The Prisoner of Guantanamo

by Dan Fesperman

  He took another swallow of warm beer, still trying to calm down. Then the phone rang in the kitchen. He ran to answer in hopes of not waking his roomie, special agent Cal Whitaker, only to be greeted by the voice of Mitch Tyndall. Tyndall worked for the OGA, or Other Government Agency, which even the lowliest buck private could tell you was Gitmo-speak for the CIA.

  “Hope I didn’t wake you,” Tyndall said.

  “No way I’d be sleeping after that.”

  “That’s what I figured. I was hoping to mend fences.”

  “The ones you just tore down?” Falk’s anger returned in a hurry.

  “Guilty as charged.”

  Tyndall sounded sheepish, new ground for him, although for the most part he wasn’t a bad guy. A tall Midwesterner with a long fuse, he generally aimed to please as long as no sharing was required. Falk tended to get more out of him than others if only because they were part of the same five-member “tiger team,” the organizational equivalent of a platoon in Gitmo’s intelligence operation. There were some twenty-five tiger teams in all, little study groups of interrogators and analysts that divvied their turf by language and home country of the detainees. Falk’s team was one of several that specialized in Saudis and Yemenis.

  “Look, I spaced out,” Tyndall continued. “Just blundered in there like a bull in a china shop. I wasn’t thinking.”

  Occupational hazard with you Agency guys, Falk thought but didn’t say. Unthinking arrogance came naturally, he supposed, when you were at the top of the food chain, rarely answerable to anyone, the Pentagon included. Teammates or not, there were plenty of places Tyndall could go that Falk couldn’t. The CIA sometimes used a different set of interrogation rooms, and recently the Agency had even built its own jail, Camp Echo. It was Gitmo’s prison within a prison, and its handful of high-priority inmates were identified by number instead of by name.

  “Yeah, well, there seems to be a lot of mindlessness going around,” Falk said.

  “Agreed. So consider this a peace offering. Or an apology, at any rate. We might as well kiss and make up, considering where things are headed.”

  “The rumors, you mean? Spies in our midst? Arab linguists on a secret jihad?”

  “It’s not just rumor, not by a long shot.”

  Coming from Tyndall, that was significant, so Falk tried to goad him into saying more.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t believe everything you hear, Mitch.”

  Tyndall seemed on the verge of rising to the bait, then checked himself with a sigh.

  “Whatever. In any case. No hard feelings?”

  “None you couldn’t fix with a favor or two. And maybe a few beers at the Tiki Bar. It’s Adnan’s feelings you should be worried about. I’ll be lucky to get two words out of him after that little explosion. It’s all about trust, Mitch. Trust is everything with these guys.” He should have quit there, but his memory flashed on a slide they always showed at the FBI Academy in Quantico, a screen full of big letters saying, “Interrogation is overcoming resistance through compassion.” So he pushed onward, a sentence too far: “Maybe if you guys would stop stripping ’em naked with the room at forty degrees you’d figure that out.”

  “I wouldn’t believe everything you hear,” Tyndall snapped.

  “Whatever. Just stay away from Adnan. He’s damaged goods as it is.”

  “No argument there. Tomorrow, then.”

  “Bright and early. And remember, you owe me.”

  Falk stared at the phone after hanging up, wondering if anyone bothered to tune in at this hour. Whitaker was no longer snoring down the hall.

  “Sorry,” Falk offered, just in case. “It was Tyndall. From the goddamn Agency.”

  No reply, which was just as well. The fewer people who knew about their little dustup, the better. People who ran afoul of Mitch Tyndall soon found themselves being shunned. It wasn’t the man’s winning personality that turned everyone against you, it was the perception that he was privy to the big picture, while all you had was a few fuzzy snapshots. So if you were on the outs with Tyndall, there must be an important reason, even if no one but him knew what it was. Falk had long ago concluded that Tyndall wasn’t fully aware of his mysterious powers, and it probably would be unwise to clue him in.

