A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel

by Robert Littell

  The Delta-Foxtrot people had a reputation for being pit bulls—the standing joke held that they could traverse more terrain on foot in a day than run-of-the-mill soldiers could cover in a jeep. Like most exaggerations, it contained a kernel of truth. I wasn’t sure I could keep up with them and told Jack as much. “You’re goin’ to seed sittin’ ’round these television screens,” he said. “God damn, Lemuel, put on your seven-league hiking boots if you need to but I want your ass out there.”

  If you’ve never used night-vision goggles, don’t. The feeling of being trapped underwater is so intense you find yourself gasping for air when you first put them on. Two helicopters, flying without lights, deposited us on a flat two ridges downwind from the target, so we had a bit of a slog between us and the village. We scrambled up and down gullies, point gunmen out ahead, followed by the main team, followed by me and my minder, a medical corpsman just back from three weeks of R and R in Japan and sweating bullets under the weight of the rucksack filled with first responder gear. On the downslope of the first ridge I stepped gingerly over the corpse of a young herdsman outside his igloo-shaped stone hut. I could see the hilt of one of those curved Afghan pulwars sticking out of his chest. The goats he’d been guarding, tethered to a long cord stretched taut between the hut and a dead tree, had all had their throats cut. For purposes of the obligatory battle report, I supposed they’d be listed as enemy combatants KIA. We made our way up the second ridge, past a field filled with vines. The grapes hanging from them appeared bluish green through my goggles. I wondered what kind of wine they could make with grapes like that. At the top of the last ridge, the Delta-Foxtrot leader, a baby-faced lieutenant, his face streaked with charcoal, only his eyes clearly visible, dropped to one knee next to me. I thought for a moment he was going to ask me to join him in prayer. “You and Meredith here wait till I radio for you to come on in, hear?” he whispered.

  “Hear,” I said.

  Lying flat on my stomach, my chin on the small radio pack strapped to the folding stock of my M-16, I could make out ghostlike figures, bluish green in their camouflage khakis and flak jackets, swimming downhill toward the drowned village, dark and silent as a sunken ship in a seabed. Somewhere at the edge of the seabed a dog barked, the bark turned into a yelp, the yelp trailed off into a soft whine of pain. I could make out hunched figures running through the alleyways, converging on the mud-walled compound around the whitewashed mosque. Then the first shots echoed through the village—bloated blasts from the old smooth-bored rifles the mujahideen had used in their ten-year jihad against the Russians, falsetto bursts from the automatic weapons of our raiders. A grenade—one of those fragmentation thingamabobs with a fifteen-meter kill radius—exploded next to the massive wooden door of the mosque compound, blowing it off its hinges. A geyser of smoke and dust rose from the seabed.

  “So much for surprising them,” I whispered to Meredith.

  Inside the mosque compound, a woman screamed in Pashto—I understood that she wanted a girl or several girls to run to the mosque. An especially tall man in a bluish green djellaba materialized in a doorway and fired his rifle into the head of a raider at point-blank range. Spinning, he tried to shoot again. The rifle must have jammed, because he took hold of the barrel and began to use it as a club, swinging wildly at the bluish green figures in camouflage khaki swarming around him. The terrified shrieks of young girls pierced the night.

  “I’m going in,” I told Meredith.

  “Lieutenant said we was to wait till he radioed up to us,” he said.

  “Lieutenant may be otherwise occupied,” I said. I pushed myself to my feet, flicked off the safety on my M-16, and started downhill through ankle-high underbrush that undulated like seaweed as I waded through it. I could hear Meredith, out of breath from an overdose of adrenaline, sliding, slipping, scampering downslope behind me. At the edge of the village I came across the first corpses, two Afghans, one a boy, one a grandfather judging from his long bluish green beard, sprawled on the ground next to a dead dog. All three were bleeding bright orange blood from slit throats. There were other corpses, maybe a dozen, maybe more, I stopped counting at eight. In the mosque compound, the corpse of the dead American who’d been shot at point-blank range was being zipped into a black canvas body bag, his dog tags wired to one of the plastic grips. Two raiders had literally pinned the especially tall man to the mud wall with bayonets thrust through the cloth of his bluish green djellaba. The left side of his face was vivid purple, bright orange blood oozed from an open wound under his left eye. Unintelligible words rose from his throat. If this was bin Laden’s English teacher, he would need an extended sick leave before he taught anyone anything again.

  “Go ahead and interrogate the bastard,” the lieutenant said.

  I approached the prisoner. “What’s your name?” I asked.

  Our Afghan translator repeated my question in Pashto.

  The mujahid stared at me with his one eye that was still operational—I couldn’t tell, even with my night-vision goggles, if the other eye was shut or no longer existed. “Fuck America,” he whispered in English. “Fuck George Bush.”

  One of the soldiers pinning him to the mud wall was wearing fingerless biker’s gloves. Still holding the handle of the bayonet with his left hand, he reared back with his right and punched the prisoner in the groin.

