Arif spun on his bare heels to return to his computer. Let it begin. How else to make it end?
He jerked awake in the chair, head on his arms around the keyboard, his ear warmed by the lamp. The sunrise adhan, called from the minaret deeper in the village, put him on his feet. Arif shuffled to the balcony, joints creaky from his awkward, short sleep.
Half-awake, he completed the fajr prayer on his knees, then stood to light a cigarette. Dawn lay prettily on the sorghum fields between his home and the desert. Irrigation pipes began to soak the soil; by the rosy light and spraying waters, his morning view was cool and placid. The village awoke with Arif. Horse carts bore goods to the market square. Women in flowing abayas walked in groups to fetch the day’s groceries; some wore pointed straw hats to keep their heads cool working in the fields or herding goats in the palm groves. Below Arif smoking on the balcony, Nadya left the house in the pickup without looking up.
In his office, Arif clicked off the lamp to study his computer screen by sunlight. During the long winter night, he’d scanned more than a thousand records, recent emails to and from the royals, with transparent usernames and passwords. Most of the messages were commonplace: meetings, chitchat, and official emails. Arif saw the sameness of concerns: Saudi men carping over money and women, women remarking on fashions and parties, officials mewling over schedules and petty slights. Some messages carried darker content: wild nights in Abu Dhabi, trysts in Qatar, drunken car crashes by royal sons, clannish dealings among brothers to fox outsiders.
Through the evening hours and height of the half-moon, Arif read of the hypocrisies and excesses of the royals, a river of debris from the House of Saud drifting by. He could pluck out one or two of the nastier stories, flog them about the Internet, but that would accomplish little. The profaneness of the royal family was well known, poorly plastered over. Arif had no intention of setting off a minor scandal, one more crack in the Saudi monarchy. That was all he’d been able to do in the two years since he’d come to Yemen, small things.
He settled into the chair, wondering if Nadya had made him coffee before heading to her clinic. He’d go downstairs in a minute, after reading a fresh email isolated by the text search engine that snagged his eye.
The sender was Mohammed al-Bakr Sudayri, a royal second cousin. The search engine identified this email as the first in a queue of messages sent back and forth, beginning yesterday at 3:10 p.m., between Sudayri and Abd al-Aziz.
The subject read Fatima. The message ran only two lines:
After you left, Fatima handed me her number and asked me to give it to you. Do you want it? She seems classy and discreet.
Arif instructed the search engine to put in order, by date, all emails between Sudayri and Abd al-Aziz in the past month. This done, he pushed away from the desk.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Nadya had left coffee warming, and bowls of olives, soft cheese, honey, jam, a round chipotti, and a bar of helwa for a sweet. Arif dunked the chipotti in his coffee and ate alone in the brightening alcove. He stared at Nadya’s pillows, glad she was not home. She knew to leave early today, to let him come downstairs to an empty house for his breakfast. She’d told him she didn’t want to know, but like any wife and daughter, she would have tried to read his face or hands for what he was finding out about her father.
* * *
6 tribal.
Chapter 2
Camp Lemonnier
Djibouti
Major Torres looked good.
Hands on hips in the middle of the Barn, feet spread, she looked like an ad for women in the air force. Surrounded by walk-in lockers stuffed with hi-tech gear for skydiving, SCUBA, mountaineering, combat communications, motorcycles, wave runners all kitted up to be pushed out of airplanes, and racks of weapons, Torres dabbed a bead of sweat off her brow from the Horn of Africa sun. LB changed his mind; this was an ad for men in the air force.
Wally rose from a worn leather recliner. The rest of the team stayed seated. In OD T-shirts, boots, and camo pants, the PJs took an informal attitude toward rank inside the Barn.
Wally approached the major briskly. They shook hands to continue the fiction that they didn’t know each other well. Torres curled a finger at LB.
“Master Sergeant DiNardo.”
She repeated the gesture at Jamie.
“Staff Sergeant Dempsey. Join us.”
