The Sandbox

by David Zimmerman

  “All right,” I lie, “I’ll do my best to convince him you’re the man to set this straight.” Lopez isn’t coming back here, I think. If he has any smarts at all, he’s lying low until daylight. “But first you have to tell me what this is really all about.”

  The captain looks at me, then down at his clasped hands. Finally, he lets out a sigh, as though it’s been quite a struggle, but now he’s giving in. I don’t buy this crap for a second. Whatever he’s about to tell me is bound to be at least half bullshit.

  “No,” he says.

  “Fine,” I say. “If Lopez comes back, I’ll tell him to burn all of it.”

  “There are other copies of those pictures.”

  “Yeah, Ahmed has them. But it’s the grid coordinates you really want, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t see what difference it makes to you, Private. If you think you can use any of this against me, think again. Nothing about any of this implicates me. My interest in this matter has nothing to do with self-preservation, unlike your lieutenant.”

  “Then what difference will it make if you tell me?” I wait for him to hit me again.

  “Of course, it makes no difference to me,” he says, toying with a button on his sleeve, “but it might make all the difference to you. Still, you’re right, why shouldn’t you know? You’ve seen the evidence. You’re up to your neck in it now anyway. Along with the rest of us.”

  “Not quite.”

  “Don’t be a child, Durrant. Knowledge means guilt to these people, and they can really put the hurt on you if they think you’re a liability. Nor are they as easily fooled as the empty-headed grunts and peasants you spend your days with.” The captain presses his hands together, as if to pray, and taps the end of my knee. He becomes solemn and fatherly, hoarse with false sincerity. This, his expression seems to say, is our come-to-Jesus moment. “Before I go on, let me make something clear: once you know, some will say there’s only one way for you to forget. And all sorts of accidents can happen between here and there. Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  I nod.

  “All right, but don’t blame me when the other shoe drops on your head and you want your cherry back,” the captain says. He moves even closer, placing a hand on my arm and squeezing hard enough to make marks.

  I shake him off. “Fine. I get it.”

  “At the start of the invasion, Lieutenant Blankenship was assigned as adjutant on a certain general’s staff.” The captain puts on a bedtime-story voice, and shit, what a story he tells.

  “It began at the end of the initial fighting. Once we’d taken the capital and rounded up most of the regime’s ministers, the ambassador worked with the State Department to airlift in a large quantity of cash, dollars, ostensibly for use in development and reconstruction. At the time, the Army was short on manpower and the natives were getting restless. There really should have been twice as many troops as we’d sent. Some of the brass were starting to get an inkling of the shit to come. The idea was to arm some friendlies. We couldn’t train an entire national police force fast enough to take care of the problems that were arising, and there weren’t enough boots on the ground to do it ourselves. One of the fears at the time was that rogue elements of the former regime, trained combatants, were regrouping across the border. True, as it turned out, and even worse than they imagined. I remember seeing this shit on TV. It was a fucking mess.

  “A chunk of the money the ambassador shipped over was secretly earmarked to arm the friendlies. This was not info for general consumption, but the word got out to a group of like-minded people inside Intel. Read: crooks. Instead of giving these militias American-made arms, which could be traced back to us if the thing went tits-up, we gave them cash and introduced them to independent contractors from Russia who could get them the weapons. Cheap plastic Chinese AKs and RPGs. That was the first mistake.”

  I must be giving the captain an odd look as he tells me this, because he coughs and blinks and begins to seem uncomfortable. For a moment, it would appear he’s thought better of giving me the rest of this history lesson, but maybe that’s just more bullshit, a way to misdirect me from some lie at the center of his story. Even so, I give him an encouraging look.

  “Right away,” he says, wiping his mouth with the yellow handkerchief, “the whole thing went bad.”