  The subject of their dispute this evening was a nineteen-year-old Yemeni, Adnan al-Hamdi, a pet project of Falk’s if only because he would talk to no one else. Adnan had been captured in Afghanistan nearly two years earlier, during a skirmish just west of Jalalabad. He and sixty other misfit jihadists from Pakistan, Chechnya, and the Gulf States had been rounded up by Tadjik fighters of the Northern Alliance in the wake of the Taliban’s mad-dash retreat to the south. They wound up rotting in a provincial prison for six weeks until discovered by the Americans. Adnan attracted special interest mostly on the word of a fellow traveler, an excitable old Pakistani who swore that Adnan was a ringleader. Adnan, in his usual monosyllabic way, said little to confirm or deny it, so into the net he fell, joining one of Guantánamo’s earliest batches of imports. He arrived blindfolded and jump-suited in the belly of a roaring cargo plane, back when the detention facility had been a rudimentary collection of monkey cages known as Camp X-Ray.

  By the time Falk came aboard more than a year later, Adnan had been deemed a lost cause by Gitmo’s resident shrinks, the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, known as Biscuit. He was a mute head case who regularly threw his own shit at the MPs, sometimes after mixing it with toothpaste or mashed potatoes.

  So he was unloaded on Falk, whose linguistic specialty was the dialect of Adnan’s hometown of Sana, only because Falk had visited the place during the Bureau’s investigation of the bombing of the USS Cole, back in 2000.

  Falk set about taming the young man with gossip and lies, tales embellished by bits of color recalled from Sana’s dusty narrow streets. Before long Adnan at least was listening instead of shouting back or clamping hands over his ears. Occasionally he even spoke, if only to correct details that Falk got wrong. Progress was slow, but Falk knew from experience that hardness at such an early age didn’t mean there were no remaining soft spots. Unlike most detainees, Adnan couldn’t even grow a full beard, and to Falk the scruff on his chin was almost poignant, like an undernourished bloom in an abandoned garden.

  Perhaps Falk also recognized a fellow loner. At age thirty-three he, too, was nominally alone in the world. He had no wife, no kids, no dog, and no fiancée waiting back in Washington. The Bureau’s personnel file listed him as an orphan, a conclusion left over from a lie Falk had told a Marine Corps recruiter fifteen years ago in Bangor, half out of spite and half out of a runaway’s yearning for a complete break. The recruiting sergeant could have easily flushed out the truth with a little more digging. But with a monthly enlistment quota to meet and a bonus of a week’s leave hanging in the balance, he hadn’t been inclined to question his good fortune once Falk walked through the door.

  Besides, it had almost been true. Falk’s mother left when he was ten. Shortly afterward his father began a love affair with the bottle. By now, for all Falk knew, the man really was dead, drowned by either alcohol or seawater.

  His earliest memories of home weren’t all that bad—a white clapboard farmhouse along a buckled road on Deer Isle, birch trees out back with leaves that flashed like silver dollars. There were five Falks in those days—an older brother, an older sister, his parents, and him. To stay warm in winter they slept head to toe in bedrolls around an ancient woodstove, arranged like dominoes on a creaking pine floor. At bath time they hauled in an aluminum washtub and poured hot water straight from the kettle, his mom scrubbing his skin pink while his sister laughed and covered her mouth.

  When spring arrived his dad rode daily into Stonington, where the lobster boat was moored. He awakened at four, revving the Ford pickup until it rumbled like a B-17 on takeoff, its muffler shot from the salt air. After age twelve Falk accompanied him on summer mornings, although he remembered little of those harsh working days on the water
apart from the chill of the wind in early June and the bitter cold of the sea, and the way his hands and feet never quite recovered until late September. Or maybe he didn’t want to remember more, because by that time his father was drinking and his mother was gone.

  Within a year they lost the house and moved to the woods, onto a stony lot of goldenrod and thistle where home was a sagging green trailer, the walls lined with flattened cereal boxes for insulation. In storms it heaved and moaned like a ship at sea. There were no more community sleeps. Everyone scattered to separate corners, and his brother and sister escaped as soon as they were old enough.

