Pakosta standing on the running plate kept up a slow solo jive and paused every now and then to mime being shot in the head, the heart, the crotch.
* * *
An hour out of Amrah City and the palms and the villages thinned out and knuckled into the slopes — primitive, Santo called them, pointing as he drove, so that Rem couldn’t be sure if he meant the place or the people. In many ways the villages appeared as tight as the old centre of Halsteren. You’d hear your neighbours, every detail, and you’d know them well. A few of the houses sported satellite discs and long aerials. Santo pointed them out. ‘If you want to fuck with someone, you go right to that house.’
Rem looked back at the line of trucks, Kiprowski’s head struck out of the second-to-last Humvee.
‘You see that?’
Santo turned in his seat and took a while to find what Rem was talking about. ‘Is that boy a retard?’
‘Thinks he’s on vacation.’
Rem called on the radio and asked Kiprowski to draw his head back inside the vehicle. Kiprowski gave a wave as he complied.
Santo tutted. ‘Certified.’
Beyond the groves and villages the land tired itself out, the bluffs and hills became distant, and the sky bifurcated, blue up top and a dirty skin-like pink along the horizon. Not a desert in the way Rem thought of deserts — as something tide-like, the wind working sand into ripples and banks — but instead a scabby gritty wasteland, hammered, used up, not a place of possibility, but a place with an over-busy history. Knackered. After a while they swapped drivers: Watts day-dreamed and Rem drove and Santo chattered to himself.
Rem focused so hard on the vehicle in front that the rough tarpaulin of the square back appeared to float, a soft fluttering box set at a fixed distance. He needed to thank Geezler and couldn’t decide the most appropriate method, then figured that saying nothing would be fine. People have their own reasons for helping you out, and in satisfying his own agenda Geezler probably didn’t realize the extent of the favour anyhow: eight men transferred to safety and security. For the first time he began to think seriously about re-establishing his business.
Santo asked Watts why he was here, and Watts explained about his wife and expected child. ‘I get back when it’s done. No point being there until it needs paying for.’
Santo looked to Rem and began to tell Watts about Matt Cavanaugh. ‘The guy who walked across the highway. You heard about this? The walker. The guy in the news?’ He cocked his thumb at Rem. ‘That’s his friend.’
‘I saw that. Why would a person do that?’
‘I had a business.’ Rem cleared his throat. ‘House painting. He worked for me, and he helped himself to a few things while we were at some of the houses. He didn’t take much. A ring, some watches. The watches were part of a collection. Just enough to cause trouble.’
Watts and Santo shook their heads. ‘You knew this man? A friend, you say?’ Then after a respectable pause: ‘So, how come he ended up walking across a highway?’
‘Details,’ Santo urged. ‘Details.’
Now Rem shook his head. ‘I don’t know much more. It happened while I was here. Maybe the question is why didn’t he do it sooner?’
‘You ever done anything stupid? I mean really stupid?’ Santo blew his nose into his hand. ‘Look, I’m still bleeding.’ He shook his hand out of the window and the gesture came as a shock to them, an invitation for trouble, a signal deserving a shot, an ambush.
‘As in, coming here?’
‘I mean stupid stupid. Animal stupid.’
‘Sober or what?’
‘Doesn’t matter. I mean insane.’
Rem watched the vehicle in front, teased forward, played with the space between them. ‘I stole a dog.’
Santo sucked air between his teeth in dismissal. ‘OK. Close. Like a prank? A joke, right? When you were a kid?’
‘Just before I came to Iraq.’
Both Watts and Santo laughed. ‘You did what?’
‘It’s complicated. I had a dog. A Staffordshire bull terrier. He went missing. I came home one time and he was gone. Doors were open and the dog was gone.’ Rem asked Santo to open a can for him. Red Bull was making him sick and he wanted something less sticky. ‘I thought I had a good idea who was responsible. So I went to that person’s house and I stole their dog.’
‘You got yours back?’
‘They didn’t have it. In fact, I doubt it had anything to do with them.’
‘But you have this other dog, right?’
‘I did. It was one of those small dogs. I took it back once I realized what I was doing. Sometimes these things seem like a good idea.’
‘You should have eaten it,’ Santo deadpanned.
‘You have issues. You know that?’
‘I have issues? I’m not the person who kidnapped a dog. Kidnapping is a felony, man or beast. Seven to nine.’
‘So why are you here?’ Watts asked Santo.
‘Because, Paul, is it Paul? I’m here to put the f in freedom.’
* * *
An hour after they’d separated from the convoy the road stopped. Rem woke to find nothing but rock and sand ahead of them. A blank field of sun-split stone that rose and ended in a haze.
‘Rem. We’re out of highway.’
Rem slowly sat up, looked past the lead Cougar at the desert, the absence of a road, looked back at the small line of vehicles idling behind them. Pakosta jumped out of the last truck. He’d taken off his flak jacket, changed into shorts and boots, a T-shirt, made an effort to look casual. Santo drew out the maps.
‘The road goes all the way, runs right along the border.’ Watts pointed out a fine and continuous line on the map, then looked to the desert, incredulous. The highway stopped at a line of barrels, metal oil drums. ‘Right here. See? There’s a road on the map, but nothing even close to a road out there. No tracks. Nothing.’
Rem rubbed his eyes, got out of the vehicle. Stood right where the road stopped and thought it strange how it looked new but just ended for no reason. He called to Pakosta. ‘Did you come this way before?’
Pakosta coolly shook his head.
‘None of this looks familiar?’
‘Nope.’ Pakosta straightened up, dropped his cigarette. ‘We came a different route out of Amrah.’
Rem shouted back to Watts and asked if he could bring the map.
As Watts came out of the Humvee, Rem checked the horizon, anxious that they were being watched.
‘Don’t worry.’ Pakosta turned a slow complete circle. ‘If there was anyone out there, we’d know by now.’
Watts spread the map over the hood and cursed the heat.
‘Show him where we are.’
Watts pointed to a line that ran alongside the Saudi border. Rem raised his sunglasses so he could see more clearly, but found the light too bright.
‘As far as I can make out,’ Watts traced his finger along a short section of the road, ‘we should be about here. We turned at the right place, but there’s no road.’
Rem nodded, he could see that.
‘Thing is,’ Pakosta advised, ‘without that road you have to go all the way back to Amrah, then take Jalla Road to get back out to Route 567. The way we came before.’
Rem started walking before Pakosta had finished. He called to the men in the security vehicles. If they returned to Amrah could they gather more security?
The first guard stepped down, settled his gun over his shoulder, mirrored sunglasses on so Rem couldn’t see his eyes. These men were ex-military, most of them brittle, unsympathetic. Santo called them Sparts, as in spare parts. ‘These guys are experiments. They come here to be entertained. The whole thing gives them a hard-on. They keep coming back until something gets shot off. Then we’re supposed to feel sorry.’