The sailor smiled. ‘We got that fucking Kilo sub, though. ASW guys from the
‘Hell, yeah,’ someone else said. Others took up the chorus: ‘Hell, yeah! Payback!’
He heard a seemingly endless stream of combat horror stories. Units cut off or abandoned. Enemies materialising out of nowhere. Supplies running out. Air cover disappearing. Waves of Iraqi troops flowing towards them, then suddenly disappearing inside great roiling walls of flame, or enormous volcanic eruptions of high- explosive dropped from miles overhead. He heard small, intimate stories about men killing each other with whatever weapon came to hand. About a female truck driver, trapped in a hostile village, crawling out via the thousand- year-old sewage system, and souveniring a couple of old Roman coins she discovered on the way.
Night had fallen, and half of the hangar’s floating population had been spirited away before he finally stopped. Both hands ached, but his missing finger tormented him with a particular ferocity and the wounded shoulder throbbed with a deep, agonising bass line from his having sat hunched over the notepad for so long. But Melton thought he had enough material for a whole book, including a wrenching series of personal stories about what people had already lost. Families, home, friends, everything.
He made an effort to gather testimonials from the handful of Europeans present, such as Milosz and his men, and some British tankers whose Challenger had been crippled by a buried mine. Fact was, their stories would sell the piece in whatever form it took, the domestic market for American stories having literally disappeared. When the Poles finally got their ride out, he was reading back over the tale of a Scottish infantryman who’d been separated from his platoon in al Basra for two days, but whose main concern remained the fate of his family’s trout farm after a week of acid rain had killed off the entire stock. They all shook hands and wished each other well.
‘Make them understand that there is a new Poland,’ said Milosz as they parted.
Melton looked around at those who remained. Not quite so many tears now. A few of them were snoring, sound asleep, jerking in the fit of a nightmare somewhere in their past. He heard a couple of guys laughing about a canoe trip they had been on – how drunk they’d been, and the silly idiot with the yellow swimming trunks who wouldn’t fall into the raft full of college co-eds.
It was mid evening; a cool, almost chilly night, alive with the rumble of distant air operations. He was tired and very hungry, and getting shack-whacky, having been trapped inside for so long, even in such a large building. The last thing he’d eaten had been a protein bar, four hours earlier, and he just knew the table service in this place was going to suck big-time. Until his transport batch number was called, there was nothing for it but to wait. Having lost the pile of Polish duffel bags on which he’d been resting contentedly, he’d since moved to one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs dotted about the facility. He remembered the poncho liner, which he still had, gifted by the specialist on KP back in Kuwait.
Melton wrapped himself in the woodland-green camo snivel gear as the earlier desert heat turned to night-time frigid. It was there, half asleep, haunted by visions of the mortar attack that had put him in hospital, that Sayad al Mirsaad found him.
27
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
‘You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me!’ Kipper was incredulous, outraged even. In fact, half-a-dozen emotions blasted through him like a hot desert zephyr on finding out that the military had arrested the elected city councillors, but mostly his feelings arranged themselves around ‘incredulous’ and ‘outraged’. ‘You can’t do that. It’s… it’s…’
‘Wrong?’ offered General Blackstone.
‘Yeah, that’s right. It’s
‘We knew you’d understand,’ McCutcheon replied, without a hint of irony. ‘That’s exactly why we put ‘em in the bag. They really do argue about the cookies, don’t they? I watched them do it last week. Amazing, man. Truly fucking amazing. Anyway, while they’re banging heads over the catering arrangements,
The last part of his routine he delivered in a parade-ground roar, emphasised by pounding a fist down on a stack of folders that burst out from under the blow in an explosion of paper. Kipper jumped and looked over to Blackstone, but the general remained impassive. It was a bad-cop bad-cop routine.
‘Look,’ the major said, instantly switching back to his usual calm and spookily cheery self. ‘They haven’t been arrested as such, just detained preventively.’
‘What the hell do you mean, “preventively”?’
Blackstone answered for him. ‘To prevent them being arrested when they fuck up so badly they really do get a lot of people killed.’
‘Like this morning?’
‘Oh grow up, Kipper,’ snarled Blackstone. ‘This is serious. We don’t want to take over here. We don’t want to take over anywhere. Hell, we’re desperate for someone to tell us what to do, but nobody’s putting a hand up. Everyone’s arguing about fucking cookies.’
‘Bullshit, General, that’s an exaggeration.’
‘No,’ said McCutcheon, tag-teaming again. ‘It’s a metaphor. For “pointless, infuriating contention about complete fucking inanities”. Like cookies – which I can assure you they did argue about. Somebody said they needed to start conserving food, so they spent three-quarters of an hour debating whether they were entitled to a packet of fucking Oreos at their meetings. This was just last Thursday, by phone hook-up, during the worst of the pollutant storm. By phone hook-up, Kipper – they were all
