A Nasty Piece of Work (14 page)

“Go ahead and interrogate the bastard,” the lieutenant said.

I approached the prisoner. “What’s your name?” I asked.

Our Afghan translator repeated my question in Pashto.

The mujahid stared at me with his one eye that was still operational—I couldn’t tell, even with my night-vision goggles, if the other eye was shut or no longer existed. “Fuck America,” he whispered in English. “Fuck George Bush.”

One of the soldiers pinning him to the mud wall was wearing fingerless biker’s gloves. Still holding the handle of the bayonet with his left hand, he reared back with his right and punched the prisoner in the groin.

The mujahid doubled over and coughed up crimson bile. Straightening with an effort, he spat out, in English, “Fuck your mother.”

“He don’t learn from his mistakes,” the soldier wearing biker’s gloves remarked.

Terrible shrieks came from the mosque. I turned to see raiders dragging two teenage girls and an older woman by their long hair over the rocky ground to the middle of the compound. All three females had been stripped naked. Seen through my goggles, their pale skin appeared bluish green.

“You need to stop this,” someone said. I turned back to see who had spoken. The lieutenant and his Delta-Foxtrot people were all staring at me.

One of the soldiers nodded in my direction. “He say sumptin?” he asked.

“You say something?” the lieutenant inquired.

“The herdsman on the hill, his goats were probably enemy combatants,” I said. “These woman aren’t.” My words were devoid of consonants, as if they originated with a ventriloquist not moving his lips when he threw his voice.

“Fucking mujahid went and killed one of my men,” the lieutenant said, as if that explained everything. “His wife, his kids, they have got to pay the blood price. That’s the only language these Taliban shits understand.”

An inhuman groan came from the mujahid—I thought at first he was trying to clear blood from the back of his throat until I noticed his one eye staring past me at his wife and daughters, who were being sodomized by the dark figures in camouflage khakis. Two of them had their pants down around their ankles, their bare asses burning bluish green in the riptide of this awful night. Funny thing is how, when I picture the scene, when I remember the unspeakable things they were doing to the woman and the two girls, in my mind’s eye I see it all happening in a kind of sluggish sea-swell slow motion.

“I’m going to report what I saw here,” I announced.

“What the fuck did he see here?” one of the soldiers pinning the especially tall mujahid to the wall demanded.

“Me, I didn’t see nuttin’ out of the usual,” a second soldier said.

Three sharp shots sounded behind me. I am ashamed to say I was afraid to turn and look—afraid of what I would see, afraid of what I would do if I saw.

“Killed resisting arrestation,” one of the soldiers snickered. “Ain’t that a fact, John Henry?”

“Teach ’em to resist arrestation,” John Henry agreed.

“Lieutenant, what d’we do wit the prisoner?”

“You’re supposed to take him back for interrogation,” I said.

The only eye available to the especially tall mujahid fixed me with a look of infinite grief. And the baby-faced lieutenant who presided over the absence of civilization in this Hindu Kush seabed reached out with the tippy-tip of the barrel of his M-16 and gently wedged it, like a dentist probing for a loose tooth, into the mujahid’s mouth. “Stand away,” the lieutenant snapped. The two soldiers pinning the mujahid to the wall stepped back smartly. Gagging on the rifle barrel in his mouth, the especially tall mujahid, held up by the two bayonets pinning him to the wall, wilted into his bluish green djellaba.

“Don’t do that—” I heard myself groan, but he did do that, he angled the barrel so that it was pointing toward the endless expanse of universe over our heads and he pulled the trigger. The mujahid’s skull exploded, splattering brain matter on all the bluish green uniforms within a fifteen-meter stain radius.

The withdrawal from the village passed in an adrenaline haze—rotors beating the air, stirring up gravel and dust and debris, two helicopters touching down on the perimeter of the seabed, gunships hovering overhead stabbing the alleyways and the mosque compound with shards of brilliant bluish green light. Bodies were gathered and piled like so much deadwood. As I lumbered across a field, I nearly stumbled over the figure of a crouched girl. I was afraid she might be wounded and tugged her to her feet looking for blood. She was skinny and dirty and scared out of her skull but not bloodstained. I remember thinking she must have been around twelve but discovered later she was an undernourished, overfrightened fifteen. I pulled her toward the nearest helicopter and, gripping her under the armpits, hefted her into it. Sitting on the metal floor, she stared at me with unblinking eyes. The helicopter door slammed shut. Nobody complained about a passenger. “I’m Gunn,” I called over the whirring rotors, tapping my chest. When she didn’t say anything I pointed at her. “You?” The Afghan translator sitting across from us shouted to her in Pashto. She turned back to me. “Kubra,” she said. “Kubra,” I nodded. As the helicopter lifted off, there was an enormous explosion in the village behind me. It lit up the night sky visible through the oval Plexiglas windows, transforming the other hovering helicopter into a night moth.