  Falk sought refuge where he could find it—in the woods, on a cove, or at libraries, the tiny clapboard ones you came across in every community on the island. He took a particular liking to the one in the island’s namesake town of Deer Isle, not only because it was closest but because it was the realm of steely-eyed Miss Clarkson. She demanded silence—exactly what Falk needed—and brooked neither nonsense nor intrusion, especially not from drunken males who came raging up the steps in search of wayward sons. In recalling her now, Falk realized she was the kind of woman he would always be attracted to—one who could glean the most from minimal conversation, as if she had an extra language skill. It was a little bit like being a good interrogator.

  On his eighteenth birthday, a month after graduating from high school, he hitchhiked to Bangor, where he moved into a flophouse just long enough to get a new driver’s license with a local address to show to the local recruiter. After basic training he arrived at Gitmo with the requisite shaved head and sunburned face. He had never been back to Maine, nor sent word of his whereabouts.

  Falk owed plenty to the Corps—his balance, his patience, enough money from the GI Bill to put him through college. He made friends with a few good men who even now he would trust with his life. But having endured his harshest trials well before basic, Falk was resistant to the Corps’ deeper strains of indoctrination. Not even three years of Semper Fi convinced him to wear a tattoo or post a bumper sticker. He still retreated when necessary.

  It was that independent outlook, as well as his progress with Adnan, that soon earned Falk a reputation as having just the right touch for detainees adrift in Camp Delta’s lower-to-middle reaches. This meant he almost never got a look at the few dozen detainees considered to be Gitmo’s prized possessions, the “worst of the worst.”

  Instead he often held court with lonely and grizzled old men, or disturbed fellows in their early twenties—bricklayers, cabdrivers, cobblers, and farmers who had enlisted as foot soldiers of the jihad—subjects of dubious intelligence value whom the skeptics sometimes referred to as “dirt farmers.”

  In the course of these sessions he discovered the taming power of food—sweets in particular—and lately he had turned that weapon on Adnan. Just last week a dripping wedge of baklava had elicited a lengthy discussion of explosives techniques, plus a better-than-average description of Adnan’s weapons trainer, which ending up matching that of another detainee who actually remembered a name. Somewhere out there, presumably, others were now acting on this tip.

  “Meat to the lions” was how one Army psychologist on the Biscuit team described the technique of swapping food for information. In Adnan’s case it was more like cookies and milk after a long day at school, a treat to soothe the soul and get him busy on his homework. Falk had once even fetched a Happy Meal from the base McDonald’s.

  “You deserve a break today,” he said, handing over the bright red box. The Madison Avenue joke whizzed over Adnan’s head, but the young man wolfed down the tiny burger in gratitude, mustard smearing the corner of sun-chapped lips as he chewed. The only awkward moment came at the end, when Falk had to reclaim the plastic toy. It was a tiny Buzz Lightyear—even Happy Meals were out of date at Gitmo—and Adnan wouldn’t let go until an MP stepped forward with a truncheon.

  There was a brief sulk, a few muttered imprecations.

  “Sorry, Adnan. It’s contraband,” Falk crooned in good-cop Arabic.

  The plastic Buzz Lightyear now stood on the sill above Falk’s kitchen sink, his resolute partner in the search for Truth.

  Others were predictably skeptical of Falk’s progress with Adnan.

  “Why bother?” Tyndall had said a few weeks ago at lunch, speaking through a mouthful of Army fries. “He’s out of his freakin’ mind. The one time I had him we had to sedate him. Then he was like some nut talking in his sleep. Probably chewed too many qaat leaves as a boy. Fought one too many battles.”

  “Hell, Mitch, he’s nineteen.”

  “Exactly. Too far gone, but not old enough to really know what he’s seen—who trained him, or who made a difference in his network. Not worth the effort.”

  “Then let him go. Send him home if he’s so goddamn worthless.”

  “Fine with me. Not my call, though. Draft a telegram to the SOD and I’ll sign it.”

  That would be the secretary of defense, who had the final word on all such decisions.

  Falk was foolish enough to take the idea to heart, but in the course of his inquiries on Adnan’s behalf the brass learned of their rapport, which only doomed Adnan to further detention.

  “Work with him,” a visiting desk jockey from the Defense Intelligence Agency said. “Make him a personal project. Everybody else, hands off, and we’ll see how it goes.”

