Fobbit (32 page)

“Of course he does. Aren’t those senior staffers always one step ahead of you?”

“They think they are, but they don’t know jack shit.”

23

SHRINKLE

A
change had come over Abe Shrinkle in the last three weeks, one with which he was not entirely comfortable. For one thing, he had become lax in his duties at the fitness center. Towels, sloppy in their folds, were piled haphazardly at the front desk like pancakes on a plate at Denny’s. Sticky grime on the handlebars of the stationary bikes went unwiped and presented a germy situation for the unsuspecting fitness patrons. Someone swiped the Barry Manilow CD and Abe let it go unreported. And, perhaps worst of all, he was late in unlocking the front doors most mornings. Ignoring the line of grumbling and bitter-spitting lieutenant colonels and sergeants major and captains who’d been standing in the morning chill for more than half an hour, Abe kept his head down and fumbled the key into the lock. Without a word, he’d open the door, step into the stale, humid stink of last night’s sweat and dirty socks, flick on the lights, and glumly put a fresh sign-in sheet on the counter.

Shrinkle was angry—not an emotion with which he was all that familiar. He was angry at the fat Fobbits who had nothing better to do in this war than waste a half hour standing around waiting for a rinky-dink little fitness center to open. He was angry at the air of self-righteous self-entitlement these men, guts straining against the waistband of their shorts, gave off as they scowled at him and pressed too hard with the pen while signing in for their session, at the way they elbowed each other aside in order to be the first on the treadmill, at the way they shouted at him from across the room to change the CD because their ears were bleeding from all that disco crap—enough already!

Shrinkle was angry at Lieutenant Colonel Duret for taking away his company and demoting him to this low station of life on FOB Triumph—though this anger was tempered by the indisputable fact that Duret’s decision was completely justified by Abe’s actions. Captain Shrinkle knew his commanding officer had had two choices and he’d taken the one that would leave the least amount of poo sticking to their boots. He supposed he should be grateful he wasn’t right now on his way to Fort Leavenworth (and, frankly, he was surprised he wasn’t); but still, he couldn’t think of Duret’s bad-news face as he’d stood in the doorway of his trailer without having to suppress a chest-tightening surge of rage. “It’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair.” Those were the words that looped through his head when he thought of Vic Duret.

He was just as angry at that Iraqi—whoever he was—who’d crawled underneath that fuel truck and started this whole chain of events. This also played like a broken, spliced film through Abe’s head: the brown-faced man in his white dishdasha dropping to all fours on the street, peering at the truck’s undercarriage, then flattening to his belly and slithering forward. Drop, peer, slither. Drop, peer, slither. If anyone was to be blamed for how it had all turned out, it was this little man who had lacked the brains to know when his life was about to end. “Fucking hajji.” There, he’d said it. And he’d say it again. “Fucking hajji.” He’d say it any dang time he felt like it.

Swearing was also a relatively new sensation for Captain Abe Shrinkle. Though he’d long been surrounded by potty-mouths in the Army, he had resisted the pull of his tongue, save for a few random moments of excruciating pain or well-run-dry exhaustion. But now he felt the time had come to start letting loose with all the
goddamns
and
shits
and
fucks
and
cocksuckers
that had been too-long pent up inside his throat. If ever there was a time for cursing, this was it.

“Fucking A!” he agreed with himself.

All this anger and profanity was a remarkable change for Abe Shrinkle. It was nothing less than a glacial shift, as distinct as the time when, in Alaska, he had taken a cruise on Portage Lake and as the boat bobbed in the water fifty yards from the base of the turquoise glacier, he had watched a column of ice creak and snap and pull away and then slide into the lake with a plunge, spewing a dozen fountains of water and finally breaking up into several car-sized chunks of ice that rolled once, twice, then started bobbing along with the cruise boat. Now there was something inside him that was just as surely pulling away and breaking into smaller pieces. It was something big, something important, something he’d held on to his entire life: a headstrong loyalty to his fellow citizens and the country at large. It was a fealty that, he was now starting to think, was misplaced.

