* * *
Alerted by the noise (a rough crank of gears and brakes, of a truck reversing at the camp gates rather than coming directly through) Rem came out of the Quonset, first walking then running to the gates. What were they doing? Just what was going on?
Strapped to the flatbed of a long trailer sat the burned-out front of a truck, a Scania — immediately recognizable as the vehicle in which Amer Hassan had died. Glassless and gutted, fire had stripped the interior, seared the seats down to their springs, left a sharp stink of burnt rubber, but the door, scorched and dulled by the heat, still held the HOSCO logo.
Rem stopped the truck as it backed through the gate and clambered up the footplate to ask Clark who was driving to tell him that this was not the vehicle he thought it was.
Pakosta and Santo looked one to the other.
‘Just tell me that you aren’t this fucking stupid. Tell me there is a sensible notion behind this.’ Rem jumped down and signalled Pakosta and Santo to get out. ‘Santo, tell me. Why would you bring this vehicle back to the camp?’
Santo began to explain that a call had come earlier saying that a convoy had passed through the previous night and the vehicle was on fire. Southern-CIPA had asked for it to be removed. Clearly, the vehicle couldn’t be left where it was, it was a danger to the other convoys, and could be set with IEDs, it was a hazard, a potential danger, and wasn’t this part of their job?
Pakosta pointed wearily to the cab on the flatbed. ‘Look. We’re doing exactly what we’re told. Stephen said we should move it.’
‘Stephen?’
‘Sutler. He spoke with CIPA this morning.’
Rem sprang close to Pakosta, face to face. ‘So, how, if it’s such a fucking danger, did you have the stupidity to approach the vehicle in the first place?’
Clark, half out of the cab, began to explain that the vehicle was upright when they arrived — it had been dragged upright, and they’d simply hauled it onto the flatbed. There wasn’t any choice. They couldn’t leave it there.
Santo folded his arms and muttered that he wasn’t paid for this.
‘Take this vehicle away. You back out, you dump this a million miles away, and you take some charges and destroy it.’
Rem drew back and pointed south to indicate where they should take the truck, then walked away without looking back.
* * *
Rem couldn’t bring himself to sit with the men at supper. Instead he started up the barbecue and picked out two of the burgers and watched them shrink as they cooked. On the other side of the awning he could hear Samuels and Clark, then Chimeno talking about the morning, and it was clear that they did not know he was there. Sutler came to the tent looking for ice or cold beer but found the coolbox empty. The men were sullen and when Watts asked what that was about earlier, Sutler refused to be drawn. As he left he said he had no idea.
Chimeno couldn’t figure it out. Everything was tits up. Did anyone know if they were working any more, and if so, who for? What was going on?
Clark sounded defensive. He still didn’t get it. What else were they supposed to do, and what was going on last night? His wife, what the hell was she doing? What was with that email — and there were others, they’d all seen them.
Rem could hear them re-load the coolbox. Chimeno struck a conciliatory tone. ‘You should have nuked it right where you found it.’
Clark opened his beer and swore.
‘About the truck.’ Chimeno attempted to reason through the morning. ‘It’s obvious. He feels responsible. Gunnersen sent the man out there. Think about it. There wasn’t any need for a translator, but Gunnersen sent him out. You should have talked with him first. Maybe if he’d known what you were doing there would’ve been a different reaction. Who knows? We’ve all been there. It’s not so unreasonable.’
Clark said he didn’t care. It wasn’t just about the truck. ‘What are we burning here? Does anyone know? Are they closing the camp? What exactly are we doing here? I mean, how do we know were not breaking some law burning this shit? Are we in trouble when we get back? You saw that list. How can any of this be legal?’
Rem waited for the men to disperse, then came around the awning to pick two cans out of the coolbox. He walked to the Beach to find Kiprowski.
* * *
He sat in the sand beside the boy and said he was sorry: about Hassan, about the men in the camp, about the camp itself. He offered Kiprowski one of the beers, and as Kiprowski accepted he asked if he’d seen the truck that morning.
Kiprowski nodded. ‘I heard,’ he said, ‘I didn’t see it.’
Rem waited before asking how he was doing.
‘I’m fine.’ Kiprowski cleared his throat. The beer unopened in his hands, his hands between his knees. ‘I’m good.’
Rem had to hold his breath before he spoke. ‘This is doing good?’
Kiprowski hung his head and his voice came low as a whisper. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
They sat in silence for a while, the sky barren, pinched of colour.
Kiprowski dropped back into the sand, his arms at his side, unanimated. ‘Something like this was always going to happen. You can’t have so much against you and expect to come out of it without something — I don’t know — happening.’
Kiprowski opened the beer and let the foam pour over his hand, where it hit the sand the grains gathered together as if contracting. ‘You said something to Pakosta about making a mistake you can’t afford.’ Kiprowski took a sip. ‘What did you mean?’
Rem had said this off the cuff after Pakosta had thrown a second flare into the pit, causing the gasoline, now airborne, to ignite and sweep over them; harmless enough, but unexpected.
‘He — I don’t know — has a particular talent.’
Rem looked over the abandoned vehicles at the foot of the dune, and felt a faint whip of disappointment. He’d watched them arrive, slung like dumb cattle and dragged by helicopter over the desert from Amrah City. There were older items, parts of a cart, a wagon without wheels. Un-funny. Mule-less. Foolish.
‘You remember that map. The route we came in on. The highway that stopped in the desert.’
Rem half-laughed. ‘Seems a while ago now, doesn’t it.’
Kiprowski drew his legs up. ‘I’ve been looking at Sutler’s maps. There’s never been a road there. The new maps he brought with him don’t show that road either. It’s only on the map from Southern-CIPA.’
‘Well, some of it does. We were driving on it.’
‘That turn on Route 567. Where we came off. That’s not on the map either.’ Kiprowski cleared his throat. ‘You look at any map and you’ll see there isn’t a turn anywhere on that road. It comes up straight from Kuwait and heads straight to Khat, then straight to Kamkun, then it starts turning, after Kamkun. You know how many accidents they’ve had on that road in the last nine months?’
Rem had no idea.
‘Twenty-two. I checked. Most are people following a map like ours, or people who haven’t driven that route in a while. Everyone expects it to be straight.’
Rem stood and brushed off the sand, tired at the useless compression of grief, the struggle to find plots and reasons to explain events that just happen because they can happen. ‘Look, I’ll leave you alone.’ He straightened up and pointed at Kiprowski’s beer can. ‘There’s more back at camp. It won’t last long.’
‘I’m stopping here.’
Rem warned that it was getting cold. The sky sucked the heat from the desert, and the temperature dropped quickly. Kiprowski said he’d be fine, for the last couple of nights he’d searched through the hulks of the scrapyard, a blue light in his hand, scanning under the vehicles for scorpions. The creatures absorbed the light and threw it back a spectral green, luminescent. ‘Did his nosebleed stop?’