Fobbit (2 page)

Until then, there was nothing they could do except finish their cupcakes, wipe their fingers, and go back to playing computer solitaire (Semple) and leafing through the pages of an old
People
magazine (Andersen). Tom Cruise was, after all, in the midst of a very passionate, very weird affair with doe-eyed Katie Holmes. And then there was that vegetable girl, Terri Somebody-or-Other, who nobody had thought to ask before she went into a coma whether or not she would want her plug to be pulled. And Jesus, what was
up
with Michael Jackson going to court in pajamas?
Day-um
. America sure was a funny place to look at when you got far enough away, thought Private First Class Andersen.

Hovering unseen at the edge of the G-1 cubicle, Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding watched the two privates toss a cupcake back and forth across the cubicle and thought,
Oh, man, this isn’t going to be easy
. He needed a word, a simple little word.

Confirmed
.

That’s all. Just those two syllables.

His life, at this very moment, depended on it. If, that is, you could call press releases a matter of life and death. Which, at this point in time, he did.

Gooding cleared his throat. “Semple,” he said.

The private turned his head, saw the sergeant standing there, and quickly minimized the solitaire screen. “Hello, Public Affairs,” he said. “What can Casualty do for you this fine afternoon?”

“Same old, same old, Semple. Need to know if you have doctor’s confirmation of the latest one—the guy from Second Brigade. The press release is done and ready to send out to the media. I’m just waiting on you guys to give me the go-ahead.”

“Sorry, Sar’nt.” Semple shook his head.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Server’s down,” Andersen said, riffling the pages of
People
a couple of inches from her throat. As if that would cool her skin. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on ice cubes, Antarctica, a guy from Alaska she once dated.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Gooding said.

“Wish we was,” Semple said.

“It was fine when I left my cubicle on the other side of the palace.”

“Don’t know what to tell you, Sar’nt. Sandstorm must have come along in the time it took you to walk from there to here. Maybe a mortar hit. Whatever. We’re dead in the water right now.”

Gooding gritted his teeth. Dead. Dying. Done for. By now, death was a way of life for him, a prescribed job skill he performed with automatic finger taps and wrist lifts across his keyboard. Death was just one of the commodities he traded on a daily basis.

It hadn’t always been this way. He could still remember a time, at the start of this deployment, when he’d been a death virgin, cherry unpopped by all the casualty reports and photos of roadside bombings. Long before the Butcher Shop of Baghdad had dulled him to cynicism.

Once, when he was still down in Kuwait, waiting to deploy north to Iraq and join the rest of the division, which had already been in-country for three weeks, a captain from the G-2 Intelligence Section walked up to him in the makeshift Tactical Operations Center and asked, “You PAO?”

Gooding had looked up from the Dickens novel he was reading, then quickly got to his feet, heart pounding. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Thought you should know we just got word from up north. Division took some fatalities earlier this afternoon. A vehicle out on patrol rolled over into a canal in south Baghdad. Two dead on impact. Another one trapped in the wreckage. Two other soldiers jumped in to rescue the vehicle crew but they got swept away. Monsoon season up there is a bitch, apparently. Anyway, last I heard, we’ve got three dead and two missing.”

Gooding had dog-eared a page of
A Tale of Two Cities
with trembling fingers and said in a hoarse voice, “Thanks, ma’am. I appreciate you letting me know.”

Back then, he’d slumped against the wall, reeling from his first deaths as a public affairs soldier serving in his first war. He pictured the Humvee tipping, tumbling into the water, the two soldiers on the bank shouting, acting on instinct, jumping into the water, misjudging the current, and getting sucked down into the muddy swirl of the Euphrates (in his mind, the canal had become the mighty Euphrates), their mouths trying to snatch air but filling instead with dirty water. He pictured those two soldiers flailing against the pull of the water, soon losing all strength as their lungs filled with the Euphrates, and their limp bodies floating downstream. He had thought about their personnel files quickly being pulled from the division’s records and labeled “Killed In Action,” their ghosts quietly falling out of company formations, their names laser-etched on a memorial plaque back in Georgia.

Not many days and three U.S. KIAs later, Gooding had written in his diary:

February 13:
This is how a death is announced. In the midst of the hum and buzz of idle boredom in the Division Tactical Operations Center, you hear one officer, bent over the back pages of
The Stars and Stripes,
ask another, “What did you get for 17 Across?” Two people are arguing about which
Matrix
movie was the best. Another soldier in his early twenties is surfing the Internet looking at engagement rings and wondering aloud what difference a half carat made in the quality and price and—most importantly—a chick’s response to the bling.

Then, like a blade swishing through the air comes a sudden sharp voice from the other side of the room, cutting through the growl-buzz of the generator and the fist-thump of wind against the tent walls. You look over and an NCO is pressing a telephone receiver tighter against his ear and saying, “Repeat that last transmission. What did you say?” He waves his hand at another NCO to get him a pen, whereupon he scribbles on an index card. Two or three others cluster near him, heads pressed in a tight circle. One head pops up and catches the eye of the battle captain sitting in his leather office chair at the front of the room. He rises from the chair—he’d been watching a NASCAR race on the TV—and walks over to the growing knot of huddled heads.

At this point, something like cold fear creeps around your heart like icy vines. The information on the index card is read back into the phone for confirmation, then the battle captain grabs the card and strides to the front of the room, yelling, “ATTENTION IN THE DTOC! ATTENTION IN THE DTOC!”

