LIBERTY

 

The story as Watts tells it goes something like this: it’s his third time in Iraq, he’s working directly with Southern-CIPA on comms across the entire South-Central region – we’re talking basic communications, because everything digital and terrestrial has been looted, bombed, looted. Not one hub or exchange has survived intact. They haven’t come close to re-establishing the basic services available fifteen years ago, it’s that backward. (Watts sits in a folding chair. Magisterial. Elbows on knees, thick forearms, a broad forehead, and explains himself in a voice Rem would describe as Midwestern, grained, husky, rangy.) What you have to understand, he says, is the mentality of the Iraqi versus the mentality of the average Westerner. An Iraqi, for example, can’t be relied on to innovate. You can’t give an Iraqi a job and expect it to be done; these guys have been trained over decades to do nothing. This isn’t your average Arab. You have to give explicit instructions and tell them step by step what you want and exactly how it’s going to happen, and even then you have to supervise. Why? Because these people don’t improvise. They have to be told. Free food and regular government handouts have made them lazy and unambitious. It’s all clan-like, top-down, individual responsibility just isn’t in the picture. Alongside this, there’s the talent of the Iraqi to completely fuck up anything that might look like progress. Which brings him to Rule Number 1: if something can be dismantled it will disappear. He’s seen whole substations stripped in one evening.

So anyway, the story: they’re scrambling to establish basic communications, with the mightily reduced aim of refitting a minimal seven out of the seventy-nine exchanges and substations. That’s seven. Count them. Seven. Less than nine per cent of the number they’ve been paid to complete. Alongside this his team is also responsible for the main communications router for the company – that’s HOSCO, remember – so every speck of information, every byte, comes through his small four-man team, and they get to hear everything. Every blip of information the parent company is telling its subsidiaries, and every anxious twitch those subsidiaries are feeding on to their project managers, everything but everything is filtered through this team. And let me tell you, it’s chaos. So, early one morning, HOSCO’s network goes wild. A message from one of the division directors announces that a statement will be made in Washington that very morning and the content of this announcement is to be passed, immediately, to all senior staff. According to this director, the statement they are waiting for is a follow-up to a statement made by the President himself, in which, while touring southern Iraq, he inadvertently blabbed out information on a project that was not intended to be made public. At. This. Point. This statement has slipped out so far ahead of schedule it threatens to kill the project unless they act quickly. You follow? Washington is now obliged to dump a fuckton of money upon said project, and unless HOSCO is ready for this shit-shower of money, they’ll miss out altogether on the mother of all projects. The story, Watts says, is a classic.

*   *   *

First though comes the story about the trip.

The commander-in-chief’s visit has been scheduled for a long time. The visit is little more than a fly-’n’-stop, a series of parsed hand-waves at relevant outposts along the Iraq–Kuwait border. Things aren’t right in Washington, and what was a planned pre-exit howdy to the remaining teams has become politically toxic.

Picture this: Air Force One, accompanied by small fighter jets prowling wing-tip to wing-tip, wasps cutting through a blue hood of sky toward a copper horizon, a jagged edge of what might be mountains but is in fact the smoke of burning refineries. The mission is important. Everyone agrees that there are few usable photographs of the commander-in-chief alongside his forces because he has the bad habit of looking bored while speaking with people he does not know.

At Camp Navistar the commander-in-chief and team decamp to a fleet of helicopters to be flown direct to the 0-9 at Camp Hope. In readiness the base has long been secured and emptied of all non-nationals, but right at the last minute the media-unfriendly wounding of four Iraqi civilians outside the compound makes the stop at Camp Hope ill-advised. Instead, the commander-in-chief will make his announcement on changes to the Third Iraq Key Strategic Plan at the next nearest manned station, Provision Camp Liberty on Route 567 in South-West District 2 near Amrah City. The change, mid-transit, makes it necessary to gather a great deal of information en route.

Down on the ground, a Colonel Pritzker, is the first to learn that the commander-in-chief has come to Iraq to announce a new development in strategy and now intends to visit Camp Liberty. That day. In fact, within minutes.

Pritzker is suspicious: there are radio shows that do this kind of thing, and he can taste the end of his career. First off, he’s never heard of a provision camp before, and he has no idea who is in residence at Camp Liberty. Camp Liberty, to his memory, is a lowly set of HOSCO cabins, a star-like arrangement of burn pits, and a vacant squatter camp.

The colonel’s advice is passed back to the team, and after some discussion the secretary gets back to Pritzker and says, great, we’re going to run with this. It’s a go. And it finally occurs to Pritzker that this really is the President, and that Air Force One is, as he speaks, winging its way across the Arabian Desert to its imminent arrival at an empty set of burn pits. His final word, the only thing that occurs to him, is to ask the secretary if he knows what a provision camp is. Has he ever heard this term before? The secretary is a little preoccupied because there are other items to concern him now, but the question stops him. No, neither he nor any of the other staffers have heard of a provision camp and presume it is some kind of a place that somehow, you know, provides.

Colonel Pritzker says uh-huh, that’s almost right. A provision camp is certainly a place that provides a service. But Provision Camp Liberty is isolated for good reason, because it is the largest site where chemical, human, and animal waste is brought to be destroyed in the desert. You lose a leg in Iraq, a finger, a toenail, if it can be swept up, it’s coming to Camp Liberty. In fact Provision Camp Liberty stinks so bad that it is known by the TCNs as Camp Crapper. You take several tonnes of human waste, add the insane heat of the Arabian Desert, and you have yourself an intense olfactory experience – but, regardless, whoever is currently in occupation at that site would be mightily proud to meet their commander-in-chief.

Watts imagines the quality of the silence that falls across Colonel Pritzker’s comm-link while the information is relayed back to the team.

Two minutes short of their destination the President’s entourage return to Camp Navistar on the Kuwait border, where, in the hangar, surrounded by his retiring troops, the President himself announces the New Strategic Plan, and here the terrible mistake is made. In an answer to a question about the apparent failure to rebuild Amrah City the commander-in-chief mentions that there is a new scheme under consideration. Somewhere, he says, here, in southern Iraq, in a place he would not identify, the Corps of Engineers are preparing to build a new military outpost, and this outpost will become the largest military staging-post yet built. Once completed, and once its mission is fulfilled, the base will be converted for civilian use and will become the first new city in a peaceful Iraq.

*   *   *

At this announcement HOSCO goes wild. The lines are crazy. Speculation crosses the globe. One hour after the commander-in-chief’s unguarded statement the Secretary of State back in Washington confirms the details, but adds, with caution, that the intended base is still little more than ‘a good intention’. They’re looking at four sites and are sending point-men to evaluate these sites as we speak. While this, initially, is to be a military ‘advisory’ base, an integral part of the New Strategic Plan. Never again will a foreign power enter Iraq territory and occupy its oil fields (a chuckle from the Press Corps to this one).

In a voice of creamy sincerity the Secretary of State insists that the administration is looking to the future. And then that smile. Everybody loves that smile.

*   *   *

You know what this means? Watts asks. You know when this happened? This all happened pre-withdrawal plans and pre-basic implementation. Which means that something has to be done about this now. Like, yesterday. Because there’s money attached to the idea, and the period in which that money remains available is near its expiration.

This is how government works. They make decisions, they appoint money to those decisions, and they expect others to bid and take on those projects. There’s a whole complicated structure for this which has government agencies and private businesses at each other neck and neck. It’s in everyone’s interest to have this money used up before it gets sucked back. That’s how everything works around here. At the last minute whole schemes suddenly materialize.

Watts salutes the air.

Goodbye, Southern-CIPA.

Hello, Camp Crapper.

*   *   *

The convoy gathered at the Transport dock.

Rem hadn’t met the men as a group before. Santo, Watts, Pakosta, Samuels, Clark, Chimeno, Kiprowski. Six of the seven picked from Fatboy’s list, seconded from their units and placements. Kiprowski added as a late concession. He rode Jalla, Death Row, on a push bike. Kiprowski, by rights, should be a legend already.

Clark held court as they waited. ‘This is all good news,’ he said, ‘they’re shutting down projects, moving people on. This is the last, last chance.’ Clark believed, as did many others, that the section base would soon be closed. ‘The commissary,’ he asked Kiprowski, ‘they’ve cut down on supplies? Am I right? Same with stores. It’s happening. You know it is. The TCNs have their exit papers. The convoys are going directly to the camps. It’s over. The only thing remaining in Amrah is Southern-CIPA because that’s where the money is.’

Rem walked from vehicle to vehicle, shook hands, gave his name and repeated theirs.

*   *   *

Rem took the first Humvee behind the lead and picked Watts and Santo for company. Pakosta, Clark, and Samuels would follow, with Kiprowski and Chimeno coming after with most of the supplies. Behind them a long train of trucks, gun muzzles spiked out of windows. For the first leg they would accompany the convoy on the southward route to Kuwait then separate before the border and make their own way west. As promised Geezler had arranged security for the final stretch, two Cougars, front and back. Pakosta had experience in recovery along Highway 80, and advised that they should keep the spacing between them uneven. Rem couldn’t see how this could be achieved. The map showed nothing west of Highway 80, simply lines indicating the grades of hills and berms, the lengths of dry windswept ditches. No villages, no installations, no pre- or post- war encampments. Nothing until Camp Liberty. A map so blank it might as well be an ocean chart.

‘Doesn’t mean nothing’s there,’ Watts advised. ‘It just means they don’t know.’

Clark’s smile slipped off his face.

Watts slapped his shoulder. ‘If they take anyone out it’s usually the second vehicle. The first pops the mechanism, the second takes the hit, after that they’ll take anyone in their sights and the whole convoy lights up.’

Clark began to buckle his jacket. ‘Much better,’ he spoke to himself. ‘Thanks. Feeling so much better.’

‘I told you what you say if they capture you.’ Santo drew his finger across his throat. ‘Remember. No one loves us. No one’s paying any ransom. We won’t be missed.’

Pakosta standing on the running plate kept up a slow solo jive and paused every now and then to mime being shot in the head, the heart, the crotch.

*   *   *

An hour out of Amrah City and the palms and the villages thinned out and knuckled into the slopes – primitive, Santo called them, pointing as he drove, so that Rem couldn’t be sure if he meant the place or the people. In many ways the villages appeared as tight as the old centre of Halsteren. You’d hear your neighbours, every detail, and you’d know them well. A few of the houses sported satellite discs and long aerials. Santo pointed them out. ‘If you want to fuck with someone, you go right to that house.’

Rem looked back at the line of trucks, Kiprowski’s head struck out of the second-to-last Humvee.

‘You see that?’

Santo turned in his seat and took a while to find what Rem was talking about. ‘Is that boy a retard?’

‘Thinks he’s on vacation.’

Rem called on the radio and asked Kiprowski to draw his head back inside the vehicle. Kiprowski gave a wave as he complied.

Santo tutted. ‘Certified.’

Beyond the groves and villages the land tired itself out, the bluffs and hills became distant, and the sky bifurcated, blue up top and a dirty skin-like pink along the horizon. Not a desert in the way Rem thought of deserts – as something tide-like, the wind working sand into ripples and banks – but instead a scabby gritty wasteland, hammered, used up, not a place of possibility, but a place with an over-busy history. Knackered. After a while they swapped drivers: Watts day-dreamed and Rem drove and Santo chattered to himself.

Rem focused so hard on the vehicle in front that the rough tarpaulin of the square back appeared to float, a soft fluttering box set at a fixed distance. He needed to thank Geezler and couldn’t decide the most appropriate method, then figured that saying nothing would be fine. People have their own reasons for helping you out, and in satisfying his own agenda Geezler probably didn’t realize the extent of the favour anyhow: eight men transferred to safety and security. For the first time he began to think seriously about re-establishing his business.

Santo asked Watts why he was here, and Watts explained about his wife and expected child. ‘I get back when it’s done. No point being there until it needs paying for.’

Santo looked to Rem and began to tell Watts about Matt Cavanaugh. ‘The guy who walked across the highway. You heard about this? The walker. The guy in the news?’ He cocked his thumb at Rem. ‘That’s his friend.’

‘I saw that. Why would a person do that?’

‘I had a business.’ Rem cleared his throat. ‘House painting. He worked for me, and he helped himself to a few things while we were at some of the houses. He didn’t take much. A ring, some watches. The watches were part of a collection. Just enough to cause trouble.’

Watts and Santo shook their heads. ‘You knew this man? A friend, you say?’ Then after a respectable pause: ‘So, how come he ended up walking across a highway?’

‘Details,’ Santo urged. ‘Details.’

Now Rem shook his head. ‘I don’t know much more. It happened while I was here. Maybe the question is why didn’t he do it sooner?’

‘You ever done anything stupid? I mean really stupid?’ Santo blew his nose into his hand. ‘Look, I’m still bleeding.’ He shook his hand out of the window and the gesture came as a shock to them, an invitation for trouble, a signal deserving a shot, an ambush.

‘As in, coming here?’

‘I mean stupid stupid. Animal stupid.’

‘Sober or what?’

‘Doesn’t matter. I mean insane.’

Rem watched the vehicle in front, teased forward, played with the space between them. ‘I stole a dog.’

Santo sucked air between his teeth in dismissal. ‘OK. Close. Like a prank? A joke, right? When you were a kid?’

‘Just before I came to Iraq.’

Both Watts and Santo laughed. ‘You did what?’

‘It’s complicated. I had a dog. A Staffordshire bull terrier. He went missing. I came home one time and he was gone. Doors were open and the dog was gone.’ Rem asked Santo to open a can for him. Red Bull was making him sick and he wanted something less sticky. ‘I thought I had a good idea who was responsible. So I went to that person’s house and I stole their dog.’

‘You got yours back?’

‘They didn’t have it. In fact, I doubt it had anything to do with them.’

‘But you have this other dog, right?’

‘I did. It was one of those small dogs. I took it back once I realized what I was doing. Sometimes these things seem like a good idea.’

‘You should have eaten it,’ Santo deadpanned.

‘You have issues. You know that?’

‘I have issues? I’m not the person who kidnapped a dog. Kidnapping is a felony, man or beast. Seven to nine.’

‘So why are you here?’ Watts asked Santo.

‘Because, Paul, is it Paul? I’m here to put the f in freedom.’

*   *   *

An hour after they’d separated from the convoy the road stopped. Rem woke to find nothing but rock and sand ahead of them. A blank field of sun-split stone that rose and ended in a haze.

‘Rem. We’re out of highway.’

Rem slowly sat up, looked past the lead Cougar at the desert, the absence of a road, looked back at the small line of vehicles idling behind them. Pakosta jumped out of the last truck. He’d taken off his flak jacket, changed into shorts and boots, a T-shirt, made an effort to look casual. Santo drew out the maps.

‘The road goes all the way, runs right along the border.’ Watts pointed out a fine and continuous line on the map, then looked to the desert, incredulous. The highway stopped at a line of barrels, metal oil drums. ‘Right here. See? There’s a road on the map, but nothing even close to a road out there. No tracks. Nothing.’

Rem rubbed his eyes, got out of the vehicle. Stood right where the road stopped and thought it strange how it looked new but just ended for no reason. He called to Pakosta. ‘Did you come this way before?’

Pakosta coolly shook his head.

‘None of this looks familiar?’

‘Nope.’ Pakosta straightened up, dropped his cigarette. ‘We came a different route out of Amrah.’

Rem shouted back to Watts and asked if he could bring the map.

As Watts came out of the Humvee, Rem checked the horizon, anxious that they were being watched.

‘Don’t worry.’ Pakosta turned a slow complete circle. ‘If there was anyone out there, we’d know by now.’

Watts spread the map over the hood and cursed the heat.

‘Show him where we are.’

Watts pointed to a line that ran alongside the Saudi border. Rem raised his sunglasses so he could see more clearly, but found the light too bright.

‘As far as I can make out,’ Watts traced his finger along a short section of the road, ‘we should be about here. We turned at the right place, but there’s no road.’

Rem nodded, he could see that.

‘Thing is,’ Pakosta advised, ‘without that road you have to go all the way back to Amrah, then take Jalla Road to get back out to Route 567. The way we came before.’

Rem started walking before Pakosta had finished. He called to the men in the security vehicles. If they returned to Amrah could they gather more security?

The first guard stepped down, settled his gun over his shoulder, mirrored sunglasses on so Rem couldn’t see his eyes. These men were ex-military, most of them brittle, unsympathetic. Santo called them Sparts, as in spare parts. ‘These guys are experiments. They come here to be entertained. The whole thing gives them a hard-on. They keep coming back until something gets shot off. Then we’re supposed to feel sorry.’

The man stared hard at Rem. Santo leaned toward the guard. ‘You know, dressing in black is only going to work at night? You know that right? We – can – see – you.’

The thing Rem had to understand was they had another job. ‘If we go back to Amrah we stay there. We only have time to take you back. After that you’re on your own. We’re needed at CIPA.’

Clark asked about the road they’d crossed shortly after turning off Highway 80. It looked like a service road, nothing much to it, but where did that go?

