The Girl in Green (28 page)

‘We're not the US military, Herb. And that's not what's happening here,' Märta says.

‘NGOs do more or less the same thing. Unfinished projects, unkept promises, unbalanced pay scales, disrespect for local knowledge and experience — it's close enough to the same thing. And, no, we're not doing that with Jamal, because I'm not going to let it happen. And if anything comes down to the wire, he's my priority.'

‘I'll notify the British and American embassies of Benton's and Hobbes's status,' Tigger says. ‘And I suggest I call Clip Maxwell at Firefly Consulting. We need to set up a crisis-management group. And then, my friends, we need to sleep. Tomorrow will be a very full day.'

25

Arwood jolts to his feet when he hears the gunshots. Benton rolls onto his knees and presses his head to the mattress, inhaling its body odour and mould, before taking hold of a knee and pushing himself upward to stand.

Arwood is already at the door by the time Benton is ready. He has pressed his ear against it. Arwood's face is placid in the harsh light of the solitary bulb.

‘What do you hear?' Benton says.

‘Shh.'

Benton watches Arwood reposition his ear to the left, lower on the door. His face is unchanged.

‘If they killed those kids—' Benton mumbles.

Arwood moves quickly from the door to Benton, turns himself around, and, with his hands still bound in plastic cuffs, grabs hold of Benton's belt, unbuckles it, unsnaps and unzips his trousers, and thrusts his hands down them to collect the phone.

‘They kill children all the time,' Arwood says, ripping the phone from the Velcro. ‘Oh, shit. It's an iPhone, isn't it?'

‘I don't know. I didn't look. I guess. Why?'

‘No buttons — that's what's wrong with it. Ever tried working one of these with your hands tied behind your back?' Arwood slips the phone into his back pocket for now, needing his hands to do up Benton. ‘User-centred design, my arse.'

Arwood reassembles Benton's trousers. As he does, Benton notices that Arwood has altered his first tattoo from when he enlisted. It now reads
Death Before Dishonorabilishness.

Finished, Arwood takes the phone out of his pocket and presses the Home button. He turns so Benton can see it. ‘Is it on? Is it lighting up?'

‘No.'

Arwood rotates it in his hands and finds the power button. He depresses it and places his thumb over the speaker, muffling the chime.

‘Arwood, what do you do for a living?'

‘I solve problems. Is it on?'

Benton looks down. ‘Whose problems? And, yes, it is.'

‘Is it charged? Icon's in the upper right.'

‘Yes, it is.'

‘We've got a signal?'

‘No. Whose problems, and how do you solve them?'

‘You know that saying, “Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach him to fish, feed him for life”? That's all very sweet until people come to take his fish away and make him a slave. Meanwhile, you give a man a gun, he can get as many fish as he wants. And keep them. We're on the GSM phone network in Iraq. There should be a signal.'

‘It could be the concrete walls,' Benton says. ‘I'm still wondering why those slats are positioned so high.'

‘We're in a bunker or military fortification of some kind. Something old. We need to find a signal in here. I'm going to walk and you're going to follow me, checking the bars. Here we go.'

Arwood stoops to raise the phone higher, and Benton stoops to see it. Together they shuffle across the room like two old men with their hands behind their backs as they scan for a signal.

‘No one would give me a job when I got back,' Arwood says as they walk. ‘With my discharge papers, I couldn't get a job at Denny's or Dairy Queen. Bad paper leaves you worse off than if you were a felon. People don't forgive a bad discharge. They feel like you personally let them down, no matter where you went or what you actually did, or the fact that you served and they didn't, and that their pain doesn't mean shit. It's like being convicted of treason and then being freed rather than facing the firing squad. There are no second chances, no do-overs, and no cleaning that record, no halfway houses, no rehab. Some people deserve that. Some don't. Mainly, I worked flea markets and gun shows across the Midwest.'

‘But you now have professional-level knowledge of geography and international affairs. You hadn't heard of the BBC when I met you in '91.'

‘I found business better in the Middle East than in the Midwest. Travel really is broadening. Besides, I was never stupid. I just didn't know anything.'

Arwood stops by the long wall across from the mattresses and looks up at the slits in the bunker walls. ‘Do you really think it's possible,' he says, ‘to spill every kind of blood, experience every kind of human emotion, and weep every kind of tear on a piece of land for over six thousand years, and actually leave nothing behind in the soil? A psychic scar of some kind? I don't believe that. I mean, forget the Bible. This place has been populated since the Sumerians. That's six thousand years. You ask me, this land has to be haunted. It has to be. It's a ghost factory.'

‘Arwood,' Benton says, standing himself upright. ‘If you came here to murder that man, why did you bring me with you? Or Jamal? Why couldn't you have done this nasty business yourself, and left us out of it?'

Arwood turns and faces Benton. He looks surprisingly young and sincere.

‘I had the intel on the colonel. But the guy I bought it from said something that made me think. So I sat on it. And then the mortar attack happened, and it all came together. That girl is the reason I'm here. But the parallels are impossible to ignore. Even you have to see them. Last time, the colonel lived, and she died. This time, he died, and she's going to live. Last time, we didn't take Baghdad. This time, we did. Last time, we were battling the government; this time, it's the insurgents. It's all inside out, but exactly the same. Don't you see?'

‘So you came here to murder him.'

