husband’s not a one-woman man, but I’m stuck with him and him alone.”
17
Wells was happy to leave Kandahar Air Field. Even in war zones, the military needed big, well-defended bases to house its planes, coms networks, all the stuff that made the guys on the front lines so effective. But the guys at KAF sometimes seemed to forget that their job was supporting the soldiers outside the wire, not the other way around. Massive resources went into making sure that the airfield’s forty thousand inhabitants had plenty of creature comforts. Meanwhile, some infantry units lacked basics like showers.
KAF’s size was part of the problem. The people who worked there could be forgiven for forgetting that Afghanistan even existed. Almost no Afghans lived or worked on the base. The Taliban fired rockets blindly from the ugly brown mountain that loomed over the base to the north, but they rarely did much damage. Like bases back home, KAF even had a full complement of military police officers who wrote parking tickets and enforced other petty regulations, like making soldiers wear reflective belts after dark.
The Air Force didn’t run flights from Kandahar to Dubai, so Wells booked a ticket on Gryphon Air, a Pentagon-approved charter service. Most of Gryphon’s passengers worked for DynCorp, a contracting company that filled thousands of jobs at Kandahar.
The contractors at Kandahar split into two broad groups. The English-speaking ones were mostly ex-military, soldiers and Marines who’d cultivated special skills like training bomb-sniffing dogs. When their contracts expired, they jumped to private contracting companies that paid a hundred and fifty thousand or more a year.
“Same job, but three times the money and a tenth the risk,” one said to Wells over lunch at the giant Kandahar mess hall called Luxembourg. “PMCs”—private military contractors—“never go outside the wire. No such thing as desertion or dereliction of duty. No brig. Worst they can do is fire you and tell you they won’t pay. Plus I got no sergeants telling me what to wear or how to salute or what time to be in bed. Course, back when I was wearing the uniform, I bitched about the contractors, said they all were useless as tits on a bull.”
“You feel differently now.”
“I do and I don’t. Not saying I work like a Joe. But how was I gonna turn this deal down? Hundred and sixty K. My wife doesn’t work and we got three kids. I put in my time, spent five years getting shot at. Fair’s fair. I don’t make the rules.”
Wells had had several similar conversations. He figured that the contractors were honest guys who felt guilty about their windfall. So they overexplained, justified themselves. Wells wanted to tell them not to worry, that Alex Rodriguez got paid as much to play one baseball game as they did in a year. But he thought that kind of reassurance would just piss them off, so he kept his mouth shut.
The second set of contractors didn’t talk to Wells. They hardly spoke English. They were the Filipinos and Indians who cooked and scrubbed and took out the trash, the scut work that the United States military no longer did for itself. Wells supposed that they freed up American soldiers to fight. They weren’t making a hundred and fifty thousand a year, either, so they might even have been cost-effective.
Still he found their presence disconcerting. They made Kandahar feel like an old-school colonial occupation. Brown men taking care of white men who were fighting other brown men.
THE GRYPHON JET FLEW southwest over the empty desert that dominated southern Kandahar province and then swung over Pakistan and the Persian Gulf. It landed in late afternoon at Dubai’s massive airport. Wells grabbed his bag and joined the parade of unshaven contractors thirsting for Dubai’s bars.
But along the way to the immigration hall he disappeared into a men’s room. When he walked out, he was wearing a
Saudis were favored travelers in Dubai. The immigration agent barely bothered to look at Wells before waving him through. Two minutes later, he stood in the humble-jumble at the front of the airport and listened to deals being made in English and Arabic and a dozen other languages. Pakistani taxi drivers and Indian hotel hawkers competed for business from Russian tourists in velour sweat suits. Dubai was a long way from anywhere, a six-hour flight from Europe and Russia, twelve from the United States. Despite the jet lag, everyone seemed excited.
By rights, Wells should have disliked Dubai. As much as anywhere in the world, the city represented the triumph of empty consumer culture. Yet he found the city strangely compelling. It had no natural advantages. Its weather was miserable most of the year. It lay thousands of miles from the major cities of Europe and Asia. It didn’t have a good natural harbor. Unlike the rest of the region, it didn’t even have oil. Yet since the 1980s, Dubai had grown as fast as anywhere on earth, sprouting thousand-foot-high sand castles built with cheap labor and cheaper money.
Americans didn’t have a good word for cities like Dubai, or the buccaneers who made and lost fortunes in them. The English did:
At their worst, flash men carved misery into the lives around them. They lived high and skipped town, leaving behind thousand-dollar suits and unpaid child support. But mostly they meant no harm. Mostly they were lazy dreamers who couldn’t multiply or divide any better than their customers. Every so often, almost by accident, they came up with something great. As they had in Dubai with the Burj Khalifa, which Wells saw from the cab taking him to his hotel.
The Burj was the tallest skyscraper ever built, a half mile high, an incredible feat of engineering. To withstand the desert winds, the Burj was built of a dozen rounded towers that buttressed one another as they rose. One by one the supporting towers fell away until only the tallest remained, impossibly long, a fingerclaw puncturing the sky. Most of the Burj was empty, and as a business venture the tower was no doubt a disaster. But who cared? Like Notre Dame or the Hoover Dam or the Great Wall, the Burj would awe visitors long after its architects were gone. It was a hundred-and-fifty-story monument to flash, with an almost magnetic pull. Wells stared at it until lesser skyscrapers nearer the highway blocked his view. “Have you been to it?” he asked his driver.
“Not me, no. Very expensive. One hundred dirhams.” About twenty-five dollars. “Also I am afraid of heights.” The driver sounded sheepish. To prove he wasn’t a coward, he cut in front of a tanker truck.
The Grosvenor was a five-star hotel, marble and sleek. Wells used one of his Saudi credit cards to take a high-floor suite that overlooked the gulf. Dubai was located on a western-facing shoreline of the Arabian peninsula, so the dusky red glow of the setting sun echoed in the waters of the gulf.
Wells wondered what Shafer was doing in Chicago, ten time zones behind. Probably about to knock on Asha Miller’s door. Wells hoped he didn’t get himself in trouble. He supposed Shafer qualified as his best friend these days. An atheist Jew and a Christian turned Muslim. But Wells trusted Shafer as deeply as he’d ever trusted anyone. He had lied to Shafer over the years, and Shafer had done the same to him. But never out of malice, on either side. Shafer had his back. Wells wondered whether he could ever build similar trust with Anne, if he had the strength to open himself to her that way.
In Dubai, the calls to prayer sounded more quietly than in most Muslim cities. The hotels and nightclubs didn’t want to remind Western tourists that Dubai wasn’t really Las Vegas East, that a different set of laws applied. Even so, as the sun descended into the gulf, Wells heard faint calls for the