Rem returned to the vehicle with the map, stood beside Watts and swore. ‘Can you find that? Is that marked down?’

‘It looks like it heads north. We want to be heading west.’

Watts traced Highway 80 almost to the border and found the route Pakosta had mentioned. ‘567, is that it?’

Rem called Pakosta back out of his vehicle. ‘What did you say the highway was, after Jalla?’

‘Route 567.’

‘We crossed that when we changed drivers. After 80.’

Pakosta shrugged, like this was common sense, something everyone knew.

‘We don’t need to go back to Amrah?’

‘Not the whole way.’

The four security men approached Rem. ‘We can take you to 80, but after that we need to head back to Amrah.’

‘You can take Route 567. See us to Liberty, continue on Route 567 to Amrah.’ Rem began to fold up the map.

‘Route 567 north is unsecure. We’d have to come back to 80.’

‘Then you come back to 80 after you’ve seen us to Liberty.’

‘We don’t have time.’

Rem took off his glasses and wiped sweat from his eyes. The heat and the brightness bore down, and nothing around them but stone. He asked the men what they suggested he do. He asked Watts if they had anything. Any kind of protection?

‘Nothing legal or useful.’

‘Anything?’

Watts apologized. There was one more thing. He drew Rem across the road. ‘What’s the name of the redhead?’

‘Samuels.’

‘He’s not looking too good.’

Samuels sat on his own on the blacktop with his back to the wheels, arms hugging his legs, head rested on his knees.

‘What’s his problem?’

Samuels’ problem had to be Fatboy. The last time Samuels sat in a Humvee Fatboy had shot himself. ‘Tell Santo to leave those guards alone and swap places. We’ll have Samuels with us.’

‘You’re going ahead?’

‘They said the trouble was north, after Camp Liberty. According to the map there’s nothing between here and Camp Liberty. No villages, no houses. Just desert.’

Watts wasn’t convinced. ‘According to the map there’s supposed to be a road.’ He pointed at the desert.

‘I don’t see a choice. Returning to Amrah, driving down Jalla isn’t an option, with or without security.’

Rem clapped his hands and told everyone to get back into their vehicles. He walked to the front Cougar, climbed up to the cab, and leaned in through the window.

‘We’re going back to Highway 80,’ he said to the driver. ‘We’re taking Route 567. It’s your choice whether you go back to Amrah or see us on to Camp Liberty. If you choose to return to Amrah, I’ll guarantee all of your contracts will be cut before you reach the city. Your choice.’

The security guard looked back, impassive.

*   *   *

They reached Highway 80 with the sun behind them. As they turned the two security vehicles pulled to the side of the road. Rem told Watts to ignore them and keep driving.

‘Don’t give them the satisfaction.’

As they turned north the sun struck into the cab and gilded Watts’ arms and shoulder, the back of his hands.

‘There’s nothing ahead. No villages. Only the road, then the camp.’ Rem checked the mirror to make sure the others followed, and without breaking pace they kept in a tight line and left behind the two security vehicles. The guards sat atop the Cougars with their guns trained across the desert. Highway 80 and the embankment quickly receded to a thin light band, a trace of amber, horizontal planes of colour. Samuels sat with his head down on his arms as if asleep or poorly, sweat beading on his neck.

*   *   *

Pakosta dominated the radio. Entertained them as they rode up Route 567.

‘They have these systems, ways of seeing. They’ve created these computer programs, these avatars, that learn. They empathize. They predict. They dream. They know the food you eat, how long it will take to digest, the quality of the shit you’re about to take. The heft, the colour, the weight. These things don’t even exist, they’re programs, right, pathways and electrical pulses. But they know you better than you know yourself. We’re just meat to them. I tell you. We aren’t even necessary any more. The future is here. This is where they test it out. It’s not chemical warfare. It’s digital.’

Pakosta sang as many songs featuring the word hero as he could recall. Asked every single one of them by name if they were all right and demanded an answer.

Watts turned down the volume.

*   *   *

Cathy sat for two hours in the library and stared at the screen, willing the download counter to creep to full. She didn’t dare touch the keyboard, and moved the mouse every five minutes to stop the screen from going to sleep. How does everyone else manage this? She was learning new words, could distinguish between KB and MB in terms of time, and how long each download would demand. She knew the difference between a gif, a doc, and a jpeg. She knew now to delete her history before closing the browser and logging out.

In his email Rem spoke about assigning cabins to the men, of clearing out bunks. He spoke about a squabble over who would take the cabins closest to the showers – although he couldn’t see the advantage, because the toilets and the showers were stupidly at opposite ends of the camp. He used the word loosely, he said. Camp. In the end they opted to draw straws, but having no straws or anything that would make do, they fell into a game of paper, scissors, stone. Grown men grouped under a temporary canopy playing a child’s game to settle a territorial dispute. He left them to it. Provisions were arriving, but without the proper equipment food would spoil: potable water was shipped in plastic bottles, non-potable water was stored in two large underground tanks set halfway into a hill that relied on gravity to drain into the showers. For the moment they would get by day to day. He didn’t mind, he said, he really didn’t mind, because they had enough vehicles and enough fuel to drive right back to Amrah City if they had to – not that he ever wanted to go back, but if they had to, they could manage themselves out of trouble. The main problem, he confided, was heat, and adjusting the work day so they’d be up before dawn to receive the trucks for the burn pits. All in good time.

*   *   *

He’d posted the videos to an email account, and she found them accidentally – a stray click on an underlined link.

Once downloaded, the first, smaller message began to play. Rem’s voice broke into the library, until Cathy fumbled the headphone jack into the correct socket.

Rem huddled in a dark room, back to a wall, knees up, the camera close to his chest, his face greased with sweat, his eyes deep, closed at first, compressed. And then: his face sulking, baby-like, mouth rising, brow falling, and sobs, awkward and girlish. Rem cried noisily, he choked in awkward bursts that made this difficult, ugly to watch.

Out on Clark, the few lime trees planted along the sidewalk – always the first to suffer the heat. She took a break, called Maggie, asked ordinary questions, surprised at the control in her voice, how cold she could sound as she asked about the orders, about details, about shifts, the possibility of more work, because money, you know, was always welcome, especially now. When Maggie hesitated she said, ‘Forget it. Forget I asked. I don’t know why I called,’ and Maggie took the insult badly and cut the conversation short.

Cathy returned to the computer, grateful that this was only one room, nothing more than a storefront, but disliked how her private life played out on public computers. She found a different image playing, the second message downloaded and running footage of a stony roadside that fell back to an endless palm grove. The jolt of the vehicle punched the image up to the sky, blinding white then blue, whipped by the feathered tops of palm trees, a rustle of green. Date palms, she knew this, not coconut. And would those be almond trees, or walnut, some kind of fruit? Olive trees broke the rhythm, pleasantly squat and pale, and locked between them the brightest sky, a thin block of air. In breaks between the groves the irrigation channels, the ditches, the dusty roads, and further back more fields and groves, an unfamiliar sight for a country she’d imagined only as stone and desert.

This world looked old by design. She put on the headphones, taken by, but not quite believing, the wearing brightness and the bare sunshine. The waters of a great river brought sparingly to the plains, passed plant to plant through channels and tubes and tight little ditches, and the transformation from flat desert to a continuous roadside oasis struck her as ingenious, hard-earned, and beautiful.

She could distinguish voices under the drone of the engine. Rem, and one, maybe two other men, laughing, discussing how the village wasn’t on the map. How wild is that? Shouldn’t be there. Across the radio, she could just about hear a voice singing and sounding like a taunt.

*   *   *

The next morning, stopped on Lake Shore Drive, Cathy smoothed the apron over her stomach, and thought again of this oasis: a clear image of water channels, low mud walls, a wild pampas-like grass, but mostly the palm trees, strong leaning trunks, a wild bush of fronds – home to what kinds of bird? What right did Rem have crying, homesick, in some boxy room, when he was free of this monotony?

She wasn’t eating regularly, she’d lost too much weight too quickly, enough to stop her periods. These things happened when she became stressed. Outward, she appeared to manage. Inward, everything became a mess: eating, sleeping, shitting, menstruation, every basic function thrown out of whack.

*   *   *

Rem could smell the camp before they came across it. A smell, from a distance, of newly turned earth, slightly foetid, not entirely unpleasant. Closer still the stink fastened to the back of his throat, turned penetrative and meaty.

Forty minutes earlier they’d come through palm groves and an ordered grid of dry irrigation channels surrounding an unmarked village, Khat. Now they sat at the head of an incline, a great plate of desert about them, falling on all sides – except to the west where a small bare hill concealed the camp. The tops of two water tanks half buried in the hill, a wire fence, and a cable-wire gate were all that could be seen from the road.

They drove slowly down the track into Camp Liberty. To their right a Quonset hut with a ribbed barrel roof and a long garage door, rosy in the late sun, with two blackened diggers pulled-up behind. To their left an uneven line of HOSCO cabins. This, Rem understood, was the camp, barely enough to justify the journey. The track continued in a wavering line toward the burn pits. Behind them, the highway struck straight, north–south. Further to the west the land lost distinction, the wind drove up a fleshy haze and the horizon faded to flat tones. He couldn’t figure why the camp was based here, nothing established its reason, no commanding feature, water, nothing, except that it lay equidistant between the Kuwaiti border, the Saudi border, and a small town called Khat.

When the vehicles stopped the men stepped out, and one by one looked about, expecting more and failing to find anything. Each one of them took shallow breaths and looked to Rem as if he was the source of the stink. Samuels sloped out last, a spanked dog, all tremors and passing terror, the only one not appalled by the stench.

Rem asked Pakosta if this was it.

‘Just about.’

‘Dead things. It smells of bad meat, animal fat.’ Santo pinched his nose, swatted the flies matting Watts’ back.

The plastic cabins were raised on wood pallets. Their fronts and sides, pitted by the sand, were so badly weathered that grit stuck in them and gave them a soft furred look. Santo gouged out the screws, and when the door opened he jumped back. ‘Something in here!’

The men gathered in a huddle and peered cautiously inside. The floor, black, appeared to move.

‘It’s ash.’ Santo thought this funny, and wafted the door and the ash stirred, disturbed as the surface of a lake.

The bed, a simple cot, at least had a mattress but the room was otherwise bare. Rem had the common sense to make sure the men brought fresh bedding and bed rolls, something more comfortable at least than their accommodation back at Amrah. He charged Samuels and Clark with checking each of the cabins. Fleas, bugs, roaches. Scorpions. Rats. Spiders. He had no idea what was out here.

*   *   *

Rem asked Pakosta to drive him about the camp. He wanted to see the burn pits as he didn’t yet know how to speak to the men about their work: everything was new and unfamiliar.

A home-made sign outside the Quonset pointed to ‘The Pits / The Beach’.

Pakosta turned the Humvee aggressively about. ‘I have one more property. I think you’ll like what we’ve done here. Honest to god.’

*   *   *

Pakosta drove first to the Beach. If Rem wanted to get a measure of this vast nothing, then the Beach was the place to start.

‘I was here in February. We had to haul a truck out of one of the pits. We should have just pushed it in.’

The Beach, a long dune, almost as high as the camp, formed a crescent-shaped gulley around an open tip of abandoned vehicles and equipment – most of it stripped of usable parts. The Beach rode up behind as a steep roll of sand.

‘This is where they dump hardware which won’t burn.’ He strode up the dune expecting Rem to follow. Once on the crest he struck a pose and swept out his arms to the north and north-west. ‘Nothing of interest until the border. Belongs to A-rabs, scorpions, camels, and desert rats. Nothing going out, and nothing coming back. If anything did happen to come at us we’d see it several days before it got here. Not so from the other direction.’ Pakosta turned to point south with two fingers, pistol-fashion.

‘Our closest neighbour is Khat. Sometimes the support and supply convoys from Camp Navistar to LSA Anaconda in Baghdad are obliged to take this road: and on occasion the good citizens of Khat choose to stone the vehicles, to slow them down and rob them, because the convoys come from Shuaiba or Camp Arifjan, and bring eggs, milk, bread, flour, you name it. Foodstuffs. Fuel. If we’re smart we’ll have nothing to do with them. Fortunately most of them believe that the pits are used to destroy chemicals and toxic material.’ Pakosta swept his hand to the east. ‘Which brings us to Camp Crapper, the largest and last burn pit in southern I-raq, which, to my knowledge, has never been permanently manned.’ Pakosta spat into the sand then levelled his arms. ‘So, what the fuck are we doing here?’

Rem gave Pakosta an honest answer. ‘Because this is the last job in town. Everywhere else doesn’t look so good right now. Why are you here?’

‘This is my career.’ Pakosta gave a laugh. ‘I’m serious. This country is my future. I’m never going back.’

*   *   *

Before returning to the cabins they stopped at the burn pits. Five long and shallow trenches, each as broad as a truck. Inside the pits a mess of black glue and scorched semi-recognizable detritus: a freezer unit, gypsum boards, a bicycle frame, half-burned boxes and bags melded together, yet to properly burn, but mostly an uneven field of papery black and grey ash.

*   *   *

As soon as he shut the cabin door Rem didn’t know what to do with himself. Tired? Certainly. But ready to sleep? He wrote a list of what he wanted to say to Geezler, and outlined their abandonment by the security unit, the highway that stopped in the middle of the desert, the stink of the pits, and how the camp was more remote than he’d imagined. Even so, despite these aggravations, he didn’t doubt that Camp Liberty would be better and safer than Amrah once everything began to settle into place. Rem couldn’t see there being much to report on, day to day. Whatever Geezler wanted from him had already been satisfied. The pits were now manned.

Neither his cellphone nor the satellite phone could pick up a signal. Rem wasn’t sure how to use the satphone: a handset with what looked like a folding hotplate. Tomorrow they’d resolve this. Watts would know. Communications would need to be established with Amrah, no one would be happy if contact home wasn’t possible.

Each of the men secure in a cabin. No wind. No traffic. Rem turned off the flashlight and lay on the bed in utter darkness. Wide awake.

*   *   *

Part way through the night the lack of sound finally bore into him. A stillness compacted by his heartbeat, the changing pressure in his ears, the random babble in his head, his stomach, his breath, mostly his breath: so that the night slowed down to these small things.

He’d covered himself with mosquito repellent. Thought it better to show caution and hope that the mixed fumes of repellent and sweat would deter anything Clark and Samuels might have missed.

Rem fretted over Cathy. He wanted a little home comfort, a presence, some body warmth. He couldn’t think of Cathy without imagining her falling down. He pictured endless scenarios of Cathy suddenly falling, sometimes heavy: on the El platform, crossing a road, climbing stairs; and sometimes slow, as if asleep: driving, in the street, in the shower, at the stove, the room catching light as she lay on the floor. And on, and on. Cathy tumbling, striking her head, not being found. All of this trouble for a ring and a couple of watches.

A sound grew from outside, the fast mechanical cut and chop of a helicopter, the twin rotors of a Chinook. A helicopter, twin rotors. By the time he’d found his boots and made it outside the drop was completed. Four crates lowered behind the Quonset, dust settling, the helicopter already leaning backward into the sky. Hard spotlights and a lit interior cabin.

He looked down the row and saw Santo smoking outside his hut. The two men waved liked neighbours in any neighbourhood.

*   *   *

In the news the bombing of four Amrah City markets in the same day, sixty-seven dead in a strip-mall that looked much like the local K-Mart with its parking lot and a broad, stippled concrete hood sheltering the sidewalk. Both the Times and the Post ran photographs of men stumbling over rubble, startled, dusty, hands to their heads. After waiting at the checkout Cathy changed her mind and left the newspapers on the counter. She didn’t need this. Although she’d known his return was indefinitely delayed, it was today that the information sank through and began to hurt. It meant an anniversary alone. It meant reorganizing the payments on their loans. It meant that she would not move apartment until the next summer, and they needed somewhere smaller, cheaper. She’d made and cancelled two appointments at the Howard Street clinic, thinking this can wait, better to go when Rem returned. No more fainting, and no dizziness, instead a lack of appetite, a general exhaustion she carried as a weight, which could be something, but could simply be sadness. This vacation had opened up a world of trouble. She kept newspaper clippings every time she found a report mentioning HOSCO, simply for the habit. In the Tribune she found a report on military wives and infidelity, and wanted to call the paper to complain, to ask what they thought they were doing? Were they really so short of ideas? Cathy took herself to the loading dock, phone in hand, ready to make the call. Not that she could bring herself to make it, because she wasn’t a military wife, just someone in the same position, and she didn’t want to have to justify herself, she just wanted to complain to someone who had to listen. The news of the bombing alarmed her; while she trusted Rem’s word that he was safe, the notion that he could be harmed stuck as a superstition. She could imagine him dead but not wounded, or if wounded not maimed, a scar perhaps, but that alone. Photographs of men lying in streets shocked and scorched made no sense to her: families would look at these images and recognize their sons and husbands.