‘I came here to confront him. Then he pulled out that same Makarov and pointed it at me, so I blew him away. And you know what? The Klingons are wrong. It's actually much more satisfying to get revenge while you're in the mood for it. That's what happened, and I don't regret it. It is scary and freakish to kill another person, but I swear to God there are times when the pros outweigh the cons. So why are you here? No one put a gun against your thick head.'

‘I felt I owed you. You came to get me in Samawah.'

Arwood shakes his head. ‘You don't owe me anything. I'm the one who convinced you to go look around. I put you there.'

‘No, you were right. I needed to do my job. You reminded me of that.'

‘I was twenty-two years old. What the hell did I know?'

‘You can be right without understanding why. Kids are like that all the time.'

‘I don't believe that's why you're here,' Arwood says. ‘You must have been looking for any excuse to get out of England, and I gave you one. You said in the car that things are rocky with your wife. So is that it? You're running as far away from yourself as possible? If that's the case, then I've got bad news for you. Buckaroo Banzai was right: no matter where you go, there you are. And so here we are. Again. Back at Checkpoint Zulu.'

‘I think,' Benton says, ‘that the reason my wife cheated on me is that she was unable to reach me any other way. And I think this was the case because I lost something significant after what happened to us here in '91. Though it may seem cowardly, the reason I'm here is to try to recover what I lost so that I might have a different relationship with my wife and daughter when I get back, if I ever do.'

Arwood is quiet for a moment before saying, ‘That actually makes sense.'

‘Well, thank you.'

‘Did you tell your wife this?'

‘No.'

‘Dude—'

‘It's a process,' Benton says.

Arwood, with nothing else to say on the matter, spins around and raises his arms to his waist. ‘Do you see my watch?'

‘Yes,' he says.

‘Read our coordinates to me. My hunch is that we're near Kursi in the Sinjar Mountains. You felt how we drove south-west, how it was flat, and then we started bouncing along going up again? How the road got all twisty, like we were in the Alps? My ears even popped. Only reason for roads to twist like that is mountains. There aren't many mountains down here — not on the way to al-Anbar. I think we're west of Tal Afar. This is not a high-rent district.'

‘Just … stop moving around. The numbers are very small.'

‘In your own time. No reason to rush.'

‘OK. It's N36° 23' 15.88”, E41°47'32.87”

‘Repeat them.'

Benton does.

‘Remember them.'

‘I can't possibly,' Benton says.

‘If they take the watch, or we're split up, or I'm killed—'

‘It's too many numbers. I'm not a computer. I'm thirsty, I'm tired, I'm in pain, I'm sixty-three years old—'

‘It's only eight numbers, not sixteen. You think of a building you know, you place each number in a room.'

‘Jamal and Adar might be dead. I'm not in the mood to play memory palace.'

‘Fine. Remember the longitude. They'll see it's near the road, and can start looking there. That's the second set of numbers. Forty-one is when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Picture it. Forty-seven was the year the National Security Act was signed by Truman, creating the CIA and the air force. Picture it. Thirty-two … um. That's tougher. Oh, '32 is when Babe Ruth played his last season. Made that called shot against Root. Shut Chicago up for probably the first and last time. We're talking baseball here, not cricket.'

‘That didn't happen. I saw a documentary. He was pointing to the dugout. They were heckling him, and he was responding that he only had two strikes. It's myth. Folklore.'

‘I saw that video with my own eyes.'

‘Yes, Arwood, but you don't know what it meant. Like the shots behind the wall.'

‘Stay focussed. Nineteen eighty-seven. I think
Ferris Bueller
'
s Day Off
was '86, unfortunately. Did you see
The Princess Bride
? That was '87.'

‘No.'

‘Mandy Patinkin? Robin Wright? Wallace Shawn? André the Giant?'

‘No.'

‘You have no memory of Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya saying, “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die”?'

‘No.'

‘Your life is empty. What about
Robocop
? That was '87, too.'

‘No.'

‘
Dirty Dancing
?'

Benton is silent.

‘Come on.'

‘I might have seen it.'

‘Cute little Jewish girl in the Catskill Mountains seduced by the gentile help, and their beatnik ways at the summer resort?'

‘I hadn't really—'

‘So: Pearl Harbor, air force, Babe Ruth,
Dirty Dancing
. All-American numbers. See? More coincidence. Makes it easier to remember.'

‘You used your American brain to make sense of the numbers, Arwood. That's why they are now American numbers. I'm wondering if you're really OK.'

‘We need to send those numbers.'

Benton has had enough. There is no way of sending those numbers. No way to type them into the phone. No way to catch a signal and ride it to safety on a moonbeam.

He steps backward to the wall, leans back against it, and eases himself to the floor. Once down, he rolls onto his side and massages his left shoulder by kneading it into the mattress, which is thin enough to be a hard surface.

Hands would be better — a woman's hands. Vanessa's and Märta's hands are different. Vanessa's are longer, softer, gentler, but she lacks strength in them. He confuses this sometimes with a mental state, as though her fingers lack will. Märta is all purpose. She's structured and orderly in her touch. She works it like a job. It's less sensual, less tender, but more productive. He needs both of them right now.

‘Don't quit,' Arwood says.

‘I need a second.'

‘Does this thing have voice recognition?' Arwood says, wiggling the phone behind his back for emphasis.

‘I have no idea, Arwood.'

Arwood presses the Home button to wake it up, then presses it again and holds it down. This activates Siri, Apple's chipper, artificially intelligent software.

‘Call Märta,' Arwood says loudly, despite the phone being behind his back.

‘
Kan du upprepa det?
'

‘What the hell was that?' Arwood says.