The Girl in Green (23 page)

The wind picks up with nightfall, as the air cools faster than the land. She drives along the uneven road between the undulating tents and past children in shabby clothing, as the men smoke and the women gather up their water jugs for the long walk.

On her mobile, she calls Ahmed in the radio room. He answers, and she drills him.

‘What's going on north-west of Mosul?'

‘I'm sending the sitrep memo around soon. There were roadblocks and—'

‘I know that part. Skip ahead. What's going on? What blew up?'

‘It's unclear. There's been an attack of some kind on one of the roadblocks. The police say there was an explosion and some gunfire. Everyone except your team is either back already or has been diverted to Zakho. I have one UNICEF team inside city limits there, and I expect them to be at the hotel in a few minutes, just before curfew. I will give their names to the police, but I think they are very busy now. They will be of no help right now.'

‘Yeah, OK. Thanks, Ahmed.'

‘Do any of them have a smartphone?' he asks as an afterthought. ‘I could do a Find My Phone. We usually leave those activated here.'

‘Benton has an iPhone, but it's my personal one, and I don't think I have that setting on. I'm not very technical.'

‘There's nothing else I can do.'

‘Keep me abreast of developments out there. I was speaking with Thomas when we got cut off. I think it's when the blast occurred. I think they were there, and close enough to have been hit by it, or at least seriously startled. I think we have a problem. I'm going to be at Louise's office.'

‘This is very bad. I have to tell UN security.'

‘Yes, it is.'

Shukran
she says, and hangs up.

By the time the call is over, she's inside the foyer at the ICRC's sub-delegation office. Farrah is gone for the night. Like most national staff, she lives in Dohuk, and they want her back before nightfall, too.

The lights to the facility are all off, and the space feels hollow and abandoned, except for Louise's single bulb. She works late, and typically sleeps on the sofa. She's unmarried, and this isn't a family duty station. Märta has long suspected that Louise might be slightly OCD. It made her an excellent lawyer before she joined the movement, and she's a good case manager, but she lacks a certain social flexibility — she's a stickler for rules, which is going to be a problem, given what Märta plans to say next.

Louise frowns as Märta comes in. ‘Shouldn't you be at home? Basking in the warm glow of Netflix?'

‘My idiots are missing.'

‘The ones from this morning?'

‘And the driver, yes. And now there's a girl with them.'

Louise pushes back from the desk. She says nothing.

‘You want to say “I told you so,”' Märta says, plopping onto the sofa across from Louise's desk. ‘I'll say it for you.'

‘Are you worried? Communication failures happen all the time.'

‘Handset is getting nothing, and Benton's phone went dead during a bomb blast. I don't know how close they were. I can't send anyone to get them.'

‘Herb and Tigger would go.'

‘I'll bet they would, which is why I won't ask. I don't run a private military company.'

‘I can't get involved, for obvious reasons, but I can pass on some numbers. The private military companies are a part of life now,' Louise says, removing a piece of maple sugar candy from a green cardboard box. ‘Want a piece?'

‘Too sweet.'

‘You eat that salty licorice.'

‘Salty.'

‘Did you give him a backup phone?' Louise asks.

‘Who?'

‘The older gentleman.'

‘Yes, I did.'

‘Are you having an affair with him?'

‘Yes.'

‘How long has it been going on?'

‘Two nights, twenty-two years apart.'

‘I don't have a label for that,' Louise says.

‘Neither do I.'

‘What are you doing, Märta?'

‘I'm doing what I'm always doing here. I'm trying to protect civilians while doing no harm.'

‘You may have to rethink your methods.'

21

They are hostages and alive, off-road, and heading south in another white Toyota Land Cruiser.

Moe had put the hood on Benton's head before pushing him into the back seat. He could hear Adar's cries, Jamal's heavy breathing, and Arwood's bullshit, too, until something struck his remaining words out and Arwood finally stopped talking.

Larry must be driving, because Benton heard the diesel engine start while Moe was still beside him. Unless there are more than two of them now. Time will tell.

There is no good direction to travel in, but south is worst, because south of Ninawa province is al-Anbar and the great western desert where ISIL is retrenching. There are no mapped roads that pass through it. The highway from Mosul to Baghdad is far to the east. As far as Benton knows, nothing passes directly through the desert itself, but he doesn't know much: a map is only a map, and not every road is documented on it.

They drive for more than twenty minutes. They are safer inside the car. They can be shot anywhere, so it's unlikely to happen where it will make a mess.

The breeze from the open window presses against Benton's hood, filling his nostrils with the fabric, and for a moment he can't breathe. His neck cramps as he turns away. It is only when he lowers his head in defeat that the fabric bunches and he can breathe again through a small gap near the neck.

Benton's inner thigh starts to vibrate.

His world is black, so he cannot see whether anyone else has noticed. The phone's silent vibrations are muffled between the vinyl seat and his leg. He'd forgotten it was there. His captors didn't search him after taking his primary phone and satchel away, because most men frisk others poorly.

Benton lifts his hips to keep the phone from vibrating against anything other than himself. There are wind gusts and engine rumble, tyre buzz, and scree kicking up into the chassis. They harmonise a dull white noise that fills the cabin and insulates the sound.

The sun is almost down. He can feel that. Desert voices belong to women. It would be nice to hear Märta's voice, if only he could answer the phone.

Hello?
he'd say.

Thomas? Where are you?

Held hostage. I should have listened to you.

Would you like to come back?

Yes, please.

This is the conversation he wants to have. It is not her voice, though, he is hearing. It is Vanessa's.

Moe is sitting in the far-back seats. He says something to Larry, the driver, that Benton doesn't understand. It must be something he doesn't mind Adar or Jamal hearing. The vehicle turns. No one else says a word.