The arrival of a package with a military frank was a reminder that Rem really was absent. He’d left her to an artificial world, and she lived expecting news from elsewhere. She drove home still dressed in the store uniform that made her itch, a ring on her finger, the Happy Shopper stitched on the breast pocket, and felt owned. Cathy settled her hand on the package. She had her mail delivered to a post-box because packages could not be trusted with her neighbour, Mr Liu.

*   *   *

Three hours at the library. Stops. Starts. Disconnections. The messages recorded on Rem’s mobile and transferred to their email account. Behind Rem a digital fuzz of flat desert and rising heat broken into shifting tonal zones of spoiled muddy ochre. The image assembled out of crude blocks, bold as thumbprints.

Rem squinted into the sun, leaned forward to speak, self-conscious and awkward. The camera propped on a car bonnet. He spoke in a fake Mexican accent, a private joke. (They played a game where he, invariably, was subordinate to her, garden-boy, pool-boy, waiter, bus-boy, and these seductions were always brief and hasty. It could happen on drives, at restaurants, at home minutes before guests arrived. Nobody they knew would guess this of them.)

‘So this is home,’ he said. Rough as it was it beat the crap out of Amrah. He’d watched the razing of entire city blocks, and for what? The idea that you could rebuild a city was messy, wrong-headed, and they hadn’t done one thing right.

Rem took off his shirt, ran his hand over his chest. He coughed before he spoke, his expression serious. ‘It makes sense,’ he said, ‘I know you don’t like it, but if I came back there wouldn’t be any work. It’s coming into summer. You know we’d be right back where we started. Anyway.’ He scratched his nose (a habit of his when he wanted to move a conversation off a sticky subject).

‘I picked these people,’ he said. ‘I get to be a manager again. I run my own team.’

Pointing to the desert, Rem said that this wasn’t anything much. It was safe, a little quiet, but definitely secure. The only trouble here would be trouble they brought on themselves through boredom. The camp was a good distance from habitation. Nothing but sand and rock and maybe a few scorpions: nothing until the border.

*   *   *

Cathy had her own news, wasn’t sure if she had already told him. Cissie had taken Matt back to Kansas. I’m sorry if I’ve already said. Cathy spoke into the phone and couldn’t help but stage her voice, pick and pronounce her words with more than her usual care. The truth is the doctors hadn’t expected him to make it this far, and now he had, they didn’t know what to do with him. They start with one thing and it affects what they do next.

She didn’t like the cadence of her voice, all Southern sing-song that made light of any trouble: every burden being a blessing in disguise. Christ, wasn’t that the word they used? Blessing? This was her family’s doing. How even the worst news came sugar-glazed, every word freighted with blessings. How had she escaped this life? And how was it, even after all these years, that her voice betrayed this last tail of home?

She started up the recording and spoke into the phone. Mike and Jenny have moved. See? Even this sounds happy? Drove by yesterday. They’re gone. Packing cases on the porch which makes it look like they were in a hurry. There were four signs of foreclosures along Ravenswood. That’s four in one block.

She’d seen a dog in the park just like Nut, except he was on a lead and barking. Nut never barked. Far across the park the dog strained against its lead, gave the man a struggle, and while it wasn’t Nut, couldn’t have been, she felt guilty for not making sure.

Cathy ended with the realization that everyone had gone. It’s me, she said, and Maggie. Ten years in this town and I know one person. How can this happen so quickly? We had a full life, didn’t we? Now I know one person.

She paused the recording and then deleted the message, and resolved to start again in the morning.

*   *   *

The satphone worked only in the late afternoons, communications dropped and stuttered alternately compressing and stretching distance and expectation. Watts sat with Rem beside the water tanks and tried to help Rem send messages back to ACSB, when the news came back that it was closing.

‘You knew this?’ Watts asked.

‘First I’ve heard.’

‘Clark said something when we were leaving.’

‘He knew?’

‘Rumour.’

They looked down the highway.

‘Haven’t seen one vehicle.’

The highway trailed back, an empty spine. Not one thing on it.

*   *   *

Geezler wanted to know about the map. He’d consulted the maps at HOSCO and none of them had a highway running alongside the Saudi border. Rem asked Watts where the maps had come from.

‘Stores.’ Watts shrugged. ‘The usual.’

Rem asked Kiprowski: if the maps came from Stores, then where did Stores get them?

Kiprowski took the map and looked it over, held the paper close to his face to read, and found printed in the corner a small tagline, S-CIPA. This one came from Southern-CIPA, he said.

Rem managed to send his reply before the lines dropped. Pleased to have a result, he’d forgotten to ask the main question he’d had since they’d arrived: now they were here, exactly what were they supposed to do?

*   *   *

On the second morning they were woken by the arrival of six yellow garbage trucks. Groots. The same back-loading garbage trucks he’d seen on the streets of Chicago. The convoy arrived early, pre-dawn, and the men duly rose, curious, to greet them. At first sight they thought this funny: dump trucks with the municipal labels and signs stripped from the sides, here, in the middle of Iraq. And yellow? The driver of the first truck, a Ukrainian, Stas, was surprised to find the camp occupied, and when he jumped out of his cab he asked if Rem needed a permit or a manifest now, like at Bravo and SCB Alpha. Rem admitted that he didn’t know, and Stas assured him that there wasn’t too much to it.

‘Here we come with no permits.’

Stas carried about a small towel, which he used to wipe his hands and forehead. He spoke briefly with the other drivers, called Chimeno to him, and asked him to drive the tanker from the Quonset and follow them down to the pits. A line of blocked shapes, dim in the pre-dawn, headlights busy with insects, slowly followed the track downhill, their vibration humming through the night air.

Pit 4, closest to the Beach, was the deepest. Stas explained in broken English how he’d helped excavate the pit.

‘You dug this out?’ Rem couldn’t quite follow. ‘You made this?’

Rem’s question made him laugh. ‘You dig! Yes? You. Every week, maybe.’

The idea horrified Rem. ‘Every week we dig a new pit?’

‘No, you dig the same pit.’

This was the reason for the two diggers parked behind the Quonset.

‘How do you know when?’

‘To dig? You’ll know.’ The pits, Stas indicated, became full, and with a chopping motion he demonstrated how the pits were extended by cutting and in-filling, and by this process they grew at one end and shrank at the other. Continually dug out of the sand they crept, caterpillar-style, into the desert. Now it made sense why they were placed in a star-like configuration, radiating away from one another.

‘How often?’ Rem wanted to make this clear.

‘Depends.’ Stas pinched his nose. ‘Sand will stop the smell. But not so much.’ He wiped the back of his neck then waved the towel in the air. ‘The fire will stop the flies. You have clothes?’

Rem had found a crate of protective suits in the Quonset. Firemen’s bunker gear, rubberized suits with reflective belts and black zippers. He sent Chimeno back to the compound and told him to hurry.

Stas tied the towel over his mouth, bandit-style, and supervised the dumping. The trucks began to unload one at a time at the near end of the pit. The first truck shivered as the pistons struggled to tip the container high enough and the contents slipped out in a dense and mudlike mass.

Pakosta started laughing. ‘That’s disgusting.’ The men watched as the black waste flopped into the pit. ‘Man, that’s graphic.’

The second truck spewed out a muddle of white bags and they watched them roll and slop, getting now a sense of depth and scale.

‘My parents,’ Pakosta shouted above the noise, ‘won a vacation on a game show. A week in Kenya. For five days they saw nothing. Some giraffes. A couple of hyenas. Someone brought them a dead snake. On their last night they stopped at this water hole and saw, like, fifty hippos – and all these hippos did was back up to the water and shit in it for something like half an hour. They made a video.’

Chimeno returned with one suit folded over his arm. Reflective strips caught the light from the trucks. ‘There’s five complete, and another one without the mask-thing, and a whole bunch of different filters.’

Stas told Chimeno to dress in the suit, then showed him how to unhook a hose from the side of the tanker, then clamp the mouth to a faucet on the back. Satisfied, Stas walked a good ten metres from the pit and scored a line in the grit with his heels. ‘Here,’ he shouted to Rem. ‘Everyone come here.’

Once the hose was fastened, Stas warned everyone to keep their distance. ‘No smoke! OK?’

He stood Chimeno at the edge of the pit, kicked the kinks out of the hose, and made Chimeno hold it up, indicating how he should stand, and how the hose should be gripped with both hands, and secured under one arm. When he turned the spigot on, Chimeno staggered back, but managed to stabilize himself and hold the nozzle up to send out a broad spray of fuel. The remaining trucks drove back to the camp. A sharp, head-splitting fume rose from the pit.

‘Jet fuel.’ Pakosta clapped his hand over his mouth and nose.

The men naturally backed away.

After two minutes Stas closed off the spigot and called Chimeno back for assistance. Once the men had tucked the hose under the tanker he drove a good distance away, then returned running to the group.

‘Now this,’ he held up his hand. ‘Watch.’

It took Rem a moment to recognize that Stas was holding a hand grenade.

Stas held the grenade upside down, twisted the base, then lobbed it softly overarm into the pit. A gesture so casual, Rem expected nothing to result from it. As Stas stepped carefully back, Santo, Watts, Clark, Pakosta on one side, and Chimeno, Samuels, Kiprowski and Rem on the other, all followed suit.

‘And now we see.’

Less than a second later with a dull thud and a plant-like plume, spidery tufts and trails of mud sprang from the pit – in itself a disappointment – then, in one sudden conflagration, the air above the pit broke into a vast orange fireball. The heat shoved them back, then rose, startlingly dynamic.

The men hooted, clapped, slapped each other’s backs. Santo swore, punched the air. Pakosta yipped and hollered. Even Samuels smiled. Kiprowski and Rem stood side by side, hands on hips, heads upturned, awe-struck. The fire, now a single branching column, sucked air from the desert and transformed into a thick pillar of grey-flecked smoke high above them. Stas stood with the towel covering his mouth and nose.

Pakosta spat then shook his head. ‘That, right there, is exactly what we’re here for.’

*   *   *

The second convoy arrived an hour after the first. Dawn broke as a sour orange band, across an uninterrupted plain. Rem distributed the remaining environmental suits, then returned to the Quonset, unfolded a deckchair, and sat behind the crates, feet up, cap pulled down.

Rem woke to Pakosta’s shouts. Chimeno had collapsed. He needed to come quickly.

After loading Pit 2, Santo had discovered Chimeno on his knees right at the pit edge with his back to the mounting fire, disoriented. Santo and Samuels had hauled Chimeno to one of the trucks. Rem found him still in the cab, his suit unzipped and mask pulled to the side. Sweat stuck his T-shirt to his chest, rucked up and sodden, and his hair slicked flat to his head. Chimeno, head nodding baby-like and unable to keep his eyes open, had still not properly revived and slowly swatted away their hands. The driver, a wiry Indian, sat aside to watch, smoking. Rem asked if he could cut it out, and the man looked to his cigarette, a little put out.

‘The suits are too hot. Someone’s going to fall into one of those pits.’ Santo unbuckled the mask and unscrewed the nozzle. ‘Look at this.’ He held up the filter, a thin grey fibre disc. ‘I don’t think this is right?’

Chimeno breathed slow and deep and appeared more connected. He shuffled himself upright and wiped his nose.

‘It’s too hot. Look at him. He can’t move in the suit. They’re not fit for purpose.’ Santo refitted the nozzle to the face mask and took several attempts to align the threads. ‘Maybe just the masks, then?’

Pakosta had spoken with one of the other drivers. ‘He said this has happened before. It’s the heat.’

‘Where was this?’

Pakosta shrugged. ‘Bravo? Alpha? I didn’t ask. He was talking about another burn pit.’

Rem opened the door to let air inside, asked the driver to take Chimeno back to the cabins. He called Samuels over to ride back with Chimeno then asked Santo if they could have a word.

They both agreed the suits were a bad idea.

‘That other driver just had a towel over his face. Maybe we don’t need these things.’

They walked back to the cabins, the slope nothing more a low-grade ridge, the sand soft at the roadside, but trenched in the centre into deep curved ruts which obliged the trucks to progress slowly and steer carefully. Santo wanted to know about food, water, general supplies. Rem assured him there would be a delivery every other morning.

*   *   *

In the evening the cloud collapsed. It was such a strange phenomenon, a column of smoke that rose from the ground and obscured the pit, as if the ground belched black breath, Rem realized he’d had his eye on it throughout the day, and noticed as the day drew on how the quality of the smoke and the colour changed (black first, then thin and white, then rolling bruised purples, then blue, then orange). As it fattened it began to resist the wind and lean toward the camp. The smoke darkened and slowly descended, came down as a shower of black flakes, small papery wisps thick enough to smudge.

Astounded by this, Clark stood outside his cabin, arms outspread, while everyone else scampered for shelter and watched from doorways. Their hurry drew the flakes in a whorl behind them, statically attracted, so their backs and shoulders, their heads, were quickly dressed. This snow absorbed sound, made the men quiet, and fell as a slight stickiness so delicate it itched.

The ash worked its way through cracks and gaps into their cabins.

‘Jet fuel will strip the skin off your hands and rot your brain.’ Watts set about cleaning the masks. Took each filter apart and laid out the composite parts.

Rem returned to the pits with his camera. He brought Kiprowski with him and made the boy take photos.

‘Got that? Let me see.’

Kiprowski handed back the camera.

Rem scrolled through the images. ‘You think you can manage this? Not too taxing?’

‘No, sir.’

‘What about Samuels? You speak much with him?’

‘He keeps to himself.’

‘He’s settling in? This is just between you and me.’

‘He’s good.’

‘You think that, or you know?’

The boy looked to the pit and reconsidered. ‘I think the others could ease off, maybe.’

‘In what way?’

Kiprowski brushed flies from his eyes and squinted back. ‘I don’t know.’

‘But he’s OK?’

‘I guess. They play jokes.’

‘What kind of jokes?’

‘Someone put sand in his bunk and he was up all night.’

‘Who did this?’

Kiprowski turned to the Beach. ‘I did.’

Rem looked up from the camera, surprised. ‘Why would you do something like that?’

Kiprowski looked out at the pits again, smoke whorled from a spill of black round bags. ‘I don’t know. It wasn’t a major plan or anything.’

‘Was it Pakosta?’

‘There was a group. I don’t know. Just something that came up, I guess.’

‘But you did it?’

‘There were other ideas that weren’t so nice. I thought this was less mean.’

Rem turned off the camera, set his cap back on his head. The men were bored, new to each other, settling in and testing. He understood this.

Kiprowski stood with his hands clasped behind his back, cadet-style.

‘Back in Amrah. I heard you rode alone up Jalla Road?’

Kiprowski smiled and shook his head. ‘I got a ride at the last minute.’

‘But you were going to do it?’

Kiprowski said he didn’t know. He guessed so. Maybe. ‘Seemed as safe as anything else.’

*   *   *

Rem had no idea who he was speaking with and the temperamental connection didn’t help, neither did an audience. Throughout the discussion he was faced with idiot grins from Chimeno and Clark, teamed up as some redneck glee-club in matching blue T-shirts. (Chimeno: ‘Lock and Load’, with an arrow pointing to his crotch, and Clark: ‘Why Does This Keep Happening?’ The T-shirts had arrived that morning in a care package from Watts’ brother.)

Halfway through the conversation Rem held his hand over the mouthpiece and asked Chimeno and Clark if they could do him a favour. Keen to please, Chimeno leaned forward.

‘Get Santo and find out who Paul Howell is. See if he’s heard of this Markland.’

The two men left and he returned to the conversation. He asked the man his name: Markland. Tom Markland, secretary for Paul Howell – offered as if he should know.

The problem, Markland insisted, was that they couldn’t transport explosives, not in the quantity Rem needed, not by road. Even if he could – just supposing – under the current directive non-combatants weren’t authorized to handle munitions of any kind.

This, Rem pointed out, was madness. The burn pits had been running long before his arrival and they had managed to start fires, with explosives, with fuel, without trouble.

Markland’s voice sank, as if explaining a very easy point to a very simple person. ‘Because the convoys have military escort. They bring their munitions with them. They set the fires by themselves. It’s their business to start the fires. Not yours.’

Rem explained about the Ukrainian, Stas, a driver, and how he’d started the fire on the previous night and how there was no military or security escort.

Markland’s voice sank further and he offered a three-line defence.

1. ‘That’s news to me.’

2. ‘They’re out of my jurisdiction. We have no control over the GST, the CMDN, or over any Ukrainian nationals, only directives on what procedures everyone should follow. If they aren’t following these procedures then you have to report this.’

3. ‘They find their explosives out and about.’

‘There’s plenty out there. There are munitions dumps any place you care to look. How do you think the insurgents arm themselves? Most of what they use is ours. Walk in any direction and you’ll find what you need.’

‘I can’t send someone out to recover explosives that aren’t secure.’

‘I’m not telling you to do that. What I’m saying is you need certification to get what you want.’

‘How do I get certification?’

‘You don’t. It can’t be done, unless the Deputy Administrator gives you special dispensation.’

‘And how do I get permission from the Deputy Administrator?’

‘You talk to me.’

‘I am talking with you.’