  The mujahid doubled over and coughed up crimson bile. Straightening with an effort, he spat out, in English, “Fuck your mother.”

  “He don’t learn from his mistakes,” the soldier wearing biker’s gloves remarked.

  Terrible shrieks came from the mosque. I turned to see raiders dragging two teenage girls and an older woman by their long hair over the rocky ground to the middle of the compound. All three females had been stripped naked. Seen through my goggles, their pale skin appeared bluish green.

  “You need to stop this,” someone said. I turned back to see who had spoken. The lieutenant and his Delta-Foxtrot people were all staring at me.

  One of the soldiers nodded in my direction. “He say sumptin?” he asked.

  “You say something?” the lieutenant inquired.

  “The herdsman on the hill, his goats were probably enemy combatants,” I said. “These woman aren’t.” My words were devoid of consonants, as if they originated with a ventriloquist not moving his lips when he threw his voice.

  “Fucking mujahid went and killed one of my men,” the lieutenant said, as if that explained everything. “His wife, his kids, they have got to pay the blood price. That’s the only language these Taliban shits understand.”

  An inhuman groan came from the mujahid—I thought at first he was trying to clear blood from the back of his throat until I noticed his one eye staring past me at his wife and daughters, who were being sodomized by the dark figures in camouflage khakis. Two of them had their pants down around their ankles, their bare asses burning bluish green in the riptide of this awful night. Funny thing is how, when I picture the scene, when I remember the unspeakable things they were doing to the woman and the two girls, in my mind’s eye I see it all happening in a kind of sluggish sea-swell slow motion.

  “I’m going to report what I saw here,” I announced.

  “What the fuck did he see here?” one of the soldiers pinning the especially tall mujahid to the wall demanded.

  “Me, I didn’t see nuttin’ out of the usual,” a second soldier said.

  Three sharp shots sounded behind me. I am ashamed to say I was afraid to turn and look—afraid of what I would see, afraid of what I would do if I saw.

  “Killed resisting arrestation,” one of the soldiers snickered. “Ain’t that a fact, John Henry?”

  “Teach ’em to resist arrestation,” John Henry agreed.

  “Lieutenant, what d’we do wit the prisoner?”

  “You’re supposed to take him back for interrogation,” I said.

  The only eye available to the especially tall mujahid fixed me with a look of infinite grief. And the baby
-faced lieutenant who presided over the absence of civilization in this Hindu Kush seabed reached out with the tippy-tip of the barrel of his M-16 and gently wedged it, like a dentist probing for a loose tooth, into the mujahid’s mouth. “Stand away,” the lieutenant snapped. The two soldiers pinning the mujahid to the wall stepped back smartly. Gagging on the rifle barrel in his mouth, the especially tall mujahid, held up by the two bayonets pinning him to the wall, wilted into his bluish green djellaba.

  “Don’t do that—” I heard myself groan, but he did do that, he angled the barrel so that it was pointing toward the endless expanse of universe over our heads and he pulled the trigger. The mujahid’s skull exploded, splattering brain matter on all the bluish green uniforms within a fifteen-meter stain radius.

  The withdrawal from the village passed in an adrenaline haze—rotors beating the air, stirring up gravel and dust and debris, two helicopters touching down on the perimeter of the seabed, gunships hovering overhead stabbing the alleyways and the mosque compound with shards of brilliant bluish green light. Bodies were gathered and piled like so much deadwood. As I lumbered across a field, I nearly stumbled over the figure of a crouched girl. I was afraid she might be wounded and tugged her to her feet looking for blood. She was skinny and dirty and scared out of her skull but not bloodstained. I remember thinking she must have been around twelve but discovered later she was an undernourished, overfrightened fifteen. I pulled her toward the nearest helicopter and, gripping her under the armpits, hefted her into it. Sitting on the metal floor, she stared at me with unblinking eyes. The helicopter door slammed shut. Nobody complained about a passenger. “I’m Gunn,” I called over the whirring rotors, tapping my chest. When she didn’t say anything I pointed at her. “You?” The Afghan translator sitting across from us shouted to her in Pashto. She turned back to me. “Kubra,” she said. “Kubra,” I nodded. As the helicopter lifted off, there was an enormous explosion in the village behind me. It lit up the night sky visible through the oval Plexiglas windows, transforming the other hovering helicopter into a night moth.

  When I got back to Kabul base, I parked the girl in the station infirmary and woke my station chief. “Jack,” I said, “bad things happened out there tonight.”

  He was sitting in his skivvy shorts on a steel cot. His mane of hair, once dirty blond, now dirty gray, was disheveled. He threaded his fingers through it several times working out knots. I noticed several empty whisky bottles on the cement floor under the cot. “How would you know what happened out there tonight?” he asked.

  “You told me to tailgate the raid.”

  “You have that in writing?” he demanded. “You’re supposed to be in the command bunker during a raid.”

  “I was out there with Delta-Foxtrot,” I said. “I saw them drag naked females across the compound. They killed the females—”

  “You saw them kill these females?”