He felt this internal shift as he stood there at the fitness center desk, glowering at the blubber-jiggling Fobbits on the bikes. He felt it when he sat in the dining facility, keeping his head down to avoid possible eye contact with members of his former company. He even felt it when he was floating in the middle of the Aussie pool, rubbing a cool can of beer across his neck and face and listening to the inane cheerfulness of the men and women playing water polo around him.

Once, one of the men, brick-red skin flaming around his sunglasses, had been reading a newspaper and called out to the rest of them, “Oy! Get a crack at this headline, mates: CHENEY ADMITS HE OVERESTIMATED IRAQIS’ ABILITY TO RECLAIM THEIR NATION IN WAKE OF INVASION.”

Shrinkle had rung out a laugh and said, “Yeah, no shit, Sherlock!”

The bloke had gone on to read more of the story but Abe had fallen into a self-contained silence after that, paddling around the pool on his inner tube and wondering why he felt such relief from jeering at the vice president,
his
vice president. Inside his British skin, Abe was filled with light and froth, as if he were made of spun sugar. He was free to do what he pleased, Richard Belmouth or no Richard Belmouth, and America be damned.

He had made his way to the shallow end, hoisted himself out of the water, then padded over to the soldier reading the newspaper. “I say, old chap, could I bother you for that section of newsprint?”

“Sure, here y’ go, Dick.”

Abe took the sheet, quickly folded it several times, then launched the paper airplane into the air to the cheers of all those around the pool. The plane caught a current of air, which it rode over the wall and, just like that, was gone forever.

Heart thudding on his tongue, Abe had announced, “And
that’s
what I think of the bloody Yanks and their Limp-Dick Cheney!”

24

GOODING

I
n the dining facility, Chance Gooding stuffed himself with chili mac, mashed potatoes, a slice of pepperoni pizza, two bags of potato chips, four carrot sticks, and two desserts (strawberry shortcake and fudge brownie). He ate with aggressive determination, only glancing up at the TV once when he heard a reporter tell the camera, “Officials here say that, mission by mission, brick by brick, they are winning the hearts and minds of the people in a war that will prove to its doubters that it’s possible to triumph through democracy.”

“Bullshit,” he muttered, though he’d meant to keep it in his head.

It had been a bad week of death and he was getting tired of typing the phrase,
Names of the deceased are being withheld until next of kin have been notified
. Whatever emotional impact these words might have once carried had gone fuzzy and numb by all the repetition. Dead soldiers were now little more than names and hometowns, corpses simply objects to be loaded onto the back of C-130s somewhere and delivered like pizzas to the United States.

This didn’t sit well with Gooding but he didn’t have much time to think about it because, like orders at a pizza joint, those bodies kept rolling in. All he could do to keep up with the demand was type the same press releases time after time until they became like words to a song he was memorizing.

Here at Division Public Affairs, Gooding never released the names; that was a task left to the Pentagon and usually came a week, maybe two, after the soldier had been delimbed by the bomb or barbecued in the driver’s seat of the Humvee. By the time the wordsmiths at the Puzzle Palace had issued the terse, official announcement, the staff in Baghdad had long since moved on to another death, and another, and another after that.

This week, in particular, had been gruesome and full of sad gore.

The thuds striking the earth were barely noticeable to the cubicle mice in Division Headquarters, what with the constant murmur of voices punctuated by sporadic laughter, the stream of official radio chatter from the SMOG speakers overhead, the insectoid static drone of the air-conditioning, and the very thoughts inside the soldiers’ heads that steadily cried out, “Home! Home! Home!”

No, the thuds were hardly audible—mere distant thumps, like a giant was walking over the crest of the horizon with hard, measured footsteps. The soldiers of Shamrock Division paid them no mind, like all the other daily thumps and thuds and thunder cracks of bombs.