  It seems that even before the Army could finish handing out all that money, some of these groups started using the weapons to hit our own convoys. The captain isn’t sure if this was spontaneous anger on their part or if they’d planned it all along. Maybe it was simple greed. They could resell the supplies from those hijacked trucks for quite a bit. He says he’s heard of MREs off those trucks turning up in markets as far away as Pakistan and Kenya.

  “And then that fucking ambassador decides to—Jesus—” A cigarette appears in the captain’s hand, and he lights it with a wooden match. I give that cig a hungry stare, but he doesn’t seem to notice. When he goes on, his voice sounds worn out and his face looks drawn and haggard.

  The general, it seems, still had millions and millions of dollars on his hands. He didn’t want to give it back. You never want to admit to the bureaucrats that they’ve given you too much money. But he didn’t want to keep it in his pocket either. Big piles of cash like that draw flies like fresh shit. You can only keep it quiet for so long. So the general took aside his most trusted junior officer and an experienced older sergeant and told them to hide the cash someplace nobody would look for it. They decided on this pile of rocks. It was out in the middle of nowhere and had been quiet for a while. Once the two of them arrived, the first thing the general did was pull out half the men on base. The fewer eyeballs, the fewer problems. Even so, the lieutenant worried about keeping the money on-base. They decided to cache it in the old toy factory.

  “The one you’ve been poking around in,” the captain says. “I imagine you scared the hell out of those two. You were fucked the moment you set foot in that place. Jesus, and you wonder why the lieutenant’s been suspicious. When did you get to this base?”

  I tell him.

  “Then you probably pulled duty guarding that factory.”

  I hadn’t, but I remember Rankin doing some. Suddenly, a few more things make sense. At the time, none of the guys could figure out why the hell we were protecting a shell of a factory. After a month, we stopped. One day it’s important, the next day it’s not. We forgot about the place in a week. In the Army, this kind of random shit happens all the time.

  “But there’s still some money there,” I say, pulling out my crumpled portrait of Ben. “I found dozens of these.”

  He snatches it out of my hand and holds it up to the light. “Shit. It’s got the Coalition stamp. It’s real. So those two were holding back a little for themselves. Where—”

  Above us, a mortar lands somewhere close. The light in the hall becomes dim, goes out and returns.

  “Why did you cut it up?” he asks.

  “One of the local children tore out the heads,” I say.

  “Maybe the child you’ve been blabbing on about. That was stupid, by the way. Did you find any whole bills?”

  “I didn’t have time, but they must be there.” I’m not sure why I tell him this. Maybe so he’ll fuck with the lieutenant. Or worse, some perverse part of me wants to impress him.

  “It certainly bears looking into.” He studies the head a moment longer and then crumples it into a pellet and throws it at me. It bounces off of my cheek and onto my lap. I slip it back into my pocket. The two of us sit in silence for a spell.

  “So,” I say, “I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they only left a few bills by mistake.”

  “No,” he says, thinking hard, but not about this. “I’ll bet there’s still a small stash.”

  “So?” I say. “What happened to the rest of it?”

  The captain can’t help himself. This story of someone else’s fuckup is too good to keep to himself. He tells me the lieutenant started having the same wo
rries the general did: someone’s going to find it and blab. Soldiers are like little boys—when they’re bored, they poke around and get themselves into trouble. There’s nothing to it but for him and the old sarge to go bury it out in the desert. Four or five night drops.

  “They did it by themselves?” I ask. This is starting to smack of coulda-woulda. I get a whiff of something stale.

  “I don’t fucking know,” he says. “The second big mistake the general made, and this, this I really—” Whatever it is, it cracks him up something fierce. He takes out his handkerchief and wipes his face. When he’s finished, he looks over at me with a wet-lipped smirk.

  He tells me the joke. The general let someone take pictures of the cash hand-overs. With the camera on their cell phone. Pictures of smiling officers and sheikhs. Even the Goddamned ambassador. The captain thinks that maybe the general didn’t see it happening at the time, but he sure as hell knew about those photos later. Then, instead of making the smart move and destroying the phone and all the prints, he keeps them. Probably thought he could use it as political capital later on. The captain says the ambassador is famous for being slow-witted, but he pulls a lot of weight back in Washington, and apparently the general has a few political ambitions of his own. Most of this was an open secret. The turning point came when the captain found the cell phone.

