We detained the sheiks’ sons, though battalion let them go the next day, since none of them lived with their father and they all claimed ignorance of the body. The remains were sent to Baghdad and then to Germany for identity confirmation. Per higher’s instructions, we spent the rest of the afternoon digging up the entire yard, looking for more bodies. We didn’t find any.
We returned to the outpost in the early evening, just as the desert beetles began trilling. Chambers met me at the top of the stairs, under the watchful stares of the Iraqi wall mural. He’d donned his body armor for a night patrol while I was preparing to shed mine.
“You found him,” he said.
“Believe so.” I stood straight and proud.
“Huh.” He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly, like a man finding air after a long swim. When he opened them, his eyes had turned to chips of glass. “My turn to say thank you.”
He stuck out a wristless right hand. I shook it and tried not to wince when he squeezed too hard.
“Where is he?” Chambers asked. “I’d like to see him.”
“Oh.” It was like I’d removed some great millstone from around Chambers’ neck. He wasn’t looking at me with contempt, or even irritation. Something had changed between us. I’d done something he couldn’t, that he hadn’t. He respected me now. Which made telling him that his friend’s bones were already en route to Baghdad even harder.
I reached down and put my hand on his shoulder, where armor met cloth. His shoulder was tense, but he didn’t shrug me away.
“We good?” Chambers asked. He wasn’t looking directly at me, but he wasn’t looking away from me, either. His right arm had gone slack, and he was balling his hand into a fist.
“Yeah,” I said. “We good.”
With that, he was gone into the Ashuriyah night. I stayed on those stairs for a long time, chewing over his words and the miracle we’d just stumbled across.
26
The hell of July passed in a seared haze. Hours and days melted into one another under a sun so tyrannical the soldiers began calling it the Sultan. Siestas weren’t sometimes anymore, but most of the time. On the barren stretches of no-man’s-land and in the alleyways of town, we asked the Sultan for compassion. There was no response.
We patrolled during the mornings. For our efforts, the locals called us majnuns, madmen. They weren’t wrong. “Don’t you understand?” they asked. “The insurgents work at night.” In between, I smoked a lot of cigarettes and drank a lot of Rip Its and watched DVDs about 1960s-era Madison Avenue and Prohibition-era gangsters. They made me miss home without reminding me of it.
We’d made national news for finding Rios. NO MAN LEFT BEHIND was the headline blasted out by the army to every news service that still gave a shit. I spoke to an Associated Press reporter over the phone, reading a statement prepared by a public affairs officer. “We acted on a tip provided by a local, evidence that Iraqis are ready and willing to take control of their nation,” I said. “As important as this moment is for Americans and the U.S. military, it’s just as important for the Iraqi people.”
“You believe that?” the reporter asked. “The violence numbers are increasing all over the country.”
“Sure,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I?”
My mom found my quote in ten different American newspapers and cut out and framed each one, even though they were all from the same AP article. “You’ll want these someday,” she assured me.
Even Will was impressed. “This is a big deal,” he said. “And good leverage for you when you make your move against Chambers. What’s the deal with that, anyways?”
“Nothing new,” I said. I still hadn’t told my family about the firefight or the medal for valor. I didn’t want to worry my parents. I didn’t tell Will for other reasons.
A two-star general called from the Pentagon, asking to speak to me about finding the remains. “You Porter brothers sure are something,” he said. “I want you on my staff. Could use some hard-chargers back here, whip some bureaucrats into shape.”
“Think I just want to stay here, sir,” I said. “But thank you.”
He laughed and explained that he’d meant after we redeployed. I took down his contact info.
Other than a long afternoon spent patching the security hole in the outpost Haitham had found before the firefight, the war went back to normal. The headaches lingered, something Doc Cork attributed to too many Rip Its and too little sleep. Each evening around dusk, our company’s leadership gathered, the only time I saw Captain Vrettos anymore. And every morning around dawn, I met my platoon’s night patrol as they filed into the outpost, scorpions on their shoulders, fatigue on their faces.
“Everything good?” I always asked Chambers.
Everything always was.
We settled into a strange sort of routine, the kind that demanded our time yet nothing of our attention. I began thinking that maybe we could really ride out the rest of the deployment and make it home all right. A few days later, I began believing it.
Then Snoop said the cleaning woman needed to speak with us.
Lying in bed, hands wrapped behind my head, I sighed and paused the DVD player on my lap. Among other things, my patience for counterinsurgency and its endless meetings had wilted in the summer heat.
“Fuck that noise,” I said. It was late morning and we were alone in my room. “I don’t care about Shaba anymore. Or sheiks, or their daughters. It’s all bullshit, a myth for stupid people.”
When I tried to go back to my show, Snoop shook the bed frame. “Yo!” he said. “She say she has information on Haitham.”
Higher’s need to capture Haitham had become a parody of itself. It’s all they asked about, all they cared about. Captain Vrettos did his best to shield us from the Big Man’s furies, though he’d taken to calling their meetings “Death by Colonel.”
“Haitham,” I said, pressing pause again.
“Haitham,” Snoop repeated. He still didn’t believe the town drunk was capable of being a terrorist mastermind. I put on my uniform top and boots, and we walked downstairs into a council office. Alia waited in the dark, already seated, the room smelling of honeysuckle and kerosene.
I flipped the light switch and we took a seat across from her in white plastic chairs. She had her hands crossed in her lap and her eyes on the ground.
“Sing me a song,” I said. “And make it good.”
Alia looked up at Snoop, confused.
“Damn it,” I said, this time in English. None of the locals could ever wade through my Arabic, despite my being able to understand them.
“You found Shaba?” she asked. She’d varied her usual outfit with a gray head scarf and eye shadow the color of dirty ice. I nodded, proud of what we’d accomplished, no longer bothered by how it’d come about. She asked where his bones were.
“Texas,” Snoop said. “With his family.”
She bowed her head and mumbled something I didn’t understand.
“Iraqi curse,” Snoop said. “She’s upset the body went to America.”
I asked why. She raised her head and explained she’d hoped he’d be buried in Ashuriyah so she could pay her respects. I considered asking Snoop why she thought that would’ve happened, but remembered we’d ended our last meeting suspecting her of understanding English.
“Haitham,” I said, trying not to sound irritated. I reached into a cargo pocket, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, and set it on the table. “Where is he?”
She pulled the money to her. “He walks around the far southeast of town,” she said. “Where the tribal leaders used to live, before the Collapse. I saw him there two days ago, standing at the gates of Sheik Ahmed’s abandoned estate.”