The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (66 page)

‘I’m missing the crotch.’ Kiprowski held out the front of his jacket and looked enviously at Sutler. ‘There were flaps for the neck but I cut them off.’

Rem looked Kiprowski up and down and swore under his breath. ‘We look like kids on Halloween.’

‘We can’t all go.’ Rem designed an excuse for Kiprowski. ‘One of us needs to stay in case there’s contact from Amrah. Where’s Watts?’

Rem found Watts in his cabin, splayed on the floor, collapsed and wheezing, his jacket beside him opened out. Watts didn’t respond when Rem turned him over, and saw, on his shirt, a fine spread of aerated blood. He shouted for Sutler and began to haul Watts to the side of the room to lean him against the wall.

Watts opened his eyes and looked at Rem as if he were a stranger, and would not answer his questions.

Sutler came hesitantly into the cabin, and knew better than Rem how to manage. He lay Watts on his side. Raised one arm out and hoisted the other under him to keep him on his side.

‘You’ve checked his pulse? How’s his breathing?’

Sutler held Watts’ head, looked into his eyes and asked him questions. ‘Can you hear us? Can you raise your arm? Try lifting your arm. Clench. Make a fist.’

Watts looked at Sutler, entirely unable to respond.

‘You need to call for help.’

Rem didn’t have a clue how to work the equipment. This was Watts’ territory.

‘Get Kiprowski,’ then shouting, ‘Go!’

They carried Watts to the Quonset and sat him upright, and slowly, in increments, he revived. The men hung close, silent and anxious. Sutler guessed he’d had a stroke, although, in truth, Watts was missing most of the typical symptoms – but nothing else would explain his disconnection. Watts moved slowly, turned his head, turtle-like, and indicated that he was thirsty. As soon as he had water he began to appear more alert.

Kiprowski sat beside Watts and said that they were shipping him out. ‘You get to fly,’ he said, ‘any minute,’ and then, in a less certain voice, ‘you’ll be all right.’

Kiprowski returned to Watts’ cabin to call CIPA and check on progress.

Watts, considerably improved, acknowledged only Rem.

When Sutler came forward with water, Watts looked sourly aside. ‘Watch him.’ He pointed to Santo’s cabin. ‘He’s no friend to you.’

Watts began to struggle again for breath. He looked about the Quonset in panic, and held Rem fast, his grip locked about Rem’s arms. He couldn’t feel, he said, mouth now struck in a gawp.

Rem asked Sutler what was happening, and Sutler said they needed oxygen.

‘Lay him down, he can’t breathe. Give him some space.’

The sound of the helicopter came as a mercy.

✩

When Cathy returned from work she picked up Roscoe and they walked to the taqueria. After eating he took Nut to the lake while she worked an hour at the library. She asked little about him, and kept her curiosity to one question: why he was living with his aunt. His answer was honest, and not quite the story she expected.

‘I was in some trouble, about two years ago. I have a younger brother and my mother wanted me out of the house.’

Cathy returned from the library and talked through her findings.

‘Two good things. First, an email from Jonnie Watts.’ She read out a portion of the message, repeated the name. ‘Stephen L. Sutler. I didn’t find anything, some people from Cleveland. Nothing in the UK. Less even than Paul Geezler. Speaking of,’ she laid the paper on the table, ‘the man is coming to Detroit.’

Roscoe looked to the paper, turned it about, still couldn’t see what she was talking about. ‘He’s giving a paper at a business conference. Here.’ She pointed out the abstract. ‘Where it says
Proteck
, it’s a talk about supply chains.’

Roscoe asked what this meant.

‘It means a visit to Detroit.’

Roscoe asked if that was the second point, and Cathy remembered. ‘No. There’s a second message, from
boston_adams
.’

✩

Rem asked the men to gather outside the Quonset. Watts, he explained, had collapsed and was currently at Camp Buehring, where they’d stabilized him, with the intention of sending him, as soon as possible, to hospital in Germany.

‘This is because of the pits?’ Pakosta stepped forward.

‘They think it was a stroke.’

‘Of course they do.’