  Translation: He’ll go home only when he tells us what he knows, and it’s up to you to deliver the goods. Leaving Falk, as it were, the master of the young man’s fate. So earlier that week Falk had decided on a new course of action. He would rouse Adnan from his sleep in the wee hours—a technique the Pentagon liked to call “sleep adjustment”—in hopes of tapping into a different stream of consciousness from the one Adnan offered by day.

  Falk had arrived at Camp Delta’s front gate at 2:20 a.m. A bored and surly MP checked his ID against a list of scheduled visitors, then unlocked the gate to the first sally port. These transactions never involved an exchange of names. The interrogators signed in with numbers. The MPs, for their part, covered their names with strips of duct tape across their uniforms, lest their identities be passed along to a shadowy network back in the Middle East that might someday hunt down their families in Ypsilanti, Toledo, or Skokie.

  Before opening the next gate, the MP relocked the one behind him, then repeated the process through two more portals. All of this chain-link jangling made it sound as if Falk were entering a suburban backyard and gave the place the feel of a kennel. It smelled like one, too, stinking of shit, sweat, and disinfectant. With showers strictly rationed, and no air-conditioning to counteract the Cuban heat, every cellblock stank like a locker room in need of hosing down.

  By day the place could be unruly. Detainees didn’t always take their punishment meekly, especially when you were moving them around. There were scuffles and staredowns, hunger strikes and shouting matches. When anyone got too unruly the MPs called in their version of an air strike—an IRF, or Initial Reaction Force. It was a sort of combat conga line of five guards decked out in helmets, thick pads, and black leather gloves, fronted by pepper spray and a riot shield. Whenever they trooped into action, rhythmically stamping their boots, the prisoners answered with the rallying cry of “Allahu Akbar!”—“God is great!”

  Although you heard a lot about Delta’s status as a sort of Babel Tower with its nineteen languages, the majority tongues by far were Arabic and Pashto, and it was the Arabs who ruled the roost, sneering down upon the gaunt Pashtun tribesmen from the hills of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was a viewpoint strangely in tune with that of the interrogators and analysts, who regarded most of the Pashtuns as dirt farmers.

  A few of the Arabs had become jailhouse evangelists, and they could silence entire cellblocks with their sermons, calling down the wrath of God with fiery Quranic verse. It drove the MPs nuts, although Falk found the exhibitions oddly entertaining, maybe because it reminded him of listening to Sunday morning radio broadcasts as a boy
, dire warnings of doom and damnation beaming through the static and whine of the AM dial.

  But in the wee hours Camp Delta was quieter, calmer. It even smelled different. Sometimes you picked up a briny whiff of the sea. Falk figured it must be tantalizing for the inmates to be reminded that waves were breaking a mere hundred yards beyond the fence. Because if Gitmo was claustrophobic, Camp Delta was downright airless, a bell jar. A few hours inside the wire and his head was ready to explode.

  In his first weeks here he had often visited Camp Delta after dark, mostly to check on his charges as they slept. Familiarize yourself with their nocturnal rhythms, he told himself, and maybe you’ll discover a hidden point of entry to their memories. So he had strolled past their cells, glancing through the mesh and listening to their breathing, to their coughs and snores, vainly trying to crack their codes of silence in the dead hours before the dawn prayer.

  In the higher-security blocks that he liked to patrol, each prisoner was curled on a narrow bunk, arm thrown across his face against the constant lighting. A few were always awake, an open eye watching from the pillow. Falk never acknowledged that he noticed, but as soon as he passed from sight he cleared his throat. It was partly to let them know they weren’t dreaming, partly to plant the thought that—just maybe—he was always out there, lurking beyond the door.

  Now and then he had come upon one of them writhing in some private passion, either masturbating or dreaming of a lover. Falk wondered what it must be like to emerge from that, journeying so far afield from this rocky edge of Cuba only to wake up back where you started, groggy from the heat, while some nineteen-year-old Reservist from Ohio shouted in English that it was time to get up. First for prayer, then for breakfast, and then over to interrogation, which was where Falk reentered their lives, the cellblock stalker now showered and shaved in the full light of day.