Red Birds

by Mohammed Hanif

  CHAPTER 26

  Momo

  I look around for Mutt. Trust him to disappear when the alarm went off. I am suddenly aware although the alarm is heard all over the Camp it carries a personal intimate message to me. It tells me that there is an American base, that’s where Bro Ali went, and never came back.

  There are rumours and rumours surrounding the Hangar since Bro Ali went and the planes stopped coming and the bombs stopped falling. Many spread by Mutt. When there is nothing to do he runs around it howling on moonlit nights. And sometimes, just to confuse the rumour-mongers, on pitch-dark nights as well.

  The alarm goes off at random hours, a three-minute shrill symphony that reminds everyone that this place, abandoned for the last seven months, is still protected, there is an electrical mechanism, which monitors the potential intruders, petty thieves looking for scrap metal, ambitious thieves hoping to find hidden treasures. They make sure that the alarm is tested at an unpredictable hour, sometimes when people are in the middle of their lunch, sometimes when they are about to put their heads on their pillows, giving people the impression that there is a clever bit of planning that goes into the security of the Hangar. Here’s a place where there has to be a clue about where Bro Ali is, otherwise why all this security after it has been abandoned?

  Sometimes you need to ask Father Dear things even when you are sure you are not getting any answers.

  He is sniffing his files like Mutt sniffs his female friends.

  ‘Is it just an abandoned base, or are they hiding something in there? Why don’t we just move in?’ I am not expecting a straight answer from him and I don’t get one.

  ‘People here are suspicious by nature,’ he says, putting his file aside. ‘They think if something is locked and has an element of security there has to be something worth stealing in there.’

  You have to be tactical with Father Dear. And, as Lady Flowerbody says, you always have to manage your expectations.

  ‘And are they wrong to be suspicious? Why still miles and miles of razor wire, why these signs saying IT’S NOT A THOROUGHFARE, INTRUDERS WILL BE SHOT, THIS PROPERTY IS PROTECTED BY GUARD DOGS, why don’t they want anybody near it, why this drama with the alarm going off, if they are not gonna protect anything inside it? Do you think they might come back?’

  The only way to keep him talking is to not mention Bro Ali.

  ‘My job description included ensuring that nobody goes in, not even me. It doesn’t say anywhere that if there is nothing inside it you can forget your duties. When there is nobody watching at a traffic signal, are you still supposed to stop or do you just say oh look no traffic, no cops I can just keep going.’

  ‘Why don’t we just move in so that you won’t have to worry about security? It’s our land after all.’

  Father Dear shakes his head as if I am suggesting an act of treason. ‘Who says I am worried about security? I am doing my job.’

  I respect his achievements. You don’t just become USAID Logistics Officer and keep the job seven months after they have left unless you know something about what’s in the Hangar. Or more likely in Father Dear’s case you are afraid of finding out what’s in the Hangar. Or what isn’t in the Hangar anymore.

  ‘There were people from fifteen countries in there,’ Father Dear says, clutching his files. ‘Daily review meetings. We had twelve thousand gallons in reserve fuel. There were eight types of bread on the buffet. We used to open a new box of brass polish every Friday.’ Father Dear is finally showing some emotion, he realizes it and retreats into his own head.

  ‘And then?’ I ask.

  ‘They took away my security badge,’ he says with such misery, as if they took away his manhood along with his badge. ‘They said they were restructuring.’

  I don’t want to remind him that they took away something more precious than his security badge: his firstborn.

  ‘Can we go in and have a look?’ I say and I don’t forget to look in his eyes. He is reluctant to give a straight answer. ‘It’s dangerous,’ he says, lowering his voice. He knows something about the place and doesn’t want to share. He is also afraid of losing his other son.

  ‘Father Dear, I know it’s not your fault, but do you have any idea why the bombings stopped after Bro Ali went in?’

  He looks down at his feet. I am never gonna be good at reading depressed people’s feelings but I think he sheds a tear.