‘They don’t know yet. I don’t think there’s anything here to cause a stroke.’

‘He looked healthy when he arrived. We were all healthy.’

‘They just don’t know at this point. They’ve done some tests, they’ll do more. It could be a number of things. Stress, or heat, or exhaustion.’ Rem struggled for an explanation. ‘We just don’t know yet.’

‘So that’s it? You’re happy with that?’ And then as a dismissive aside, ‘Your friends don’t do so well, do they?’

Rem asked Pakosta to say that louder.

‘I said your friends don’t do so well.’

Sutler watching from the Quonset said he was sorry about Watts. ‘It’s unfortunate. This next step is crucial. And it’s important that we work together. I need a team to pull toward the same goals now.’ Sutler began to lay out his plan. ‘From tomorrow you’ll be working on the Massive. The pits are closing. It’s over. I’ve organized a team to come from Southern-CIPA.’

Pakosta interrupted. ‘Who is this team?’

Sutler looked to Rem.

‘Do you know who they are?’

‘They’re an environmental safety – I don’t know – I haven’t properly . . .’ Sutler hesitated. ‘The idea is they’ll advise us on the best way to deal with whatever’s left over.’

‘Is this the same team that went to Camp Bravo?’

‘I don’t know anything about—’

Pakosta asked Rem. ‘Is this the same team that went to Camp Bravo after it was closed? Has he called in the EPA?’

Rem shook his head.

‘Because they didn’t advise on anything. They took samples to see what they’d burned. They were collecting evidence.’

Sutler took his hands out of his pocket and folded his arms. ‘I don’t see what you’re getting at.’

‘I’m saying, if you want your project to go ahead you don’t want to invite the EPA in beforehand. They will shut this place down, just like they shut down Camp Bravo. We should bury the pits ourselves. Dig them out, bury them, get rid of them.’

Sutler agreed. ‘We can do that.’

Chimeno and Pakosta lingered in front of the showers after the meeting had broken up. Before Rem could settle with Pakosta, Chimeno asked, ‘Why are you letting him do this? He’s taken over.’ With the light on in the Quonset they kept their voices low so they would not be overheard.

‘That’s why HOSCO sent him. It’s his project and we can’t keep the pits open.’ Rem shook his head.

‘You’re kidding, right?’ Pakosta, hands on hips, leaned to the side and spat. ‘You seriously expect us to do this? He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s talking about inviting the environmental agency to inspect the pits for fuck’s sake. He doesn’t have a clue.’

Rem held up his hands. ‘This is something else.’

‘Fuck you
it’s something else
. It’s not something else. We didn’t come here to get nailed for burning waste.’

Rem leaned forward, his shadow falling across Pakosta’s face. ‘Keep pushing Pakosta. Say one more thing.’

Chimeno tugged Pakosta by the arm and drew him away.

Back in the cabin Kiprowski said that he was comfortable with the arrangement staying as it was.

‘It would be weird to move into Watts’ cabin.’

‘I think you’re right.’

‘It has all the communications.’

Rem nodded, uncertain where the discussion was heading. Kiprowski folded then unfolded his arms.

‘Sutler could move his office there. He uses comms all the time.’ The boy had a point.

‘There’s no point moving the equipment,’ Rem agreed, and Kiprowski immediately appeared to soften, as if this had been a source of some anxiety.

‘Tell Sutler he can have that cabin. Move him out of the Quonset. We need the stores.’

Kiprowski nodded, clearly satisfied. He’d get right on to it.

Rem waited for Kiprowski to leave and found himself a little relieved also. It hadn’t occurred to him that he’d need to reassign Watts’ cabin, and being used to Kiprowski’s presence, he thought it would be odd to be alone now.

✩

Cathy wrote directly to Paul Geezler and explained that she would be in Detroit the next weekend and wanted to meet him. He might remember that he hired her husband to work in Iraq, and had assigned him duties at one of the burn pits. She didn’t want to waste his time, but a short meeting would be enough. Say fifteen minutes before or after his presentation.