  “But we didn’t know where the money was. No one did. It took a little work, but Saunders and I found it.” Again the ugly smile.

  “How?”

  The captain shakes his head. “If you make it into Intel, maybe I’ll show you a few tricks. A little of the famous razzle-dazzle.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  He keeps on talking. It’s almost as though he can’t help himself. He has to tell the rest of the story. When you are the keeper of so many secrets, it must be a pleasure of sorts to disclose a few—or just simply a relief to unload them onto someone else.

  He and Saunders knew where the base was, but not the actual cash dump. It took a little finagling and some forging of documents, but after a while he managed to get Saunders posted out here. Saunders brought the phone and a few prints with him, but the photos were all backed up on a computer somewhere else. Here their game got tricky. Saunders had to move carefully. The captain wouldn’t go into the dirty details, but somehow Saunders got Lieutenant Blankenship to agree to give him grid numbers for the drop sites in exchange for the phone and the prints. This was the real reason we’d been going to Inmar that day. Saunders had planned a meet with the captain in Inmar because Lieutenant Blankenship, who was working with Sarge for the general, believed the captain was the one who had the photos. And that’s where he told Lieutenant Blankenship he’d hand them over.

  “And, well, you don’t need to know the rest.” He snorts. “Suffice it to say, your lieutenant, he bought it. Swallowed the whole salty load. And he agreed to give us the details and a map. He showed Saunders the map, but he wouldn’t give him the GPS numbers until he had the photos and phone in hand. And now I find out the crafty little bastard was holding out on us. Well, believe me, he won’t for long.”

  The captain stretches and moves around the room. He kicks the wall. Mildewed chunks of concrete break away and drop to the floor. “And then, imagine this. On the way to Inmar, there just happens to be an IED attack.”

  The captain studies my face, waiting for me to get the picture. Whatever he sees must satisfy him, because he smiles again. His teeth look wet and sticky.

  “Shit,” I say, genuinely shocked, “you don’t really think he planned it. I mean, how, sir? I interviewed the prisoners.”

  “Yeah,” he says, “and what did they tell you?”

  I must look completely dumbfounded. He smirks at me like I’m a complete and utter dumbass. And maybe I am.

  “Exactly,” he says. “I bet they told you the story about their long tribal battle with the Gashtus, right? Well, guess what? Their tribe, the Furdus, just happens to be one of the few friendly groups that didn’t go sour on us.”

  Something else becomes clear to me. Something awful. Something else awful.

  I speak too quickly, before I really think it all the way through. “But weren’t the prisoners killed by Ahmed?”

  “Oh, right.” He rolls his eyes. “Sure they were.”

  “The hinges on the cell were taken off. Why would the lieutenant do that if he had the key?”

  The reason is so obvious he just waits for it to come to me.

  “Why do you think he chose you to interrogate them? Why didn’t he do it himself? Do you really believe you’re the one on this base most qualified to conduct interrogations? He needed a fucking patsy, someone just smart enough to notice things like scratched hinges.” The captain takes two brisk steps across the room, so he can jab me in the sternum. “You. He had to make a report. He had to make it look good. If you talked with them, he wouldn’t leave his fingerprints. And then, once he thought you were getting too close to the money, he found a way to put you down here. Just before that kangaroo court the other day, he told me he suspected you of killing the prisoners. Pretty neat backup plan, huh? I was impressed. But that was back when he still had the phone and the photos.”

  “No one will believe that, sir.” I’m speaking too quickly, my voice shrill. “There’s no proof to—”

  “When you tell them your sad little story during the court-martial,” he says, not unkindly, “tell me, who do you think they’re going to believe?”

