‘Where is this again?’
They waited by the entrance to the transport dock. Three rows of vehicles, the noise shuddering through the garage, the fumes rising. Santo pointed out a mechanic who stood among the security and drivers as they decided on a running order. Santo waved the man over. ‘This is Pakosta, he’s been here longer than me.’ Pakosta wiped his hands on a rag as he came to them. Confident and fresh, he shook Rem’s hand as they were introduced.
‘Should have stayed here,’ he said to Santo. ‘Had a fight. No one wants to ride in the first set.’
‘It’s that bad?’
Pakosta shrugged. ‘The problem is how they drive. People fall asleep. Lose the road. They won’t slow down or stop. I’m sick of picking dogs out of fenders. Last week one ran through a herd of goats. Refused to stop. They think if they stop then they’re dead. Most are high on chaw anyway.’ Pakosta pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘They wear adult diapers. Honest to god. Like monkeys. Don’t even stop to shit. You don’t want to go inside those cabins after a long haul.’
Santo asked Pakosta when he was done, and Pakosta said he was looking for an extension. ‘You mean here, right? You’re asking when am I done here?’
‘You heard of Camp Liberty?’
Pakosta looked up in the air in thought. ‘Which one?’
‘South-east. Al-Muthanna. On the way to Kuwait.’
Pakosta nodded, he knew it. ‘Camp Crapper? Off Highway 80 someways? I’ve been there on a recovery. It’s not occupied. Why?’
‘He’s putting a team together.’
‘For?’
‘A short job, managing the burn pits.’
‘They need people for that?’
‘The pay is good.’
‘They dump stuff and set fire to it. Why do they need people?’
Rem said he didn’t know, and Santo asked if it mattered. Pakosta said he guessed it didn’t. Santo asked a second time if he was interested, and Pakosta answered that he’d sooner just wait in Amrah and see what came up.
Ready to leave, Rem began to make his excuses. Pakosta rolled up his sleeve.
‘You see this. Here.’ He held up his arm to show a fresh scratch, a short thick line, as thick as a finger. ‘Nearly died last night.’ Santo and Rem looked at the scar.
‘What is that?’
‘We were recovering a vehicle on North Jalla. We just got it hitched and someone took a shot.’
‘Is that a graze? You saying it just missed you?’ Santo leaned in to look closer.
‘They shot out the bulb from the headlight. Burned right through.’ He turned his arms so he could look.
Santo disagreed. ‘Doesn’t count. No one’s getting rich off a miss.’
As they walked away Rem and Santo were silent.
* * *
Imagine you could do something undeniably, unquestionably good. That dropped into your hands was the opportunity to achieve One Good Thing.
Imagine a man stumbling across a motorway, blind, out of his mind, and you beside him, guiding, making those split-second choices.
Let’s say it’s only temporary. Let’s say it’s in your power to grant someone a reprieve. You can snatch them away, and offer a short respite. And maybe what’s coming might become less of a certainty?
Rem slept, woke, slept again, revived the same dream of scooping people from highways, buildings, cars — elemental dreams with floods and fires. Dreams of stress not salvation. The last hours of the night he slept heavily and decided on a plan. These men in Fatboy’s book were lined up, dead certainties while they remained at ACSB.
LIBERTY
The story as Watts tells it goes something like this: it’s his third time in Iraq, he’s working directly with Southern-CIPA on comms across the entire South-Central region — we’re talking basic communications, because everything digital and terrestrial has been looted, bombed, looted. Not one hub or exchange has survived intact. They haven’t come close to re-establishing the basic services available fifteen years ago, it’s that backward. (Watts sits in a folding chair. Magisterial. Elbows on knees, thick forearms, a broad forehead, and explains himself in a voice Rem would describe as Midwestern, grained, husky, rangy.) What you have to understand, he says, is the mentality of the Iraqi versus the mentality of the average Westerner. An Iraqi, for example, can’t be relied on to innovate. You can’t give an Iraqi a job and expect it to be done; these guys have been trained over decades to do nothing. This isn’t your average Arab. You have to give explicit instructions and tell them step by step what you want and exactly how it’s going to happen, and even then you have to supervise. Why? Because these people don’t improvise. They have to be told. Free food and regular government handouts have made them lazy and unambitious. It’s all clan-like, top-down, individual responsibility just isn’t in the picture. Alongside this, there’s the talent of the Iraqi to completely fuck up anything that might look like progress. Which brings him to Rule Number 1: if something can be dismantled it will disappear. He’s seen whole substations stripped in one evening.
So anyway, the story: they’re scrambling to establish basic communications, with the mightily reduced aim of refitting a minimal seven out of the seventy-nine exchanges and substations. That’s seven. Count them. Seven. Less than nine per cent of the number they’ve been paid to complete. Alongside this his team is also responsible for the main communications router for the company — that’s HOSCO, remember — so every speck of information, every byte, comes through his small four-man team, and they get to hear everything. Every blip of information the parent company is telling its subsidiaries, and every anxious twitch those subsidiaries are feeding on to their project managers, everything but everything is filtered through this team. And let me tell you, it’s chaos. So, early one morning, HOSCO’s network goes wild. A message from one of the division directors announces that a statement will be made in Washington that very morning and the content of this announcement is to be passed, immediately, to all senior staff. According to this director, the statement they are waiting for is a follow-up to a statement made by the President himself, in which, while touring southern Iraq, he inadvertently blabbed out information on a project that was not intended to be made public. At. This. Point. This statement has slipped out so far ahead of schedule it threatens to kill the project unless they act quickly. You follow? Washington is now obliged to dump a fuckton of money upon said project, and unless HOSCO is ready for this shit-shower of money, they’ll miss out altogether on the mother of all projects. The story, Watts says, is a classic.
* * *
First though comes the story about the trip.
The commander-in-chief’s visit has been scheduled for a long time. The visit is little more than a fly-’n’-stop, a series of parsed hand-waves at relevant outposts along the Iraq — Kuwait border. Things aren’t right in Washington, and what was a planned pre-exit howdy to the remaining teams has become politically toxic.
Picture this: Air Force One, accompanied by small fighter jets prowling wing-tip to wing-tip, wasps cutting through a blue hood of sky toward a copper horizon, a jagged edge of what might be mountains but is in fact the smoke of burning refineries. The mission is important. Everyone agrees that there are few usable photographs of the commander-in-chief alongside his forces because he has the bad habit of looking bored while speaking with people he does not know.
At Camp Navistar the commander-in-chief and team decamp to a fleet of helicopters to be flown direct to the 0–9 at Camp Hope. In readiness the base has long been secured and emptied of all non-nationals, but right at the last minute the media-unfriendly wounding of four Iraqi civilians outside the compound makes the stop at Camp Hope ill-advised. Instead, the commander-in-chief will make his announcement on changes to the Third Iraq Key Strategic Plan at the next nearest manned station, Provision Camp Liberty on Route 567 in South-West District 2 near Amrah City. The change, mid-transit, makes it necessary to gather a great deal of information en route.