  ‘You know that he wanted to go. And the people in the Hangar wanted him also. Who can say no to a son?’ he says. ‘Who can say no to Americans?’

  I don’t tell him my own plan: we have got a white man in the Camp. So he goes in and we follow him. It’s that simple.

  I think we are gonna have to drag Father Dear there too. With respect of course.

  CHAPTER 27

  Ellie

  ‘They know who you are,’ she says. ‘There are no secrets in the desert.’

  We are sitting at the edge of the pond. A couple of goats are eyeing us suspiciously as they take turns grazing and sneezing over the thorny bushes. She has asked me to follow her here. I am happy to follow her, hoping for a moment of privacy where she could give me a road map that will take me from here to a room in Diego Garcia, a couple of days to check if all my bones are intact, to give some of those taxpayer dollars to the folks discovering a new strain of PTSD, to make sure I had not surrendered any state secrets to the desert folks, as if the desert folks were interested in anything other than their next shipment of tinned beef.

  And now she tells me they know about me.

  What is there to know anyway? My whole CV could fit onto two lines: one man, 637 missions, a few thousand tons of the finest explosives deposited in some of the world’s most evil places. Some hits. Some misses. Current status: lost.

  How do they know? I thought I had been doing a good job of looking like a mid-level USAID executive, it basically involves listening to everyone patiently and then saying let’s continue the meeting after the lunch break. It is the kind of job for people who say they are interested in people because they are really not interested in anything. And although I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about people before ending up in this shithole, I was beginning to like this, people talking earnestly about sewage and cheating spouses, about the need for winter shelters and better ways of teaching maths. I had started to sense the possibility of a post-retirement career in the parallel universe called International Relief. Cath would approve. We could get posted to Darfur and maybe adopt a baby. It’d shake up the neighbourhood, the colour of the baby that is. Make them orphans, then adopt them, that’s how the world goes.

  ‘How do they know?’ I ask in an accusing voice. ‘I am sure they are used to people like me coming and going. I haven’t got my job description engraved on my forehead. Or have I?’

  She picks up a pebble and throws it in the pond. A small cloud of mosquitoes rises, hovers over the surface, then settles down.

  There are voices in the distance, vehicles stuck in sand, revving their engines, hushed voices, twigs breaking. Probably a bunch of kids trying to start a wildfire. It is probably against the Camp rules but then kids everywhere start fires because starting fires is forbidden.

  ‘You talk weird,’ she says. ‘Sometimes people are only guessing what you are saying.’

  I feel hurt. Why can’t I speak my own language? Half the damn world speaks bad English. Do I ever mind? She is talking to me in English. She is objecting to my presence, my speaking in English, in English. I can speak a few words of Arabic. Five, to be precise, if you count the word ‘Arabic’ itself. Now is it my fault that they don’t speak Arabic around here?

  ‘They call themselves Muslims and still don’t speak any Arabic. Why don’t they speak Arabic?’

  She looks at me like I’m a moron.

  ‘You are Christian, why don’t you speak Aramaic?’

  What the fuck is Aramaic? I want to say. But I need to steer the conversation away from religion and languages; no one ever wins. ‘I am o
nly a cultural Catholic.’ And then she goes into a righteous rage, typical of do-gooders far far away from home. ‘What the hell is a cultural Catholic? Someone who only half believes that His mother is a virgin? Someone who nails himself to a wooden beam over the weekend?’

  The twigs are crackling now, but I still can’t see any fire. In a very low voice which occasionally rises above the audible level, someone is singing. They might be sending a coded message, but it definitely sounds like someone singing. A gang of amateur singers trying to form a band in the wilderness, a promising subject for anthropology graduates but a bloody nuisance when you are trying to have a conversation about how to escape the barbarians and get home. But what is left of home? A three-bedroom condo, and a car gathering dust in the garage, and memories of Cath everywhere.

  ‘And why do you have to wear this flying suit all the time?’ she says. ‘Just borrow a local dress. And please stop calling this place a camp. This is home for the folks out here.’