When I got back to Kabul base, I parked the girl in the station infirmary and woke my station chief. “Jack,” I said, “bad things happened out there tonight.”

He was sitting in his skivvy shorts on a steel cot. His mane of hair, once dirty blond, now dirty gray, was disheveled. He threaded his fingers through it several times working out knots. I noticed several empty whisky bottles on the cement floor under the cot. “How would you know what happened out there tonight?” he asked.

“You told me to tailgate the raid.”

“You have that in writing?” he demanded. “You’re supposed to be in the command bunker during a raid.”

“I was out there with Delta-Foxtrot,” I said. “I saw them drag naked females across the compound. They killed the females—”

“You saw them kill these females?”

“I heard the shots. There were three females. There were three shots.”

“You saw the bodies?”

I concentrated on Jack’s bare feet, which he was fitting into ornate Afghan slippers

“You didn’t actually see bodies, huh, Lemuel?”

“I didn’t see
those
bodies … I was too frightened to turn around and look.” I sucked the stale air of the bedroom into my lungs. It struck me that the stale air of a station chief’s bunkroom could be more harmful than cigarette smoke. I could hear sirens wailing somewhere in the city but I could never tell from the pitch whether they were fire engines or ambulances or police cars escorting VIPs in and out of the Green Zone. “I saw the lieutenant murder the especially tall mujahid,” I said. “The stain on my shirt—it’s his brains, Jack.”

“Lemuel, Lemuel, he was an enemy combatant. Delta-Foxtrot lost one of their men in the raid. They radioed in he was shot in the head by your especially tall mujahid. You know standin’ operational procedure as well as me—we take Taliban alive when we can, we leave them dead when we can’t.”

I murmured something about needing to file a report.

“File, file. This war is a quagmire. One more report in triplicate won’t keep us from sinking in deeper.”

It took me hours to write out what I wanted to write out. I preempted the screen showing the
Seinfeld
rerun and typed it up with one finger, then I rewrote it (you’ll laugh) leaving out all the consonants from my own dialogue, then I re-rewrote it putting them back in because words without consonants come across as gibberish. I wound up, in the umpteenth version, pretty much telling the story as I’ve set it out here. I printed out three copies and put my John Hancock on the last page and dispatched the report on up the chain of command. Jack, which, you may remember, wasn’t his real name, put his initials on the top right and sent it on up, through channels, to the Company’s in-country commander, who sent it on up, through channels, to the Afghan desk in D.C. All this took time. Lots of time. I lost track of what happened after my report reached Washington as the senior brass who may or may not have read it weren’t required to initial the single copy that made its way back downhill to me stamped
NOT ACTIONABLE
. It seems the baby-faced lieutenant and his Delta-Foxtrot people had been rotated out of Afghanistan. It seems the target village in the Hindu Kush had been abandoned by the Afghans who survived the raid. It seems their empty mud huts had been used by army demolition specialists to teach greenhorns how to blow up what passed for a house in this godforsaken wasteland of a country. I still had two months, two days left on my Kabul tour (like Millie Kugler’s husband, Hank, I would mark off the days on a calendar) when the classified cable firing me for reasons deemed too secret to spell out reached my desk. I was already opening beer bottles with my thumb and index finger and crushing the metal tops between my fingers. The Company, which obviously didn’t appreciate whistle-blowers, neglected to add the usual war zone bonus to my termination check. (When I raised the matter with the disbursing officer, he shut his eyes tiredly. “Go sue us,” he said.) Whatever pension credits I had were out the window. A form letter from the station chief was paper-clipped to the cable. It thanked me for unspecified services to my country and wished me good luck in my civilian endeavors.

Good luck in my civilian endeavors! Screw him.

