The Sandbox (28 page)

When Sergeant Guzman sees me tapping the phone against the wall, he steps out of the office and takes it from me. I avoid his eye. He gives a sad little nod and hooks his thumb in the direction of the office trailer, where the lieutenant and Sergeant Oliphant and the captain and all the rest of the shit that will soon be raining down upon my head await.

85

Outside, Sergeant Guzman
jams a cover onto my head and smears a finger or two of greasepaint under each of my eyes. “It’s my ass if they catch you out of that cell,” he says, wiping his sticky, brown fingers on my neck.

The base looks exactly the same as it did when I went into the Comm Trailer, but it’s not. Tent canvas flutters in the wind, the American flag flaps on its splintered pole, sandbags still surround the office trailers, the old fort continues to crumble bit by bit into the desert floor; but nothing is the same as it was before, and it never will be again.

The evening feels heavy, dense. As warm as unspilled blood. A physical thing that weighs on my shoulders and head. As Sergeant Guzman walks me back to my cell, an explosion rumbles in the distance somewhere north of the base. Both of us look off toward the Noses. Neither of us says it, but I’m sure we’re both thinking it. HQ has finally decided to give us air support. Sergeant Guzman smiles. A splash of water hits me on the cheek. I look around to see where it came from. We’re still about fifteen yards from the fort’s bay doors. Sergeant Guzman hustles me across the parade ground, pushing the center of my back with his palm. Another drop of water. I look up, and when I do, the heavens crack open and an ocean comes down all at once. A storm the likes of which I haven’t seen since the summer I left Savannah. Lightning forks the plain. Water falls in thick sheets. The rain is so heavy that within seconds, the motor pool disappears behind a curtain of gray. I turn my face up and drink it in. Sergeant Guzman grabs me by the crook of my arm and pulls me into the entrance to the old fort.

86

A couple of
hours go by. I mark the time by counting off the seconds between falling mortars. At first I thought it was thunder, but then one landed close, maybe even hit the old fort, and I knew they were shells. From the sound of it, we’re really getting hit hard. I wonder what the guys are doing, if they’re all right. I hope we’re giving them hell up there. It pisses me off that I’m not fighting beside them. I try to sleep, but it’s no good: I’m too keyed up.

“Hey.” Someone raps a hand on metal. “Hey.”

The door opens. Rankin gives me a strange look. About an hour ago, I heard Rankin relieve Sergeant Guzman of guard duty, but this is the first I’ve seen of him. If they weren’t so shorthanded and Rankin wasn’t injured, there’s no way they’d let him watch my cell. Even now, it strikes me as odd. The lieutenant must be desperate. He steps aside and in comes Lopez behind him, dripping water on the floor. Rankin winks at me over Lopez’s head and shuts the door. I notice that the Judas hole is open now, but it is eyeless. A mortar round lands nearby. It shakes centuries-old grit loose from the ceiling. Lopez puts a hand on the wall to steady himself. I haven’t really gotten a good look at him since the night of the fuckup by the wall. And that night it was too dark to see him clearly. One side of his face has swollen up where I popped him. The skin around his eye is purple with splotches of green and murky yellow. He notices me looking at it and touches his face gingerly. I offer an apologetic smile.

“You don’t look much better,” Lopez says, but there isn’t any heat in his voice.

“Probably not,” I say. “But I bet old Ahmed’s sporting a shiner himself. And a pretty good headache, I hope. I beaned him in the face with a nice-sized rock before he got away.”

Lopez shifts from foot to foot, jangling something metallic in his pocket. It makes a hollow clank, like a handful of spent cartridges. I can’t for the life of me figure out what he’s doing here. So I ask him. He stares down in a dazed sort of way, tightening the muscle in his injured cheek, then letting it go slack.

“I need to talk to you,” Lopez says. The swollen eye makes him appear to be squinting, as though he’s trying to make do after losing his glasses. “I think I might have made a mistake. A big mistake.”

When I’d thought about Lopez over the last couple of days, I imagined that a scene like this would bring me immense satisfaction. But I don’t feel much of anything. Lopez looks as though he hasn’t slept in days. Dark stubble has sprouted on his chin and jaw. His boots are scuffed and his fatigues are wrinkled. I’ve never seen him like this. A brown splotch that looks like Salisbury steak gravy covers the bottom half of his shirt pocket. The whites of his eyes are a mess of painful-looking blood vessels. He rubs his upper lip in the place his moustache used to be.

I don’t say a word.

“I got the lockbox that night, right? But I didn’t give it to the lieutenant. I meant to, but I didn’t. Something you said bothered me."

I nod.

“I looked at that darn thing and I looked at it. Something, I don’t know what, just wasn’t right. So I prayed on it. I couldn’t stop thinking about the stupid thing. Something about this felt very wrong. Finally, I couldn’t—I mean, well, I had to know.”

“You opened it.”

“Yeah, I did.” He continues to stare at the ground.