  ‘People here wear all kinds of uniforms; that proves nothing. And everybody calls it a camp, it says so out there on the gate. Does it have another name?’ I decide to shut up. It is the kind of argument that got me in trouble with Cath, when she would hear me out quietly for fifteen minutes and then would only answer after four days. And now when I see her she doesn’t speak to me at all.

  But what I just said is kind of true. Half the refugee kids wear discarded uniforms from European police forces and paramilitaries. Anyone venturing in here for the first time could easily mistake it for a grand reunion of forgotten armies. There are teenagers who strut around in NATO generals’ uniforms, grandfathers puff on huqqas wearing overalls from the British infantry, a bunch of teenage girls have taken a shine to the French Foreign Legion’s berets.

  Why is an air force pilot with a simple flying suit considered a total alien in this freak show?

  ‘And my suit’s considered proof here in this humanitarian world of yours? If they were to start judging people by what they wear, half your camp’s population would end up in war crime tribunals in Amsterdam.’ I am positively furious now. I had taken for granted that she was an ally. That in this lost world she was my traffic controller, my direction finder, my navigation map. I thought we were natural allies, indispensable for each other. If two well-educated people stranded at the edge of a desert can’t stick together we have already lost half the battle.

  Yesterday we were natural, even spiritual, allies; today I am told that I don’t speak good enough English.

  ‘The war tribunals are held in The Hague,’ she says dismissively. ‘And nobody ends up there. That’s just for show. Unless you are some poor unlucky Serb and can’t afford a good lawyer.’

  I can’t decide if she is acting dumb, doing some essential part of her job or if she is just refusing to acknowledge how indispensable we are to each other. The only two like-minded people in the Camp, refusing to help each other.

  ‘Aren’t brown people back home always whispering to each other, in their own language? I’m not saying they are always scheming or plotting against us but isn’t that the truth? Don’t they do it in the subway, standing in Gap checkouts? Forget colour, forget nationality, aren’t we mutually dependent on each other? How are we going to defeat the forces of darkness if we can’t even help a good soldier get into a rescue helicopter and go home? Aren’t we together in this? Don’t we complete each other?’

  I want to continue but I stop. There are some simple facts of life that she is not ready to face, sometimes a man must hold back.

  If I didn’t bomb some place, how would she save that place? If I didn’t rain fire from the skies, who would need her to douse that fire on the ground? Why would you need somebody to throw blankets on burning babies if there were no burning babies? If I didn’t take out homes, who would provide shelter? If I didn’t take out homes who would need shelter? If I didn’t obliterate cities, how would you get to set up refugee camps? Where would all the world’s empathy go? Who would host exhibitions in the picture galleries of Berlin, who would have fundraising balls in London? Where would all the students on their gap years go? If I stop wearing this uniform and quit my job, the world’s sympathy machine will grind to a halt. You don’t hold candlelight vigils for those dying of old age and neglect. You need fireworks to ignite human imagination.

  I can see now that she belongs to that civilian world of eternal deceit, of well-earned loneliness, people wanting to arrive somewhere without risking the journey. She is as devious as anyone who has never stared death in the face, someone who has never looked at an eight-inch LCD screen and had to decide whether place X should exist or not; she has never had to guess if a convoy of vehicles was a wedding party or an advancing army. The only choicesthat she has had to make are how much powdered milk to order, how many boxes of mosquito repellent; she only has to count people or look at old registers to get the approximate population, then guess the number of surviving children and make sure that there is enough Play-Doh for everyone. And then study their young, hopeless minds.

  Goats are jumping up at the only tree around the pond and flailing around the poisonous-looking yellow berries. A vague homesickness settles over me. In the first flush of love, sometimes you hug someone and linger a second longer, you know that it’s going to be over now, but you linger. That’s what I need now, a hug that’ll last a moment longer than is customary. A hug that’ll say keep me here, keep me safe from sinister-looking goats and their poisonous yellow berries. I need a hug.