But less than twenty minutes later, they snapped to attention because now those distant explosions were front and center in Shamrock Division operations and SMOG filled the air with its chatter of acronyms. Terrorists had fired mortars and rockets into a crowd of thousands who were congregating at a mosque in al-Kadhimiya in honor of an ancient imam’s birth (or perhaps it was his death—either way, it was a religious celebration of his coming or going).

At least eight indirect fires were launched at the pilgrims from two different sectors of the city, one landing on the mosque, the others falling outside and along the miles-long stream of chanting Shi’as. The first reports estimated the civilian casualties in the hundreds; a few hours later, that would be downgraded to seven dead and a few dozen injured. Sham Div helicopter pilots floating in the sky nearby saw the rockets launched; they pinpointed the source, locked on target, and effectively wiped out the terrorists with one squeeze of one decisive finger, blasting them straight to whatever Allah they had been praising. Ground troops also quickly descended on the area and rounded up more than fifty people and pieces of evidence, including a metal tube that had most likely been used to launch the rockets.

Back in Cubicle Headquarters, Staff Sergeant Gooding’s first instinct was to
not
issue a press release but, rather, to step back and allow the Ministry of Interior to handle the media (which it did in due time, with only minimal assistance from the U.S. Army, thankyouverymuch).

However, in the meantime, the Sham Div’s chief of staff, noting the extreme gravity of the situation and how the tide of public opinion could quickly turn to a tsunami of unrest with little provocation, had descended from the upper floor of the palace, arriving at the Public Affairs cubicle with his bald pate already agleam with excited sweat.

“P-A-O!” Colonel Belcher barked, causing Chance Gooding to jump a good two inches off his chair and accidentally type a word in his midday report that looked something like
terr33oris6&
.

“Sir! Yes, sir!” Gooding barked back.

Major Filipovich poked his head over the top of his cubicle, then quickly disappeared, as fast as a turtle sucking its head back into its shell.

“We need to get something out there right now!”

“You mean the al-Kadhimiya mosque incident, sir?”

“No, the fact that there’s now soft-serve ice cream at the DFAC.” Colonel Laser Beams sent two buzzing red lines through the air, drilling holes into Gooding’s forehead. “
Of course
I mean the mosque bombing, PAO. For God’s sake, Sergeant, get with the game plan.”

“Yes, sir,” Gooding, chastened, sputtered. “I-I’ll have something for you to look at in two minutes, sir.” Without being too obvious, he used the heel of his hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then he did a little
tappity-tap-click
number on his keyboard and pulled up a press release template labeled “Terrorist Atrocities.” The laser beams still boring into the back of his skull, Gooding knuckled down and started changing names and dates.

“Very good, I’ll wait.” The chief rocked back and forth on his heels. “By the way, where’s your boss?”

Gooding didn’t miss a beat in his keyboard tap dance. “Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad is in a meeting, sir.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet. Probably in close conference with a slice of apple pie over at the DFAC, huh?”

Gooding half-turned in his chair and gave the chief what he hoped would be interpreted as a conspiratorial grin and not a sneer of insubordination. “No comment, sir.”

(Eustace Harkleroad was, in fact, at that very moment in the Post Exchange buying the last two bags of Cheetos cheese puffs and a six-pack of Diet Coke. He would spend the rest of the day in his office scrolling through SMOG reports and nervously brushing cheese dust from his Desert Camouflage Uniform, where it fell on his lap and belly like an accusatory beacon.)

The chief snapped his fingers and pointed at Gooding’s computer screen. “Back to work. We need to stay ahead of this one. Tempest fugit and all that shit.”

Peck-peck-peckity-peck-peck
.

The chief hovered over Chance’s shoulder, jingling the loose change in his pocket and occasionally providing guidance on a word here and a word there, shaping, patting, and molding the press release so that Division Headquarters could eventually issue accurate information in coordination with the Ministry of Interior but keeping the words generic and hazy enough to allow for wiggle room when this all came boomeranging back to them.