The librarian waited by the desk, impatient to close. Cathy logged off and apologized. She played the housewife in such circumstances, gave a little story about her husband being in Iraq, and could see from the turn of the librarian’s shoulders that she’d ruined the woman’s night, made her feel bad.

‘We open tomorrow at nine,’ she said, a sweet apology in her voice. ‘Tomorrow, then.’

✩

The work began in earnest the next morning. Sutler and Kiprowski drove out and began to calculate the distances, set up flags as markers first in a broad circle, then, inside this circle, a spiral of posts, and for the first time Rem began to understand Sutler’s dogged involvement in the project. Sutler began to describe the form of the city, the districts, the relation of one sector to another out in the field, plotted with small posts and paper flags. He stood in the centre of the plain and pointed out. There:
a centre for transport
, there:
commerce
, there:
housing
, there:
education
, there:
entertainment
. Sutler returned to the jeep to sketch, as Rem and Kiprowski followed his instructions. He drew patterns, spirals, and complex internalized webs, spoke about how the city should be low-lying, with broad avenues and tiered squares. If the desert was formerly green, he would begin with a new system for irrigation. Whole zones would be planted with vetiver, grasses which bound the desert stone and sand, drove down deep roots, made stable environments. Concrete, yes, but also, of much more importance: water and grass.

Rem looked over the drawings while Sutler slept in the back of the jeep with his feet propped up. He turned the sketches round and over and couldn’t follow what Sutler was aiming for, because he was drawing shapes now, patterns, blocks of colour which bore no relation that he could see to buildings or figurable structures. Etched small in one corner Rem recognized the form of a ziggurat, and as they talked he slipped his foot out of his shoe and drew out a small shard of shell.

‘How about that?’ Sutler held up the rounded white fragment to Kiprowski for inspection.

*

Rem asked to be dropped at the pits on their way back.

He found Pakosta supervising Clark and Santo with the diggers. The others stood about watching and advising. The atmosphere a little easier than the previous night.

‘You’re making progress.’

Chimeno said he didn’t understand the point. ‘I don’t see how getting rid of the pits will change anything. They measure trace amounts.’

‘Who?’

‘The specialists. They take samples. We can bury the pits, but whatever they’re looking for it’s in the sand.’

Pakosta finished talking with Santo, jumped from the digger, and pulled off his mask. ‘You’re not thinking right. If everything is churned up, there’s no way they can say we were responsible, because they won’t be able to tell what happened when. If we leave the pits as they are then they can tell what fires were lit and when shit was burned. They can read them like a book. With no pits, they just have random samples, and no timeline. We could have been burning paper.’

Pakosta had devised a workable plan. Burn Pit 5 would stay in use for the interim – in this pit they’d burned mostly electrical equipment, vehicle parts, computers, chairs and tables, on one occasion a whole store of cabinets, and something like forty sprung cot beds and thin mattresses, all marked from a hospital. A mass of metal frames and a strange puzzle of blackened wires were all that remained, but they needed compressing, or a hotter fire. Pakosta suggested just blowing them up, an idea not too ridiculous. The smaller the pieces, the hotter the fire, the easier the task.

The other pits would be filled in, but first, the sides need to be bought down, which meant, impractically, excavating a ramp into each pit and using the diggers to collapse the sides. Anything unburned would be dug out and transferred to the final pit. The men working in the diggers would wear full protective clothing. Everyone else would stay east, upwind, and away.

Pits 2 and 3 didn’t pose much of a problem. Sand and shale could be heaped up beside them and pushed in. These they would flatten later.

They ate at the Beach. Flares stuck upright into the sand about them, a can brought from the camp to hold the coals for a fire, the last of the beer brought in a coolbox.

Sutler set up the area, then sat with the men on the prow of the dune and passed his camera about so they could look at the photos he’d taken earlier. Below them the fire deepened the shadows on the boat, the ambulance, the two jeeps, the Humvee, all fettered to wood pallets. Further down, the jumbled wreckage of civilian cars, burned and flattened, alongside stripped pieces of military hardware. And while their conversation seemed comfortable, they avoided speaking about Watts, and sometimes looked over the scrap, silenced by the evidence at their feet.