  ‘There was a tip-off that the Camp was going to be bombed again,’ she looks into my eyes, still not sure if she should be sharing this information or not. ‘There was a very reliable tip-off. International Relief is kind – well at least reliable – when it comes to these tip-offs. Their supply chain is touch and go, poor things are always sending us beach volleyball gear, but they are good with tip-offs. They let us know that a plane was headed this way and it was not theirs. Also, that Doctor predicted it. You might think it’s mumbo jumbo, but people here, they believe him. He has a track record. He is not some kind of stargazer or spiritual healer, he has foretold stuff that has happened. And I am not talking about predicting rains, which even kids here can do quite well. He has been going on about ghosts in the Hangar. It’s not haunted in any conventional sense. But perhaps there is something more there, not just your people’s ghosts trapped in there.’

  I try hard to concentrate. The sun is suddenly above our heads and no more a gentle source of muddy light, but a determined torturer wielding a blowtorch. Sometimes all you need is a hug and all you get is political analysis.

  ‘So we were all in our shelters, all the cattle pushed into the desert, and yes, there was a plane, it circled and circled as if looking for us from up there and then nothing. After midnight we heard a little snap in the sky and then again, nothing. We waited and waited in our shelters listening out for that whistle your missiles whistle before they visit us, but it was all quiet. We came out in the morning and everything was the same. The goats and camels were back. And we were receiving congratulation from Helping Hands who we haven’t heard from since the last USAID drop and they are saying, your people in the Camp shot the Eagle down. We’re like yes the fuck we did. Should give us some cred with them. The bigger the guns behind you, the bigger the aid package you attract. What have you got? And we are pretending, yeah hell we did, we haven’t got anything to show for it though. But we go on pretending we have got something that can shoot down planes. But no, we haven’t got any such thing except our prayers.

  ‘Those clowns in the Camp, they are always looking for visual material. Optics they call them. So these boys are in the desert and they film this wreckage, a crashed plane, half a plane apparently stuck in the sand. Also pictures of a dead guy. Now I have to say this, he is strapped to his seat, charred mostly so not recognizable but has a nametag with your name. Now they want to produce their own video. Everyone wants to make a grainy little video. But they have footage an
d you look quite dead in it. But here you are and they want more footage. They are quite determined.’

  The world is full of struggling film-makers. So what if they have filmed some dead zoomie in the desert. When they are dead they all look the same. They wouldn’t kidnap me. What’ll they demand in ransom: happiness? They don’t want to lose their refugee status. Who wants to stop getting free packaged food and almost-new Nike attire?

  ‘And on the eighth day you are found roaming the desert,’ she continues. ‘They bring you in and you start pretending you were doing milk runs in the desert and took a wrong turn. And now you are here and you don’t even want to go home? Don’t you want your medal, get your picture in the paper, collect your bonus, play golf? You’ll have to get out of here, sooner or later, but first there is work to be done.’

  ‘What work?’ I am through with work.

  ‘Colonel Slatter’s crash was all over the news back home,’ she says. ‘“American hero’s last mission” or whatever nonsense. They found his plane’s wreck but not Colonel Slatter. And then you walk in talking about some stupid army ritual.’

  ‘It’s a matter of squadron’s honour. Your officer crashes, you fly the same mission. So I did.’

  ‘I am all for traditions and respecting the military culture but something new is happening here. Your people took in their boys and they didn’t come back, and then you took in Momo’s brother and your planes started crashing. The boy was a nerd but could he be bringing the world’s largest air force to its knees? Anything I am missing here? You followed Slatter, right? So who is following you here?’

  I know it is time to be square and firm. ‘I have taken an oath and I am not going to discuss our war plans with anyone. Not even you. And who are you anyway, my rescue party? We might be on the same team, same ball, same park but our shit is different. I fly missions. I do my work and I go home. I don’t live in some godforsaken commune and poke into other people’s minds.’