“What’d you jimmy it open with? A screwdriver? Ahmed already had it open somehow. Did he bust the lock?”

“No, I don’t know how he got it open. I used the combination.”

“How’d you get the combination?” I’m amazed. Does Lopez have safe-cracking skills?

“I’ve gotten to know the lieutenant pretty well. I even know the year he graduated from West Point. He should really have used random digits.”

“I would of used a hammer,” I say.

“Of course you would.” He unbuttons the top button of his shirt, thinks about it, and then buttons it up again. This is getting weird.

“So?” I ask.

“When the lieutenant told me to go look for it, he said he’d taken it from Lieutenant Saunders. He said that’s the real reason we were going to Inmar the day we got hit.”

I say, “I thought the meet with the sheikhs was an excuse for
Saunders
to take the box to Six Zone HQ. Lieutenant Blankenship was supposed to think the real reason for the trip was to talk with the sheikhs. A hearts-and-minds thing. The rest of us were going to try and shake loose some supplies and video—”

“Wait, wait, what did you just say? Back up a second.” Lopez reaches for my arm; but when he realizes what he’s doing, he pulls away again. “Who told you that about taking the box to HQ?”

Oh, shit. There’s nothing for it now but to tell him. What difference does it make at this point? “The MI guy, that new captain.”

“The captain?”

“He was planning to leave tomorrow with the box,” I tell him.

“How do you know?”

“I stole it from the lieutenant for him.” I run a hand through my hair. Here we go. I explain how the captain had me backed into a corner, that I could either steal the box and get his help or not do it and have him lie and say I did all those things Lopez thought I was doing. When I tell Lopez how Ahmed stole it from me after seeing me bury it, he gnaws at his lip. I continue: “The captain went batshit. But I wasn’t positive Ahmed had it, until we went after him last night. Nevada and Rankin didn’t know anything about the box. We wanted Ahmed for other reasons.”

Lopez frowns and fidgets. I’m not sure how to read this.

“I know you don’t believe me,” I say, “but that’s the way it was.”

“I believe you. I just don’t know what to do,” Lopez says. “Right is right and wrong is wrong. But this, I don’t know any more.”

“Have you told the lieutenant that you have it?”

“No.”

“Well, he knows now.”

“Did you—” Lopez jerks back like I’m fixing to smack him one.

“I’m sorry.” And I am, although I’m not sure why. He doesn’t deserve it. “I didn’t think it mattered any more. I was sure you’d already given it to him, and he didn’t say otherwise.”

He shrugs.

“I’m surprised you didn’t—”

“I opened it.” Lopez examines my face. “And now I’m all mixed up about what—” His voice falters and then trails off.

“What’d you find?”

“Pictures mostly, and some other stuff, stuff I don’t quite understand. Or I think I
do,
but if it’s what I think it is, then—”

“What kind of pictures?”

“They’re strange. I didn’t get what the big deal was at first, but then I recognized some of the—” Lopez seems to be trying to make up his mind about something. “—people.”

“And?”

The photos, he says, are of a bunch of locals around a table. Two of them are leaders of militia groups. They’re the ones who’ve been causing most of the trouble up in the capital. He recognized them from CNN. They’ve been in the news for months. The third is a religious leader who is supposedly hiding out in Iran or Pakistan now. He heard about it on Army radio just last week. As he tells me this, his voice becomes odd and contorted.

“I don’t follow,” I say.

“There’s a big-shot U.S. Army general in the pictures too. One of the main leaders of ground forces during the initial invasion. He’s sitting across from them, smiling.”

“Are you telling me the general was a traitor?” I ask.

“No, not really. I don’t know.” He looks completely lost. “In the pictures, there’s money on the table. Lots of it. It looks like they’re negotiating something. In one of them, a man on the general’s staff is pointing to photos of machine guns. But I don’t think they were selling them to the militia. It didn’t look that way. One of the photos was of a Chinese-made AK. I got the feeling they were giving these guys advice. But that doesn’t make much sense either. I don’t know. It’s—I don’t know why I’m telling
you
this. I don’t know why I’m talking to you at all. Ahmed, or whoever went through that door in the wall last night—”

“It was Ahmed.”

“Well, Ahmed got some of the pictures. I don’t understand
exactly
what they mean, but I do know one thing. If these get out, the whole Army will be disgraced.”

“Like now we’re fighting guys who have weapons we helped them buy?”

“Here, I’ll just show you one of them. The one that’s got me feeling—” He pulls a sour, disgusted face.

Lopez unbuttons his shirt and pulls out a manila envelope. We sit down on the cot. He fusses with the red string that closes the flap for such a long time I take it from him and finish unwinding it.

“Dump it out.” He squeezes his hands together, staring at them as though they are someone else’s. “Please.”

