In the hour before dawn, the platoon they had been tacked onto hit a private home, set back in a grove of palms, with a white stucco wall around the yard, and a wrought-iron gate across the drive. The house was stucco too, and had a swimming pool out back, a patio and grill, wouldn't have looked out of place in southern California. Delta Team drove their Hummer right through the gate, which went down with a hard iron bang, hinges shearing out of the wall with a spray of plaster.
That was all Mal saw of the raid. She was behind the wheel of a two-and-a-half ton troop transport for carrying prisoners. No Hummer for her, and no action either. Carmody had another truck. She listened for gunfire, but there was none, the residents giving up without a struggle.
When the house was secure, Corporal Plough left them, said he wanted to size up the situation. What he wanted to do was get his picture taken, chewing on a stogie and holding his gun, with his boot on the neck of a hog-tied insurgent. She heard over the walkie-talkie that they had grabbed one of the Fedayeen Saddam, a Ba'athist lieutenant, and had found weapons, files, personnel information. There was a lot of cornpone whoop-ass on the radio. Everyone in the 82nd looked like Eminem — blue eyes, pale blonde hair in a crew cut — and talked like one of the Duke boys.
Just after sunup, when the shadows were leaning long away from the buildings on the east side of the street, they brought the Fedayeen out and left him on the narrow sidewalk with Plough. The insurgent's wife was still inside the building, soldiers watching her while she packed a bag.
The Fedayeen was a big Arab with hooded eyes and a three-day shadow on his chin, and he wasn't saying anything except, "Fuck you" in American. In the basement, Delta Team had found racked AK-47s, and a table covered in maps, marked all over with symbols, numbers, Arabic letters. They discovered a folder of photographs, featuring US soldiers in the act of establishing checkpoints, rolling barbed wire across different roads. There was also a picture in the folder of George Bush, Sr, smiling a little foggily, posing with Steven Seagal.
Plough was worried the pictures showed places and people the insurgents planned to strike. He had already been on the radio a couple times, back to base, talking with CI about it in a strained, excited voice. He was especially upset about Steven Seagal. Everyone in Plough's unit had been made to watch Above the Law at least once, and Plough claimed to have seen it more than a hundred times. After they brought the prisoner out, he stood over the Fedayeen, yelling at him, and sometimes swatting him upside the head with Seagal's rolled-up picture. The Fedayeen said, "More fuck you."
Mal leaned against the driver's side door of her truck for a while, wondering when Plough would quit hollering and swatting the prisoner. She had a Vivarin hangover and her head hurt. Eventually she decided he wouldn't be done yelling until it was time to load up and go, and that might not be for another hour.
She left Plough yelling, walked over the flattened gate and up to the house. She let herself into the cool of the kitchen. Red tile floor, high ceilings, lots of windows so the place was filled with sunlight. Fresh bananas in a glass bowl. Where did they get fresh bananas? She helped herself to one, and ate it on the toilet, the cleanest toilet she had sat on in a year.
She came back out of the house and started down to the road again. On the way there, she put her fingers in her mouth, and sucked on them. She hadn't brushed her teeth in a week, and her breath had a human stink on it.
When she returned to the street, Plough had stopped sweating the prisoner long enough to catch his breath. The Ba'athist looked up at him from under his heavy-lidded eyes. He snorted and said, "Is talk. Is boring. You are no one. I say fuck you still no one."
Mal sank to one knee in front of him, put her fingers under his nose and said in Arab, "Smell that? That is the cunt of your wife. I fuck her myself like a lesbian and she said it was better than your cock."
The Ba'athist tried to lunge at her from his knees, making a sound down in his chest, a strangled growl of rage, but Plough caught him across the chin with the stock of his M4. The sound of the Ba'athist's jaw snapping was as loud as a gunshot.
He lay on his side, twisted into a foetal ball. Mal remained crouched beside him.
"Your jaw is broken," Mal said. "Tell me about the photographs of the US soldiers, and I will bring a no-more-hurt pill."
It was half an hour before she went to get him the painkillers, and by then he had told her when the pictures had been taken, coughed up the name of the photographer.
Mal was leaning into the back of her truck, digging in the first aid kit, when Carmody's shadow joined hers at the rear bumper.
"Did you really do it?" Carmody asked her. The sweat on him glowed with an ill sheen in the noonday light. "The wife?"
"What? Fuck no. Obviously."
"Oh," Carmody said, and swallowed convulsively. "Someone said — " he began, then his voice trailed off.
"What did someone say?"
He glanced across the road, at two soldiers from the 82nd, standing by their Hummer. "One of the guys who was in the building said you marched right in and bent her over. Face-down on the bed."
She looked over at Vaughan and Henrichon, holding their M-16s and struggling to contain their laughter. She flipped them the bird.
"Jesus, Carmody. Don't you know when you're being fucked with?"
His head was down. He stared at his own scarecrow shadow, tilting into the back of the truck.
"No," he said.
Two weeks later, Carmody and Mai were in the back of a different truck, with that same Arab, the Ba'athist, who was being transferred from Abu Ghraib to a smaller prison facility in Baghdad. The prisoner had his head in a steel contraption, to clamp his jaw in place, but he was still able to open his mouth wide enough to hawk a mouthful of spit into Mal's face.
Mal was wiping it away when Carmody got up and grabbed the Fedayeen by the front of his shirt and heaved him out of the back of the truck, into the dirt road. The truck was doing thirty miles an hour at the time, and was part of a convoy that included two reporters from MSNBC.
The prisoner survived, although most of his face was flayed off on the gravel, his jaw rebroken, his hands smashed. Carmody said he leaped out on his own, trying to escape, but no one believed him, and three weeks later Carmody was sent home.
The funny thing was that the insurgent really did escape, a week after that, during another transfer. He was in handcuffs, but with his thumbs broken he was able to slip his hands right out of them. When the MPs stepped out of their Hummer at a checkpoint, to talk porno with some friends, the prisoner dropped out of the back of the transport. It was night. He simply walked into the desert, and, as the stories go, was never seen again.
The band took the stage Friday evening, and didn't come offstage until Saturday morning. Twenty minutes after one, Mal bolted the door behind the last customer. She started helping Candice wipe down tables, but she had been on since before lunch, and Bill Rodier said go home already.
Mal had her jacket on and was headed out when John Petty poked her in the shoulder with something.
"Mal," he said. "This is yours, right? Your name on it."
She turned. Petty was at the cash register, holding a fat envelope toward her. She took.
"That the money Glen gave you, to swap for his wedding ring?" Petty turned his shoulder to her, shifting his attention back to the register. He pulled out stacks of bills, rubber-banded them, and lined them up on the bar. "That's something. Taking his money and fucking him all over again. You think I plop down five hundred bucks, you'd fuck me just as nice?"