LB and Jamie got to their feet. Like Wally, the two of them perpetuated a lie, that they weren’t sore, recently wounded. Seated next to Jamie, Mouse pushed on the young PJ’s rump to help him lift off the sofa; Jamie swatted the hand away. Doc muttered at LB’s back, “Uh-oh, Mom’s pissed.” The new CRO, Berkowitz, a Manhattan kid, watched expectantly. He’d been in HOA7 a week and hadn’t gotten down the rhythms of the team yet. Berko, muscular, with an early receding hairline, stood for the major. Passing close, LB whispered for the young officer to sit back down.
Wally led the way to the briefing room. Torres stayed at the front, leaning on the table while the three took seats on the tiers. Wally eased into a hard desk chair. Three days ago, he’d had 101 stitches removed from his neck, upper back, shoulders, and right biceps.
“It’s been two weeks since the cargo ship.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“How’s the rehab going?”
All three fidgeted.
“I need to know. I have to decide whether to send you stateside or keep you here. Lieutenant Berkowitz seems capable of taking over the team. We have replacement PJs waiting to deploy. They’re sitting on my word and I need to decide. Now.”
While Torres glared, LB scratched absentmindedly at his right calf, where his own twenty stitches had been removed. Jamie, who’d taken bullets through both thighs, flattened both palms over where the holes had been, as if to hide them.
“Boys?”
LB gestured at Wally.
“He doesn’t bring it up at dinner?”
Wally’s chin sank. Torres folded her arms to give LB a brown-eyed, dark-haired Latina shake of the head.
“No, Sergeant.”
“We’re good to go, ma’am.”
“Is that so?”
LB slept in a tent on top of a high, broad shelf here in the Barn. Doc camped next to him. The two liked having the Barn to themselves after hours, the Ping-Pong table, TV, fridges, and saline IV bags available to ease a hangover. The rest of the team lived in cramped CLU trailers around the dusty camp. Yesterday was the first day in two weeks that LB could haul himself up the ladder to his rack; he’d been sleeping on the sofa. The first time he saw Jamie walk without a limp since the mission against the Somali pirates was when Jamie stood for Torres. Two days ago, Wally took off his sling.
Most nights, at 11 Degrees North, the camp canteen, LB, Jamie, Doc, Quincy, and Mouse defied orders never to discuss what happened on the CMA-CGM Valnea. They talked quietly about young Robey who died on that freighter, the twenty-three pirates they killed up close, the three pirates LB took out with a knife, including the Somali chieftain on the sinking ship, how they all were just one minute from being blown up by their own government, along with the crew. Their many wounds were mending, but there were no sutures for the images of two dozen corpses, a dead comrade, the ship’s murdered skipper, PJs running through corridors of blood. No one wanted to break up the team, no one wanted to give in to their wounds or Valnea, and it definitely wasn’t a good idea to leave the team to the untested Berko. LB assumed that Wally, on those nights at a separate table with Major Torres, was talking the same stuff, healing himself the same way, breaking his orders.
“Yes, ma’am. That is so.”
Leaning against the table, arms and ankles crossed, Torres beheld LB while he stood.
“Anything else, ma’am?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Ma’am.”
“I want a PT test for you three. Today.”
Wally rose to his feet.
“Today, Major?”
Torres didn’t budge. “As in right now.”
Wally was clearly blindsided; that meant Torres just got the orders herself this morning. With LB and Jamie watching, she could give Wally no sympathy. All she could do was stonewall.
“Captain, you’ve had two weeks to rehab. Anyone else, and I mean anyone else, would’ve been sent home by now. I’m down to seven PJs. I need you three fully operational. Or gone.”
Wally needed to keep his face blank, as well. He had all of LB’s reasons for wanting to stay at Lemonnier, plus another, the one now facing him, who might have to send him away.
To punctuate Torres’s point, the hangar roof of the Barn rattled to the roar of big engines rumbling down Lemonnier’s flight line four hundred yards off. With Yemen and Somalia heating up, over fifty flights took off from the base every day, at all hours: HC-130s, a squadron of F-15E Strike Eagle jets, choppers, Predator drones. Bulldozers and contractors flooded the camp, expanding the HOA facility and its importance in this theater. The PJs had been lucky not to have a major rescue mission while Wally, Doc, and LB were laid up. They’d pushed the envelope. Torres was right to push back.
