Yo, LT Jack. Source called.”
I looked up from the poker table. Snoop stood in the doorway, a swirl of dark skin and shadows. I could tell by his voice that the matter was urgent, but there was three hundred dollars in the pot. I’d spent a good hour sandbagging hands. Maybe some of the platoon originals saw what I was doing, but Chambers hadn’t. He’d no clue, thinking I was just another dumb lieutenant who didn’t know how to play cards.
“Duty calls.” Dominguez’s chipmunk cheeks widened into a grin as he rubbed his shaved head. He’d clean up quickly with me gone. “Insha’Allah. As God wills it.”
“Something like that,” I said. I stood and put on my uniform top, an amalgam of digital camo, tan and green and gray and ugly as puke. “I’ll cash out when I get back.” I followed Snoop out of the windowless room, the poker game resuming behind us.
In the two days since the goat incident, everyone had stayed silent about it. There wasn’t much to say. I’d wondered how my brother would’ve handled things, since he was the perfect leader of men or something, but hadn’t been able to land on anything specific. I could always call and ask, I thought, before rejecting the idea. He’d just lecture me for letting it happen in the first place.
On the other side of the outpost, Snoop and I angled by the command post, where Captain Vrettos hunched over the radio like a broken stork, updating battalion headquarters. He had a poncho liner wrapped around his shoulders and head as a shawl.
“Yes, sir, I understand the tenets of counterinsurgency,” he was saying. His voice was brittle; he sometimes slept in there during the days, on a folding chair, so he could stay up and track our company’s night operations. He must’ve been speaking with someone from battalion. “Clear and hold. Then build.”
In a whisper, Snoop asked if I wanted to stop and check in with the commander. I shook my head wildly. When battalion got going on the tenets of counterinsurgency, there was no stopping them.
The interpreters’ room lay on the far reaches of the hallway, across from a small gym. We walked into dank must. The other terps were playing a soccer video game in the dark. I flipped on the light switch and a ceiling panel flickered to life.
“Lieutenant,” one of them said. “Surf’s up.”
“For the millionth time, I’m not from that part of California. I grew up in the foothills. By a lake.”
The terps’ faces remained blank. There was only one California on this side of the world, and nothing I could say would ever change that.
“Haitham called,” Snoop said.
Haitham was the town drunk, a toy of a man with flitting eyes and rotting yellow teeth. He was also the Barbie Kid’s estranged uncle. For being a Muslim on the bottle, we figured. We paid him twenty thousand dinars a month, and he still claimed he couldn’t afford toothpaste.
“He drinks too much.” Snoop liked him more than I did. “But he’s no liar.”
“True,” I said.
“He say he watched us the other day. When the new sergeant shot the goat.”
“He did? Why?”
“He remembers the new sergeant, from before. He say the new sergeant helped murder Iraqis during the al-Qaeda wars, when the Horse soldiers were here. Called him a white shaytan.”
I leaned against a bunk with a wood frame and plush foam mattresses. It was a great mystery how the terps had ended up with better beds than us. “Horse soldiers?”
“First Cav,” another terp said, eyes fixed on the video game. “The horse on their unit patch.”
“Okay,” I said. “They were here four, five years ago?”
Snoop shrugged. “I was a terp in the south then. And these Arab fuckclowns”—he pointed to the others—“were still schoolboys in Egypt.”
Originally from Sudan, Snoop was an equal opportunity racist. The frantic mashing of buttons served as the only response.
“This makes no sense,” I said, waving away Snoop’s offer of sunflower seeds. He stuck a handful into his mouth. “Chambers is a big white dude with brown hair. Ninety percent of the army is big white dudes with brown hair.”
“He saw him do this.” Snoop let his right arm go slack and balled his hand into a fist repeatedly, causing the forearm to flex. “How he knew.”
“Snoop—”
“He swears in Allah’s name. Big thing to swear on. Even for fuckup Arabs.”
I rubbed my eyes and fought off a yawn. The grind was getting to me. So was the heat, and it was only April.
“Some locals got killed a few years ago,” I said. “I don’t want to sound cruel, but this is a war.”
“Ashuriyah used to be a bad place, LT. Before the moneys and the Surge and the counter-surgery. And check it, Haitham say a man the new sergeant helped kill? The only son of a powerful sheik.”
“Counterinsurgency,” I said, stressing the last four syllables of the word. “It’s pronounced ‘counter-in-sur-gen-cy.’ ”
“Yeah, that’s what I say.”
I didn’t bother to correct him again. Maybe this is a big deal, I thought. But probably not. “Which sheik?”
“Didn’t say. Just that he doesn’t want to be a source anymore. Something about respecting the Shaba.”
“What’s that?”
“Shaba is ‘ghost.’ ”
I gave him a puzzled look.
“Like respecting the dead,” he added. I’d no idea what the hell that could mean.
“He knows we won’t pay him anymore, right?”
Snoop nodded. “He’s scared of something, for sure.”
I walked downstairs to the cooks’ pantry, grabbing a warm can of Rip It. It tasted like liquid crack should, flat fruit punch with a splash of electricity. I headed back to our room, hoping the poker game was still going, but instead found everyone napping or reading magazines. Rage Against the Machine blared from the speakers of an unseen laptop.
“Who won?” I asked.
Dominguez cursed under his breath in Spanish. I followed his stare to Chambers, who lay in bed, boots still on, hands wrapped behind his head. Straightening his arms, Chambers pointed to a black, hollow-eyed skull on his right forearm. Five other skull tattoos lined his arm from the bottom of his bicep to the top of his wrist. He balled his hand into a fist once, twice, three times.
“Nice try, Lieutenant,” Chambers said, his eyes pale as slate. “But this ain’t my first rodeo.”