  “I heard the shots. There were three females. There were three shots.”

  “You saw the bodies?”

  I concentrated on Jack’s bare feet, which he was fitting into ornate Afghan slippers

  “You didn’t actually see bodies, huh, Lemuel?”

  “I didn’t see those bodies … I was too frightened to turn around and look.” I sucked the stale air of the bedroom into my lungs. It struck me that the stale air of a station chief’s bunkroom could be more harmful than cigarette smoke. I could hear sirens wailing somewhere in the city but I could never tell from the pitch whether they were fire engines or ambulances or police cars escorting VIPs in and out of the Green Zone. “I saw the lieutenant murder the especially tall mujahid,” I said. “The stain on my shirt—it’s his brains, Jack.”

  “Lemuel, Lemuel, he was an enemy combatant. Delta-Foxtrot lost one of their men in the raid. They radioed in he was shot in the head by your especially tall mujahid. You know standin’ operational procedure as well as me—we take Taliban alive when we can, we leave them dead when we can’t.”

  I murmured something about needing to file a report.

  “File, file. This war is a quagmire. One more report in triplicate won’t keep us from sinking in deeper.”

  It took me hours to write out what I wanted to write out. I preempted the screen showing the Seinfeld rerun and typed it up with one finger, then I rewrote it (you’ll laugh) leaving out all the consonants from my own dialogue, then I re-rewrote it putting them back in because words without consonants come across as gibberish. I wound up, in the umpteenth version, pretty much telling the story as I’ve set it out here. I printed out three copies and put my John Hancock on the last page and dispatched the report on up the chain of command. Jack, which, you may remember, wasn’t his real name, put his initials on the top right and sent it on up, through channels, to the Company’s in-country commander, who sent it on up, through channels, to the Afghan desk in D.C. All this took time. Lots of time. I lost track of what happened after my report reached Washington as the senior brass who may or may not have read it weren’t required to initial the single copy that made its way back downhill to me stamped NOT ACTIONABLE. It seems the baby-faced lieutenant and his Delta-Foxtrot people had been rotated out of Afghanistan. It seems the target village in the Hindu Kush had been abandoned by the Afghans who survived the raid. It seems their empty mud huts had been used by army demolition specialists to teach greenhorns how to blow up what passed for a house in this godforsaken wasteland of a country. I still had two months, two days left on my Kabul tour (like Millie Kugler’s husband, Hank, I would mark off the days on a calendar) when the classified cable firing me for reasons deemed too secret to spell out reached my desk. I was already opening beer bottles with my thumb and index finger and crushing the metal tops between my fingers. The Company, which obviously didn’t appreciate whistle-blowers, neglected to add the usual war zone bonus to my termination check. (When I raised the matter with the disbursing officer, he shut his eyes tiredly. “Go sue us,” he said.) Whatever pension credits I had were out the window. A form letter from the station chief was paper-clipped to the cable. It thanked me for unspecified services to my country and wished me good luck in my civilian endeavors.

  Good luck in my civilian endeavors! Screw him.

  Jack’s real name, the one on the bottom of his insulting letter, was Jack F. for Francis Coburn. Jack ass.

  Go sue me for revealing a state secret. It’ll give me a chance to tell what happened on the Hindu Kush in open court.

  You wanted to know where my anger comes from. It comes from my gut.

  Eighteen

  According to this Clark County Historical Society brochure I came across on a shelf in the Nipton general store, Searchlight got its name when a miner tunneling into a hill lit a Searchlight brand match on the sole of his boot and caught sight of a vein of gold. That was back before the turn of the last century. Searchlight, astride the old Arrowhead Highway, boomed until the twenties when the vein began to run dry and U.S. 91 swung around the town instead of through it. The gold diggers drifted away to mine other veins: in Reno, Nevada, for instance. Leaving five hundred or so people clinging to a bygone era by their fingernails.

  We were Searchlight bound in the rental Toyota. Ornella Neppi was driving, “All my exes live in Texas, that’s why I hang my hat in Tennessee” was playing on the car radio, I was stretched out in the back trying to catch up on the shut-eye I’d missed out on the night before. “Will you take a look at this!” Friday exclaimed as she braked the car onto the gravel shoulder. I sat up so quickly I banged my head against the roof of the car. Ornella was peering through the front window at a historical marker indicating the direction to Walking Box Ranch, Clara Bow’s Shangri-la after her Nipton interlude. “It might be worth the detour,” she said as I scrambled past the stick shift onto the front seat. Her tone was mischievous. “I mean, I am a great Clara Bow fan. I’m seriously considering starting a Clara Bow fan club in Doña Ana. Thanks to you, I know who she is. And I know what can happen when someone sleeps in her
bed. Come on, spoilsport. It’s only seven miles into the Mojave. What do we have to lose?”

  “Time,” I said. “We need to concentrate on Searchlight if we’re going to pick up the trail of your Emilio Gava.”

  A dark cloud discolored the seaweed green in her eyes. “Why is he suddenly my Emilio Gava?”