Wally headed for the door, LB and Jamie close behind.
“Ten minutes. In the Barn gym.”
LB gutted out twenty-one pull-ups in a single set. Thick-chested with short arms, he was the team champ for pull-ups and could have done twenty-five without the wrenching sting in his left shoulder and right forearm from the thirty stitches needed to close both knife wounds. Still, twenty-one was good. Dropping from the bar to his boots, favoring his left calf, LB mimicked snapping a whip at Torres and her clipboard.
Jamie followed. He was athletic and lean, and all his injuries had been to his legs. The kid banged out eighteen.
Wally reached the bar just by raising his long arms. His T-shirt sleeves slid back to reveal the scar a pirate’s bullet had left across his right biceps—a pink, puckered grimace. Wally’s cheeks flushed while he gutted out a dozen pull-ups, mostly with his left side. The best athlete on the team, Wally should have been able to do twenty.
Sit-ups were hellish for Jamie. He gritted his teeth against the searing in both thighs where bullets had tunneled. Though the skin had knitted, his damaged quad muscles must have been smarting viciously. Grunting from the start, Jamie managed thirty-five sit-ups in a minute, with LB shouting into his straining face every time he bobbed up, for one more, one more. Wally got back on form with seventy-two. LB struggled to make sixty; he’d gained a few pounds from inactivity and nightly beer sessions at 11DN. Torres stood apart, scribbling notes, observing more than the numbers.
Push-ups became another ordeal for Wally. On the pirate ship, he’d dived across LB to protect him from an RPG blast in the ship’s passageway. Wally’s body armor caught a lot of the shrapnel, but every exposed bit of his back took a hit. With each press off the gym floor, the scabs, new skin, and red welts across his hundred small wounds stretched and flexed. Wally bared his teeth through twenty-nine push-ups in sixty seconds. With a secret nod, LB and Jamie sandbagged to make Wally’s number look better, each recording push-ups in the thirties for Torres’s chart. All three should have been north of sixty.
Without letting them change out of their blue shorts, gray Ts, and combat boots, Torres led the way to one of the Barn’s fridges for bottled water, then outside to a waiting all-terrain cart. The African sun stood on girders of midday heat, and the temperature had reached an easy ninety. Torres drove through the camp, headed for the dirt track along the security fence. Wally sat on the front seat beside her, left hand resting on the bench. LB wanted Torres to reach down and cover it with her own, give some signal that they all weren’t up shit’s creek. Torres drove on, wordless and unglancing.
At the start of the dusty path, LB tried to stretch his calf and hip. Jamie glared at the trail as if it were a mountain slope, nodding to himself, looking defiant, as though he knew he could do this with two freshly healed bullet holes in his legs. Wally seemed stoic, perhaps sad, behind his sunglasses. Humidity from the Gulf of Aden dripped into every breath, a sopping blanket of air.
Torres tattooed her pen against the clipboard, giving the men time to gather themselves. She pulled her cap low over her eyes, then tapped the board hard once.
“Three miles. You first.”
LB didn’t budge.
“What?”
“I said you first.”
“We run together. A team.”
“Not today.”
“Every day. Trust me, I learned that one.”
Torres cocked her head like a dog trying to understand something it can’t, like LB’s disobedience. Torres looked past him to Wally.
“Captain.”
“It’s her call, LB. Stand down.”
“You stand up, Captain.”
Torres cut him off.
“This is not a hill to die on.”
“It’s a hill.”
“All right. I understand the PJs well enough. But I can’t have any more fake results. I need to assess you, each of you, one at a time. Those are my orders. That makes them yours.”
Her head righted, mind made up.
“Get on the line. And to be clear, that’s an order. On your mark.”
Torres held her stopwatch in plain view, thumb poised.
