News From the Red Desert (42 page)

“Yes. And the bigger picture here isn't going in the right direction.”

“Since when?

“Maybe 2003.”

“For the last six months I've heard nothing from your field commanders and public affairs guys except that every day, in every way, things are getting better and better.”

“We are a can-do organization.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“Go home.”

“To your wife?”

He nodded.

“Politics?”

“I don't know.”

“Of course you do. I bet Fred has the PAC started up already.”

He smiled at her. She knew him so well. “I've had some inquiries from interesting organizations in every sector I can think of. Finance, armaments, diplomacy, academia—I'll take my time.”

“Have you talked to Tom?”

“No. He's busy.”

“He's seen my piece on the massacre in Panjwai, you know.”

“What did he say?”

“That he will corroborate everything I wrote.”

“Can I see your piece?”

“I filed it just before I went to the screening. And anyway, you don't want anyone asking if you had access to that piece before it went to press.”

“No, probably not.”

“So we're all going home.”

“We should get together for a game of golf or something.”

Deirdre laughed then. “Hey, I'm going to write about a soldier who did something very brave the other night.”

“At the shooting?”

“Yes. And when it comes out, I want you to make sure he's recognized. Like, officially. A commendation. Something that will get him attention.”

“I'm going to have a lot less influence, you know.”

“But you'll know who to call. And they'll still take your calls.”

“All right. I should get going now. There are lots of wounded to visit here.”

“Okay,” she said. She moved her armature-encased arm and pinched his little finger between her thumb and index finger. “Still…” she said, and looked at him for a long time.

“I know,” he said. And after a moment he opened her fingers gently and released himself. He stood and drew back the curtains around her bed and left.

A week later.

The sergeant sat, exhausted, at a table in the SF OPS centre. Waller and three more SF interrogators and a CIA interrogator sat with him. Lattice stood by the door. Waller said, “I like the manager. He's got the right bio: professional humiliations, rejected by his wife. He's got that crazy brother-in-law. He spent years in Peshawar. He's had more influence over the boy than anyone else. They had a quasi-parental relationship. He had to be instrumental in shaping the boy's world.”

“I don't know about that,” the sergeant said. “But I'm pretty sure the young guy doesn't know anything.”

The CIA interrogator said, “He and the manager's story have some interesting correspondences. Both lived abroad and flamed out. Both superficially secular. Both involved in this chess tournament.”

Waller: “Both bilaterally symmetrical. Vertebrates. Both read words. Both Muslims.”

Lattice raised his eyebrows at him.

In the room behind this one, Rashid sat, his head drooping, as Slayer's
Hell Awaits
played so loudly the concrete walls faintly vibrated, though the sound transmitted was minimal. His chin slowly approached, and finally touched, his chest, which ran with bile-stained vomit. A soldier with ear protectors poked him in the ribs with a broom handle. This time it took four hard jabs, the fourth one with a foot of wind-up, to get Rashid to lift his chin off his chest.

It was not a prized assignment. The man had been caught napping on sentry duty himself, after a thirty-hour hike, chasing militants into the Hindu Kush. He had some sympathy for what Rashid Siddiqui was enduring. Though not for his role in organizing that shooting.
Motherfucker. How do these people become like this? Look at him: swollen eyes and lips, head hanging, hair matted with blood and snot. Fucking animal. He poked him again.

The other SF interrogator said, “I don't think we just let Siddiqui go. a) He still might know something, and b) we may have just radicalized him ourselves. We might as well say it: everything to do with this disaster is going to be scrutinized by endless commissions of inquiry. If we let him go and he turns out to have been the plant, or even if he wasn't but he takes umbrage at our conversations with him this week and decides to throw his lot in with the bad guys and gets caught on the battlefield—well, that will be talked about endlessly.” The CIA guy made a move to respond, but the soldier talked over him. “So let's give him to NDS. They'll take him to Sarpoza and let him contemplate his situation a bit and maybe something interesting will come to light. And if nothing does, at least he's not planting bombs in the roads at night.”

All of them nodded.

The sergeant spoke. “Issay is another story. He's just false. I know it.”

Lattice said, “Can you be more specific, Sergeant?”

“Every time I catch him looking at me, I can tell he's trying to figure out what I want to hear.”

“That could have something to do with the beating you have been laying on him.”

“Maybe, sir.”

Waller: “Sounds like we're not ready to draw any definite conclusions, yet.”

“I'm not ready to say he's clean, that's for sure,” the sergeant said.

“So what's the next step? More of this, here?”

“We're not making progress.”

The CIA guy said, “You could send him to Salt Pit.”

Waller said, “He's not a CIA prisoner. He's military property.”

“You can continue the interrogation there, or sit in on them with us helping, whatever you like.”

Waller looked at Lattice.

Lattice nodded. “Send him to Salt Pit. Waller, you're going with him.” He looked at CIA. “Waller travels with him, on the same flight. Waller is present for, or conducts, all interrogation. I need a memo, agreeing to this.” To Waller: “Get packed.”

The CIA man nodded. Lattice left the room.

Rashid was unchained from the wall and a couple of soldiers helped him to stand. He was made to sit on a wheelchair and strapped in. He was turned around and the door was opened and he was wheeled out.

Though they had not communicated, he had spent the last two weeks never more than thirty feet from Rami Issay. In this time they had been asked about each other so many times that each felt as if the other was in the same room—a sensation that grew more powerful as the interrogations proceeded and the attendant sleep-deprived delirium grew more profound. Each was confronted with contradictory claims from the other so often that it was clear they were both being interrogated. The other had to be nearby.

And now Rashid was being removed. He was suddenly anxious that they might be separated, that this was the last time they would be even in mediated contact. And he thought,
Peace be upon you, Rami Issay.

After an hour-long truck trip into Kandahar City, he was led into the Dantean stench of Sarpoza prison. Thousands of men were confined here, in dim light, amid a cloud of flying and leaping ectoparasites, and hot tuberculous air as if from the mouth of a fevered animal.

John Wayne looked up as Rashid was dropped on the floor of the cell next to his. They did not recognize one another. Rashid's face was grotesquely bloated in the way his own had been when the Americans first gave him to NDS. Rashid lay on the ground for many long minutes after guards left his cell, locking the door behind them.

“Be at peace, brother. You will not see them again today. The Pakistan–South Africa cricket match is on. It is all they have talked about all week,” John Wayne finally said, in Pashto.

Rashid groaned.

“I don't think they will bother you again today,” John Wayne tried, this time in Urdu.

The flight went directly from KAF to the Salt Pit and Rami Issay was the only detainee on board. The CIA facility was north of Bagram, built purely for the purpose of interrogating high-value detainees. As a black site, its existence was supposed to be the tightest of all secrets. For the first few years, it had been, but now the knowledge of its existence was seeping through the SF, if not the regular army, like an evil rumour. Things that were too ugly for the detention barracks at KAF were supposed to be done there.