‘Too sweet.’
‘You eat that salty licorice.’
‘Salty.’
‘Did you give him a backup phone?’ Louise asks.
‘Who?’
‘The older gentleman.’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Are you having an affair with him?’
‘Yes.’
‘How long has it been going on?’
‘Two nights, twenty-two years apart.’
‘I don’t have a label for that,’ Louise says.
‘Neither do I.’
‘What are you doing, Märta?’
‘I’m doing what I’m always doing here. I’m trying to protect civilians while doing no harm.’
‘You may have to rethink your methods.’
21
They are hostages and alive, off-road, and heading south in another white Toyota Land Cruiser.
Moe had put the hood on Benton’s head before pushing him into the back seat. He could hear Adar’s cries, Jamal’s heavy breathing, and Arwood’s bullshit, too, until something struck his remaining words out and Arwood finally stopped talking.
Larry must be driving, because Benton heard the diesel engine start while Moe was still beside him. Unless there are more than two of them now. Time will tell.
There is no good direction to travel in, but south is worst, because south of Ninawa province is al-Anbar and the great western desert where ISIL is retrenching. There are no mapped roads that pass through it. The highway from Mosul to Baghdad is far to the east. As far as Benton knows, nothing passes directly through the desert itself, but he doesn’t know much: a map is only a map, and not every road is documented on it.
They drive for more than twenty minutes. They are safer inside the car. They can be shot anywhere, so it’s unlikely to happen where it will make a mess.
The breeze from the open window presses against Benton’s hood, filling his nostrils with the fabric, and for a moment he can’t breathe. His neck cramps as he turns away. It is only when he lowers his head in defeat that the fabric bunches and he can breathe again through a small gap near the neck.
Benton’s inner thigh starts to vibrate.
His world is black, so he cannot see whether anyone else has noticed. The phone’s silent vibrations are muffled between the vinyl seat and his leg. He’d forgotten it was there. His captors didn’t search him after taking his primary phone and satchel away, because most men frisk others poorly.
Benton lifts his hips to keep the phone from vibrating against anything other than himself. There are wind gusts and engine rumble, tyre buzz, and scree kicking up into the chassis. They harmonise a dull white noise that fills the cabin and insulates the sound.
The sun is almost down. He can feel that. Desert voices belong to women. It would be nice to hear Märta’s voice, if only he could answer the phone.
Hello? he’d say.
Thomas? Where are you?
Held hostage. I should have listened to you.
Would you like to come back?
Yes, please.
This is the conversation he wants to have. It is not her voice, though, he is hearing. It is Vanessa’s.
Moe is sitting in the far-back seats. He says something to Larry, the driver, that Benton doesn’t understand. It must be something he doesn’t mind Adar or Jamal hearing. The vehicle turns. No one else says a word.
The driver slows, and later slows further. The light changes. They are behind a hill now, or in a garage, or the sun has set entirely. The temperature drops.
Märta — assuming it was Märta — has stopped calling. She tried three times.
Could it have been Charlotte? She’s been trying to reach him. She’s been wanting to tell him he’s a cretin for turning on her mother after ignoring them both. She wants to explain to him — he supposes — that he has no right to disappear at a time like this, to place something distant and historical and abstract like peace in the Middle East over something proximate and tangible and immediate like herself and her mother. She will be eloquent in her juxtapositions and her line of reasoning. She will be linear and faithful to logical progression, and she will substantiate her claims on accepted norms of social behaviour among adults, which she learned about from someone other than her father.
It couldn’t have been Charlotte, though. This isn’t his phone. It is Märta’s phone. She has called it three times, and he hasn’t answered. Now he has to trust that she knows what to do with silence.
The Land Cruiser stops after hours on the road and off it. The route has been too complex to memorise, and the sun has set, so Benton is completely without his bearings. All he knows, for certain, is they have gone up. Way up. When the door is opened, cold air rushes in, along with the new danger. It is almost welcome.
Moe yells at his hostages to get out, and slaps their heads, giving them a direction to walk. Adar has stopped her crying. There are no city sounds. There’s no traffic or village life. They are someplace desolate. Unwitnessed.
A third man comes out to meet them. His footfalls are crisp. He shuffles as he walks. He mumbles quietly to the other men. He sounds surprised. He is asking questions.
Benton names him Curly.
The longer Curly speaks, the angrier he gets at Larry and Moe. Whatever he says, he is saying in front of Jamal and Adar, who surely understand what’s being said. Which either means it doesn’t matter because it’s incidental, or he’s going to kill them all anyway, so it’s also incidental.
Nothing can be deduced here. Even Sherlock Holmes would be lost.
Moe grabs Benton’s arms and cuffs them behind his back, using a zip cuff.
Benton gently pushes his wrists outward as far as possible while Curly tightens them; too tight, but they would have been tighter if Benton hadn’t pressed back.
Moe pushes and slaps them as they walk blindly. After twenty steps from the car, Benton’s feet land on something different from the packed earth. It is smooth and manmade. The pressure on his ears increases. There is an echo. It is even colder. It smells like a musty cellar suffering from water damage.