‘You come to Amrah and you make your case to me, and then I make your case to the Deputy Administrator.’

This, to Rem, sounded deeply unsatisfactory.

‘It can take six weeks,’ Markland seemed to crow. ‘And I’m due to leave, so the process might not be completed if you don’t start it soon.’

*   *   *

In the late afternoon Geezler called Rem directly. ‘The map,’ he wanted to know. ‘You said it came from Southern-CIPA?’

‘As far as we know. Usually we pick them up from Stores or the PX, but this came from one of the convoys, and they get their intel and commands routed through Southern-CIPA.’ Rem said he wasn’t sure who they were, but he’d had dealings with a man called Markland. ‘I need permission to handle explosives so we can start the fires. Otherwise the pits fill up and we live with the stink and the flies. It’s not wholesome. The man I need to see is Paul Howell.’

Geezler said he was listening.

‘From what I know he’s the government man for the sector, handles the money and keeps the locals involved. I’ll ask around.’

He asked how everything else was going.

‘It’s basic. No doubt about that. Supplies are due every other day. It’s pretty much hand-to-mouth right now. We’ve no way of keeping anything cold or fresh, so we’ve moved from A-rations to MREs. I had the feeling that Southern-CIPA didn’t know we were here.’

Geezler advised Rem to come up with a list of what he needed. ‘Go to Southern-CIPA as soon as you can and get this organized. Everything in Amrah is under reorganization. ACSB will shut down within a month. You’ll be busy.’

*   *   *

After work Cathy returned to Touhy Park, picked up some tacos on her way and sat opposite the fire station and faced the road. She never did this, and wasn’t comfortable with the shift in her day, but stopping in the apartment would mean cooking, opening a rotgut bottle of wine, losing another night to the same routine, and this routine, she’d decided, was holding her down. Besides, she could go to the library and check the internet when she returned, fix something else if she was still hungry. There wasn’t one thing that couldn’t wait.

Done eating she rolled the foil and paper into a wad, looked about for the trash – and saw, across the park, a dog, not unlike Nut, the same dog as before, with the same owner.

Cathy closed her eyes. She had to deal with it. Go, check out that this definitely wasn’t Nut, otherwise she’d have another spoiled night fussing over yet one more thing she’d failed to attend to. From a distance the man looked rough. Dressed in a white tracksuit with a blue trim, a Bulls baseball cap, he walked with a spongy stride – of course he’d have a dog like Nut. It just figured. She decided to walk by, keep it nice and casual, didn’t even have to look at the man, but just wander by and check out the dog.

She cut across the grass, already threadbare, patches spreading out from the path. The dog, as before, lunged and started barking, almost in response to her. Nut never barked. The man yanked the leash and pulled the dog back, other people walked off the path to keep wide of them. As the man tugged the leash the dog chuffed and pulled in resistance.

Despite the barking, the dog became more and more like Nut with each step.

Closer, she realized that the man was not a man at all but a boy, who despite his height could not be older than fifteen. Closer, she realized – no doubt about it – the dog was definitely Nut.

The boy understood what was happening even before she reached him. With the fuss and lunging it became obvious that Cathy was not any person walking toward the dog, but someone who was known. She stopped a little ahead, looked to the boy, and pointed at the dog.

‘I’m sorry but I think that’s our dog.’

Nut tugged and strained and coughed, his backside swung powerfully, front legs pedalled. Cathy settled to her knees and opened her arms. ‘Nut. Nut.’

Unable to hold the dog back, the boy loosened his grip and the dog bounced forward.

‘Where did you find him?’ She cradled Nut, closed her eyes to breathe him in, ran her hands over his back. Nut fell upon her, force of habit, licked her face and neck. She looked up at the boy and repeated her question. The leash, a piece of rope, had chafed Nut’s neck, and rubbed the fur to a sore red line.

She asked a third time where he’d found the dog, and kept her voice even, friendly.

‘He’s my dog.’ The boy’s voice pitched high.

‘I think you found him. Where was he?’

The boy attempted to draw Nut back to his side.

‘He’s very gentle. You don’t have to pull so hard. You’re hurting his neck.’ Again she spoke firmly but with care, did not want a confrontation, but wanted to lay out the facts. ‘That’s my dog.’

‘He’s mine.’

‘What’s his name? Call him to you.’

When the boy failed to answer, Cathy settled again on her knees. ‘We both know that this is my dog.’

The boy’s pants were dirty, grey not white, hand-me-downs.

‘Look.’ She stood up, closer than she intended, and was surprised that the boy flinched. He gripped his fists round the rope, looked to the ground, neither at Cathy nor the dog.

‘I can give you a reward. I don’t have money with me, but if you let me have your address.’

The boy shook his head, a small movement of defeat.

‘We’ve had him from when he was a puppy.’

His mouth tightened. Cathy couldn’t hear what he was saying and had to lean in closer than she felt comfortable. Still she couldn’t hear him.

‘He really belongs to my husband.’ Cathy wasn’t sure what to do. Why did this have to happen? ‘We put up signs. Here. In this park.’ She pointed to the few spare trees as if this would make the lie more truthful. ‘It would be nice to have him back.’

‘So?’ The boy’s voice came as a whisper.

‘So, his neck is sore. Is he trying to run away?’

The boy nodded.

She thought to snatch the leash. Take back what was hers. Get angry.

‘I think he’s been trying to come home.’

He didn’t resist when she took hold of the rope. Nut came immediately to her side and leaned against her leg. The boy wiped his nose with his cuff.

‘I want to thank you for finding my dog.’ Now Cathy could not look at him. Oh god, was he crying? ‘How can I thank you?’

*   *   *

The boy followed them six blocks south to Lunt. Cathy thought to walk around the corner as she didn’t want him to know where she lived, then realized that he seemed to know this anyway. He’s not right, she told herself. He has some kind of disability. The way he dresses, the way he walks on tiptoe. As she unlocked the lobby door the boy leaned forward, a gesture not unlike the dog’s, one of intent, of someone rousing determination but failing to push himself to action. When she turned to him he walked away, then after a few paces he began to run, his hands to his face.

Cathy crouched down to hug the dog and asked why did every goddamned thing have to be so hard?

*   *   *

Santo travelled with Rem back to Amrah City. Rem didn’t like seeing the camp from the air: the pits laid out in a rough star, the Quonset’s rounded hood, the row of cabins, the shower block, the toilets all looked provisional. Once the craft had risen high enough to see the Beach, the camp dissolved.

‘I told myself I wasn’t going back.’

Santo nodded, sullen. ‘They have women at Southern-CIPA?’

Rem looked to Santo as if he was mad. Santo pinched his nose and in a sudden flush, a stream of blood ran between his fingers. Rem moved his knees to avoid the mess and asked over the comm-link for a towel or something. The navigator said he didn’t have anything.

‘Nosebleed?’

Santo, with his fingers blocking his nostrils, blood running through them, looked sourly at the man and answered sarcastically, ‘No. It’s that time of the month.’

The man handed Santo what he had, a piece of cloth, and Rem said thanks. ‘He gets moody,’ he said, ‘it’s always like this.’

Every morning, Santo complained, same thing. A headache. A nosebleed.

*   *   *

On arrival at Southern-CIPA they found that the meeting was to be held with both Tom Markland and Paul Howell. Howell, being Deputy Administrator, would be able to give immediate approval to what they wanted.

The offices for Southern-CIPA were concealed behind security walls: first the heavy concrete blast walls cordoned off the entire block, and then inside, a running wall of sandbags and an untold number of security detail. In contrast to Camp Liberty the compound, formerly a school, was otherworldly: busy and sealed, and occupied by white Americans and Europeans. Most of the personnel in Operations spent their entire tour inside the compound.

Rem and Santo were escorted through a series of offices – small interlocked Portakabins.

Markland, dressed in tan trousers, a long-sleeved shirt, cuffs rolled ready for business, led them into Howell’s office and told them to sit at the desk. Paul Howell was running late – a little trouble this morning – but he would be with them shortly. Markland leaned over the desk to shake Rem’s hand. ‘I’m sorry you had to come in but it makes things easier.’ None of this sounded much like an apology, and there was no explanation about the nature of Howell’s delay. The room appeared provisional, flimsy, much like a film set, with a heavy desk, a wall of cabinets, a few trophies: silver boats on dark wood mounts. Behind the desk hung photographs of the Deputy Administrator, his white hair singling him out. Paul Howell with tribal chiefs. Howell with a team dressed in Olympic colours; Howell quayside in an anorak, his arm about a sportsman Rem thought he recognized but couldn’t place. Behind Rem and Santo, taking up a good amount of space, an old-fashioned safe. Squat, heavy, and incongruous.

Rem asked Markland if the Deputy Administrator really was coming. Surprised, Markland gave a tight nod and drew his chair back from the desk. Howell would join them just as soon as he could.

Santo sank a little lower into his seat, fists bunched into his armpits, his nose red and sore.

Markland set the papers in front of them and read as he spoke. ‘So, what can we do? The issue is about gun permits for non-combatants and the handling of controlled items. Fuel. Explosives. Which goes beyond current licensing and permission.’ Markland pressed back into his chair. ‘You have any Iraqi nationals working for you?’

Rem shook his head.

‘Shame. We could allow them to handle the materials, but we can’t allow you, and we can’t allow you the permits. Iraqis don’t require permits and they can handle what they like. This is internal so we have to run to the same safety standards as we would Stateside.’

Rem couldn’t place Markland’s accent. Mid-Atlantic, crafted and insincere, deliberately unspecific. His hair cut English-style, parted, short back and sides.

‘We’re out on our own. There’s no perimeter fence. If there’s any kind of trouble we’ll be defenceless.’

‘And why are you there?’

‘To man the burn pits.’

‘They manage themselves. This is purely a HOSCO initiative, we have no funding assigned to this.’

Rem shrugged, unsure if Markland was making a statement or asking a question. ‘Ask HOSCO,’ he replied, ‘they want someone there.’

Markland compressed his fingers tip-to-tip. ‘Can I ask who set this up? Whose project is this?’

Rem wasn’t sure how he should answer.

‘Is this Brendan? Or David? Is this David Mann?’

Rem gave a small nod, his reticence seemed to provide an answer. Now Markland appeared to come to a decision.

‘There is, perhaps, one way forward. But it’s not straightforward. If you want, the Deputy Administrator can grant authority if the men are working directly for Southern-CIPA in some capacity.’

‘But they’re working for HOSCO?’

‘No matter. They can work for Southern-CIPA, on occasion, on contract. I need men to work on a security detail, once or twice a month. If they work on security then they can receive training, and they can carry arms.’

‘You don’t have enough security?’

‘Believe me,’ Markland glanced up with a sly quick smile, ‘everything we have here is committed. We’re under-resourced. We have three security details for the entire Southern-CIPA, and on occasion, when the Deputy Administrator makes his trips, we’re caught short. I need more security. You need explosives and men who can carry guns. I can have them flown in for you. Today even. Look.’ Markland sat forward. ‘I can’t pretend we aren’t cutting corners. But I can advise Howell to let you have everything you need.’

The problem with shipping explosives, it was explained to him, was the most complex problem of all. If news of the shipment leaked out of the office then every convoy, Christ knows, would be sabotaged. The solution, simply, would be to airlift the munitions as soon as possible, before any rumours could spread.

*   *   *

As they left the compound Santo sucked air between his teeth.

‘How do they find people like that?’

‘Like who?’

‘Markland. You see that safe? Wasn’t even locked. You ever seen so much money? The whole thing packed. How much you think was in there? You see the whisky? He had whisky. There were bottles in the safe.’

Rem said he didn’t want to know. ‘We have what we came for.’

‘And they do too.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Now they have us managing some security detail. That’s all they wanted. Stop.’ Santo held Rem’s arm. ‘Is that a woman?’

Rem took Santo’s arm and led him on.

*   *   *

When they arrived back at Camp Liberty they found Watts and Clark waiting for them. A message had come ahead of their arrival. Markland had spoken with Howell and everything was agreed.

‘They’ll send the first shipment with the next food drop. You need to pick men out for training.’ Watts explained the message. ‘They want to send a team to Kuwait for a certification course in firearm safety.’

Rem passed the note to Santo. ‘You’ll know more about this.’

Santo asked Watts what this was about.

‘They want a security team.’

Santo held up the paper. ‘So who are we going to send? It says you need to select them.’

Watts had already considered this. ‘Send the men who already have basic training.’

Clark immediately began to protest. He wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t go. ‘Don’t put me on that list. I want nothing to do with it. Once they start taking notice they’ll pick you out for all sorts. You put your head up a little and they pick you out.’

‘Clark, that’s what people call a career.’

‘Whatever they call it. I don’t want it.’

Clark gave a gesture like he didn’t care.

‘Did they say how many?’

Rem looked over the note. They didn’t say.

Santo counted out the men. ‘Pakosta, Clark, Chimeno, Kiprowski, me.’

‘Kiprowski? With a gun? I don’t want to see that.’

‘He’s done basic already. He’ll do fine.’

‘Kiprowski was in food services.’ Watts disagreed. ‘There’s no way he ever did basic.’

‘Then Samuels. But that hound won’t hunt.’

Santo grimaced, but Clark protested. If they wanted everyone who had basic training, then they needed to include Samuels. It was only fair. And why not take Kiprowski if he wanted to go?

Rem asked if they could keep it down. ‘Tell them we can only spare four. We still have to run the pits. Even with four down this will leave us short. Find out more about what they want.’

Watts steered clear of the ruts, and the Humvee lost traction and slipped sideways, a small slip, almost imperceptible.

*   *   *

Watts called on Rem late in the morning.

‘We have a connection. Praise the lord.’

‘You have a signal?’

‘I know. Who knew. A connection. Different thing, same result.’

Rem sat in his doorway with a towel over his head and poured water on occasion to keep himself cool. ‘Who was it?’

Santo stretched out in the shade, feet dug into the dust. ‘Probably your boyfriend Markland.’ Santo rolled to his side, wrapped his arms about himself, spoke in a squeaky voice. ‘Oh Rem, tell me about HOSCO. Kissy kiss kiss.’

Watts pulled a face. ‘Actually, it was Markland. He said they’d fixed what you wanted and you should expect him to arrive this afternoon. Fourteen hundred hours.’

Rem didn’t understand. ‘You said him?’

‘Or it. I’m not sure.’

Rem asked if he knew what him or it was.

Watts shook his head. ‘I just wrote down what he said.’

Santo sat upright, ‘Markland’s pimping for you now? You even remember what you asked for?’

Rem shrugged. ‘You were there.’

‘Me? I lost all interest the minute you started talking.’

Watts held his cap up for shade. ‘Well. It’s coming in two hours, whatever it is. He just wanted us to be ready. That’s all.’

Rem looked up at the man. ‘I’m ready. You ready?’

‘Sure,’ Santo laughed, ‘I’m always ready.’ He kicked down his heels, folded his arms, and closed his eyes. ‘Ready for anything, me.’

*   *   *

Rem stood at the cabin door and watched as Chimeno wandered from the latrines to the Quonset to the latrines. As far as he could tell Chimeno didn’t want to go to the latrine or back to his cabin and was caught tracing the ground between them.

The afternoon gave itself to reflection, the strangeness of being here. Rem took out his phone, turned the camera to video, and panned about the camp. Goldrush, he thought. We look like prospectors.

Chimeno’s movements made little sense, and when Samuels came out of his cabin Chimeno sank back to the Quonset door. Rem watched as Chimeno watched Samuels walk to the latrines. After one moment inside Samuels came out running, helter-skelter.

‘You should see this.’ Samuels pointed back at the latrines, eyes agog, face bright with surprise.

Samuels’ shout brought Pakosta and Santo to their doors. Rem couldn’t immediately see the reason for the fuss. The latrines were a simple row of open-topped huts with a sandbag wall, head height, built as a blast protection. Samuels pointed to the ground where the bags slumped into the dirt, at what Rem first took to be a kind of hairy crab, brittle and spindly: an insect, with a body as long as the palm of his hand. The creature straddled the first sandbag, legs splayed on one side, tucked in on the other.

‘Ten legs. That’s not right.’

Not keen on leaning any closer Rem took Pakosta’s word.

‘You know what this is?’

‘Camel spider.’

Samuels ducked back. ‘That’s no spider.’

‘You’re right. It’s not a spider. It’s not a camel either.’ Pakosta straightened up, matter of fact. ‘I wouldn’t stand so close.’ He stuck out his boot and the creature braced. ‘See that? Instinct. They only come out once they’ve bred. Females. They inject you so you can’t feel anything, then chew a hole in your guts and lay their eggs. They run at thirty miles an hour and jump five, six feet at a time. Spring right up. See those legs? Man, you don’t want that on your face.’

Pakosta flicked his cigarette and the spider sprang right at them. Pakosta, Samuels, Santo and Rem careened out of the latrines, the spider, already ahead, scuttled under the cabins. Chimeno ran full pelt past the Quonset and the fuel dump until he couldn’t be seen.