Jack’s real name, the one on the bottom of his insulting letter, was Jack F. for Francis Coburn. Jack ass.

Go sue me for revealing a state secret. It’ll give me a chance to tell what happened on the Hindu Kush in open court.

You wanted to know where my anger comes from. It comes from my gut.

Eighteen

According to this Clark County Historical Society brochure I came across on a shelf in the Nipton general store, Searchlight got its name when a miner tunneling into a hill lit a Searchlight brand match on the sole of his boot and caught sight of a vein of gold. That was back before the turn of the last century. Searchlight, astride the old Arrowhead Highway, boomed until the twenties when the vein began to run dry and U.S. 91 swung around the town instead of through it. The gold diggers drifted away to mine other veins: in Reno, Nevada, for instance. Leaving five hundred or so people clinging to a bygone era by their fingernails.

We were Searchlight bound in the rental Toyota. Ornella Neppi was driving,
“All my exes live in Texas, that’s why I hang my hat in Tennessee”
was playing on the car radio, I was stretched out in the back trying to catch up on the shut-eye I’d missed out on the night before. “Will you take a look at
this
!” Friday exclaimed as she braked the car onto the gravel shoulder. I sat up so quickly I banged my head against the roof of the car. Ornella was peering through the front window at a historical marker indicating the direction to Walking Box Ranch, Clara Bow’s Shangri-la after her Nipton interlude. “It might be worth the detour,” she said as I scrambled past the stick shift onto the front seat. Her tone was mischievous. “I mean, I
am
a great Clara Bow fan. I’m seriously considering starting a Clara Bow fan club in Doña Ana. Thanks to you, I know who she is. And I know what can happen when someone sleeps in her bed. Come on, spoilsport. It’s only seven miles into the Mojave. What do we have to lose?”

“Time,” I said. “We need to concentrate on Searchlight if we’re going to pick up the trail of your Emilio Gava.”

A dark cloud discolored the seaweed green in her eyes. “Why is he suddenly
my
Emilio Gava?”

“He’s your Emilio Gava in the sense that it’s you who posted the bail he’s jumping.”

She took several deep breaths, which naturally drew my attention to her chest. As usual I wasn’t looking for campaign ribbons. “Want me to drive?” I asked.

“Sure.”

I walked around the Toyota and got in behind the wheel, pushing the lever to push the seat back. She slid across to the passenger side. I drove past the small airport on into town and pulled up in front of the only place that looked open for business, one of those old-fashioned hardware stores with aisle upon aisle of wooden shelving and dim electric lighting.
MILLMAN & SON HARD AND SOFT WARE
was written in fresh gold lettering above the door. There was a collection of barbed wire in a frame on a wall, samples of the different “bobbed wire” used by cattlemen to fence off grazing land in the Texas Panhandle. The name of each sample was printed underneath it: the Crandal Zigzag, the Merrill Buffalo, the Allis Sawtooth, Upham’s Snail.

“You interested in barb wire?” an elderly gentleman with silky gray whiskers inquired from the back of the store.

“Not especially,” I said.

He ambled down one of his aisles toward us. “I’m the Millman of Millman & Son. Son’s gone up to Carson City to check out a radio-controlled model plane fair. Max-Leo, that’s the son in Millman & Son, he’s the one that went and added the software to my hardware—he has got hisself a line of computer software, hi-tech, low-tech, no-tech gizmos, microphones, recording devices, video cameras, he has got RAM and ROM and VDU and VDT, damned if I know what they all mean but Max-Leo sells them and repairs them. Seems like as if he’s gonna add radio-controlled model aeroplanes. Where Max-Leo will end only God knows and he ain’t confiding in your servant.”

Ornella picked a pair of goggles off a shelf. “I could never bring myself to open my eyes underwater,” she said.

“Them there ain’t underwater goggles, miss.”

“They’re army PVS-7 night-vision goggles,” I said. “If there’s starlight or a slice of moon, you can see as if it’s daytime except everything you see looks greenish.”

“How do you know all that?” Ornella asked.

“There’re parts of me you haven’t been to yet,” I said.

“How much?” Ornella asked Mr. Millman.

“Brand new, they go for $2,699. These here are thirdhand. Max-Leo went and retooled them back to factory condition. They’ll set you back”—he scratched at a whisker—“three hundred, the case, the head strap, two AA batteries thrown in.”