It’s into this chamber that Arwood decides to speak. Again.
‘I said before that there’s money to be made off us. But I forgot to tell you this. If you don’t make a deal for our release, you’ll be the ones paying the price. My people are watching. I strongly suggest you make a low ransom demand, take your money, and get this done. Because if you don’t, you’re dead men walking.’
At least four distinct voices laugh. So there are four Stooges, who speak English well enough to chuckle at Arwood.
Which introduces Shemp as the fourth stooge. And this means that Benton is running out of Stooges faster than they are.
When Benton’s hood is removed, he sees nothing. His eyelids are sticky, and his vision blurry. The glaring bare bulb on the ceiling is little help. When he does manage to focus, he makes out a square room about five metres by five metres, with slits on the wall in front of him near the ceiling, like in a World War II pillbox. To his right is a door of drab-green sheet metal and rust. It is closed. To his left, there is another that seems more robust and may lead outside. There are two dirty mattresses on the floor behind him, and nothing else.
When his eyes focus, he sees that Arwood’s hood has been removed as well, his arms bound behind him. Jamal and Adar are there, too, standing in the corner as though they can avoid their circumstance by giving it a wide berth.
He turns, and sees that the door to the outside is closed as well. They are all boxed in together.
‘Everyone OK?’ Benton asks.
Jamal nods, and Adar is immobile and hangs her head. Her face has vanished into the darkness of her hair, which shields her.
‘We’re going to need a plan,’ Benton says.
‘Oh, I have a plan,’ Arwood says. �
�I wasn’t bluffing. We’re being watched. I’ve got people.’
22
It has been said that the US Army was designed by geniuses to be run by idiots. When Arwood returned to the United States in June 1991 as Operation Provide Comfort wound to a close with a whimper, he wondered what they had been geniuses at doing.
He avoided a court-martial somehow, and the mandatory ‘bad conduct’ or dishonourable discharge that comes with it. Instead, he was given an ‘other than honourable’ discharge. At first, he had no idea what that meant, and didn’t care. His buddies called it ‘bad paper’, and after that they weren’t his buddies anymore. Apparently, bad paper is contagious, and it doesn’t matter how you contracted it.
He went home to his parents’ house, because he had no apartment or job. It was a nondescript white ranch house with three small bedrooms. At first, this was exactly the atmosphere he needed. It was a staid purgatory that demanded nothing of him, gave nothing in return, and offered no judgement, because there was no one around who cared enough to be judgemental. Not until his father chewed him out.
After that, Arwood decided to call Veterans Affairs and see if he could get some help from them. He wasn’t suicidal or anything, but he wanted to know what they could do to help him out, because he was lower than he’d ever been, felt more alone than he knew was possible, and the furthest into the future he could imagine was reaching for the door handle that led outside.
It was kind of interesting speaking with the Department of Veterans Affairs, because Arwood learned that the US government considers eligibility for psychological counselling to be a reward for not really needing it. By excluding veterans with less-than-honourable discharges, they were excluding those who had acted the worst in a war — probably for psychological reasons — and, rather than helping them out, instead set them loose on the general population, resulting in pretty predictable violence, wife-beating, alcoholism, criminality, family disintegration, long-term unemployment, welfare, emergency medical costs, unpaid medical bills, loan defaults, drug use, federal and state drug-enforcement costs, state legal fees for prosecuting criminals, prison costs, and appeal processes, not to mention all the traumatised children they beat the crap out of.
But Arwood was told that he wasn’t necessarily excluded. His was an in-between case — being other than honourable — that may or may not have been disqualifying, based on the standards set under Title 38 Code of Federal Regulations (C.F.R.) §3.12. Now, as it was explained to Arwood one afternoon by phone in 1991, as he wiped potato-chip crumbs from his AC/DC T-shirt, he still might retain eligibility for VA health-care benefits for service-incurred or service-aggravated disabilities, unless he was subject to one of the statutory bars to benefits set forth in Title 38 United States Code §5303(a), Authority: Section 2 of Public Law 95-126 (Oct. 8, 1977).
‘Uh-huh,’ he’d said.
He might be eligible for pending verification status. ‘You have to put in a request for an administrative decision regarding the character of service for VA health-care purposes, and that must be made to the local VA regional office or VARO. Do you know where your VARO is?’
‘Um —’
‘This request may be submitted using a VA Form 7131, Exchange of Beneficiary Information and Request for Administrative and Adjudicative Action. In making determinations of health-care eligibility, the same criteria will be used as are now applicable to determinations of service connection when there is no character-of-discharge bar.
‘Sir? Are you there?’
With his savings from the army, Arwood bought a very used red-white-and-blue Yamaha FJ 1100 motorcycle, and disappeared into America at $0.98 a gallon. He realised, in looking at his Rand McNally map, that he’d actually seen less of the country than he’d seen of Iraq, and he’d only seen four towns in Iraq. His goal was simply to put as many miles as possible between himself, his father, and anyone who might understand that phone call.