The driver slows, and later slows further. The light changes. They are behind a hill now, or in a garage, or the sun has set entirely. The temperature drops.

Märta — assuming it was Märta — has stopped calling. She tried three times.

Could it have been Charlotte? She's been trying to reach him. She's been wanting to tell him he's a cretin for turning on her mother after ignoring them both. She wants to explain to him — he supposes — that he has no right to disappear at a time like this, to place something distant and historical and abstract like peace in the Middle East over something proximate and tangible and immediate like herself and her mother. She will be eloquent in her juxtapositions and her line of reasoning. She will be linear and faithful to logical progression, and she will substantiate her claims on accepted norms of social behaviour among adults, which she learned about from someone other than her father.

It couldn't have been Charlotte, though. This isn't his phone. It is Märta's phone. She has called it three times, and he hasn't answered. Now he has to trust that she knows what to do with silence.

The Land Cruiser stops after hours on the road and off it. The route has been too complex to memorise, and the sun has set, so Benton is completely without his bearings. All he knows, for certain, is they have gone up. Way up. When the door is opened, cold air rushes in, along with the new danger. It is almost welcome.

Moe yells at his hostages to get out, and slaps their heads, giving them a direction to walk. Adar has stopped her crying. There are no city sounds. There's no traffic or village life. They are someplace desolate. Unwitnessed.

A third man comes out to meet them. His footfalls are crisp. He shuffles as he walks. He mumbles quietly to the other men. He sounds surprised. He is asking questions.

Benton names him Curly.

The longer Curly speaks, the angrier he gets at Larry and Moe. Whatever he says, he is saying in front of Jamal and Adar, who surely understand what's being said. Which either means it doesn't matter because it's incidental, or he's going to kill them all anyway, so it's also incidental.

Nothing can be deduced here. Even Sherlock Holmes would be lost.

Moe grabs Benton's arms and cuffs them behind his back, using a zip cuff.

Benton gently pushes his wrists outward as far as possible while Curly tightens them; too tight, but they would have been tighter if Benton hadn't pressed back.

Moe pushes and slaps them as they walk blindly. After twenty steps from the car, Benton's feet land on something different from the packed earth. It is smooth and manmade. The pressure on his ears increases. There is an echo. It is even colder. It smells like a musty cellar suffering from water damage.

It's into this chamber that Arwood decides to speak. Again.

‘I said before that there's money to be made off us. But I forgot to tell you this. If you don't make a deal for our release, you'll be the ones paying the price. My people are watching. I strongly suggest you make a low ransom demand, take your money, and get this done. Because if you don't, you're dead men walking.'

At least four distinct voices laugh. So there are four Stooges, who speak English well enough to chuckle at Arwood.

Which introduces Shemp as the fourth stooge. And this means that Benton is running out of Stooges faster than they are.

When Benton's hood is removed, he sees nothing. His eyelids are sticky, and his vision blurry. The glaring bare bulb on the ceiling is little help. When he does manage to focus, he makes out a square room about five metres by five metres, with slits on the wall in front of him near the ceiling, like in a World War II pillbox. To his right is a door of drab-green sheet metal and rust. It is closed. To his left, there is another that seems more robust and may lead outside. There are two dirty mattresses on the floor behind him, and nothing else.

When his eyes focus, he sees that Arwood's hood has been removed as well, his arms bound behind him. Jamal and Adar are there, too, standing in the corner as though they can avoid their circumstance by giving it a wide berth.

He turns, and sees that the door to the outside is closed as well. They are all boxed in together.

‘Everyone OK?' Benton asks.

Jamal nods, and Adar is immobile and hangs her head. Her face has vanished into the darkness of her hair, which shields her.

‘We're going to need a plan,' Benton says.

‘Oh, I have a plan,' Arwood says. ‘I wasn't bluffing. We're being watched. I've got people.'

22

It has been said that the US Army was designed by geniuses to be run by idiots. When Arwood returned to the United States in June 1991 as Operation Provide Comfort wound to a close with a whimper, he wondered what they had been geniuses at doing.

He avoided a court-martial somehow, and the mandatory ‘bad conduct' or dishonourable discharge that comes with it. Instead, he was given an ‘other than honourable' discharge. At first, he had no idea what that meant, and didn't care. His buddies called it ‘bad paper', and after that they weren't his buddies anymore. Apparently, bad paper is contagious, and it doesn't matter how you contracted it.

He went home to his parents' house, because he had no apartment or job. It was a nondescript white ranch house with three small bedrooms. At first, this was exactly the atmosphere he needed. It was a staid purgatory that demanded nothing of him, gave nothing in return, and offered no judgement, because there was no one around who cared enough to be judgemental. Not until his father chewed him out.

After that, Arwood decided to call Veterans Affairs and see if he could get some help from them. He wasn't suicidal or anything, but he wanted to know what they could do to help him out, because he was lower than he'd ever been, felt more alone than he knew was possible, and the furthest into the future he could imagine was reaching for the door handle that led outside.

It was kind of interesting speaking with the Department of Veterans Affairs, because Arwood learned that the US government considers eligibility for psychological counselling to be a reward for not really needing it. By excluding veterans with less-than-honourable discharges, they were excluding those who had acted the worst in a war — probably for psychological reasons — and, rather than helping them out, instead set them loose on the general population, resulting in pretty predictable violence, wife-beating, alcoholism, criminality, family disintegration, long-term unemployment, welfare, emergency medical costs, unpaid medical bills, loan defaults, drug use, federal and state drug-enforcement costs, state legal fees for prosecuting criminals, prison costs, and appeal processes, not to mention all the traumatised children they beat the crap out of.