Pakosta pointed in Chimeno’s direction. ‘Spider-boy moves to number one.’

Rem wanted to know if these creatures were harmful.

Pakosta laughed. ‘Sure. If you give it a chance to bite you. There’s other things, much worse. Scorpions for one. They’ll sleep in your boots and get you five times before you pull your foot out. You can’t get help fast enough.’

The three of them looked along the cabins for the spider, each armed with a section of tent pole taken from the Quonset. Chimeno waited at a distance, hands on hips, and couldn’t be coaxed back to help with the search.

‘Vibration. That’s what they don’t like. Most times you see them at night, if you see them at all. Then you wake up and it’s chewing your dick off.’

Pakosta made a munching sound and Santo told him to shut up. Some things they didn’t need to know.

‘Fine by me, just don’t sleep.’

Santo raised his pole as a threat. ‘I’m not sleeping.’

‘It’ll still get you. They hide in holes smaller than your fist. Come out at night and rape your ass.’ Pakosta stood with the pole over his shoulder, satisfied. ‘And they love dark meat.’

Santo levelled his pole at Pakosta’s neck and prodding him, warned: ‘You say shit like that one time.’

Pakosta backed away with a small laugh.

Watts and Clark stood at their doors curious at the fuss. Watts suggested they get Kiprowski out to help find it, and Kiprowski, already behind them, came to the front, sank to his knees, and swept his arm under the steps.

‘Woah!’ Watts jolted back. ‘You don’t do that. You don’t know what’s under there.’

Kiprowski smiled up, still reaching. ‘There’s no way a camel’s getting under there.’

‘Spider,’ Santo corrected, ‘a motherfucking egg-laying turd-breeding bastard camel spider.’

‘Yeah?’ Clark nodded thoughtfully. ‘I heard about those.’

‘Place is infested.’ Santo spat.

‘No shit.’

Kiprowski stood and dusted off his shirt.

Pakosta stabbed his pole under the cabin. ‘Seriously, no shit. This is serious business. They crawl up your ass and eat their way out to your face.’

‘That won’t feel good.’ Watts began to collect the poles.

‘Got that right.’

‘Hey, Watts, what it’s like to have something eat out your ass?’

Watts paused on his way to the Quonset, gave serious consideration to the question. ‘Ask your mother, Pakosta. Go ask your mom.’

For a moment Pakosta’s reaction, a slight collapse in his expression, showed him to be nothing more than a boy. Santo stumbled back, mock-shot. Clark doubled over and laughed into his fist. Kiprowski looked about, undecided, checking for a cue.

Rem followed after Pakosta as he walked toward the pits, wanting to know what Pakosta had meant by saying Chimeno had moved to number one, but Pakosta’s smart stride made it clear that he didn’t want to talk.

*   *   *

At 15:40 the sound of the convoy could be heard, a rick-rack reverberation clattering off the cabins – seeming to come from the huts not the desert. Rem looked out to the road, hands shading his eyes, but still not able to see. The noise increased, adding a bass sound and becoming insistent, internal, felt. The craft, when he saw them, five army Chinooks, smooth, black pods, almost too distant to justify their noise.

The men grouped behind the Quonset to an area where the ground levelled, big enough they imagined for the five craft to set down. Rem asked Santo if this was good enough and Santo gave a gesture, he had no idea. None of them had any idea.

Beneath the helicopters hung vehicles strapped to platforms, a truck, a Humvee, what looked to be an ambulance, another Humvee, a boat. The five craft came out of the blank white sky. Holding a loose ‘V’ they swung wide of the Quonset and rode over the cabins and kicked up a sharp blister of sand. Watts and Clark backed into the Quonset, hands holding down their hats.

Chimeno pointed to the Beach and gestured to Rem that they should take the Humvee.

Rem cupped his hands round Watts’ ear and had to shout. ‘Call Southern-CIPA. Find out what this is about. I want to know what’s going on.’

The wind ripped between the cabins as the first craft hovered above the Quonset, dwarfing the camp. The cover on the Quonset rippled wildly and threatened to tear. The cabins, otherwise solid, shivered and strained against their footings – Rem feared the downdraught would destroy them.

*   *   *

By the time they arrived at the Beach the first vehicle had been unloaded. One corner of the pallet slipped into the sand and the ambulance shifted as the sand settled. One by one the packets were carefully lowered and released. The boat, improbably beached, tilted precariously, the bow pointing downhill. The cables wound back up as the helicopter yawed away.

Watts said he knew what that was, and Clark slapped him on the back. ‘In my culture we call them boats. Buh-oats. Normally we like to use them in the sea or in the ocean, or on some kind of water, on which, my friend, they glide as if by special powers.’

Watts ignored the taunt and couldn’t resist running his hand along the boat. ‘It’s a Sunshine Fifty-five-O. I was raised on the Sunshine Forty. Five years, from when I was nine.’

‘I took you to be a trailer-boy. Same as everyone else.’

‘Benton Harbor, before we moved to Missouri.’

‘Hippies?’

‘Something like that.’

Pakosta couldn’t do much but laugh, a boat in the desert being too strange to make sense.

The fifth helicopter set down the truck then veered away toward the camp. Rem and Santo followed in the Humvee. Irritated not to know what was going on, Rem drove into the dust barely able to see.

The helicopter settled behind the Quonset and left two long crates and one man. The man stood by the boxes as Rem drove round, and the helicopter hovered then swung away. Whorls of sand drawn by the craft’s swift rise twisted about the man, then dissipated. A clear sky began to break through the yellow dust.

The man stepped forward and introduced himself as their translator, Amer Hassan. He repeated his name and his duties until Rem was clear on both.

‘Translator?’ Rem couldn’t help but smile. ‘But everyone speaks English.’

‘He say translator?’ Santo leaned out of the vehicle and shouted: ‘You sure you’re supposed to be here?’

Amer Hassan took the question seriously. He was certain. Camp Liberty. This was his destination.

‘Who sent you?’

‘My previous position was with Security at Southern-CIPA. I will be working with Paul Howell and his security team.’

‘Howell? Here?’

‘Yes. With the security team based here. I received instructions this morning.’

Now Rem scratched his head. ‘Paul Howell is coming here?’

‘No. This is the equipment.’ Amer Hassan indicated the two crates. ‘For the security team.’ He paused, eyes closed. ‘This is only what I have heard. When Mr Howell makes his visits he requires a security detail and a translator.’

Rem gave a soft ‘oh’. ‘OK. You didn’t hear anything about those vehicles that were just delivered, because they don’t look much like junk?’

Hassan closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘No. There was some talk, the men who brought them also did not understand why they were bringing them here.’

‘And this was organized by who? Tom Markland?’

‘By Howell, I believe. This is what they said.’

Rem offered a ride to the cabins. Santo gave Rem a quick look and slipped into the back seat. Watts, Clark, Chimeno, and Pakosta, they agreed, could move the munitions boxes back to the Quonset – under strict instructions that they should not be opened and stored securely away from the other provisions.

*   *   *

Rem found the man disarming. It wasn’t his handsomeness, but his softness: big eyes, long lashes, his slender shoulders and small frame which conspired to one delicate effect.

He led Amer Hassan to Kiprowski’s cabin, apologized, and said he hoped it wouldn’t be inconvenient, sharing a small cabin with another man.

‘That’s Kiprowski’s cot. Don’t worry, we have plenty in the Quonset.’ Kiprowski, he assured him, was a good person, quiet and unassuming.

As Rem walked back to his own cabin he shook off this coyness. There were things he was missing, he told himself. Things that weren’t good to be so long without. Santo wolf-whistled and asked if Rem was interested in seeing what they’d been sent.

*   *   *

Rem found Kiprowski in the Quonset and explained the situation.

‘This will only be temporary, but we don’t have enough cabins and sharing is necessary. I can’t see any of the others being…’ He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say, accommodating? ‘You speak Arabic?’

‘No, sir.’ Kiprowski shook his head and looked like he had something to say.

‘I thought you spoke Arabic?’

He worked in food services. Remember?

‘No matter. Obviously he speaks English. This whole thing is some kind of mix-up. I can’t see him staying with us for long.’

Stopped at the doorway Rem began to make the introductions and suggested that Kiprowski help find a cot and whatever else Amer Hassan might need.

Kiprowski and Hassan greeted each other affectionately with smiles, a handshake that fell into a brisk hug.

‘We were at Southern-CIPA at the same time.’

The silence that fell after this explanation made it clear to Rem that he should leave.

*   *   *

That evening Kiprowski brought the translator to the area they’d set aside for eating. Hassan helped Kiprowski start up the portable stoves and watched as they brought water to the boil. He shook hands with the other men, but once Kiprowski had passed out the rations, they sat separate from the group – and about the two men grew a private air.

Pakosta, Clark, and Santo settled to play cards. Samuels and Chimeno returned to their cabins, and sat at their doors, one reading, one writing, while Rem and Watts struggled to find a clear connection to Southern-CIPA.

Markland confirmed the arrangements for the weekend. Chimeno, Clark, Pakosta, Santo, Samuels, and Watts would undertake a firearm safety training course at Camp Arifjan. Howell, who had business in Kuwait, would be there to meet them. With these details settled, Markland began to speak about Route 567, which was now re-designated as a Secondary Supply Route. Neither Rem not Watts understood Markland’s instructions.

‘If anything happens on 80 then we need to have Route 567 secured for military and supply convoys.’

Rem asked if anyone at Southern-CIPA had actually seen the road. ‘In some parts it’s just a graded track. You know that?’

Markland didn’t care. ‘It’s not perfect, but it’s what we have. We’ve had trouble on Highway 80 before, and there’s no option but to use 567 as an alternative.’

A forty-mile stretch either side of the camp was to be checked and regularly patrolled. All activity along 567 was to be monitored, a zone cleared along either side.

*   *   *

Rem caught Geezler up on the details and found him more interested in Howell’s vehicles than the munitions and the arrival of the translator. They had two new generators and more fuel, which meant, for the evenings, they’d have light. A freezer wouldn’t go amiss. Watts was stringing up a line of lights for the front of the Quonset now, lights also for the food area, such as it was.

Geezler was stuck on the vehicles. He wanted to know how many were now at the Beach. ‘Send me some pictures. I need to see this.’

Rem explained about the new duties, and how they would be expected to monitor part of Route 567. ‘We have a translator. Sent by Southern-CIPA.’

This threw Geezler into confusion. ‘You’re there for the burn pits,’ he argued, ‘not patrols. You work for us, not CIPA. Why has Howell given you a translator? I don’t see why he’s even involved?’

Rem said he didn’t know, doubted there was a good reason, that everything was largely random. Over the coming weekend most of the men would accompany the Deputy Administrator to Kuwait to take a basic weapons training course.

Geezler asked Rem to repeat this. Could he clarify? The most senior government representative in southern Iraq was taking time out to accompany contractors on a weapons training course? ‘Your contracts come from HOSCO. He can’t give you work unless he raises a contract which goes for public tender.’

Rem couldn’t help but laugh. Geezler seriously didn’t understand the territory, the deal with Markland on security was separate. He shouldn’t have mentioned it. As for Howell, what did it matter? Nothing here was logical. CIPA had college graduates running entire government divisions. Why worry over five contractors and a Deputy Administrator who probably only want a weekend off?

*   *   *

The next morning Rem took Santo on a drive north along Route 567, and found parts in worse condition than he’d reported. In an hour’s drive they encountered no other vehicle. Santo pointed to the roadside, he’d seen something, a dog, or maybe a coyote.

‘They have cats out here. In the middle of the desert. I’ve seen their tracks about the cabins.’

Brooding over his discussion with Geezler, Rem wasn’t listening. ‘You know, when Southern-CIPA speak about contingencies that means something’s going on.’

Santo agreed. They send arms, they send a translator, equipment, vehicles, all without explanation. They shut down the section base in Amrah. Something was afoot.

‘I’m talking about the road, this whole security detail.’

‘Right. I mean, what do we know about him? We don’t know anything. They drop him in the desert with a box of guns.’

‘The translator? You know what he’s doing here. Howell sent him from Southern-CIPA.’

‘That’s what he told you. He could be anyone.’

‘Kiprowski knows him.’

‘You just said you don’t trust them.’

‘Who are we talking about here? Kiprowski, the translator, or Howell? I was talking about Southern-CIPA, and maybe Howell.’ Rem pointed to the vast space about them. ‘Everything about this place is backwards. I think there’s something we don’t know. Those vehicles, this security team. I think there’s information we don’t have yet. I don’t think it’s mysterious. I just think we’re not in the loop.’

‘Think about it. He could be anyone, someone they want isolated, kept away from trouble. Someone we aren’t supposed to know about.’

‘He speaks Arabic, Farsi, and English. He’s a translator.’

‘Think about it. You didn’t know he was coming. And why do we need a translator?’

‘Santo, who would he be exactly?’

Santo backed down. ‘I don’t know. He could be anyone. Who do you think they’d drop in the middle of the desert with two boxes of weapons and enough ammunition?’

‘A translator?’

‘I’m being serious.’

‘So, who is he? Tell me who you think he is? The translator is here because Howell needs him. The security detail is necessary because we’re remote and Howell wants a team when he does his travels. And for this he needs a translator.’

‘Then why hasn’t he asked the translator to come tomorrow?’

‘For the training? It’s in English? Surely?’

‘And those vehicles? What about the vehicles?’

‘Maybe that’s part of it? I don’t know. Santo, this isn’t anything different. We just don’t have the details.’

‘And the guns?’

‘They stay in the crates.’

Santo leaned away from Rem, folded his arms, a slight edge of disbelief in his gesture as if he didn’t agree, but he was prepared, for the time being, to leave it alone. ‘One last thing. Is Kiprowski officially retarded?’

Rem refused to answer.

‘I don’t want him coming tomorrow. There’s something not right about him.’

‘He isn’t going anyway. You know this? They didn’t ask for him. I thought it was Samuels you didn’t like.’

‘Samuels is run-of-the-mill chicken-shit scared. Kiprowski isn’t normal.’

‘He’s nineteen.’

‘They’re all nineteen, give or take. That’s not the problem.’

‘I hope this has nothing to do with the translator.’

Rem pulled the Humvee to the side of the road and they agreed to return.

*   *   *

Rem rose early to see the men off. Lined up in front of the Quonset, Humvee at the ready, he found Santo, Clark, Chimeno, Samuels, and a groggy Pakosta.

Rem asked Santo if he was sure about the group. ‘You have Samuels?’

Santo shrugged. ‘You want him to stay?’

‘I don’t care who goes. Take him if that’s what he wants.’

‘I’m poisoned.’ Pakosta held his stomach. ‘I can’t eat those MREs any more. You seen this?’ Pakosta rolled up his sleeves to show a rash, large, palm-sized blotches, map-like and raw.

‘Looks like a reaction?’

‘No shit it looks like a reaction.’

‘See if there’s a medic when you’re in Kuwait.’

At the mention of a medic, Pakosta rolled down his sleeves and said it was nothing. ‘Better today than yesterday. Itches like a bitch.’

Surprised to see Clark, Rem asked if he was sure he wanted to go. ‘Never been to Kuwait,’ was the only justification he offered for his change of heart.

Neither Kiprowski nor Watts came out of their cabins. ‘I don’t want any problems to come out of this,’ he told Santo. ‘Tell them Watts is sick or something. He isn’t interested in going.’

Rem watched them clamber into the single Humvee, then slapped the side and sent them off.

He stood on the spot long after the vehicle had pulled out, its lights furred and faded along the curve of the road. The cabins buzzed with the hum from air-conditioners, the air vibrated, then, with a click, the generator turned off. The only people in the camp were Rem, Kiprowski, Amer Hassan, and Watts.

*   *   *

Watts joined Rem at Burn Pit 5 just as the trucks were unloading.

‘How many is it today?’

‘Twenty-five. Fifteen shit-suckers. Best stay up-wind.’

‘Do you know what the problem is between Santo and Kiprowski?’

Watts said he had an idea.

‘I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s a small thing. Kiprowski’s a nice kid. He sticks to a routine. Makes his bed. You’ve seen how orderly he is? He’s not from the same planet as the others. He’s struggling to fit in.’ Watts held his hand to his throat, his voice husky from the smoke. ‘I’m too old for this,’ he said. ‘You do it for so long, and you begin to ask yourself that question.’

‘Why?’

‘Exactly. You start asking why. I tell you. I don’t have an answer any more. But this is it. As soon as that child is born I’m done. I married late. I’ve done everything backwards. I know that. But I’m telling you. Once I’m done here, I’m done. No more contracts. No more of this.’

‘You know what you’ll do?’

Watts looked out over the pits. ‘That’s the problem. You do one thing for twenty years and you’re no good at anything else. Who’s going to hire you? No one wants to take that risk.’

Rem agreed. ‘Nothing’s easy.’

‘And if it is there’s something wrong with it, right?’

‘Right.’

The smoke cleared, and the fire blistered across the pit.

‘You see what went in there today?’

‘Looked like powder? Something white.’