“Get set. Go.”
Torres clicked the stopwatch. It ticked with the audible urgency of a bomb. LB shook his head.
Wally cursed and took off, arms pumping. His heels kicked high. A strong runner, he sprinted hard; the team would have at least one good time on Torres’s notepad.
“Staff Sergeant Dempsey. You’re next.”
Silent, Jamie waited while Wally disappeared down the track. Torres gave him the go. Jamie dashed off, looking good for the first hundred yards, until his limp caught up with him downrange. He ran on gamely. Torres made a note.
“You can’t send us home.”
“You think I want to? Honestly?”
“No.”
“Then shut up and go balls out so I don’t have to.”
“Can I say one more thing?”
“Which part of shut up did you miss, Master Sergeant?”
Torres showed him the stopwatch.
“On your mark.”
In swimsuits beside the swimming pool, they circled each other, whistling at scars, scabs, and cherry-stained flesh. They’d not seen each other’s wounds since the fight against the Somalis, and the bloodbath returned in their marks. Knitting cuts and nicks crisscrossed Wally’s back and hamstrings. Jamie’s thighs each showed the two red coins of entry and exit wounds. All of a sudden, Wally shook Jamie’s hand. LB patted Wally’s naked shoulder because every slash and stitch Wally bore would have been LB’s.
Torres cleared the twenty-meter pool, telling a group of marines it was closed for the next hour. The jarheads didn’t say a word on their way out, only nodded and dipped their heads at the diced-up PJs they shared the Djibouti base with.
Torres sat on a bench, clipboard in her lap. Jamie approached.
“How’re we doing, ma’am?”
“We’ll need to pick it up, Sergeant.”
“Normally I can do that run a lot faster.”
“I know.”
“It was just tough this time.”
“Of course.”
They moved to the edge of the three-lane pool, Wally in the middle, Jamie on the far side. Torres stood, stopwatch in hand and said, simply, “Go.”
All three dove in. An endurance swim of 1,500 meters was the last stage of the PT test. Despite his squat physique, LB was one of the strongest swimmers on the PJ team, indefatigable and powerful through the shoulders. His first strokes didn’t bother him and he reached the far wall in quick style,
thirty-seven laps to go.
He swam fast, leaving Wally and Jamie behind after the first turns. The pounding of the three-mile run had made LB’s calf sear, causing him to finish with an awful time, thirty-two minutes, just ahead of Jamie’s thirty-three. LB narrowed his focus to the concrete pool floor, controlled his breathing, and surged through the water.
The ache in his shoulder didn’t slow him until the tenth lap, then grew as the distance reeled off. The pain, working like a spear twisting in his gashed shoulder, drew his focus tighter, away from the rest of his tiring body, to become a spur. He swam faster, racing the hurt to see if he could finish before it peaked. With eight laps to go, kicking into the next turn, he arrived at that place where the pain was so great it couldn’t increase. He windmilled his left arm into another stroke; the flesh quit.
Stymied, clamping his teeth to keep from bellowing, LB rolled onto his back. He frog-kicked to keep advancing, with his face out of the water. He trailed his left arm, letting it burn. At the wall, he ducked under the surface and screamed, then kicked off.
He stretched his arm not into water but agony. He swam on like this, fending and fighting with the pain, moving a distance and time that Torres couldn’t record or evaluate. LB himself couldn’t measure it. He pushed through the barrier of his body and didn’t stop, doing all of his yelling underwater, until Torres stood at the end of his lane shouting that he was done.
He dropped his feet to the shallow bottom, cradling his left arm as if it were not attached. Turning from Torres and her ticking stopwatch, LB bit his lip hard. Crimson threads spread in the water beneath his dripping elbow, dissolving into a rusty cloud. Torres headed back to the bench to watch the last laps of the other two.
LB hoisted himself out and fetched a towel to stanch the reopened slit in his shoulder. Catching his breath, he faded to a seat against the cinderblock wall next to the major. She spoke without turning, as if she wasn’t supposed to address him.
The Empty Quarter Page 4
