“We shoot ’em,” interrupted Murphy.
Buck gave him an accusatory look.
Murphy spat tobacco juice out the window. “Just kidding,” he said.
“Actually,” said Buck, “we release them. That means they can go back to their weapons and try again tomorrow night.”
The downside of being in Buck’s Humvee soon became clear. Our job was to drive ahead of the howitzers and find new firing positions, where the Long Distance Death Dealers could set up shop and cover the infantry during another push forward. We were essentially the forward reconnaissance unit. And so, after passing the prisoners of war, we left the howitzers on the relative safety of the road and went off in search of a new location. We drove for an hour, eventually reaching Highway 8, a four-lane expressway that runs from Safwan on the Kuwait border to Basra, then on to Baghdad. Instead of taking the road, we roared over a bulldozed crash barrier, across the central reservation, and down the embankment on the other side.
Highway 8, I noticed, had been blocked by a company of tanks, in front of which was a solitary Iraqi. He was lying bleeding on the tarmac next to a green motorcycle. “Is he dead?” asked Murphy as we passed. “No,” came Hustler’s shout from the roof. “He’s alive, but he sure as hell looks shell-shocked.”
The tanks reassured me. I felt as though we were surrounded by friendly forces. And so, as Murphy steered the Humvee through ditches and barren fields, I began to relax. As the fear subsided, I started to feel strangely bored. So I pulled out my Walkman, loaded up a CD, and dozed off. I felt like a child again, in the backseat of my dad’s Renault 9, on a French summer vacation. In my dream the familiar figures returned, standing in a sun-bleached room from my childhood, all swirly carpets and patterned wallpaper. There was Mum; Dad; Catherine; and Alana. I was looking up. My dad was telling me something I couldn’t make out. He said it again. Now I could hear. “Proud line of cowards,” he was saying over and over again.
When I awoke, the Humvee had stopped and Buck and Hustler were arguing.
“Are you sure?” said Buck.
“I’m fuckin’ sure!” replied Hustler.
“Hey, wakey-wakey,” said Buck, turning to me. “Sweet dreams? Do you have any batteries for that tape recorder of yours?”
Glad to be finally of some use, I dug deep into my North Face laptop bag and produced a twelve-pack of Duracells. The batteries were, in fact, for my electric toothbrush. But I wasn’t going to tell the captain that.
Buck opened up his GPS device, tore out the dud batteries, and replaced them with my Duracells. Then he waited.
“Goddammit,” he said finally. “You’re right. We’re here.” He pointed to the middle of an empty white grid on his map.
“Where’s the front line?” asked Hustler.
“There,” said Buck, moving his finger down and to the left.
Then, on the berm in front of us, a robed figure appeared.
For a fraction of a second, Buck, Hustler, Murphy—and, of course, the cowering blue-helmeted embed in the back of the Humvee—thought we’d been ambushed. Then we realized the explosion was too big, and too distant, to be aimed in our direction. It was an industrial noise, like machinery pounding metal into metal, and on a totally different scale of violence to the artillery fire I’d grown used to. I guessed it was an air force bomb, taking out an Iraqi weapons bunker.
“Boy, someone’s gettin’ all messed up over there,” declared Buck. “I sure as hell would not like to be gettin’ some of that…”
“That shit would suck,” agreed Murphy, who was still kneeling down and peering through the sights of his M-16.
The Bedouin, I noticed, had ducked. Now he was back on his feet, and Hustler was trying to communicate with him using hand signals. The exchange began with Hustler saluting, then giving the Iraqi a questioning look. The nomad began frantically shaking his head. This, I assumed, meant he wasn’t an Iraqi soldier. Then the Bedouin cupped his hands toward his mouth. This was followed by a patting motion, as though he was tousling the hair of a young child.
“He’s saying he needs water for his family,” said Buck, getting restless.
Hustler turned and started jogging back to the Humvee, his gun now back in its holster. He stopped outside Buck’s window.
“Hey, Captain,” he said. “Do we have any spare water?”
“What did you tell him?” asked Buck, passing the first sergeant his own bottle of al-Qassim through the window.
“I basically told him I’d give him the water if he would take his fuckin’ sheep somewhere else and keep them there.”
“Good work,” said Buck through a snorted chuckle.
“Man, that dude was old and crusty,” said Hustler, grinning. “He kind of looked like the guy from Lord of the Rings.” With that, the first sergeant turned and jogged back to the Bedouin, handing him the water. The tribesman waved thank you with his wooden crook and hobbled off over the berm.
“How do you know he’s not going to give away our position?” I asked Buck.
“I don’t,” said Buck.
Hustler, now coughing up sand and sweating, jumped back into the Humvee.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here, Murphy,” said Buck. “Before we meet someone who isn’t from Lord of the Rings.”
“Foreign new-ews?”
It was 7:10 P.M., and we were back in EmCon Delta, which meant I could use my satellite phone. Buck had found a position for the Long Distance Death Dealers near Highway 8, and the howitzers were hard at work again, reigning down death and dismemberment on some poor bastards eighteen miles to the east. According to the World Service, that was where the 1st Marine Division and British 7th Armoured Brigade were trying to take Basra. In a few hours’ time the 51st Mechanized Division would surrender. Not, of course, that I knew that.
“Martin,” I said.
“Chris! How’s it going?”
Barrow sounded chipper. He probably knew more about the progress of the war than I did. Buck wouldn’t tell me anything.
“Great,” I said in a voice thick with phlegm. “This is so much fun.”
One of the howitzers went off, drop-kicking me in the stomach with the back blast. By now, however, I was used to it.
“Still at war then,” said Barrow.
“Yeah. Did my story go in on Thursday night?” I asked.
Barrow suddenly sounded distracted. His keyboard clacked in the background.
“Oh, er, yeah. It went through.”
It went through? This, in Barrow-talk, meant the story went through the computer system but didn’t get in the newspaper.
“Martin, did it make it into the paper?”
“I’m not sure,” said Barrow, now bullshitting for Britain. “I think something went in the first edition. Don’t know about the second…”
“What?”
The first edition, as Barrow knew, was shipped overseas to newsstands in Europe. No one else in Britain, apart from the night editors of rival papers, and the drunks who bought The Times from the Leicester Square tube station at midnight, would ever see it. It probably wouldn’t even make it into the electronic archive. The Times spiked my story from the first day of the war! I felt afire with betrayal. This, I knew, was punishment for dictating “mucky copy.”
The silence, transmitted via space at ten dollars per minute, was uncomfortable.
“Not to worry,” I said eventually. “I’ve got another story, this one about the Bedouins. I’ll file it over the weekend.”