Watts nodded, eyes on the fire. ‘Building materials. Four loads, whatever it was, shipped from the US, not even opened. And yesterday, food cartons, those plates they use at the commissary. You know how many of those we burn?’

‘Must be in the thousands.’

Watts craned his head back, followed the trail of smoke. ‘Can’t be doing any of us any good. I was checking the news yesterday, looking for information on the closure of ACSB. You know they’ve closed down Bravo? Those pits aren’t operating any more, manned or unmanned. Which means we’ll be busier here.’

*   *   *

Back at the cabins, Rem found Kiprowski and Amer Hassan returning from the showers. The men walked side by side, a towel over Amer Hassan’s shoulders, and Kiprowski animatedly describing Chicago. His hands formed the ideas, drew rapid shapes in the air. He’d seen the lake freeze only once, he said, great rucks of ice packed against the shoreline, the water steaming. You can’t imagine how cold it gets in the winter, he said, you can’t even imagine it.

Rem returned to his cabin. Lying back on his cot, he congratulated himself on taking up Geezler’s offer.

*   *   *

For the first night Cathy allowed the dog to sleep in the bedroom. He picked the rug on Rem’s side of the bed, then part way through the night came round to Cathy’s side and settled close. For the first time since Rem’s departure Cathy slept well, aware of the dog, his breathing, his musky smell. When she woke she thought again about the boy. She hadn’t properly thanked him. She turned to her side and looked at the dog. As always, of a morning, Nut sat right beside the bed and looked up, innocent enough, with a little pink hard-on. His chilli as Rem called it. See, he likes you.

‘You’re disgusting. You know that? That’s just vile.’ She sat upright. ‘I can’t even look at you.’

It was no surprise to see the boy outside. Dressed in the same clothes, the cap pulled back so he could look up, he stood by the sign for the currency exchange, hands in pockets.

Cathy came down to the door, brought Nut with her. Out on the street she approached the boy and offered him the leash.

‘You want to walk with us?’

The boy nodded, hesitated.

‘Go on.’

He ran with the dog in a half-jog, then stopped at the corner and waited for her to catch up. When she caught up he crossed the road, then ran ahead another half-block. She wondered what stopped the boy from taking the dog and disappearing. But the dog sat at the kerb, and the boy sank to his knees to hug it.

‘I don’t know your name.’

The boy set his arms about Nut’s neck and kissed it.

‘My name is Cathy.’

The boy didn’t speak until they returned to the apartment.

‘What’s his name again?’

‘Nut. My husband named him. It’s his dog really.’ She didn’t want to explain that the dog only had one testicle.

‘Nut.’

‘What did you call him?’

The boy shrugged and walked away, and Cathy realized it didn’t matter, whatever name he had chosen was irrelevant. The boy turned the corner on Greenleaf and did not look back.

*   *   *

The men returned from Kuwait in army fatigues. Samuels had tied his jacket about his waist. As soon as the vehicle stopped he stepped out and walked stroppily to his cabin. When Rem asked what the problem was, Santo told him not to ask.

Pakosta, happily gave an explanation. The training wasn’t what they had expected. On arrival at the camp they’d waited almost the entire day before they were hustled through an improvised assault course. At the end of this, at something like two in the morning, they were handed automatic rifles with live rounds.

‘Only Sammy mustn’t have heard the part about live rounds. Because the first thing he did was sling the gun to his hip and blast a round over the camp.’

Rem turned to the cabin to look for Samuels.

Santo corrected him. ‘No, he didn’t. He shot a couple of rounds into the desert.’

‘My version’s better.’

‘He shot one round…’

‘… took off a camel’s head, went postal, emptied the rounds into thirteen NCRs…’

‘Did no such thing.’

‘Left the camp looking like a high school.’

Rem held up his hand and asked Santo for the story.

‘We were doing this simulation where you go into a mock-up of an Iraqi village.’

‘It wasn’t a mock-up. It was an actual village. And we were in Kuwait.’

Santo held his hand over Pakosta’s mouth. ‘He’s right. At some point in history it was an actual Kuwaiti village. Anyhow, he didn’t have his gun on safety. That’s all he did. No big thing.’

‘And?’

‘And the instructor took it off him, said if he couldn’t look after his weapon then he couldn’t have one.’

‘That’s it?’

‘That’s the story. No one was shot, no camels were hurt.’

Pakosta wrested himself free from Santo and asked what the time was, then held up his wrist with a half-mocking flourish. ‘Oh, look, I forgot.’

‘That’s the other calamity.’ Santo pointed at the watch on Pakosta’s wrist. ‘Pakosta now has a fake Rolex.’

‘It’s not fake.’ Pakosta held up his wrist. ‘You know it.’

‘The only way you can tell is if you smash it open. They have a number etched under the seal. It’s the only way you can tell for sure.’

‘It’s real. I’m telling you. Gen-u-ine.’ Pakosta slipped his wrist behind his back.

*   *   *

In private Santo caught Rem up on the details of the weekend. ‘Samuels didn’t want to be there, shouldn’t have gone, just about shat himself every time a gun went off. Maybe he had some other idea about what he was doing there. Once the instructor took notice of him, he just wouldn’t leave him alone. To be honest, it was embarrassing.’

‘And Howell? You spend much time with him?’

‘Howell?’ Santo looked ready to say something but backed away. ‘Let’s just say he’s not your usual bureaucrat.’

*   *   *

The expected convoy didn’t arrive the next morning. After dawn Rem drove to the camp entrance, but even with Santo’s binoculars he couldn’t see any problem, and wasn’t sure in any case what he expected to see. No timetable, orders, or instructions had come through about the regularity of the convoys and their deliveries, so he decided to think nothing of it. Santo thought otherwise and encouraged Rem to call Southern-CIPA to see if there was a problem.

‘We’d hear soon enough if something wasn’t right.’

Santo wasn’t convinced. There could be a convoy in trouble, people being held to ransom, the trucks themselves stolen, damaged, or burned. Heads being severed. There was no telling what could go wrong.

‘We need to prepare. We should protect ourselves, be ready.’

Rem didn’t want to argue, but Santo insisted. ‘They sent guns, right? For this very purpose. We need to get ourselves ready. We’re exposed, completely vulnerable. This is what they trained us for.’

‘No guns. There’s nothing to be concerned about.’

‘Yet.’

‘There’s no delivery today, that’s all.’

Rem said he was going to call his wife, an excuse to be alone. In truth he didn’t want Santo’s company. Santo was fine, he supposed, although he couldn’t understand his fretting over the convoy, just as he didn’t understand his automatic distrust of the translator.

He wrote notes on what he wanted to tell Geezler: news on the training, the translator, nothing of particular urgency.

*   *   *

Rem was woken at noon by the sound of gunfire. He sat up, immediately sweating, believing himself to be back at the section base in Amrah. Recognizing his surroundings brought fresh fears: Santo was right, they were vulnerable, and he immediately regretted not distributing the guns. The shots were close.

As soon as he was on his feet he realized that the gunfire was too regular, and in the spaces between he could hear Pakosta laughing. There was no shouting, nothing to indicate trouble, and he guessed that the guns had been unpacked against his direct instruction.

He found Samuels and Chimeno idling at the back of the Quonset. Santo stood by an open crate giving instruction to Pakosta and Clark who lay side by side on their stomachs. Each man dressed in military drab. Each man armed. Pakosta took aim and fired. The dirt tufted far in the distance. They stopped when they noticed Rem.

‘We needed the flares,’ Santo explained, ‘something to start the pits, they’re all packed together.’ Then, as Rem did not reply, ‘I didn’t see any harm.’

Rem drew the gum he was chewing between his teeth and bit down and decided not to react. He wouldn’t say a goddamned thing.

‘They’ve had training. I’ve given the basic safety instructions. We were just about to finish.’

Rem nodded.

Pakosta looked to Santo. ‘We only just started?’

Santo began to dismantle his weapon. ‘Disarm the weapon and put it away.’

Pakosta stretched out in the dirt, belly down, eye to the sight. Santo set his boot on the small of Pakosta’s back. ‘I said, put the weapon away.’

This was – Rem couldn’t decide – insubordination? While he was in charge, his position was, at best, merely supervisory. They held no rank, had no formal organization. He had little authority. His best decision lay in practical monitoring: managing the weapons and not the men.

Santo began his defence as they packed the guns away. ‘What’s the problem? They’re no use if they don’t know how to handle them.’

‘Supplies are limited.’

‘They need to practise.’

‘And what if there’s an accident?’

‘What if we’re attacked?’

‘An accident. You’re ready for the consequences?’

‘That’s more of a reason for them to train. They have two hours’ experience on a firing range, they have certificates saying they know what they’re doing. They need to practise. Not everyone is Fatboy.’

Rem didn’t appreciate the reference. He looked Santo up and down. ‘You’re wearing a military uniform.’

Santo tried a different approach. ‘We have no security. No one will protect us. If something happens they aren’t going to send anyone. It’s not going to happen. We burn shit. And what’s the point in having guns if we can’t use them? What was the point in going to Kuwait if they can’t practise? I can train them so they know what they’re doing.’ Santo stopped, folded his arms. ‘These men aren’t stupid. They know what’s going on out there.’

*   *   *

Cathy’s hostility to her customers didn’t go unnoticed: how she leaned over the rheumy Mrs Dempsey with her hands on her hips as if the woman was stupid as well as deaf. She lost her patience counting out change, waiting, then scanning coupons. Couldn’t focus. Took breaks which became longer and more frequent. Maggie waved a pack of cigarettes and brought her onto the loading dock.

‘You have to be nicer.’

‘Nicer?’

‘Kinder.’

‘Kinder and nicer. Let me see?’ Cathy narrowed her eyes as she inhaled. ‘You know? I’m fresh out.’

Maggie allowed the idea to sink in.

‘Oh, come on.’ Cathy tried to laugh. ‘I mean, seriously. Don’t they get to you? Their stupid questions when everything is so obvious.’

‘I mean you. I mean you have to be nicer to yourself.’

‘To myself? This is crazy talk.’ Cathy looked for a place to put out her cigarette, then paused. ‘It’s just a bad day. That’s all it is. I shouldn’t be smoking.’

‘It’s not just today. You know that. You’re too hard on yourself. You need to talk to someone.’

‘You’re saying I need help?’

‘No.’ Maggie rolled her eyes. ‘Yes. But not like that. You need to talk with someone who knows what you’re going through. Someone who has a better idea. You’re on your own here.’

Cathy leaned back against the wall, arms folded. ‘There isn’t anything to say. There isn’t anyone to talk to.’ After a while she appeared to soften and allowed her shoulders to drop. ‘You know what I got yesterday? I got an email, one of those round robins – I’m not even sure what you’d call it. I don’t know how she found me, but she sent this email to all of the wives who have husbands or partners out in al-Narnia, maybe even some of the parents.’ She took up the offer of another cigarette. ‘I don’t know. It just seems so dumb. All she talked about was her kids and how much they missed their daddy, and how blessed she was…’

‘Blessed?’

‘I know. Everything is a blessing. All this praying, and Jesus, and – I don’t know, just all of this shit about how everything has a purpose, about being happy that today was a good day. She has a child in hospital and she writes to strangers about being blessed. It wasn’t enough to delete the message, I had to print it out so I could throw it away.’

Both women paused as the loading-bay doors opened. Outside a van reversed into the dock. Cathy murmured that they should get back.

‘Why don’t you write to her?’

‘I don’t want my business to be on their minds. I don’t want anyone to pray for me, or Rem. I don’t need their Jesus, and I don’t want to know about their lives. I didn’t ask to hear any of this. I don’t want it in my head.’

‘And that’s what she’s doing?’

‘That’s exactly what she’s doing.’

As the truck reversed it cut out the daylight and Cathy and Maggie retreated to the storeroom doors.

‘She’s just the same as you.’ Cathy dropped her cigarette and stepped on it. ‘I don’t see the difference, actually. I mean, sure. Maybe you’re right. Maybe everyone should just leave you alone. Maybe all you need is some new batteries in that Jack Rabbit of yours.’

*   *   *

Cathy logged online and waited for messages to download. The dog sat outside, tied to a bike rail. Once she was done with the library, she decided, she’d take a longer walk, maybe down to Loyola along the lake. The inbox remained empty. With no word from Rem and no other business to distract her she returned to the round robin and clicked ‘reply to all’.

We know that this is as hard on the families and loved ones and pray that this trial will soon pass over.

Cathy began typing unsure of what to say, except, she wasn’t going to ask anyone to pray.

I don’t know who you all are and I apologize for writing without permission. My name is Cathy Gunnersen and I’m the wife of Rem Gunnersen, and this is the first time we’ve been apart. I was born and raised in Seeley, Texas, and I now live in an apartment on the North Side of Chicago. I don’t know what else to say except ‘hi’.

She read the email before sending it, unsure what she expected back.

*   *   *

Rem counted the traffic through the morning. Forty-eight: Kia, Renault, Daewoo, Toyota, Hyundai. The first vehicles he’d seen on the road since his arrival. Among them, the occasional Mercedes and BMW, all battered and distressed.

He returned to the cabins to see Pakosta exercising, still wearing the military drab trousers. The sun turning the sweat on his back to silver. The exercises, determined, structured, weren’t anything Rem had seen before. Rem found Watts and asked him to contact Markland.

As Watts made the call Rem returned to the road with Santo, and found it empty.

‘No one drives in the day. Too exposed.’ Santo stood with his arms folded. ‘How many?’

‘Forty-eight. Domestic traffic.’ Rem turned back to face the camp. ‘No one knows we’re here, but as soon as those fires are lit the smoke will tell everyone.’

He attempted to reach Geezler, a little surprised not to have heard from him after his promise to find out more information about Paul Howell.

*   *   *

Within an hour of contacting Markland, Watts had an answer. He found Rem in his cabin. The intersection between Highway 80 and Route 567 had been hit – an IED. A convoy, intended for Kuwait, had headed right back to Amrah.

Rem ate while he considered the news. The air-con unit in pieces about the small cabin. His hands black with grime. The air grotty with heat.

‘Two things.’ Watts hesitated at the door, a little sulky Rem thought. ‘First, we’re supposed to make reports. Every day. CIPA want a log of when the trucks arrive and when they leave.’

‘You can manage this?’

‘Sure.’ Watts remained at the door. ‘The second thing – they want you to check Highway 80, see what the problem is. They’ll send a team from Amrah to fix it.’

As Rem stood up he told Watts to pass the news to Santo, as Santo, Pakosta, Clark, Chimeno, and possibly Samuels, were now working security.

‘Tell him to take the guns if he’s confident they can use them safely.’ Rem didn’t see much choice. If they were to go off-base, they shouldn’t go unarmed.

*   *   *

While Santo organized the new detail, Rem took Kiprowski with him to Highway 80 to see the damage for himself.

As he drove off the camp, Kiprowski pointed to the east. At some distance, four Chinooks approached with vehicles slung beneath them, all heading toward the camp.

The vehicle ran well, Rem could feel it in his grip, an easy thrum, a satisfying throaty roll.

‘Another delivery?’

Rem said he didn’t know, but it looked that way.

‘You look at that boat? It’s all new.’

Rem asked if Kiprowski had ever been to Europe, if he’d ever travelled before. It didn’t matter if he hadn’t. Kiprowski didn’t respond.

‘We’ve never spoken about Chicago. What neighbourhood are you from?’

‘West Ridge.’

‘I don’t know where that is exactly.’

‘Back from the lake. Bryn Mawr to Howard.’

‘I’m Rogers Park. Clark and Lunt.’

‘Rockwell and Coyle.’

They both nodded.

‘You know it?’

Rem shrugged. ‘I have – I had – a dog, so I spend most of the time closer to the lake.’

‘Some parts of it are fancy.’

‘You mind if I ask something personal?’

The boy looked right ahead, and said cautiously he didn’t mind.

‘It’s just most people have their reasons for being here, and I was wondering about yours…’

Most of their stories ran to the same narrative. While Pakosta was dodging personal debt, and maybe some unspecified trouble (same as Clark, Samuels, and in his own way, Watts), Kiprowski was avoiding debt of a different kind: the near-poverty that locked his family to a small railroad apartment, night school and service jobs. The promise of money was more than enough to draw him to Iraq – food services couldn’t be a safer proposition. Rem tried to curb his impatience as Kiprowski told his story, about how he was the first in his family to travel to the Middle East. In every story the same tidy tax-free $100,000 figured as the basic lure. This money would be used to provide a decent house, settle parents’ or spouse’s debt, or children’s medical expenses, be seed money for a business they would start with a brother, father, cousin – who knows? Everyone had the same idea, or something close. That money would turn around a life that otherwise had no direction but forward and down.

Kiprowski had the idea more polished than others. He’d picked out a storefront on Howard, right at the Chicago–Evanston border. A café, a small restaurant. Maybe buy into a franchise. Kiprowski’s plan sounded dryer than the landscape they were passing through. If Rem breathed deeply enough he could smell the boy’s future: a body sweating labour through unbroken years.

