"What's he saying?" Plough asked. "I don't speak sand nigger."
"He said don't," Mal said, translating automatically. "He says he hasn't done anything. He was picked up by accident."
Plough kicked away the other crutch. "Get those."
Carmody picked up the crutches.
Plough put his boot in The Professor's fleshy ass and shoved.
"Get going. Tell him get going."
A pair of MPs walked past, turned their heads to look at The Professor as they went by. He was trying to cover his crotch with one hand, but Plough kicked him in the ass again and he had to start crawling. His crawl was awkward stuff, what with his left leg sticking out straight in its cast and the bare foot dragging in the dirt. One of the MPs laughed, and then they moved away into the night.
The Professor struggled to pull his Johnnie up onto his shoulders as he crawled, but Plough stepped on it and it tore away.
"Leave it. Tell him leave it and hurry up."
Mal told him. The prisoner couldn't look at her. He looked at Carmody instead, and began pleading with him, asking for something to wear and saying his leg hurt while Carmody stared down at him, eyes bulging, as if he were choking on something.
Mal wasn't surprised The Professor was addressing Carmody instead of her. Part of it was a cultural thing. The Arabs couldn't cope with being humiliated in front of a woman. But also, Carmody had something about him that signified to others, even the enemy, that he was approachable. In spite of the 9mm strapped to his outer thigh, he gave an impression of stumbling, unthreatening cluelessness. In the barracks, he blushed when other guys were ogling centrefolds; he often could be seen praying during heavy mortar attacks.
The prisoner had stopped crawling once more. Mal poked the barrel of her M4 in The Professor's ass to get him going again and the Iraqi jerked, gave a shrill sort of sob. Mal didn't mean to laugh, but there was something funny about the convulsive clench of his butt-cheeks, something that sent a rush of blood to her head. Her blood was racy and strange with Vivarin, and watching the prisoner's ass bunch up like that was the most hilarious thing she had seen in weeks.
The Professor crawled past wire fence, along the edge of the road. Plough told Mal to ask him where his friends were now, his friends who blew up the American GI. He said if The Professor would tell about his friends, he could have his crutches and his Johnnie back.
The prisoner said he didn't know anything about the IED. He said he ran because other men were running and soldiers were shooting. He said he was a teacher of literature, that he had a little girl. He said he had taken his twelve-year-old to Disneyland Paris once.
"He's fucking with us," Plough said. "What's a professor of literature doing out at 2:00 a.m. in the worst part of town? Your queer fuck Bin-Laden friends blew the face right off an American GI, a good man, a man with a pregnant wife back home. Where do your friends — Mal, make him understand he's going to tell us where his friends are hiding. Let him know it would be better to tell us now, before we get where we're going. Let him know this is the easy part of his day. CI wants this motherfucker good and soft before we get him there."
Mal nodded, her ears buzzing. She told The Professor he didn't have a daughter, because he was a known homosexual. She asked him if he liked the barrel of her gun in his ass, if it excited him. She said, "Where is the house of your partners who make the dogs into bombs? Where is your homosexual friends go after murdering Americans with their trick dogs? Tell me if you don't want the gun in the hole of your ass."
"I swear by the life of my little girl I don't know who those other men were. Please. My child is named Alaya. She is ten years old. There was a picture of her in my pants. Where are my pants? I will show you."
She stepped on his hand, and felt the bones compress unnaturally under her heel. He shrieked.
"Tell," she said. "Tell."
"I can't."
A steely clashing sound caught Mal's attention. Carmody had dropped the crutches. He looked green, and his hands were hooked into claws, raised almost-but-not-quite to cover his ears.
"You okay?" she asked.
"He's lying," Carmody said. Carmody's Arab was not as good as hers, but not bad. "He said his daughter was twelve the first time."
She stared at Carmody and he stared back, and while they were looking at each other, there came a high, keening whistle, like air being let out of some giant balloon… a sound that made Mal's racy blood feel as if it were fizzing with oxygen, made her feel carbonated inside.
She flipped her M4 around to hold it by the barrel in both hands, and when the mortar struck — out beyond the perimeter, but still hitting hard enough to cause the earth to shake underfoot — she drove the butt of the gun straight down into The Professor's broken leg, clubbing at it as if she were trying to drive a stake into the ground.
Over the shattering thunder of the exploding mortar, not even Mal could hear him screaming.
Mal pushed herself hard on her Friday morning run, out in the woods, driving herself up Hatchet Hill, reaching ground so steep she was really climbing, not running. She kept going, until she was short of breath and the sky seemed to spin, as if it were the roof of a carousel.
When she finally paused, she felt faint. The wind breathed in her face, chilling her sweat, a curiously pleasant sensation. Even the feeling of light-headedness, of being close to exhaustion and collapse, was somehow satisfying to her.
The army had her for four years before Mal left to become a part of the reserves. On her second day of basic training, she had done push-ups until she was sick, then was so weak she collapsed in it. She wept in front of others, something she could now hardly bear to remember.
Eventually, she learned to like the feeling that came right before collapse: the way the sky got big, and sounds grew far away and tinny, and all the colours seemed to sharpen to an hallucinatory brightness. There was an intensity of sensation, when you were on the edge of what you could handle, when you were physically tested and made to fight for each breath, that was somehow exhilarating.
At the top of the hill, Mal slipped the stainless steel canteen out of her ruck, her father's old camping canteen, and filled her mouth with ice water. The canteen flashed, a silver mirror in the late morning sun. She poured water into her face, wiped her eyes with the hem of her T-Shirt, put the canteen away, and ran on, ran for home.
She let herself in through the front door, didn't notice the envelope until she stepped on it and heard the crunch of paper underfoot. She stared down at it, her mind blank for one dangerous moment, trying to think who would've come up to the house to slide a bill under the door when they could just leave it in the mailbox. But it wasn't a bill and she knew it.
Mal was framed in the door, the outline of a soldier painted into a neat rectangle, like the human silhouette targets they shot at on the range. She made no sudden moves, however. If someone meant to shoot her, they would have done it — there had been plenty of time — and if she was being watched, Mal wanted to show she wasn't afraid.
She crouched, picked up the envelope. The flap was not sealed. She tapped out the sheet of paper inside and unfolded it. Another thumbprint, this one a fat black oval, like a flattened spoon. There was no fishhook shaped scar on this thumb. This was a different thumb entirely. In some ways, that was more unsettling to her than anything.
No — the most unsettling thing was that this time he had slipped his message under her door, while last time he had left it a hundred yards down the road, in the mailbox. It was maybe his way of saying he could get as close to her as he wanted.