars. One of them spoke English. Pakosta later described his manner as servile: the man was a snake. Kiprowski and Clark spoke with the women through Amer Hassan. Hassan translated in a calm voice so that he seemed to defuse the problem. The conversation, with many pauses, was oiled by smooth and conciliatory OKs.

Clark asked why two of the women were from Baghdad and the others were from Sadr. The women claimed to be related, but did not know each other’s names. They all gave the name of their driver as Mohammed.

Hassan asked where he was heading and why. The man replied, astonished: ‘Because I am leaving.’ His papers showed that he came from Egypt, and was a businessman in imports and exports, but gave no particular detail. Hassan repeated his questions and they slowly learned that the women’s families had paid for them to be to be taken out of the country to safety: instead of kidnapping, these women were being taken to a safe house. They were all married, and were being sent ahead of their husbands for their own safety.

As the men climbed back into the cars, one of them looked for a long time at Amer Hassan.

‘He knows me,’ Hassan said. ‘That man knows who I am. Word will get back that I am working with the Americans.’

Kiprowski asked who would know that he was working here, and how that would matter. Amer said that there were many people who could not leave. His family were still in Baghdad, and if word got back to them there would be trouble.

‘What do they think you are doing?’

‘They think that I am finishing my studies in Damascus.’

Pakosta held up his gun and tracked the vehicle as it disappeared. He could solve the problem, he said. Hassan only had to give the word.

✩

The next morning Cathy received a reply from Marianne Clark.

Cathy returned to the library after work and found messages from John Watts, brother of Paul, and Sara Morales, girlfriend of Mark Samuels.

and

One day more and Cathy was surprised to see a whole number of messages, each copied to all of the recipients.