A fancy cell phone rolls onto the cot. Lopez picks it up and cradles it in his hands. And then a piece of blue cellophane slides out along with a brown paper money wrapper with “$10,000” marked on it in green, an old highway map produced by the former regime, and a piece of typing paper covered with hand-printed lists of some sort. At the bottom is a stack of photos held together with a yellow rubber band.

Lopez fumbles through the photos; he can barely keep the pictures from falling. He finds the one he’s looking for and gives it to me. “Look at this one first.”

I do. It shows a florid-faced general I recognize from TV news reports early on in the war. He’s grinning and shaking hands with the famous cleric-turned-militia-commander. The one Lopez says left the country. In the background of the shot, there’s a stack of blurry green. Behind the general, two other soldiers stoop over the table. Something strikes me as familiar about the one next to the general. Lopez jabs the photo with his finger.

“Look,” he says, “right there. Who does that look like?”

The man’s face is difficult to see. But I’m sure I’ve seen him before. It’s like trying to remember a dream later in the day, though. You reach and you reach, but you can’t quite pull it up.

“All right,” I say. “I give up. Who the fuck are these people?”

“That guy,” Lopez jabs at the photo with his finger. “Look closer. See that scar on his cheek? Doesn’t that look like Sergeant Oliphant to you?”

Oh, God, I hope he’s wrong. Many, many unhappy possibilities fill my head.

“Look really closely.”

I bring the photo closer to my face, tilt it back and forth. I’m trying to find anything that might prove him wrong. But he’s right: now that the name is in the air, I see it. It’s him. I decide to play it carefully. This is still Lopez, after all. “Now that you say it, he does look similar. But there’s no way you could prove it.”

“I don’t care about proving it. I just want to know if you see it too.” He shuffles through a couple more. “And this one. Doesn’t this man’s head look like the lieutenant’s?”

In the foreground of the shot, an officer points at an enlarged photo of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher with a pen laser. Lopez taps the head of the person next to him, a young man in dress uniform with only a small section of his face turned toward the camera. His pin shows he’s a first lieutenant, but the hair and the neck, they could be anyone. I tell him this.

“That mole, right there. Lieutenant Blankenship has one just like it.”

“So, what are you saying?” I ask him.

“With the proper equipment, they could enhance these photos. Then there’d be no doubt. And there are others saved on the phone.”

I wonder if I look as freaked out about this as he does. Tiny beads of sweat have formed on his nose. His pupils look enormous. He studies my face, trying to make a decision. Finally, he purses his lips and picks up the road map. Yellow dust spills onto the cot. When he unfolds it, I see someone has circled three spots in the desert just south of Kurkbil, maybe fifty or so klicks from our base. A completely uninhabited zone. Next to each circle there’s a number: 9,000,000, 18,000,000, 8,500,000. Below this, another circle and a date from a couple of months ago. I look closer. It’s the toy factory. Before I can wrap my head around this, he takes the sheet of paper and reads a series of dates and grid coordinates and physical markers. A truck tire painted blue, a waist-high pile of white stones, a circle of green cinderblocks.

“Okay,” I say, “I’ve got it. Grid coordinates.”

“And this.” He holds out the 10-K money wrapper.

“And this.” I point to the cellophane. It suddenly comes to me. I’ve got it now. It’s something Doc Greer told me the day after the IED attack that makes me realize.

“That I don’t get.” Lopez crinkles it in his hand. “A piece of trash? I was going to throw it out, but—”

“The American ambassador, brilliant asshole that he is, shipped some fifteen billion dollars in cash into the country a year or so ago. Flew it in on troop carriers. Most of it is now unaccounted for. Vanished. It came in ten-thousand-dollar blocks. They wrapped it in—”

“Blue cellophane.”

“Right,” I say.

“Holy crud. I thought Greer was just making that stuff up.”

And then the last tumbler falls into place and the lock opens. This is really fucking big. Colossal. No wonder the captain got so exercised. Lopez has the same lightbulb going on above his head. His breath hisses out between his teeth. Then I remember something else. The last time I saw Herman, he had a bit of that cellophane wrapped around his neck.

“Now,” he says slowly, “I get what he said.”

“Who?”

“The captain. He said he’d go in on it with me if I handed the box over. I thought he was talking about blackmail. This is bigger. This is—”

“How did the captain know you had it?” I asked.

Above us, three mortars land in quick succession. The lightbulb in the ceiling jiggles, making our shadows twitch.

“I don’t think he did for certain. He was just sounding me out. Like a fool, I admitted it.”

“But what about the cell phone?”

“That’s what they used to take the photos. I went through it this morning after you got back.” Lopez picks the cell phone up and hefts it in his hand. “I guess it’s like keeping negatives.”

“Why the fuck would they do something stupid like that? Why not just break the thing?”

“I wondered about that too.” He flicks through the stack of photos again. “Now I think I get it. Look at this one.” He hands me another picture. It’s crumpled, probably from the rough handling it got last night, but the image is clearer than some of the rest. In it, the ambassador himself hands one of the sheiks a blue block of bills. Both men grin.