All sound and motion in the tent stops. Someone mutes the NASCAR race. The battle captain reads from the index card: “We have reports of one IED in the vicinity of Scania along the convoy route. One KIA. Battle-damage assessment still being made. That is all.” He reads it as carefully and dispassionately as someone quoting stock market prices, then he turns and writes the information on a large sheet of paper taped to the wall at the front of the room where all significant activities—the loss of an M16, the arrival/departure of a convoy, the publication of an operations order—are recorded.

As you watch him write with the magic marker, the conversation-buzz of the room gradually returns to its former volume. Some drop their heads in sorrow, shaking them back and forth as if that will counteract the loss and bring the KIA back to life, or at least change his status to WIA. But the magic marker ink is permanent, seared there by the heat of an IED blast. No wounds can be reversed. The battle captain returns to his leather chair. A couple of officers return to their crossword puzzle. Someone turns up the volume on the TV and the NASCAR race resumes.

But now, five months later, death was a matter of course, one more task in a day already filled with a heavy workload. Gooding could type his KIA press releases blindfolded. If, that is, he could get these two cupcake-smeared clerks in G-1 to cooperate and give him the nod.

Gooding ground his teeth. CNN was breathing down his neck, calling every ten minutes to ask about the explosion half the people in al-Karkh saw and nearly everyone heard, the deep thud rippling through the neighborhoods, the smoke pluming like a gray finger. The producers had called an hour ago and said they already had a cameraman on the site who was telling them there were U.S. casualties. The rest of the meat-wagon media were right on CNN’s heels. By the time he walked back to his cubicle, Gooding could expect to see three or four e-mails in his in-box from the
New York Times,
NBC, and Reuters. They wanted details. They had deadlines. They needed confirmation of death.

“Not much we can do right now, Sar’nt,” said Semple, clicking uselessly at his e-mail in-box. “Dust storm’s fucking up the whole computer network from here to Basra.”

“CNN just announced this guy’s death and they have footage of a body wearing a U.S. uniform being hauled from the blast site on a stretcher.”

“You know the drill, Sar’nt,” Semple said. “He ain’t dead until we get the e-mail from the docs at Camp Bucca saying he’s dead.”

“And you can’t pick up the phone and call?”

“C’mon, Sar’nt. You know it has to be official and in writing. We can’t go vocal on casualty confirmation.”

Semple looked at Andersen to see if she’d agree with him and get this sergeant off their ass. She had stopped sucking her fingers and was now picking at a piece of dried lunch caught on the ample breast of her DCUs. She scraped her nail back and forth right where the nipple would be beneath the uniform, the brown T-shirt, and the bra. Sweet Jesus have mercy!

When he had the chance, Semple was going to tell her about a new Porta-Potty he’d seen by the chapel where no one went except Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings. He was going to make his invitation smooth as chocolate milk and maybe she’d reconsider her previous reluctance for toilet sex.

For now, he couldn’t say anything because the sergeant from PAO was still standing there.

“So,” Gooding said, “even though you know he’s dead and I know he’s dead and by now his momma probably knows he’s dead, the dude’s not really dead, is that what you’re telling me?”

Semple leveled a flat gaze at Gooding and clicked at his equally dead in-box. “He ain’t
officially
dead yet.”

“What about unofficially?”

“Unofficially, yeah. He’s road meat. But if anyone asks, you didn’t hear it from me.”

Gooding was already gone. He’d spun on his heel and started speedwalking back to his cubicle by the time the word
meat
had fallen off Semple’s lips.

“
Day
-um,” Andersen said.

“Ole sarge needs to slow hisself down,” Semple said. “Guy’s gonna have a heart attack if he starts taking this shit too seriously.”

“Yeah. He needs to pace himself. We still got another six months to go in this shit hole.”

“Ticktock, ticktock.”

“Why you always gotta bring up the deployment clock, huh?”

“What else we gonna talk about?” Semple asked. “It’s all one big fuckin’ Groundhog Day anyway, so what does it matter?”

“It matters. I’m sick of this shit already.”

Semple snorted. “Your words: pace yourself.”

“Whatever.” Andersen brushed off her breast with wide, hard strokes to dislodge the crumbs, then picked up her
People
and moved on to Brad Pitt. Semple watched her, crossing his legs to hide his hardness.

“Hey,” he said and Andersen looked up from the magazine. The words
Porta-Potty
were there on the tip of his tongue, but what he said instead was, “Check the server again.”

Andersen clicked her in-box. “Well, lookee here. It’s back up. Whaddaya think? Should we call him back?”

Semple grinned. “Naw. Let him sweat it out for a little bit longer. Pass me that other cupcake, will ya?”

2

DURET

T
his was not good.

With Iraqis pressing around him on all sides like circus spectators leaning forward to see the man on the high-wire act slip and tumble, Lieutenant Colonel Vic Duret looked through his field glasses at the man slumped in the driver’s seat. The man should be dead by now but he was still breathing and every so often his shoulders gave barely perceptible twitches.

This was
definitely
something to be filed under “Not Good.”

This was “Hello, soldier! Welcome to the Land of Lose-Lose!”

This was chopping off his hands, then asking him to conduct a symphony.

This was dangerous and delicate and would not be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction.

This was, in fact, the classic tar-baby situation. But what could he do? They were here and here they’d stay until they yanked free of the tar.

Duret fingered the focus ring, pulling the car closer into view across the two hundred yards. The roof was caved in and the steering column had broken loose, pinning the driver against the burgundy upholstery. Half the guy’s skull seemed to have been knocked ajar, but the scene was still definitely a problem. The half-dead terrorist was, after all, still half-alive.