Not that Rem wasn’t prone to this romance himself. Weren’t there properties in Evanston he’d imagined Cathy inside, perhaps even a family, but no matter how much money he earned, this wouldn’t be his leafy lane. And wasn’t this the point of Evanston, somehow, to offer up modest but unattainable possibilities?

They found the damaged intersection shortly after they left Route 567. An oval pit, about nine metres in circumference and one metre at its deepest, broke the highway. Upside down, on either side, lay the stripped blown fragments of a car.

‘This isn’t good.’

Until Highway 80 could be repaired Route 567 would need to handle the traffic between Kuwait and Baghdad, which brought potential danger to Camp Liberty.

‘Doesn’t look like much to fix.’

Kiprowski was right: one or two days and the highway could open. Rem wound down his window, leaned on his forearm and smoked. ‘It’s just a hole.’

His optimism didn’t last. On the journey back the radio buzzed with news of two bombings on the outskirts of Amrah City. Jalla Road. Looting stirred up by the bombing had spread from the city centre to the outlying neighbourhoods with less protected FOBs. The sooner the section base closed the better.

As soon as they passed Khat they could see the black plumes from Camp Liberty, two separate strands conjoining as a single cloud to signal the precise location of the burn pits. Rem punched the steering wheel. ‘Look at that!’ He opened his hands at the horizon. ‘Could they make it more obvious?’ The convoy from Amrah had made it through. He should have left instruction that there were to be no fires until the highway was secured. He should have considered this.

As they drove in silence the columns grew fatter and more ominous.

*   *   *

In the late afternoon Rem held his first ‘three-point’ briefing. Southern-CIPA had divided Route 567 into zones. Zone B15 included Camp Liberty and would be monitored by Rem’s team. The men were to build two blockhouses out of sandbags and set chains across the road. Signals would alert them of the convoys heading to Amrah City. The plan would become operational immediately.

Markland had specified that all vehicles holding potentially looted goods should be stopped, searched, and held. Rem looked about the group from man to man. ‘If you see anything, step out of the way. Let the people at Zone 14 or Zone 16 deal with it. We can’t hold people here, and we don’t have any kind of authority.’

Clark had a different idea on what was causing the trouble, discussions roiled with conspiracies peeled off the internet. Pakosta agreed. ‘Sixty per cent of the oil that’s shipped overland is stolen. Fact.’

Amer Hassan had stories from other translators. ‘There’s no gas,’ he said. People queue all day in Baghdad, in Nasiriyah, even in Kurdish Mosul. Families risked breaking the curfew to get in line early, and violence while waiting, snipers who would shoot at the cars for sport. ‘It’s no easier buying fuel on the black market.’

Chimeno couldn’t see the logic. They’d seen the convoys on YouTube, the dirty silver tankers in long heavy lines. How was this possible? ‘Just yesterday on CNN, an entire caravan of thirty trucks with Iraqi Ministry of Oil logos was hijacked. It was nothing if not brazen.

Amer Hassan concurred. He’d also heard of this and knew it not to be uncommon.

‘You don’t stop anything,’ Rem repeated. ‘Leave it to the military.’ If there was going to be any activity, he warned, anything which threatened them, it would likely come at night.

Rem held his hands up for silence. ‘Two days. At most. That’s all we have to get through. The highway will be repaired, guaranteed, in two days.’

A groan passed through the group at the word ‘guarantee’. HOSCO, Southern-CIPA, they all knew, were not dependable.

*   *   *

After the briefing, Rem contacted Geezler and left a message explaining their circumstances. While he didn’t ask, he made it clear that he wanted advice. Geezler’s misgivings about them working for CIPA now made sense. ‘I’m concerned that we’ve worked ourselves into a situation we can’t manage.’ He spoke briskly wanting his concern to sound controlled and confident. At the same time he didn’t want Watts to hear him.

*   *   *

Rem joined Pakosta, Kiprowski, and Santo for the first shift. The men held back behind the sandbags and allowed the traffic through.

‘Looks like everyone’s moving house.’ Kiprowski couldn’t quite believe his eyes. Anything that could be pilfered was being pilfered, and in the first night they saw flatbed trucks loaded with bathroom fixtures, toilets, baths, slabs of ceramic tiles, metal rebar hammered out of concrete, metal doors and window frames. One vehicle crammed with the entire contents of a hotel room: a television, telephone, self-assembled furniture, in another, mirrors and bed frames, doors and shower units. A whole truck of dried semolina, a cloud of flour, white from the distance as the top bags were split. Semis came toward them as a hard vibration, a mirage unwrinkling on the road, approaching and promising strangeness as they passed.

‘Guess what we have in this one. Just guess.’

The road brought everything. It brought the dead and the living. It brought people and livestock; oil, kerosene, diesel, and petrol. Hospital equipment, scanners, beds, cots, mattresses, dentists’ chairs. Crates marked ‘popcorn’, ‘peppercorn’, and ‘processed meat’. Milk and honey, and every type of foodstuff. It brought CDs and DVDs. Concrete and tar, stone, brick, clay, paint, and bales of material, canvas, cotton, and silk, stuffed into family cars. Cars, and cars towed by other cars, cars on trailers, car parts, and motors. Machines to break down buildings, military supplies and vehicles. Humvees and Bradleys. One car stuffed entirely with socks and baby clothes stolen from a department store, with the driver lodged into his seat. It was a road of wonders. At dawn, Kiprowski watched a painted stone head with a silent pursed mouth and wide blue eyes agog at the desert, with thin spangled hair flapping in streamers behind it, strapped to the roof of a family car. There were cars with other pieces of cars and sheet metal welded and battened to them for protection, and there were the SUVs black and clean with tinted windows.

Hassan told stories of how women were taken from their houses and brought across the border to Syria or Jordan. Clark had heard similar news on the British World Service. There were hotels in every border country where women were set up as cleaners and prostituted. It was hard to guess how many were involved. Hard also to say what happened to the women who escaped or returned.

The idea was especially repugnant to Kiprowski, who compared everything back to his own family, his three sisters, his mother who’d raised him. He pestered Amer with questions. How could such a thing be conceived? And Amer said that there was always worse, always one more degradation possible. It would be better, he said, that they should die. Amer Hassan instructed them. They should not speak directly to the women, only the men.

*   *   *

Later that night Clark and Pakosta pulled over two black sedans. With the cars stopped off-road Pakosta called Kiprowski and Rem to come immediately. In total there were three men and seven women, all young. Their passes showed the men and women to be unrelated.

Clark shone his torch into the back of the first vehicle and one of the women shielded her eyes and shied away. Clark shook his head, he just didn’t feel easy about the situation. They separated the three men, took them out of the cars. One of them spoke English. Pakosta later described his manner as servile: the man was a snake. Kiprowski and Clark spoke with the women through Amer Hassan. Hassan translated in a calm voice so that he seemed to defuse the problem. The conversation, with many pauses, was oiled by smooth and conciliatory OKs.

Clark asked why two of the women were from Baghdad and the others were from Sadr. The women claimed to be related, but did not know each other’s names. They all gave the name of their driver as Mohammed.

Hassan asked where he was heading and why. The man replied, astonished: ‘Because I am leaving.’ His papers showed that he came from Egypt, and was a businessman in imports and exports, but gave no particular detail. Hassan repeated his questions and they slowly learned that the women’s families had paid for them to be to be taken out of the country to safety: instead of kidnapping, these women were being taken to a safe house. They were all married, and were being sent ahead of their husbands for their own safety.

As the men climbed back into the cars, one of them looked for a long time at Amer Hassan.

‘He knows me,’ Hassan said. ‘That man knows who I am. Word will get back that I am working with the Americans.’

Kiprowski asked who would know that he was working here, and how that would matter. Amer said that there were many people who could not leave. His family were still in Baghdad, and if word got back to them there would be trouble.

‘What do they think you are doing?’

‘They think that I am finishing my studies in Damascus.’

Pakosta held up his gun and tracked the vehicle as it disappeared. He could solve the problem, he said. Hassan only had to give the word.

*   *   *

The next morning Cathy received a reply from Marianne Clark.

Dear Cathy,

It was very good to hear from you. I live in St. Louis, although I have family in Aurora and have spent some very happy times in Chicago. I don’t want to presume anything, but I was very pleased to hear from you as an earlier message had me a little confused. I am new to the internet, and much happier with the telephone if you should ever want to talk. It would be nice to talk and please do not hesitate if you should like to call me. It was a great comfort to hear from you and know that there are others in our situation.

Sincerely,

       Marianne Clark

Cathy returned to the library after work and found messages from John Watts, brother of Paul, and Sara Morales, girlfriend of Mark Samuels.

Thnks for yr message. Write when u want, wld be interested in hearing more. Have pics from Camp Liberty to share & willing to set up a chatroom if u and others are interested.

JW

and

I haven’t heard from Mark since he moved from Amrah City, and hope that everything is all right with him. I don’t know if the messages are getting through, can you let me know? Have you heard anything?

Sara Morales

One day more and Cathy was surprised to see a whole number of messages, each copied to all of the recipients.

I’m angry, this isn’t what we were told … we were told that his wage would be $19.45 an hour, but the rate so far is far below at $11.25!!!!! Has anyone else experienced this?

Paul Pakosta

… same here, annual income indicated at a minimum of $87,000 to $95,000, starting wage at $21 an hour – so far, hasn’t come close. Plus travel deductions for the first seven months of $750 to $1,000. Why are they taking money out? I have copies of the original contract which says nothing about this?

Sara Watts

… and vaccination charges, shipping costs, this is not what he signed up for!!!!! This is not what was promised!!!!!

Paul Pakosta

… Mark’s first contract was with U-Tech who recruited him, but he was asked to sign another at the induction in Virginia, where he was told he was working for HOSCO, who charged us $7,000 for his transport to Iraq and for the seven days they kept him waiting in Dubai, which is paid with interest? Is this legal? I don’t think they started paying till he arrived in Iraq, which means those ten days in Austin were unpaid. It’s confusing. Can anyone get information on where he’s placed? All we’ve been told is that decisions are made ‘on the ground’. He was at ACSB. Where is this? Please advise.

Doug & Marsha Samuels

P.S. our neighbors have a family member who was in an accident in Iraq and he worked for HOSCO and he had to pay all of his medical?

Cathy wrote to John Watts and enquired about the chatroom and received an immediate reply inviting her to an online discussion board and suggesting a login time of 19:00. Once she completed the form she noticed a new icon at the bottom of the screen. When she clicked on it a message-box opened up.

JONNIEWATTS92: ;) it’s cathy, right?

CATHYGUNNERS: Hello?

…

…

JONNIEWATTS92: i sent emails to everyone in the earlier email did that even make sense ???

JONNIEWATTS92: you’ve not used messenger before?

JONNIEWATTS92: you have to hit the spacebar

…

…

JONNIEWATTS92: hit enter.

CATHYGUNNERS: OK, thanks. Sorry. Is this live?

JONNIEWATTS92: it’s real time, yup, happening now : )

CATHYGUNNERS: Can we speak with them at Camp Liberty?

JONNIEWATTS92: it’s 4am in iraq now --- you can send an invite : ) click on the red icon at the bottom that looks like a man with a hat -- type in the email address and they get an invite

JONNIEWATTS92: you’ve not done this before?

CATHYGUNNERS: No

JONNIEWATTS92: seriously!?

[DSAMUELS has entered the chatroom]

CATHYGUNNERS: It’s all new

JONNIEWATTS92: it won’t take long -- it’s not rocket science

DSAMUELS: This is Doug.

CATHYGUNNERS: Hi Doug

JONNIEWATTS92: hey

DSAMUELS: Sorry we’re late.

JONNIEWATTS92: s’ok -- we’ve not really started.

DSAMUELS: My wife is here, Marsha, I’m typing, she’s dictating … Cathy, we were happy to hear from you. Did everyone get the same message?

JONNIEWATTS92: i sent the invite ; )

CATHYGUNNERS: I don’t know where to start.

CATHYGUNNERS: I had all these questions.

JONNIEWATTS92: No worries ; )

JONNIEWATTS92: we have time

DSAMUELS: Has anyone heard from Mark? Does anyone know how he is?

JONNIEWATTS92: i heard from my brother -- he didn’t say anything was wrong.

JONNIEWATTS92: u said he was at ACSB … I think he’s at camp liberty now

DSAMUELS: He’s ok?

JONNIEWATTS92: paul didn’t say otherwise -- tho he sounded bored.

JONNIEWATTS92: my brother sounded bored -- said they weren’t up to much -- out in the desert -- just them and some scorpions --

DSAMUELS: Why are they there?

JONNIEWATTS92: the company picked them for the job

CATHYGUNNERS: I think that was my husband.

DSAMUELS: We don’t understand. What is the job?

CATHYGUNNERS: He was asked by the company director to pick a team.

DSAMUELS: By U-Tech?

CATHYGUNNERS: HOSCO.

DSAMUELS: Sorry? It doesn’t make sense?

DSAMUELS: … like everything else. But you’re sure he’s ok?

JONNIEWATTS92: my brother sent pictures. I have photos.

DSAMUELS: You’re sure he’s ok. We don’t understand why he hasn’t been in touch.
[you have three attachments WY8959001.JPEG: WY8959002.JPEG: WY8959003.JPEG]

…

…

…

DSAMUELS: Thank God.

DSAMUELS: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

DSAMUELS: This is the first we’ve seen him since he left. Thank you thankyouthank you. Tell your brother thank you.

JONNIEWATTS92: most welcome

DSAMUELS: How can we get a message to him?

DSAMUELS: Why is he there? When will he come back?

    [Invitation from JONNIEWATTS92 to CATHYGUNNERS for a private chat]

    JONNIEWATTS92: this makes me feel bad

    CATHYGUNNERS: I know. I don’t understand why they don’t know anything?

    JONNIEWATTS92: it’s weird --

    JONNIEWATTS92: their son is in Iraq and he’s not contacted them -- they can call anytime they want -- that’s really really sad

    CATHYGUNNERS: Do you know what’s going on?

    JONNIEWATTS92: paul said that there was a real oddball -- won’t talk to anyone, is kinda ocd, and another guy who’s gay -- probably -- suppressed -- seriously -- they’re stuck in the desert with some guy with ocd and a gay

    CATHYGUNNERS: You can’t write that!!!

    JONNIEWATTS92: no offence, but they’re in the desert with a guy who does tippy-tap sh*t who wants everything nice and tidy -- that has to be a problem right?

    JONNIEWATTS92: I work pt at borders my boss has ocd

    CATHYGUNNERS: Seriously? What does he do?

    JONNIEWATTS92: she chain smokes

    JONNIEWATTS92: honest to god … she’s killing herself.

DSAMUELS: When will he come back?

…

DSAMUELS: When will he come back?

[DSAMUELS has left the chatroom]

JONNIEWATTS92: did you see that???? -- that has to be hereditary

At work Maggie commented that Cathy seemed less tense. If she needed more batteries, she said, she could just help herself, as and when.

*   *   *

Pakosta liked the movie, would have wiped the outline of a five-pointed star in the dust on the vehicles if it didn’t run the risk of making him look like some kind of fanatic – Maoist, Zionist, or Russian. But he really liked the movie.

Rem had to hold his tongue.

‘See,’ Pakosta explained, ‘these two brothers slaughter this guy. Gut him. Cut him to pieces, then drop him all over this city. This old woman finds the tongue in a bag. Anyhow, that’s it, job done, these brothers slink back to their farm in France, where they become totally normal. No one would suspect. The Italian police have no idea what’s happened. No clue. And they start to look at other cases that look something like the same thing. Other missing people. And this is twisted. So in their investigation the police find that this woman has gone missing, right, and because they don’t really know what’s happened, they don’t have a clue, they really don’t, they have no clue, they make this announcement that whoever killed the first person has – more than likely – killed this missing woman as well. Follow?’

Pakosta drew in breath, a ball of energy stuck on a desert road, a vast stretch of night surrounding him.

‘So, these brothers. These psychos, playing normal in their French farm, see this announcement in the papers that whoever killed this first person probably also killed this second person – which isn’t true, right, we know this. But they learn about this, because the whole thing has everyone interested, and they realize, fuck, we didn’t kill no woman. Uh uh. Not us. So what do they do?’

Pakosta held his arms open, turned about, offered the question to the others.

‘Come on. What do they do? What would you do? They’re up for two killings not one. So, they only go back to the same city, right when this film is being made because, I forgot to say, because it’s all based in fact, and pick up a woman, completely random, and kill her. Because they’ve already been accused of a second murder anyway.’

Watts slowly shook his head. Kiprowski stood with his arms folded over his chest, and Rem, who at least had seen the film, decided not to speak.

Pakosta looked about for support, confirmation. ‘It’s out now. Just before we came here. Look it up. Go online. What I’m telling you is true. They were making this film about these brothers and while they were making it they came back and they killed someone.’

Everyone agreed that this was publicity.

