“The vote doesn’t matter,” Mason said. “The president has enough power in Congress to push it through anyway. They’ll make a few changes, claim they fixed it, and force it through regardless of what the people want.”
“Is that a good thing?”
Mason shrugged. Realistically, it meant there’d be no political will to implement the peace, which meant less efforts in the poorest, most violent parts of the country, which meant fertile ground for BACRIM and narcotrafficking, which meant guys like Diego would be able to find employment in Colombia for a long, long time. “What do you think?”
“I don’t really understand this country well enough to have opinions about it one way or the other.”
Diego laughed at that. “That’s the luxury journalists have. For guys like us, shit here moves too fast for us to wait to have opinions until we understand things.”
“When I came here,” she said, “Diego promised me a good war.”
“Consider the competition,” Mason said. He knew he’d rather be here than in Afghanistan, or the Horn of Africa, or the Philippines. “I think he delivered.”
On the way home, Mason decided that was true. This was a messy war, but that was the nature of war. And as wars went, it was a good war. Which meant, regardless of the particulars of this or that operation, his efforts were spent for a good cause. His country was a force for good here. His was a good country. His service to it was a way of being a good man. That was the faith, anyway.
IV
To remain a great nation or to become one, you must colonize.
—Léon Gambetta
Juan Pablo waited to see who would come for the bodies. On the video feed before him was the aftermath of the latest air strike near Hodeidah. A wedding tent. Broken instruments. Bits of colorful clothing. If the camera resolution were better, he’d be able to see flesh, teeth. Children’s slippers and severed fingers. Targeting here was not like targeting in Colombia. It was less squeamish.
He’d arrived in the region a few months before. A Colombian company that had a deliberately obscure connection to an American military contracting firm had, upon seeing his résumé, practically rushed him onto the plane to the Emirates, where, supposedly, he was going to help with training and internal security. Most of the Colombian troops here were ground forces. Cattle, more or less. They’d already flown to Yemen and were there, fighting a primitive war with sophisticated weapons. But given his experience and his fluent English, he was placed in a targeting cell staffed mostly with Americans and Israelis, working with a team of analysts constantly flooding the operations center with data from ISR aircraft and drone feeds and sitreps and forensic reports, sifting through and finding people to kill. He was also making more money than ever before in his life.
His wife was talking about moving to an apartment in El Nogal. He was considering sending his daughter to Externado, which wasn’t necessarily a better school but was where she’d be less exposed to bad influences. It was all possible now. Money made everything easier.
“Look.” Jeffie Sung, a thin, jittery American drone pilot, motioned to the video feed from the drone, where a bongo truck with a crudely painted red crescent on it made its way to the site. Jeffie, who’d flown Predators for the U.S. military, now flew the Chinese drones the Emiratis used. And since his shift overlapped with Juan Pablo’s, and since he occasionally needed to speak to Latin American ground troops but didn’t speak Spanish, they’d built up a good working relationship.
“The Red Crescent hasn’t been operating here,” Juan Pablo said. “Let’s see who this is.”
The truck stopped and a group of young men emerged and began collecting the bodies in a workmanlike way.
“This is the strange part of the job,” Jeffie said. “Watching the cleanup.”
Juan Pablo nodded. “Does it bother you?” he asked.
“No.”
“Good.”
“And you?” There was something peculiar in Jeffie’s tone.
“I’m not without heart.”
Jeffie laughed, even though it was true. Juan Pablo took no pleasure in watching these scenes. But in war, only sociopaths are guided by pleasure. He told himself he was guided by duty. During his time in the Emirates, he’d been trying to determine what that was, exactly.
“Oh, and I’ve finally got my damn liquor license.” Jeffie pulled from his wallet one of the little Alcoholic Drinks Licenses that permitted non-Muslims to buy booze in the country. “Want to swing by after our shift, have a little whiskey?”
“Well . . . yes,” he said, his eyes on the screen. Two of the men loaded a child-size figure onto a stretcher. He kept his eyes on the figure as it made its slow way to the truck, was unloaded, and then the men went back for more, the next time picking a corpse the size of an adult.
He pointed to the screen. “Regrettable,” he said.
Jeffie shrugged. “Emirati pilots suck,” he said.
It was strange. Juan Pablo knew he was looking at the aftermath of a wedding party. He knew this war killed civilians by the thousands. He knew disease would soon claim worse. He knew cholera was spreading from Sana’a to Aden. He knew children were dying of malnutrition and he knew that Hodeidah was the central port for the vast majority of humanitarian aid coming into Yemen. So he knew that as they closed in and choked it off, more children would die. Regrettable, very regrettable. But necessary.
The Houthis, of course, had killed thousands even before the Emirates and the Saudis had intervened. They fought a dirty guerrilla war, laying minefields indiscriminately, getting six-year-old children to drop grenades in the turrets of tanks, establishing a totalitarian police state in the areas they’d taken over. They were primitive tribesmen, he told himself, their brightest idea the restoration of a seventh-century theocracy run exclusively by blood descendants of Mohammed, the sort of