Arwood Hobbes tried working regular jobs — supermarkets, photo labs, record stores. But regular jobs for regular people had in common the element of routine. Routine, he found, could be a great way to hold things together if you’re already a together kind of guy, but Arwood was in pieces, and he wanted to do something that might put himself right again. Holding the line was not going to make that happen.
He arrived in the Midwest, only in the sense that you can’t get anywhere without passing through it, and he had to stop for money for petrol. Amid the flatness, he found hand-written signs for yard sales and flea markets, all of them selling guns.
Arwood wasn’t a gun nut. He didn’t have any happy childhood memories of hunting with his grandpa or learning to track with his daddy. He had never heard lectures on nature and conservation, or on Teddy Roosevelt. Guns were mechanical things he’d been trained to take apart, put back together, and use. They were fun to play with at the outset, but, after basic training and jogging in the desert, what Arwood had come to appreciate about guns was that — more than anything else — they were heavy.
What he did like, though, was sales.
Supply and demand made sense to him. It was a simple seesaw, a singular philosophy with one fulcrum on an unalterable axis — much like talk radio.
Still, though, Arwood was dissatisfied. It wasn’t the money he wanted; it was a higher calling, a purpose. He was still pissed off, and he had no way to get over it.
In Montana, at one well-attended and well-stocked gun show in the autumn of 1991, Arwood met a large, bearded man named Nick Harwood. Nick ran a booth selling military-surplus items — lots of wool, backpacks, bayonets, gloves, and camping gear. Arwood had been standing next to him, selling re-loads and second-rate small-game rifles at someone else’s table for $8.50 an hour plus lunch, minus questions.
He and Nick started talking. Like a lot of other guys who look like they could unscrew your head and pour your guts into a bucket, Nick was actually soft-spoken, pleasant, and slightly defeated.
Nick lived out of an RV that pulled a trailer full of what he called ‘stuff’. He’d buy stuff where there was a lot of it, and then sell the stuff where there was less of it. If he was lucky, petrol prices stayed low, and the people who had it weren’t too far from the people who needed it. Lately, though, he’d gotten into a new line, mainly because he had a slipped disk, and driving the RV was literally a pain in his arse he didn’t need anymore. That was what he was into now, he said: ‘brokering.’
‘Like with stocks and stuff?’ Arwood asked.
‘Same logic, but different stuff. A broker is someone who sits anywhere he wants, and instead of dragging stuff around from place to place with a bad back, he brings supply and demand together for a price, or else a cut. The nice thing is, you never need to take possession of the stuff, or actually move stuff around. You’re the connection guy. You can bring anything you have access to to anyone you want to have it — if you’ve got access to the goods, know the right people, and have the chops to make the deal happen.’
‘What’s the hard part?’ Arwood asked.
‘The hard part?’ Nick laughed. ‘The hard part is matching up the supply with the demand, and gaining the trust of both sides so they think you’re the man to be the bridge for them. The more mainstream the goods, the greater the competition. The more unusual or niche or dangerous, the less competition. Most people don’t want to take big risks.’
‘What if minefields don’t bother me?’
‘Anything that bothers other people and doesn’t bother you is an asset in this life.’
‘This is interesting,’ Arwood said. ‘How do I start?’
‘You’ll need a phone.’
Arwood shook his head as though he were being told he’d need a third hand for his second penis. ‘I live on the road. Where am I gonna get a phone?’
‘You’ll need to stick around someplace, or work the pay phones. I think you should stick around someplace.
I’ll tell you what,’ Nick said, sizing Arwood up and having nothing better to do than take a chance, ‘I’ve got a little place outside Bozeman. It’s a cabin, but it’s got electricity and a phone line. You want to give it a go, the place is yours for $150 a month.’
‘What’s in it for you?’
‘$150 a month.’
‘That’s a pretty strong argument.’
‘You think that’s the kind of life you want?’
Arwood said it was. It really, really was.
Arwood realised quickly that weapons were his game and that the US wasn’t his market. As it happened, 1991 was a stellar year to become an arms broker. The Berlin Wall was down, the Warsaw Pact was defunct, all of eastern Europe was begging to join NATO and the EU, and the only thing of marketable value left behind in the former Soviet Union was military hardware. No one was getting paid, the military had nothing to do, and everyone needed jobs because communism wasn’t so much being replaced by capitalism as by reality.
That was supply taken care of.
Transportation wasn’t too hard to arrange, either. There were plenty of surplus Soviet air platforms lying around in the newly independent states of the former USSR, and no one had any work for them. If you offered to pay the pilots and some bribes, the planes went wherever you wanted them to.
That left only demand.
But these were the salad years. Everyone was buying. By the late 1990s, Arwood knew his way around the planet. Planes and a bank account in Geneva were all he needed once he cracked the nut on domestic transport problems in conflict zones, which usually involved hiring the same charter companies the humanitarian organisations used, and simply filling them on their return runs.
It all came together.
And yet, all through this period, what Arwood Hobbes really wanted was to close the chapter on a piece of old and unfinished business. What he needed was intelligence information, and that was finally what he’d received a few weeks before arriving in Dohuk — before the mortar attack — from a Kurd named Jindar Zafar.
The Girl in Green Page 17