Rem looked out to the desert anticipating stars, a horizon, a suggestion of life through some hint of light. Instead the moon blotted the sky black, kept the land dense, undiscoverable. Nothing out there to be seen.

*   *   *

JONNIEWATTS92: did you hear about the samuels?

CATHYGUNNERS: Doug?

JONNIEWATTS92: doug & marsha right they were in a fight someone didn’t like a sticker on their car ---- totalled

…

…

CATHYGUNNERS: When was this? How did you hear?

JONNIEWATTS92: he was online a couple of days ago i wondered if you’d heard

CATHYGUNNERS: They stopped writing. I haven’t heard any of this.

JONNIEWATTS92: last week drove into the local Dominics with an i-heart-our-troops sticker i don’t know maybe jesus-hearts-iraq and some loon rammed them and knocked them one side of the parking lot to the other

CATHYGUNNERS: No?

JONNIEWATTS92: seriously!!!!

CATHYGUNNERS: Because of the bumper sticker?

JONNIEWATTS92: supposedly i wouldn’t put it past the old man to have given some verbal

CATHYGUNNERS: Because of a bumper sticker?

JONNIEWATTS92: that’s not the worst of it they smacked the car two or three times -- Doug Samuels managed to jump out and the person kept ramming the car with his wife still in it, all he could do was watch

CATHYGUNNERS: I can’t believe it. Who did this?

JONNIEWATTS92: god’s truth someone who’d come out of wholefoods -- a woman -- just saw the bumper sticker and went postal -- thing is, Marsha Samuels has some kind of dementia -- no clue what was going on

JONNIEWATTS92: apparently she’s ok -- shaken up but ok

CATHYGUNNERS: Just awful.

…

…

JONNIEWATTS92: i don’t tell anyone about paul -- no one’s business

CATHYGUNNERS: You don’t talk about your brother?

JONNIEWATTS92: not worth the grief

CATHYGUNNERS: I’m sorry to hear that. Is this among friends?

JONNIEWATTS92: work friends everyone just about

JONNIEWATTS92: not worth the trouble
can’t handle it
his wife’s pregnant

…

…

CATHYGUNNERS: Because it makes life easier?

JONNIEWATTS92: even family

JONNIEWATTS92: easier?

JONNIEWATTS92: they don’t like the idea of him being there

CATHYGUNNERS: In Iraq?

…

JONNIEWATTS92: pretty much

JONNIEWATTS92: not worth the trouble

JONNIEWATTS92: what about you? how does your family handle this

CATHYGUNNERS: There’s only my family. Rem’s family are in Europe. My sister just married. I don’t know what she really thinks. It all came out of the blue. It doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know.

JONNIEWATTS92: so …

JONNIEWATTS92: … he just went?

CATHYGUNNERS: Pretty much

JONNIEWATTS92: … and you don’t want him there?

CATHYGUNNERS: It’s not easy to answer that.

…

…

CATHYGUNNERS: It’s different for me. Rem’s parents aren’t alive, his brothers and sisters are in Europe. His family is big and they all do different things. I don’t know if it would matter if they had a problem with it. I don’t think that would be an issue.

JONNIEWATTS92: but you don’t want him there?

CATHYGUNNERS: I guess I don’t

…

…

…

…

CATHYGUNNERS: What about you? What about Paul?

…

…

CATHYGUNNERS: I don’t mean to upset you.

CATHYGUNNERS: This is just how I feel about it.
[JONNIEWATTS92 has left the chatroom]

…

…
[CATHYGUNNERS has left the chatroom]

*   *   *

On the second day a message came through from Southern-CIPA that Highway 80 was now open for traffic heading north. Markland sounded blasé. They would see the results in about three hours. If they kept to their post until then, an army vehicle would bring the last convoy through.

As always with CIPA another message arrived within the hour. The final convoy from Kuwait would arrive at Camp Liberty at 02:00 Zulu, and they would need volunteers to accompany the drivers as there was no security.

*   *   *

The traffic stopped two hours after the notification of the convoy. Both Kiprowski and Chimeno waited at the compound entrance.

Rem took the opportunity to speak with Amer Hassan.

Hassan answered the door and stepped aside for Rem to enter. The two beds, both made, both tidy, and so close that once they sat down their legs interlocked. Rem found himself embarrassed, uncertain how he should start the discussion.

‘I have made a decision. I have no choice. I have to leave. I was recognized. The men in the car will tell everyone I am working for the Americans.’ Hassan paused, looked quickly at Rem. ‘At Southern-CIPA I always covered my face. Then, one day, they said that the interpreters cannot cover their faces any more. They killed two interpreters. The same day. My wife and children are in Britain. My son is very sick. My father and my brothers are here. I should not have come. I have placed my family in very serious trouble.’

‘We can help.’

‘You cannot help.’ Hassan briskly shook his head. ‘There is nothing you can do.’ He looked up. ‘Everything makes trouble. You give our names to the Ministry of Finance, who sell this information to anyone. Anyone can find our names. Sooner or later.’

‘You could stay here?’

‘And what about my family?’

Rem stood up in surrender and said that he understood.

*   *   *

The convoy arrived forty minutes ahead of time: Scanias and MANs, large bull-headed flatbeds, long bodies, camel-packed, mounted incestuously so that one could drag four.

The men gathered round them as they parked, dust colliding upward. The drivers were small, Indian and Sri Lankan, thin and anxious, exhausted from the drive.

Pakosta punched Rem on the arm. ‘You heard? We get to ride in these all the way to Amrah and they fly us back?’

Rem asked Santo if this was true. Watts stood beside Santo and nodded. ‘Apparently. This is the understanding. They won’t go any further unless they have an escort.’

‘I was sitting at the stop lights when a semi ran right over a car loaded with Muslims…’

Rem checked that Hassan was nowhere near earshot, and caught Pakosta’s arm. ‘You need to watch your mouth. You understand?’

Pakosta hunched and immediately apologized. ‘What? What did I do? It was a joke. Nothing but a joke.’

Bolder, Pakosta tugged back his sleeve. As he walked out he directed a comment at Kiprowski Rem did not quite catch. ‘What did he just say?’ Kiprowski shrugged. ‘I heard him say something. What was it?’

‘It was nothing.’

‘It wasn’t nothing. He said go fuck sand out of his ass. Right? Is that what he said?’

‘It wasn’t anything.’ Kiprowski pushed through the group of drivers. They were hollow-eyed but wired and decided on continuing.

Santo slapped Rem on the back. ‘You coming?’

Rem said no, he’d stay. ‘You can take Pakosta and Kiprowski, and Clark. Clark can follow and bring everyone back. I’ll stay here with Watts and Samuels, and Chimeno.’

Chimeno immediately complained. He wanted to go.

‘Let him come along if he wants.’

‘Fine with me.’ Rem stepped back and bumped into Amer Hassan. Hassan offered his hand. If he returned with the convoys, he said, he could find his family.

Rem asked him to reconsider.

‘I don’t have a choice.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘Give me two days before you tell anyone.’

Rem slowly nodded in agreement. ‘You should say something to Kiprowski before you go.’

Hassan looked puzzled.

‘He’s young. He doesn’t have too many friends out here. I think he likes you in his way.’

Hassan nodded briskly, decided.

‘Do you need to get your things?’

Hassan had packed what he could in a small backpack. Kiprowski climbed into the cab behind him.

*   *   *

Most mornings the boy waited for Cathy to come out with the dog. She wanted his name but the boy wouldn’t give it. On the final morning one of the cashiers from the currency exchange came out, unlit cigarette in hand, she squinted into the sun and asked Cathy what she was doing.

‘We know you, don’t we, Roscoe.’ She spoke with mean and nasty intention to the boy, who immediately started walking, hands in pocket, head down. ‘Yes, we know all about you.’ She pushed her glasses back up her nose, looked to Cathy, and told her to watch herself. ‘He’s bad with women. Like his father. And watch your things. I wouldn’t trust him with anything. That entire family is handy, if you know what I mean. He’s always around here. Waiting for an opportunity. Helps himself to what he sees.’

Cathy wanted to defend the boy, but found the dog pulling in the opposite direction. She watched him walk up Lunt, but Nut had other ideas.

She still hadn’t told Rem. When he came back she’d surprise him.

*   *   *

Three hours after their departure, Rem received a report that the convoy was involved in an incident on Route 567 in which the unit translator had been killed.

Chimeno and Kiprowski were flown to hospital at Camp Buehring, and brought back the next day by Catfish Air. Chimeno had no difficulties talking about what had happened. Straight off the transport he called his girlfriend in Ohio, told her the story in detail, said that he missed her and made her cry. Immediately after he called his sister in Lansing, and after that his mother in Denver and did the same thing, improving on the story with each telling. By the time he talked to the unit it was smooth and elegant and properly composed. They listened with reverence.

Chimeno’s driver was a man from Nepal, only just tall enough, he swore, to reach both the pedals and the steering wheel of his rig. Two hours into the drive the guy was standing up waving his arms, insisting on some point Chimeno couldn’t recall. The floor of the cab was drecked with candy wrappers, and he was making plans about how he’d have to drive if the driver had a heart attack. In the event, the man drove courageously into what would have been the line of fire to protect the rig that went down. At that point all they knew was one of the lead trucks had taken a hit. Kiprowski was riding two trucks ahead with Amer Hassan. Once it happened, Chimeno did exactly as he was trained, and when they came to Kiprowski’s truck they found him banging and shrieking to get out. Amer Hassan had landed on his head and snapped his neck, and when they pulled him out there was black blood in his mouth, a limp head, but no other sign of damage.

Rem spoke later with Kiprowski. The plainer truth was that Amer hit his head when the truck went over. Not at the beginning of the fall when it was tipping, when he slid to the side, and not while the truck was still going forward, but once it was past the point where it could correct itself, when gravity pulled it down. For Kiprowski it was a question of velocity and force and how it was impossible not to fall, how everything happened in one compressed moment with his back against the glass and feet up to the seat. He was hit in the face, a coffee canister, CDs, pens, a map book, torch spun down, and dirt and sand and whatever else was on the seat or dashboard, everything thrown into the air and falling with them – a vague memory, or was this invented, of Amer slipping past. The moment before Kiprowski had turned to see Amer, curled up on himself in the small daybed at the back of the cab.

Amer had told him he was leaving.

Kiprowski had sulked at the news, so Amer had curled up and slept, or seemed to sleep, and before Kiprowski could explain himself the vehicle had come off the road.

Kiprowski was the first pulled out of the truck, they tugged him free over the body of the driver who was concussed. His first thought, much like Chimeno, was that this was an attack, and they would come to the front of the truck and shoot them through the glass.

Out of the cab, Kiprowski heard small-arms fire, a hollow clap sent out over the desert, and it took him a while to realize that these were the shots from the other drivers, who carried, illegally, their own weapons. There was no ambush, no roadside bomb, no attack. The driver had fallen asleep and they’d lost the road.

The death of Amer Hassan was like every other, he supposed, except he counted this man as a friend. It all came down to a curve in the road – that was it. No junction, not even an intersection, just a simple slight change in direction.

Rem understood that the problem, Kiprowski’s attachment, was not that simple.

*   *   *

He called Geezler again and began reading his notes, but felt the words slip from him, the call itself to be useless. ‘You know what, there’s probably some legitimate reason for not hearing from you, but some contact would be appreciated.’

As soon as he hung up he immediately regretted the message. It wasn’t what he’d said, so much as his tone.

*   *   *

Rem wanted to speak with the men in the Quonset the night before Kiprowski and Chimeno returned. He let them gather first, and when he came in he surprised Santo, who had money in his hands, a notebook.

‘What’s this?’

‘Nothing.’ Santo tucked the money behind him, slipped it into his back pocket. ‘They owe me.’

‘They owe you?’

‘It’s nothing.’

Rem looked to the group, Clark, Watts, even Samuels with hangdog expressions – all except Pakosta, who also had money in his hand.

The realization that they were gambling left him dumbfounded.

Santo said it wasn’t quite what it looked like.

Rem struggled to speak. ‘How much?’

‘It’s not like that.’

Rem pointed to Santo then Pakosta. ‘How much?’

Now Pakosta lowered his head.

‘How much?’

Pakosta drew the money out from his pocket and folded it round his fingers.

‘Seventy dollars.’

‘And you?’ Rem asked Santo. ‘How much?’

‘It isn’t like that.’

‘I want to know what he was worth.’

Pakosta gave a snort, something small, either derisive or nervous, Rem didn’t care to know.

*   *   *

Rem sat outside his cabin and watched them leave the Quonset one by one, none of them speaking. The temperature dropping. The sky an unbroken black.

*   *   *

On Saturday mornings Cathy made a point of going to Evanston Farmers’ Market on her own – she regarded this as part of her independent life, and did not mind so much that she had erased Rem from the routine. She bought exactly what she wanted: basil, tomatoes, olive bread, and when she could make the expense, cut flowers. Hot with her walk from the station and irritated at the shoulder strap for her purse (over her breast, to the right, between, under? None of the options felt comfortable) she pointed out two bunches of gladioli, and as she searched for the correct change she became distracted by the conversation beside her, two women, one making the choice for the other and explaining in a hurry: ‘Four months ago I had no idea. Now? Now I have a whole new language.’ She replicated the action with three pained gasps. ‘He’s lost weight. His appetite. None of the specialists will admit this has anything to do with the smoke.’

Cathy took her change and backed away. Had she heard the words burn pit? The cut stems bled through the paper, a little repellent. She left the market and made her way back to the station, sure that the conversation was not what she now imagined, then changed her mind and returned to the market to seek out the two women – but could not find them among the stalls and the crowd.

She walked to the library without the decision being properly made and found herself coming up the stairs, sweating at the effort, tired as usual (why always so tired?), and before she could properly rationalize what she wanted she was facing a volunteer and explaining that she was looking for information on burn pits, HOSCO, and everything associated with their dealings in Iraq. She needed to sit down. Damn it, no, she needed to pee.

Phyllis, her name pinned to her jacket, stood with Cathy’s packages as she hurried to the restroom. As Cathy returned she adjusted her top. It wasn’t that her clothes were small exactly, not all her clothes, and maybe it was just because her breasts this past week were as sensitive as hell.

Phyllis helped with the bags and walked with her to the computers. As soon as Cathy sat down she thought she’d need the restroom again – and Phyllis said yes, with a small laugh, it was exactly the same for me.

*   *   *

When she came to say goodbye, Cathy sought out the librarian, and found her collecting books from the carousels. Phyllis asked with interest if Cathy had found what she was looking for.

‘I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ the woman stepped forward, hands precise in their movements, shaping an idea, ‘but how far along? Eight weeks?’

Hands full with bags from the market Cathy looked down and couldn’t see what the woman was talking about. Did she think she was pregnant?

*   *   *

They sat outside the Unicorn Café, Phyllis with her black coffee, a smart air, with her hair drawn back in a style from another era, one where women smoked, occupied kitchens and dining rooms, took lunch, held dinner parties – her mother’s generation, where women worked to appear sophisticated, nurtured, that look.

‘I shouldn’t have said anything. You aren’t very far along, are you?’ It was only intuition, she explained. ‘You won’t know, properly, until you see a doctor.’

Neither did she apologize. Cathy had cried. Her first thought that she wasn’t much of a woman if she didn’t know this about her body. How stupid could you be? It wasn’t just the dumbness of the situation, but that she’d missed two months of the experience. Here she was, by her calculation, reaching the end of her first trimester without any of the usual indicators. No specific weight gain, no obvious hormonal changes, no morning sickness. Yes to a change in her complexion. Yes to sore breasts, off and on, of all things the nipples, especially today. Yes to the constant need to pee – although wasn’t all this a little early? Yes to the void of her periods, which usually came irregularly with irregular flow. Christ. She’d heard examples of women making it right to the birth without knowing. If she had to admit she thought this was pathetic. How can you not know? She could excuse herself, what with the fainting, and having given up some time ago on her gynaecologist, who’d pronounced her womb to be a hostile environment. Something like Mars. Not very likely to sustain life. Not in those words, not from a professional who couched the judgement in gentler terminations: unfriendly being the favoured phrase. She must have conceived the night Rem left. This, at least, almost had some kind of logic.

The realization came with other fears. A warning once that it would be unlikely that she could carry a child full-term. This is what she’d been told. Christ sake.

The idea that they hadn’t taken precautions was ridiculous. Rem was messy, boisterous, and sex became a kind of combat, so physical she often lost herself. Metaphors wouldn’t cut it, because Rem, being so helter-skelter, was not one man but parts of many. She had no complaints. There might be long periods of inactivity, of barely even touching, but when there was, she thought of this as a kind of fission. But the idea that they should have been careful just didn’t fit the project.

Phyllis listened without overt sympathy. Doctors always draw the worst picture. ‘I lost two,’ she said, ‘with my first husband. On the second marriage it all seemed to work out.’

Earlier today she was one person, now she was two, which struck her as remarkable and horrifying.

Christ. A baby. How much will that cost?

She wouldn’t tell Rem until she was certain.

Secret number two.

Number one: a dog.

Number two: a baby.