  I take a breath. And then another. I need to calm the fuck down. “I don’t know, sir. This all sounds too crazy. I can’t believe the lieutenant would sacrifice soldiers. Two soldiers. The prisoners, maybe, but I mean, come on—”

  The captain looks at me like I’m pitiful, a rube. “Expendable.”

  “Oh.” It’s the only sound I can manage to get out.

  “It’s all piss under the bridge now. Forget about it.”

  Right.

  “How much of that story is true, sir?” I ask him.

  “Oh.” He taps his chin with a knuckle. “Say, about ninety-five percent.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Sir,” he says, cuffing me on the head.

  “Sir,” I say.

  “It means take it or leave it. You wanted to know. And now you do. Like I said before, knowledge is guilt in this game. You’re in it with the rest of us now.” He lights another cigarette. This time he gives me one. “Talk to Lopez. That’s the only thing that can save you. All that matters now is that we get the shit back.”

  We, he says. Sure. I must look pretty stupid.

  “I can do it more quickly if you get me out of here.”

  “Listen, Durrant. You do this for me, and I’ll arrange it so the charges are dropped and you’re out of here by morning. I’ll figure out what to do with you when I get to Inmar. Get the stuff and I’ll make sure your records are cleansed. We’ll take the same chopper out of this dump.”

  I imagine a quick shove out of the helicopter door and the long fall to the desert below. I see now how deep I’m into this. I’ll be lucky to come out of it with my head still attached.

  “I want you to have some alone time. To think. You’re not out of the soup yet, and without my help you’ll drown in it.”

  The captain raps twice on the cell door.

  “Where are you going now, sir?”

  “To have a frank discussion with your lieutenant.”

  Rankin holds up a finger behind the captain’s back and mouths the word, “Wait,” before he closes the door. I don’t know whether to believe all of the captain’s story, part, or none. Ninety-five percent, my ass. It sounds too clever by half. Nothing that happens in this war adds up quite so neatly. I walk back and forth. From one wall to the other. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. The numbers add up to the same sum every time. Nothing else in this place does.

  88

  After the captain leaves, Rankin comes to the doorway to talk with me.
<
br />   “Lieutenant’s sending a team out to blow the factory in the morning.” Even as Rankin tells me this, I can see him starting to regret it. A narrow-eyed cautiousness.

  “What?” I shout.

  “Damn, man. There ain’t nothing you can do.” He holds out his palms as if to stop me from moving, even though I’m sitting on the cot. “You’ve done enough, D.”

  “Why are they doing it?” I pick at a loose string in the cot’s fabric. When I tug on it, a line of green thread pulls away from one end to the other and then back again. If I sat and did this long enough, the whole cot would come apart in my hands. A big pile of olive-colored string. A big pile of nothing.

  “Lopez has him thinking there’s insurgents holed up in there.” Rankin puts his hands on either side of the doorjamb and leans into the cell, but he’s yet to take a step inside.

  “But Lopez told me he doesn’t believe that any more.”

  Rankin gives me a skeptical look. “He said exactly that?”

  “Well, not exactly that, but close enough. We had a heart-to-heart.”

  “I heard. Heartwarming.”

  “You listen in?”

  “I might of heard a word or two.”

  “Or a number or two?”

  Rankin smiles.

  “You get those GPS numbers?”

  Rankin keeps on smiling, but now maybe a touch wider. He taps his head.

  I know he knows what I’m thinking. It’s there on his face. Why can’t we take the money instead? Why let them have it?

  “No,” he says, his smile becoming wary now.

  “Why not?”

  “Aw, shit, man,” he says. “There ain’t no way we could get that money back to the States with us, even if we did get it before they did.”

  He drums the very top of his skull with three fingers like he’s fingering a trumpet.

  “It sure would be nice, though,” Rankin says, probably imagining everything he could do with money like that. From the expression on his face, it looks like he can think of quite a few things.

  “We could open up a Bubba shrimp franchise,” I say. “I hear they do really well in the malls.”